Those are claims of fact, and they could be true. How can you demonstrate that they are? What insights do you have on psychology that make your guess better than mine or someone else's? How is your post different than regular anti-intellectualism? Certainly those influences exist, but how are you measuring their magnitude relative to things like professional integrity and honesty? These influences exist as well.

You could replace psychologist with medical doctor and transgender with coronavirus, and post it on the politics board and get 50 blue stars. You could be right, but this type of claim is the kind morons use to justify the fact that experts think they're morons.

I kinda assumed that guy was a Barnes incarnation. Either way I enjoyed the posts.

I currently have 18 hours of credit in pre-med Biochemistry at ASU, so I'm practically a doctor. And have no problem dishing out my pre-medical Opinion.

Here's a collection of a massive number of studies covering a wide-range of transgender-related topics.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1CXQWFWpHU_l4gxk0lncHFt4CdAZlHLWaIYdm4f0qq64/mobilebasic

There are certainly bad studies out there. See Littman's study where she concocted the myth of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, for example.

That seems reasonable then. I don't think having a graduate degree, especially a masters, means you know anything about other parts of academia, but your wife being a psychologist seems about as good a credential as you can have.

Joe Boudain said:

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I currently have 18 hours of credit in pre-med Biochemistry at ASU, so I'm practically a doctor. And have no problem dishing out my pre-medical Opinion.

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This comment always pops up. Queue Admin Errors.
If I've seen the struggles of my wife over a long period of time, does that not give me an informed opinion about where there are issues? I don't intentionally speak out of my ass. Just relating that the polished agendas of orgs don't add up to any moral answer nor do they belie all the concerns of the psychologist seeing clients.

My wife couldn't do a stress analysis as part of my job, but she could definitely talk about the issues of mechanical engineering R&D at big companies, the future of the industry, and where the biggest BS in academia lies.

And she could definitely opine about the top level moral obligations MEENs have when choosing jobs. Whole lotta cool stuff goes into making bombs and other weapons. Gotta decide if you're going to be about that or not.

one MEEN Ag said:

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Joe Boudain said:

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I currently have 18 hours of credit in pre-med Biochemistry at ASU, so I'm practically a doctor. And have no problem dishing out my pre-medical Opinion.

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This comment always pops up. Queue Admin Errors.
If I've seen the struggles of my wife over a long period of time, does that not give me an informed opinion about where there are issues? I don't intentionally speak out of my ass. Just relating that the polished agendas of orgs don't add up to any moral answer nor do they belie all the concerns of the psychologist seeing clients.

My wife couldn't do a stress analysis as part of my job, but she could definitely talk about the issues of mechanical engineering R&D at big companies, the future of the industry, and where the biggest BS in academia lies.

And she could definitely opine about the top level moral obligations MEENs have when choosing jobs. Whole lotta cool stuff goes into making bombs and other weapons. Gotta decide if you're going to be about that or not.

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Man I was on your side, and my comment was in jest, as I obviously am very far away from being a doctor.

Dilettante said:

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That seems reasonable then. I don't think having a graduate degree, especially a masters, means you know anything about other parts of academia, but your wife being a psychologist seems about as good a credential as you can have.

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I think there's a lot of similarities in academia across fields. I wouldn't opine about the school of architecture or education, etc but we both walked away from grad school thinking there was a lot of similarities in our experiences. The politics of who gets accepted into programs, who gets grants, who gets tenure, the rigors of having to advance the knowledge in your field and the varying quality of research. The dumbing down of standards to increase numbers, the politics of internships, the specialty designations and impacts on your career. Model creation and stats validation. There is a common theme of becoming a researcher and producing versus staying a consumer of education. I wouldn't recommend anyone getting a ME over and MS. She wouldn't recommend getting a PsyD over and PhD.

