The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

OK, what do you make of this? A review of a hundred studies gives gender reassignment surgery the thumbs down,

"There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation, according to a medical review conducted exclusively for Guardian Weekend tomorrow.

The review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective. " http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/...ntalhealth

Motherfucker, if you're going to just keep listing citations to dodge the issue, the least you could do is to actually read them first.

I mean, just to start with: a meta-analyses commissioned from one research group by a newspaper to sell copies of a magazine issue filled with anecdotal experiences from a couple of trans people who regret transitioning is hardly the peak of scientific rigor. In fact, I think there's something wrong with every major word in that sentence.

But as it happens, you're also straight up lying about the results of that analyses, because in no sense does the review "give gender reassignment surgery the thumbs down," only that a large swathe of the studies analyzed show methodological problems that render the results potentially unhelpful, something that both sides of this issue tend to agree on in many cases. But hey, I can see how you missed that: it's the fifth paragraph (of an article where most paragraphs are three sentences at best) and clearly, you stopped reading at the second paragraph, which is where your quotation stopped. I guess you found something that confirmed what you already believed and then stopped.

What's particularly interesting is that, in the example they picked, the director of the research group leaps to assuming that those respondents who dropped out of the study "for unknown reasons," were all dead, instead of just... you know, dropped out of a five year study. He then intimates, based on no evidence (remember, they lost track of these people, they don't know what they're doing) that perhaps those deaths he just imagined out of thin air were suicides? Awfully suspicious leap of logic there.

Oh, and there's also the bit where they note that research from the US and Holland indicates that up to a fifth of study respondents report dissatisfaction with their transition... which by corollary suggests that four fifths do not. In what world is that sufficient to conclude that transitioning doesn't work?

The article ends- since I know you never read enough to get to the end of this stuff- by noting that any properly constructed study of this, with a control group, probably wouldn't make it past an ethics committee, as it would be unethical to deny patients medical care in order to establish a control group. So... you fucked up again: you presented a meta-analyses of dubious provenance that concludes that there are methodological issues with the research into transitioning thus far, which is an entirely uncontroversial statement among science-minded types (which you are not), and then asserted that this is tantamount to "giving gender reassignment surgery a thumbs down," which it is simply impossible to conclude from the actual content of the article.

So, did you not read the article, or were you lying about its contents? Because it has to be one of the two, and frankly, I'm getting very tired of having to correct every single citation you make at this extensive a level.

Oh, and also, are you willing to admit that you were wrong about the first trans study you cited? Because I don't want you to escape accountability on that issue: I know that's what you were trying to do by leaping to another study, but I'm not one to forget very easily.