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.
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.
As it happens, an article appearing recently in PGN
supports that suspicion. “New study highlights suicidal thoughts among trans
adolescents” by Victoria Brownworth (11/13/19), 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!”
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