I'm not going to pretend to be well read on the topic, but a bunch of studies doesn't necessarily mean anything. You can be almost assured that there will be studies pro and con for almost every single topic imaginable in medicine and mental health if only because of the confidence intervals and usual effect sizes. A bunch of topically related studies may or may not be generalizable or even useful taken together without accounting for the differences between them. It's hard enough figuring out if medicine works when you can do placebo controls. Something like "what is the best thing to do with a person who has a dysphoria" is immensely more difficult. What would be much more compelling would be a systematic review or a meta analysis for something fairly specific, e.g., a review of treatment outcomes for specific gender dysphoria that's evaluating between two interventions.

When you combine the fundamental fuzziness of this type of science with the political and culturally charged environment, I just don't have any trust that what is presented as consensus has much of a relationship with reality. It isn't that dissimilar to my views on global warming, except in this case I think it's even more vague and foggy.

Btw, there are 7 different meta-analysis studies in the link that cover a wide-range of subjects. Some are listed below.

Quote:

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Cornell University

• ENORMOUS meta-analysis on transgender people and the effect gender transition has on their mental health
• Of 56 studies, 52 indicated transitioning has a positive effect on the mental health of transgender people and 4 indicated it had mixed or no results.
• ZERO studies indicated gender transitioning has negative results

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Quote:

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Murad et al. 10

• ANOTHER meta-analysis of 28 studies on transition and hormones
• Sex reassignment/hormonal improvements:

• 80% of individuals reported significant improvement in dysphoria
• 78% of individuals reported significant improvement in psychological symptoms
• 72% of individuals reported significant improvement in sexual function
• overall quality of life was found to have increased significantly

• Lower quality evidence, see methodology. Still significant and helpful findings regardless.

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Quote:

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Nobili 18

• Longitudinal meta-analysis which indicates transgender people have a lower quality of life than the general population.
• However, that quality of life raises dramatically with 'Gender Affirming Treatment', the nature of which is detailed extensively in-text.

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Quote:

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Virupaksha 16

• Broad meta-analysis of 21 studies on the trans suicide rate (it's quite high).
• The suicide attempt rate ranges from 32% to 50% across countries
• The following were found to have an impact on the suicide attempt rate

• Gender-based victimization
• Discrimination
• Bullying
• Violence
• being rejected by the family, friends, and community
• harassment by an intimate partner, family members, police and public
• discrimination and ill-treatment in healthcare

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Quote:

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Cornell University

• A META-ANALYSIS of 42 peer-reviewed studies that analyzed the links between family support and the health and well-being of LGBT youth

• 25 studies found that accepting behavior by parents toward their children's sexual orientation or gender identity is linked to the health and well-being of LGBT youth.
• The other 17 studies found that family support in general (i.e. not necessarily in response to children's sexual orientation or gender identity) is linked to the health and well-being of LGBT youth.

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Sorry, didn't mean to come off as defensive.

one MEEN Ag said:

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Sorry, didn't mean to come off as defensive.

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This is why I did MET instead of MEEN

Joe Boudain said:

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All of the links don't seem to touch on the fact of whether or not transpeople are actually the sex that they claim, but on the impact of affirming their choice of gender.

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These questions are sort of stupid. They've been addressed.

Sex is immutable. Everyone agrees on this.

Dilettante said:

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Joe Boudain said:

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All of the links don't seem to touch on the fact of whether or not transpeople are actually the sex that they claim, but on the impact of affirming their choice of gender.

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These questions are sort of stupid. They've been addressed.

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Where?

Happy to help.

I am open to the idea that affirming people's perceptions leading to dysphoria may help the dysphoria. That would include actual treatment. I don't think this is even considering the question at hand in this thread. Most of those results you linked are fairly fuzzy, and the way they're summarized here doesn't give any indication as to the strength of evidence they present.

For example, the first thing from Cornell is almost impossible to actually read as a meta-analysis. There's no indication of the sample size of each paper, they don't mention heterogeneity between studies or even tell you what the actual study is, other than a binary "good or bad." They don't give any kind of way to evaluate for publication bias, which is a real issue being discussed in this very thread. So ultimately it is not very helpful.

