Rigging the Science

The ersatz “scientific consensus” cited on behalf of “gender affirming care” rests upon a foundation of quicksand. It is a Collateralized Debt Obligation constructed out of a mass of underpowered — at best methodologically flawed, at worst downright fraudulent — individual studies that make only the most perfunctory attempts to qualify as data-gathering. Each constituent part is invalid in itself and is aggregated into a larger whole that compounds rather than mitigates the weakness of the individual parts. The resulting structure is then blessed with a Triple-A rating by a credentialed member of the scientific clerisy with activist commitments to the cause whose declaration that the benefits of “gender affirming care” are “settled science” is then uncritically broadcast by the NGO lobbies that dominate Democratic party messaging and mainstream media coverage of the issue.

It takes only a very cursory understanding of research method to be able to see this once you look into the studies themselves. The studies are that slapdash, almost contemptuously so at times. The manufacture of this pseudo-consensus based upon confident pronouncements issuing from what we’ve all been led to believe are authoritative institutions is one of the many dimensions along which the transgender movement has corrupted the integrity of truth-seeking in pursuit of an overreaching sociopolitical agenda. This agenda amounts in practice to propagating medicalized self-harm onto children under the guise of affirmation of authentic selves.

The process of exposure of this fiasco has been ongoing. The sexologist James Cantor dismantled the evidence cited on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement regarding pediatric gender medicine back in 2018. Michael Biggs wrote this important critique of the Dutch Protocol that is the most often cited piece of evidence in support of the efficacy of pediatric gender transition, which was further elaborated in 2022 in a separate critique. Leor Sapir did a thorough fisking of 16 studies at Reality’s Last Stand. Jesse Singal’s Substack has been covering this issue continuously in recent years. He recently published an overview of this subject in the publication Unherd. And the British Medical Journal recently weighed in with a reported feature covering similar territory. All of these publications confirm what comprehensive evidence reviews undertaken in Finland and Sweden have found — that there has never been any high-quality evidence in support of the safety or efficacy of pediatric gender medicine. These findings in turn serve as