To paraphrase a bumper sticker: if you want justice, work for truth.

That this needs to be said is a sad comment on the way so many people discuss social justice issues these days. In this essay I’m going to focus on some examples related to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression (SOGIE). (For anyone to whom this may matter, I’ll state up front that I, personally, am both bisexual and on the autism spectrum.)

The first example is an article by Victoria Brownworth that appeared in a recent issue of the Philadelphia Gay News, reporting on the findings of a new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. Its title is “LGBT folks face more poverty than straight cisgender people.” But this headline is misleading.

One finds a number of similar statements scattered throughout the article. For instance, one paragraph reads:

“Our study shows that all subpopulations of LGBT people fare the same or worse than cisgender straight people,” said lead author M.V. Lee Badgett, a Distinguished Scholar at the Williams Institute. “And factors like living in a rural area can prove especially challenging to their economic stability. As a whole, LGBT people have at least 15 percent higher odds of being poor than cisgender straight people.”

But, if you keep reading, you eventually see this:

While most significant was the disparity for bisexual women and trans people, the study also found cisgender straight men and gay men have similar rates of poverty, and their poverty rates are lower than every other group.

The study also found cisgender lesbian women have similar rates of poverty as cisgender straight women, at nearly 20 percent. However, women of all sexual orientations have significantly higher rates of poverty than cisgender straight men and gay men.

Brownworth doesn’t tell us what “similar” means, but in the case of cisgender women it evidently means no more than a couple percentage points. It isn’t even made clear whether these differences are statistically significant.

So, in the language of statistical “analysis of variance,” a close reading of the article tells us there are basically just three effects identified by the study:

a “main effect” of sex, not SOGIE-related: being female predicts being poor
a main effect of transgender identity: being trans predicts being poor
an “interaction effect” of sex and sexual orientation: being both female and bisexual further predicts poverty

Note what the study doesn’t appear to show us. There’s no main effect from sexual orientation -- only an interaction effect with sex. And there’s no effect of any sort from monosexual orientation -- being either gay or straight -- only from bisexuality in interaction with being female. But you would never guess this from the headline, would you?

In effect, the article takes greater poverty for two subgroups of LGBTs -- trans people and bisexual women -- and artificially mingles it with other subgroups to create a false impression that being LGBT per se is a predictor of poverty. And why? Apparently for no reason except an ideologically based a priori insistence on viewing it this way.

A possibly even more serious example of science journalism warped by ideology is the way some media have treated the concept of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, a trend in which a trans identity is being declared, typically in conjunction with an insistence on rapid social and medical transitioning, by adolescents and young adults, mostly assigned female at birth, who had shown no signs of gender variance previously. This has occurred more than once in Gwen Smith’s “Transmissions” column, published in PGN, and also in an article in The Aspergian, an online publication by people on the autism spectrum, titled “The Fallacy of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and the Importance of Calling Out Sloppy Science,” by AspieGurl. In the third paragraph she writes:

The core issue, however, is that ROGD is sloppy science and has not been conclusively proven to exist at all.

This is an example of a “straw man” argument, since researcher Lisa Littman has never claimed that it’s proven science. The original paper in which she introduced this term was explicitly a report on an exploratory study whose purpose was to generate hypotheses, not prove one. Far from being sloppy science, as Littman herself told Quillette (“An Interview With Lisa Littman, Who Coined the Term‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,’” 3/19/2019):

Some of the critics of the paper talk about these methods as if they are strictly the province of pseudoscience, but that is simply not the case. I believe these critics are uninformed about the scientific process. In fact, I attended a panel discussion where speakers referred to my study as “methodologically atrocious” and another study—one supportive of social transition—as “phenomenal,” without recognizing the irony that both studies used the same methodology.

AspieGurl writes, “The research was so widely criticized that Dr. Littman was forced to revise it in 2019.” But as Littman puts it:

The manuscript was meticulously evaluated, and, in response to the resulting feedback, changes were made to several sections of the paper, though the methods and findings remained mostly unchanged…. Overall, I am very pleased with the final product and [with the fact] that my work has withstood this extensive peer-review process.

