The Tyranny of Pseudoscience

How do you persuade someone to believe something that is intuitively nonsensical?

Answer: call it science, or better, scientific fact.

You need but cobble together some observations and hypotheses, then to say that they have proved your point. The world will sit up and take notice. More importantly, no one will dare dispute the findings.

Far too much of today’s science is merely a modern form of religious dogma.

If this story does not attract your attention, it should. It involves the pseudoscience of gender dysphoria. It involves a paper written by some Dutch researchers several years ago, paper that has been taken to provide the ultimate in scientific proof that puberty blockers and transitioning are good things. 

They join the pseudoscience that proves, for example, that gender exists on a spectrum, that it is not fixed, that it need not have anything to do with your chromosomal makeup.

None of that is true, yet many people believe it to be scientific fact-- thus, a settled opinion that you must believe. It began with a Dutch study about gender dysphoria.

Now, some American researchers have demonstrated that the Dutch study is not only flawed; it is pseudoscience.

The Daily Caller summarizes.

• In a new paper published last week, American doctors picked apart the methodology and key conclusions of two Dutch studies which formed the basis for modern pediatric gender medicine by claiming to observe improved mental health for patients who underwent sex changes.
• The Dutch studies only included the most successful cases of individuals undergoing cross-sex treatments and excluded the experiences of those who dropped out of the study over time, creating a bias towards participants who reported positive experiences, according to the new, critical study.
• “The field has a penchant for exaggerating what is known about the benefits of the practice, while downplaying the serious health risks and uncertainties,” the critique reads. “As a result, a false narrative has taken root. It is that ‘gender-affirming’ medical and surgical interventions for youth are as benign as aspirin, as well-studied as penicillin and statins, and as essential to survival as insulin for childhood diabetes.”

So, the field of gender dysphoria has been contaminated by studies that were poorly conducted and skewed to produce desired results:

The Dutch studies, published in 2011 and 2015 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine and Pediatrics, respectively, by Dutch medical doctor Annelou de Vries and two teams of researchers in the Netherlands, tracked dozens of adolescents as they underwent puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries and concluded that patients’ mental health and well-being improved; both studies were used as evidence in support of childhood cross-sex medical interventions and were widely cited throughout the medical establishment. 

 Dr. Stephen Levine, Dr. Julia Mason and E. Abbruzzese found that methodological biases completely undermined that research in their Jan. 11 study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, arguing that the Dutch researchers had skewed the data by only including the most successful cases in their results and failing to control for the confounding effects of psychotherapy.

Will this change minds in the transgender community? One doubts it, though time might change that.