The “trans” lobby claims that genital mutilation of minors is necessary in order to prevent troubled teenagers from committing suicide. To my knowledge, there is no empirical basis for this claim, and suicide rates among those who have undergone sex change surgery are sky-high. But the claim persists, nevertheless.
Now, it turns out that one of the key “studies” relied on to support sex change procedures has been withdrawn. Public Discourse reports:
A major correction has been issued by the American Journal of Psychiatry. The authors and editors of an October 2019 study, titled “Reduction in mental health treatment utilization among transgender individuals after gender-affirming surgeries: a total population study,” have retracted its primary conclusion. Letters to the editor by twelve authors, including ourselves, led to a reanalysis of the data and a corrected conclusion stating that in fact the data showed no improvement after surgical treatment.
Integrity in published research has been on a downhill slide for some time. It started in the social sciences, and has now spread to the hard sciences. The basic idea of a research study is to be reproducible: someone else who tries the same experiment should get more or less the same result. But in recent years, a combination of hunger for headline-making publications and pursuit of political agendas has given rise to countless allegedly peer-reviewed studies that turned out to be utterly bogus:
It has been an open secret for some time that there is a crisis of irreproducibility of scientific studies in medicine and other fields. No less a figure than the Director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, wrote that, “the checks and balances that once ensured scientific fidelity have been hobbled. This has compromised the ability of today’s researchers to reproduce others’ findings.” For example, the National Association of Scholars reports, “In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 ‘landmark’ studies in hematology and oncology, but could only replicate 6 (11%).” In 2015 an article was published in Science in which there was an attempt to replicate 100 studies from three well-known psychology journals in 2008. In the original studies, nearly all had produced statistically significant results, whereas in the study replications, only a little over a third produced similar significant results.
There is no benign explanation for these phenomena. The linked article goes on to explain in detail the mostly obvious, and likely intentional, flaws in the pro-trans surgery study that has now been withdrawn. The authors contrast that discredited study’s findings with a more robust piece of research:
We concluded our letter by comparing this study to the one we consider perhaps the best of its kind, also from Sweden, the 2011 Dhejne study. The Dhejne team made extensive use of numerous, specified Swedish registries and examined data from 324 patients in Sweden over thirty years who underwent sex reassignment. They used population controls matched by birth year, birth sex, and reassigned sex. When followed out beyond ten years, the sex-reassigned group had nineteen times the rate of completed suicides and nearly three times the rate of all-cause mortality and inpatient psychiatric care, compared to the general population.
Nineteen times the normal suicide rate. Contemplate that. The claim that sex change surgeries are somehow saving lives is a fantasy. That genital mutilation destroys lives is an undeniable fact.
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