A new study supposedly demonstrating that adolescents are not identifying as transgender under social pressure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics, claims that the percentage of youth identifying as transgender is not increasing and that biological males identifying as trans outnumber females doing likewise, as they traditionally have. Thus, the authors argue, “social contagion” isn’t causing teenagers to turn trans, and movements to deny them drugs and surgery to change their sex — “gender-affirming care,” advocates call it — are ill-founded.
Since the study fit the prevailing progressive template, major media were quick to report on it uncritically. Had they not been in the tank for the trans agenda, however, they would have noticed some serious flaws in the study.
For one thing, it is clearly a piece of advocacy masquerading as a scientific study. Its lead author, Stanford University medical professor Jack Turban, is a homosexual and a vocal advocate of “gender-affirming care” — a phrase that, along with other loaded terms such as “sex assigned at birth” and “cisgender,” appears repeatedly in the study.
For another, it contradicts most other recent studies examining the birth sex of trans-identifying youth, in which the ratio of females to males is invariably quite high. A 2016 Minnesota student survey, to take just one such example, found that among trans-identifying students, females outnumbered males two-to-one.
The Daily Caller reports:
“There’s been an extraordinary rise is [sic] young females identifying as transgender and seeking gender care in every country that’s catalogued this. We see it in schools, we see it in clinics, we see it at the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic…, which saw a 5,337% rise in adolescent girls in the last decade,” Stella O’Malley, Irish psychotherapist and founder of the gender-critical organization Genspect, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Gender dysphoria patients used to be composed almost exclusively of two cohorts, young boys and middle-aged men, but a meteoric rise in teenage girls seeking “gender-affirming care” began about ten years ago, O’Malley said.
How did the Turban study come to such unexpected conclusions? Simply put, the study relies on an extremely limited set of data and makes one highly questionable assumption about said data. It is based solely on the 2017 and 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and then only on data from the 16 states that asked about gender identity — hardly enough of a data set from which to draw definitive conclusions or to examine long-term trends. In addition, the authors assume the birth sex of respondents based on how they answered the question “What is your sex?”
“Although this question does not refer to sex assigned at birth specifically, several studies have found that [transgender] youth are likely to understand ‘sex’ to be sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity, due to the foundational salience of these characteristics to their identities,” they explain. “For this reason, we conceptualize responses to this question as referring to sex assigned at birth.”
Oxford University sociology professor Michael Biggs contends — in a comment Pediatrics refused to publish — that this assumption is unwarranted. The YRBS itself acknowledged that “it is unclear whether transgender students’ responses to the sex question reflected their sex or gender identity,” and the citations given to bolster the authors’ assumption “fail to support” it, writes Biggs. Transgender students’ reluctance to answer the question — 8.6 percent of them skipped it versus 0.5 percent of non-trans students — also weighs against assuming they understood it as the study authors did. Furthermore, notes Biggs, “transgender respondents who identified as male were on average 2.5 cm [one inch] shorter than non-transgender male respondents … evidence that some of the transgender respondents who identified themselves as male were natal females.”
(To be fair, Pediatrics did publish another comment raising some of these same concerns; but that one, unlike Biggs’, was titled “Science and Public Health as a Tool for Social Justice Requires Methodological Rigor” and included such statements as, “We assert that transphobia is a social contagion, and being transgender is not.”)
In short, the Turban study is practically meaningless from a scientific standpoint. But from the standpoint of public relations for the trans agenda — its real purpose — it has already performed admirably.
