Rex Kerr
3 min readJul 17, 2023

--

Welll, it shows that you have your science journalist hat on rather than your astrophysicist hat. It's a decent account, but it's not one of your stronger articles because (unsurprisingly) it lacks the kind of discerning insight that you're able to bring to bear on your area of expertise.

The best part, I think (in that it is both most engaging and most scientifically informative), is where you go through various abnormal chromosomal and genetic conditions that result in a variety of intersex conditions. This documents very clearly that sex is not simply binary: sometimes it's more complicated.

The least scientifically helpful part is when you conflate I-know-my-gender-because-you-told-me-and-I-can-tell-it-back-to-you gender identity (age 2-4) and my-sexual-morphology-doesn't-match-my-internal-gender-identity (which is gender dysphoria, when severe): "If you’re a human whose gender identity matches your assigned gender, congratulations!" There is so much complexity here, much of it admittedly woefully understudied, but that in no way means that the issues aren't there. Furthermore, it implies that what typically happens is that gender is assigned, when actually it is sex which is observed (in the ~99%+ of cases where it's clear). There are myriad issues here to consider, including: to what extent is gender identity bimodal? To what extent is it socially pliable and to what extent is it intrinsic? To what extent may gender dysphoria a result of flipped sexual dimorphism in the brain? All of these issues and more are critically important when one is considering how best to objectively decide "what is a woman" (or how fuzzy the boundaries are on the category).

The most misleading part is where you talk about detransition: you cite studies (good!) but unfortunately don't seem to have a good handle on either the diversity of practice or the flaws in the studies. Dropout is a huge problem in almost every study, and the different studies do not seem self-consistent (which is unsurprising, given that the practice of gender affirming care is different in different places, but it means that there isn't just a universal answer to questions about detransition). The gist of it--that detransition is comparatively low--isn't at issue, but the numbers in almost every study are suspect. Anyway, the best review of the various studies on the subject that I know of is actually a fantastic Medium article by Lexi Henny: https://medium.com/@lexi.m.henny/how-common-is-detransition-a-review-of-all-the-evidence-95518e6affe1. I talk with her there about the problems with accuracy. Again, the general point of "transition regret is fairly low, and detransition is fairly uncommon" stands despite the methodological problems, but given the methodological problems it's misleading to quote numbers without having checked the methods. Also, "no data supporting those assertions at present" is about the weakest statement you can make about anything but uses phrasing that implies a stronger degree of certainty. This just isn't good science reporting practice. Even given the methodological problems, we can state with a fair degree of confidence that the historical practice of gender affirming care seems to have adequate safeguards. Because of the lack of stationarity (societal attitudes are changing rapidly, the numbers are growing rapidly, techniques are improving significantly, etc.) it's not necessarily safe to extrapolate too much. We do know that it's possible to do it "right", where patients have a high chance of improved lives and a low chance of regret. Your literal statement is far too weak. Your implication is far too strong.

Finally the most wrong part is where you seem to have just misread G. Marquez-Velarde et al.; they show that suicide rates drop by a factor of two, not ten, with a supportive family environment, and suicidal ideation is still really high. The study, like most do, has methodological problems that ought to prevent us from believing the numbers too much, but it simply doesn't say what you said it does. Look at figure 1! (Note--I have serious doubts that they did their statistics properly given some of their numbers, but even so, at least one should report their findings accurately!)

So, anyway. It's pretty decent, but in your astrophysics posts the quality is almost uniformly extremely high, and this is...just...fairly competent science journalism but not without its flaws.

--

--

Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

No responses yet