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Comment by techpineapple | Hacker News Reader

At first glance, I'm curious what the point of this is, people who want to believe it are going to believe, it people who don't want to aren't going to. The mainstream science community will probably just disavow most of these studies, and probably for good reason. They won't have good methods or won't be replicable.

But I'm guessing maybe the point is, if you can get these studies published by the NIH, then red-state governments can more easily argue for conversion therapy since it will be "backed by science"

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The point of this is explained further down in the article:

> But some people argue that previous research on trans regret and related issues have been poorly done and is outdated.

> "We are starting to see much greater numbers of young people who are seeing that they went down the wrong path for them and they're now left with irreversible changes to their body and they no longer identify as transgender," says Evgenia Abbruzzese, the co-founder of the group Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. "But they are left with these permanent effects."

> She adds: "There are a lot of negative impacts of transition. And regret is definitely one of them," she says. "It's a very important area of medicine to study."

> Others agree.

> "The research on detransition is very useful, it's a very important area," said Michael Biggs, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oxford. "This is an understudied population to collect systematic data on."

That's pretty much it, providing cover for more regressive policies, denying funding for programs they don't approve of, etc.

It's the same playbook the tobacco and petrochemical industries use to block or weaken regulations. The refrain is something like, "the science is not settled".

ExxonMobil and Phillip Morris used to have to fund their own scientists, this is just getting government to spend your tax dollars for them.

The current state of things in a nutshell, really. Our tax dollars now primarily fund corporations.

unrelated: a month ago you mentioned a quote: "Your religion prohibits you. It does not prohibit me." is originally from the WW2 movie "The Wind Cannot Read" (1958)

Same purpose as the upcoming vaccine autism studies.

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