I think PLoS have been a very interesting experiment, and for sure they’ve disrupted the industry, but long term I think the real solution to the academic publishing nightmare is to find a way to curtail the pressure to publish so much.
3 Likes
Hmm, Jason Momoa…
1 Like
Ah the old “bad guy with a gun vs good guy with a gun” canard, but now with the veneer of science. Well done!
3 Likes
That’s right! Everyone knows you refute bad science with witchcraft, interpretative dance, and crystals! We need strict science control and absolutely to get science out of schools and all public places.
We should also probably ban assault science.
1 Like
Depends very much on the reviewers. Editorial control seems a bit unbalanced in some fields.
I reviewed for them, and I think I did a mediocre job. However, that was at the start of my PhD program!
Also, I found several major errors, from misleading or even wrong graphics to misapplied statistics in published papers in PloSOne. I found the same in other journals, but PloSOne was perceivably more prone to have accepted flawed research.
Again, this is ENTIRELY a problem of the reviewers and a not to stringent editorial board. That said, an EiC of a well-respected journal in my field shot down a paper of mine because he was being an arsehole, basically.
I’m a botanist, specifically publishing and reading ecology papers, so I can only speak for that specific field.
1 Like
Sounds like, but they’ll get traction as they have authority (in being academics) and they are playing to fears some people hold about gender. It pisses me off.
7 Likes
Yep, absolutely. And to emphasize to emphasize quality of contributions—whether journal publications or alternate media or service.
1 Like
Sorry, but the questions here are real all around: regarding academic freedom, the quality of the research, and the origins of gender dysphoria (or if you prefer, why some people are trans and others are not). It’s worth reading the Science article and the paper itself. My thought after reading all that was the the criteria for diagnosis of gender dysphoria are really fuzzy, as they are based on current assumptions about what constitutes gender-normative dress and activities; the study seems to have self selected for parents “concerned” about their children’s coming out as trans; and it’s really not possible to tell whether what’s being observed is a different path toward trans identify or just kids who were good at hiding their feelings from parents they expected to be unsupportive.
But the questions are reasonable to ask.
That said, I understand the reaction and can sort of relate to it when I think of my own response when I read about research into the origins of homosexuality - it makes me very uncomfortable, wondering if a study is going to contradict my lived experience, and what that means if it happens.
2 Likes
Thanks for posting the detail about the source of the survey participants. I had not read the paper yet, and that is an important detail.
I am not sure anyone can do real science on such an emotional subject these days. Some of the comments on both sides are pretty extreme. One that stuck out for me was that the article was “written with transphobic dogwhistles (sex observed at birth, for example)”.
What’s extreme about not wanting to be erased and marginalized?
Isn’t that assuming that sex is always easy to determine at birth? How is questioning assumptions based on outward appearances “extreme” compared with those who seek to completely ignore that gender isn’t always a binary?
17 Likes
Clearly not “always easy”. However, according the the person sitting next to me who has attended a bunch of births, the Physician starts with visual observation. Most of the time it is obvious. When there is any question, DNA or chromosomal testing is done. But we are not really talking about gender, we are talking about sex observed at birth. That does not include conditions that might not manifest until later in life, or chromosomal diseases like Turner Syndrome in females, or Klinefelter syndrome in males. Or anyone trapped in the wrong body. I am told the “spectrum” view is not particularly accurate.
Most of this is stuff I did not know 10 minutes ago.
I do think that a physician noting obvious visual sexual characteristics can reasonably be seen as a “transphobic dogwhistle”. That is a bit extreme. I am glad they are expanding provisions for the notation of intersex conditions on birth certificates, but the vast majority of people are either obviously male or obviously female. It would seem negligent for a physician to not note that in their description of the child at birth.
But it looks like this discussion does still seem to be about a binary system. We are speaking about male to female or female to male gender reassignment when medical options are discussed, unless there are other classes of transgenderism, where someone might change from male or female to some completely other identity. That would be interesting to learn about.