As she wrote it in the Notice of Republication:

Other than the addition of a few missing values in Table 13, the Results section is unchanged in the updated version of the article.

AspieGurl claims:

Parents of adolescent girls who did not want to see their daughters as a part of the trans community had latched on to ROGD.

But she never offers any evidence that this is actually their motive.

Similarly, in an attempt to explain why changes in behavior are only being reported in adolescence and not previously, she writes:

Adolescence is the normal time for child exploration and rebellion against one’s parents.

Children are very perceptive and tend to learn from a very young age what pleases a parent and what does not. A daughter of a more conservative parent likely caught on quite quickly that her parent smiled more often and bragged on her more when she wore dresses and acted like a “little girl” according to gender norms.

But notice this explanation assumes a conservative parent. It’s hard to see how she could believe this explanation if she’s actually read, with an open mind, the paper by Lisa Littman to which she links, wherein we can read:

Respondents were asked, “Do you believe that transgender people deserve the same rights and protections as others in your country?” which is a question that was adapted from a question used for a US national poll…. The majority (88.2%) of the study participants gave affirmative answers to the question which is consistent with the 89% affirmative response reported in a US national poll. All self-reported results have the potential limitation of social desirability bias. However, comparing this self-report sample to the national self-report sample, the results show similar rates of support. Therefore, there is no evidence that the study sample is appreciably different in their support of the rights of transgender people than the general American population.

In other words, the findings of the study clearly contradict the notion that these are just parents who are especially resistant to recognizing or accepting gender variance in their children.

And, of course, AspieGurl’s attempt to “explain away” the phenomenon also completely fails to account for the fact that its rate of occurrence has jumped qualitatively in the past decade or so, nor for the fact that this has been accompanied by a total reversal of the natal-sex ratio among adolescents and young adults declaring a transgender identity, and nor for the fact that it so often occurs in whole groups of girls in the same online friendship group simultaneously.

Why is this important? Because, if we refuse to recognize that something is going on here that’s different from the previously observed pattern of adolescent onset gender dysphoria, we can’t determine whether a different response is warranted.

Indeed, Littman’s paper suggests it may be, because another difference is the higher rate of emotional distress being exhibited in these cases -- rising, not falling, after declaring a trans identity -- as well as a higher than usual prior history of difficulty coping with negative emotions. This leads Littman to suspect that it’s a maladaptive coping mechanism rather than a reflection of true transgender identity. If this is true, then failing to recognize the phenomenon actually means leaving these young people at greater risk of suicide and other forms of self-harm.

19), reporting on a new study by Dr. Brian C. Thoma of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry, states:

His research studying the intersection of gender identity and mental health is the first to ask teens to answer two key questions: What is your current gender identity, and what gender were you assigned at birth?

That two-step question revealed disparities within the broad definition of transgender used in all health research. Transgender boys were at the highest risk of a suicide attempt requiring medical attention.

If a substantial fraction of those suicidally inclined adolescents now identifying as transmasculine are actually exhibiting a maladaptive coping mechanism for dealing with negative emotions, this is exactly what we would expect. And a failure to reckon with this reality means being unable to help them work through their emotional difficulties and, ultimately, stay alive.

Fortunately, the inverse is also true: when the real nature of the difficulties is recognized, the results can be life-saving. As Littman explains:

Although the controversy was stressful and often contentious, a lot of good came from it. I believe that my research received far more attention than it would have otherwise…. One amazing outcome is that four young women who experienced gender dysphoria in their teens and then de-transitioned or desisted found each other and created The Pique Resilience Project, a video series they use to share their experiences. All of them now speak openly about having experienced ROGD.

And one last thing I’ll add, on a personal note. Although there seems to have been a surge of this problem since the mid-’00s, it’s not without precedent. Around 2000, I heard Susie “Sexpert” Bright speak at Penn, in the course of which she described how, after one of her talks, a young person had approached to tell her about their discovery that they were a trans man. After she’d listened for a bit to their explanation of how they’d determined this -- and at the risk, as she related to her audience at Penn, of being very “politically incorrect” -- she was moved to ask, “Are you sure you’re not just a lesbian?” To which this young person responded, “You know, I never thought of that!”