In the end, what is here is low quality evidence, as the Cornell notes - it's all individualistic and there's no feasible way to do a controlled trial. This isn't to say these studies aren't useful, it's just to say that they are far from fact.

Ag of 08, do you think that your biological sex is female?

I'm guessing the answer is no. Does anyone think that? Again, I'm pretty sure it's no.

I think there are people in this thread who do not agree with this.

Dilettante said:

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Ag of 08, do you think that your biological sex is female?

I'm guessing the answer is no. Does anyone think that? Again, I'm pretty sure it's no.

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Is there such a thing as non-biological sex? Why would he get his driver's license changed if the sex was accurate?

Zobel said:

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I think there are people in this thread who do not agree with this.

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I could be wrong. I hope they come out and say it then.

Regardless, I maintain that questions like Joe's are a combination of bad faith and stupidity. It's surface level garbage.

Dilettante said:

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Zobel said:

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I think there are people in this thread who do not agree with this.

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I could be wrong. I hope they come out and say it then.

Regardless, I maintain that questions like Joe's are a combination of bad faith and stupidity. It's surface level garbage.

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the question you're referring to wasn't even a question, but a statement. Don't really know what you're referring to or if you've confused me with someone else.

If we start considering non-traditional definitions of sex which are phenotype based then I could see someone saying yes, sex can change. And I think I would agree. I think those conversations are very interesting, but not from a language perspective.

I suspect you can literally change the phenotype of sex by repression or removal of genes like SRY. Whether you've truly changed the sex is a matter of definitions, but I think it should count.

Dilettante said:

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Sex is immutable. Everyone agrees on this.

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Define sex.
Is it what is between someone's legs? What is between someone's ears? The arrangement of the 23rd pair of chromosomes? What a forensic anthropologist (not sure why Redstone is obsessed with this suddenly) would label someone based on their skull or pelvic width?
I think we could reasonably think that these definitions could provide multiple different answers for a small percentage of people.

Quad Dog said:

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Dilettante said:

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Sex is immutable. Everyone agrees on this.

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Define sex.
Is it what is between someone's legs? What is between someone's ears? The arrangement of the 23rd pair of chromosomes? What a forensic anthropologist (not sure why Redstone is obsessed with this suddenly) would label someone based on their skull or pelvic width?
I think we could reasonably think that these definitions could provide multiple different answers for a small percentage of people.

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I agree, the definition of sex is arbitrary and determines whether it can be changed.

I'm fine with using chromosome types as the definition for this discussion. It's simple and clear. It's also the main definition used by the public. We all agree that this definition of sex is immutable.

I do believe that as we grow in our understanding of what it means to be transgender, that's why we see a change in terms for things like "sex change" to "gender confirmation surgery". Or even from transsexual to transgender, although I know some still use "transsexual".

Biology was never my strongest subject in school, but let me try a hypothetical here. In my experience, hypotheticals crash and burn on this board, but I'll try.
Let's assume the configuration of the 23rd pair of chromosomes determines sex. Whatever your favorite physical differences between men and women are all determined here.
But there is more to men and women than that. If someday scientists could consistently and accurately determine that a certain (non 23rd pair) gender chromosome combination (I'll call it GCC for short) determines a male vs a female brain. Some difference in the way the brain is folded, neurons fire, chemicals get expressed, something. This brain difference would determine your favorite non-physical differences between men and women.
I think that someday this will be possible, it's just a matter of data gathering, computing power, and technology advancement. So if are basing this conversation of science and chromosomes, then would a provable GCC being different from the configuration of the 23rd pair change the board's opinion on the existence of trans people or not?

I think the answers on a strict basis are:

- sex is chromosomal
- genitalia etc. are primary sex characteristics
- skull shape and pelvic width are secondary sex characteristics
- anatomical or physical brain sexual dimorphism seems to be a thing, but it also seems to be contentious

None of those things have anything to do with gender though, as far as I understand it. The description of gender seems to be strictly a social construct mediating how physically sexed humans interact with each other.