2 Likes
Here’s a new word for you to Google:
non-binary
14 Likes
Because it’s making assumptions about the stability of gender identity based on sexual characteristics. It’s assuming that variations in gender identity are pathological instead of spectrum that are shaped by entirely natural phenomenon. It’s assuming sex IS gender, when gender is a social construct.
Then maybe do so? You can maybe start by listening to some of the people here who have shared their stories, including how harmful being assigned the wrong gender at birth has been in their lives.
13 Likes
No, it is noting obvious sexual characteristics, if present. Which is apparently a very easy thing to distinguish for almost everyone. Even if a person’s gender is different or ambiguous, knowledge of their physical sex is not irrelevant. When my wife does well baby checks, which is pretty much her favorite thing to do, whether the baby or toddler is growing normally is determined by consulting different tables, depending on sex. Certainly some babies do not conform to those norms, and no doubt the examining doctor would apply different metrics to determine if length or head diameter or weight measurements confirm that the baby is developing properly. And “properly” in this context means that departures from the expected norms can be symptoms of disease or other problems. Which parents would absolutely want to learn about as early as possible.
The sad fact that people have been sometimes “assigned” a sex when it could not just be “noted” does not logically mean that notation of the sex of a baby should be abandoned as “transphobic”, since only a very tiny percentage of people do have that ambiguity. The harm in making such assignments in those cases does seem to be a topic that physicians are aware of and addressing.
5 Likes
That’s very true. Along with that there’s also the aspect that this plays into the way too common attitude about trans people that it’s performative. That trans people are playing a role of their gender, not that they actually are their gender. This, I think, is one of the most damaging things. In fact today I couldn’t get myself to use a public restroom because using the wrong one would have done nothing but made me feel awful and the risk of using the right one but being harmed because of it was too great.
9 Likes
Question: How do we protect the mental health of 1% of the population without ignoring indicators relevant to the physical health of 99% of the population?
Obviously consciousness raising is good, but does the transgender community have a practical suggestion for dealing with the biological sex versus gender problems later from assessing sex at birth?
1 Like
Not being sarcastic at all, but I have been told the number is 99.982%, according to the latest accepted data.
( Edit- citation) Leonard Sax, MD, J of Sex Research, January 2010. via pubmed.
The “wrong gender at birth” question seems to be something that would require a lot of research. When I first read Mindysan’s comment, I was thinking of the horrible cases of people born with true intersex biology, but were assigned a gender for whatever reason, instead of being treated with some sort of compassionate understanding of their issues. But if we are also talking about people who exhibit healthy unambiguous male or female biology, but later find they are a different gender, I am not sure that is something that the doctor in the delivery room can predict, at least not currently.
If there is to be a method for such predictions to be made, it will come only after a bunch of research into the mechanism of gender is done. I doubt that can be accomplished if activists on any side of the issue are allowed to influence what gets studied or published. The subject report seems to be deeply flawed, from selection of the pool of survey subjects to the small sample size. But I am not sure it would be allowed even if those obvious flaws were addressed.
1 Like
So if gender is a social construct, isn’t trying to understand the impact of social forces on gender a reasonable area of study?
Not that this study is particularly useful, but the impression I get is that a lot of people are very upset by the question being asked at all.
1 Like
i think the difficulty you almost seem to be, possibly, trying to address is that the bias of the researcher sometimes tends to skew the reported results, consciously or unconsciously. in dealing with topics which are both relatively rare and controversial there is a tendency for researchers in the field to have a bias on one side or the other. the way to deal with that bias is to make sure the study is constructed to be as airtight as possible which is far from the case in the research described above which almost seems to have been constructed with a desire to deliberately get the results they got, no matter what.
as long as the research is solidly grounded in high quality statistical practices i’m less concerned with the potential bias of the researcher.
6 Likes
No, these questions are asked and researched responsibly all the time. This paper rushed to apply a snappy pathalogical label on a made up phenomenon that fits the mold of a youth-driven-societal-breakdown scare campaign. If Littman thought she had new questions to ask, she should have consulted experienced people from the field and recognized the risks of treating this subject so cavalierly.
15 Likes
