A group of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals have absolutely destroyed the conclusions reached in a recent study that makes the incredibly absurd claim that transgender hormones have benefits for the children who have cross-sex hormones who persistently identify themselves with the opposite sex of their biological one. That’s the kind of insanity we are having to fight against these days, folks. Proving that a person who is born either a boy or a girl, is in fact, biologically a boy or a girl if, thanks to mental illness, they identify as the opposite.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m ready to get off this ride.
The organization, Do No Harm, referred to the study as “fatally flawed and borderline unscientific” in a new report that was given to the Daily Signal. The group’s report slams the study, titled, ” Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth After 2 Years Of Hormones,” which was headed up by Dr. Diane Chen at the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The study was published by the New England Journal of Medicine back in January.
“The study analyzed 315 participants, identified as transgender and nonbinary, between the ages of 12 and 20, over the course of two years. These participants received ‘gender-affirming hormones,’ i.e. hormones to make their male or female bodies resemble bodies of the opposite sex,” the Daily Signal reported.
“During the study period, appearance congruence, positive affect, and life satisfaction increased, and depression and anxiety symptoms decreased,” Chen’s piece about the study satys. Eleven individuals who participated in it experienced suicidal ideation, and two committed suicide.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, who serves as the chair at Do No Harm, released a statement to the Daily Signal saying that the Chen article “raises several questions that weaken its overall conclusions that this form of therapy is truly beneficial to these subjects.”
“Many scientific studies break participants into two groups—a test group and a control group. The test group receives the drug or intervention while the control group either receives a false version of the drug—a placebo—or receives a different treatment that is less experimental, such as counseling. This study did not have a control group,” the report said.
“’The absence of any control group raises the possibility that ongoing psychological counseling and therapy may explain the slight improvement in some parameters of the study,’ Goldfarb said. Cross-sex hormones may not have been the only factor in reported improvement, and without a control group, it becomes much harder to isolate the exact role hormones may have played,” the Daily Signal continued.
Goldfarb then pointed out that “the fact that the subjects were seen in these clinics for some prolonged period of time prior to entry into this study may produce spurious results due to the well-known phenomenon in surveys called ‘demand characteristics’. If a survey is conducted under the auspices of the study authors, the results may be influenced by a ‘cheering on’ effect.”
“The researchers and four clinics featured in this study have a well-publicized history of radical activism and advocacy for the medical transition of children,” the report explains. “For example, Boston Children’s Hospital posted and later removed a video on its YouTube channel that endorsed the idea that some children know their gender identity ‘from the womb.’”
“Given this obvious bias, there is a high likelihood that study participants were steered toward responses that align with the activism promoted by these clinics,” the report further clarifies.
The professionals at Do No Harm also noted that the results of the study, “indicate that the only meaningful improvement over time was participant scores for ‘appearance congruence.’ Improvement in positive affect, life satisfaction, depression and anxiety only improved by the smallest margins.”
While the study did not manage to find any sort of measurable change in self-reported mental health for the youngest individual participating in the study, the authors of the article said that “these observations align with other published reports that earlier access to gender affirming medical care is associated with more positive psychosocial functioning.”
“In other words, they assert that the lack of improvement among this subsample constitutes evidence in support of their radical worldview,” Do No Harm remarked. “It’s a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ proposition.”
“This study, despite the headlines it has received, is fatally flawed and borderline unscientific,” Do No Harm stated in conclusion. “Like other studies on the topic, it obfuscates rather than clarifies questions around the medical transition of children. Policymakers must accept that elite gatekeepers have become cheerleaders and that their recommendations on politicized topics warrant healthy skepticism.”
The organization then recommended that policymakers follow the pattern set forty by European countries which “increasingly prohibit access to these experimental treatments for minors, largely due to acknowledgement that the evidence base fails to establish that these treatments are beneficial on balance.”
Sounds like a great idea.
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