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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.

Singal's work is not well-researched or reasonable. There have been countless analyses documenting the factual inaccuracies in his work, not to mention the routine and egregious violations of journalistic ethics.

Nobody has cast false aspersions on him, least of all the person that you are responding to. On the contrary, your comments on this post suggest to me that your defense of Signal and your description of him as "grounded and reasonable" has more to do with your approval of his beliefs rather than an honest assessment of his work.

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Could you link to some of those analyses?

I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.

The most comprehensive “Singal does bad journalism” montages come from the left-wing media outlets and leftist bloggers that he’s targeted over the years. The typical HN commenter is going to immediately gloss those accounts as partisan hyperbole. And why not? It’s purely academic for some of them, and internally worldview-challenging for others.

But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.

> But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.

Wow. I've read that article and if you think that was unbiased or even-handed...

There is a tech blogger who I really don't like and this blogger happened upon a comment where I said I really didn't like anything they had written, and happened to ask, "Why?" And my answer was how deeply incurious they were, and how incurious they invited their readers to be. This blogger never acknowledge the potential they might be wrong. Even as a nodding feint to fallibility as something we simply expect of people writing about any complex topic.

That's what that article is like to me.

I explicitly said it and every other example of the genre was biased, so I don’t know why you’re claiming otherwise. Thanks for confirming my priors on HN users.

I said it was well-researched, which is true.

> But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.

He misrepresents Singal's writing, uses guilt-by-association smears, and focuses more on personal vilification of Singal than substantive critique.

For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.

This is nothing more than a hit piece penned to destroy the heretic.

> For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.

Partially due to Singal’s sensationalist journalism, trans people in the United States are about to lose access to some forms of healthcare—treatments that will remain accessible to cis people, like hormone replacement therapy.

So I think history has vindicated this particular claim. I don’t expect you to agree, however.

I am honored that you made an account just to respond to this! Welcome to HN.

That's quite the leap of causation

https://commonslibrary.org/the-anti-trans-movement/

Singal is part of the “Disinformation and Conversion” faction, as a promoter of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria.”

Couldn't it be possible that chemically altering minors isn't be best course of treatment? The UK, Finland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have all stopped routine prescription of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria on the grounds that their efficacy is not clear but the negative side effects are. It's extremely hard to claim the science is settled at this point.

The allegations of harm seem to come from an a priori conclusion that these treatments are beneficial.

I welcome any novel, high-quality scientific research on better treatments for gender dysphoric children.

But, in the States at least, there is no longer any funding for that. They cut all of it by grepping the NIH and NSF databases for “gender”, more or less.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/nih-terminating-active-researc...

What there soon will be in the States, assuming SCOTUS overturns the Colorado ban this term, is a renaissance of conversion therapy. If you abuse the child hard enough and long enough, they’ll have bigger problems than gender dysphoria or—coming up in the next wave of manufactured outrage—same-sex attraction.

Hard to say that the “just asking questions” club has the child’s best interests at heart.

There has been quality research published recently on treating gender dysphoria. For instance, A 2020 study on treating GD with hormone therapy: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039488.2019.1...

Somewhat unique among studies on pediatric gender affirming hormone therapy, this study had a control group that wasn't prescribed blockers. The group on blockers fared no better than the control group. This is the study that primarily motivated Finland to stop routine prescription of puberty blockers to children, with half a dozen or so other European countries following suit after their reviews of the evidence.

Researchers in the US have typically balked at the idea of including a control group in their studies on blockers, arguing that it's unethical to withhold live-saving medicine from patients. This, conveniently, lets authors frame null results as positive, by claiming that gender dysphoria patient would have fared even worse without blockers. This is what Johanna Olson-Kennedy did in her latest study: she observed no change in the patients' outcomes, and claimed that this indicates that blockers are beneficial because they prevented the patients from getting even worse. But without a control group in her study, this is statement is just speculation.

The retreat from gender affirming care is motivated by the absence of good evidence in favor of their usage. And it's hardly a US-specific phenomenon. It's uniquely politicized in the US, I'll grant that, but this shift in stance on altering children's endocrine systems is happening in plenty of other countries too, so I'm not so convinced this is solely borne out by this latest President.

And again, I find the attempts to equate anti-gay conversion therapy aimed at suppressing homosexual desire with exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body. It's fundamentally different to[ tell a boy attracted to other boys that his feelings are wrong than it is to tell a boy identifying as a girl on account of his same sex attractions, "boys can like other boys, not only girls can like boys". The former is telling someone to reject a part of themselves, the latter is expanding's one's concept of gender to include one's natural state of being.

I’m not interested paying to read your study. The bulk of your comment is a non sequitur that conflates “novel, high-quality scientific research” with a single N=58 study that may very well be high-quality, but in any case does not propose a novel course of treatment. It has always been the case that many gender dysphoric children do not receive puberty blockers.

You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that. “Not routinely prescribed” is logically distinct from “never prescribed.”

Finally, you misrepresent conversion therapy. “Exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body” is simply an inaccurate description of both conversion therapy as practiced in the past and “gender exploration therapy” as practiced today.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10018052/

> Proponents of gender-exploratory therapy acknowledge that some consider it a form of conversion practice, paradoxically resenting the suggestion while opposing bans on conversion practices on account that it would prohibit their approach. As for critiques of gender-exploratory therapy, they are presented as evidence of trans health care’s ideological capture. Yet a close comparison of gender-exploratory therapy and conversion practices reveals many conceptual and narrative similarities. How proponents talk about gender-exploratory therapy is nearly identical to how individuals offering conversion practices targeting sexual orientation frame their own work. Despite the language of exploration, gender-exploratory therapy shares more with interrogation, if not inquisition.

Well, anyway. I cannot quote the entire article here.

> You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that.

No, it largely does not. Most European countries at this point, if they do permit blockers at all, only permit it as part of a clinical study, not as routine treatment for gender dysphoria. This excludes all but a slim minority of (if any) patients. Pointing out that it's still legal as part of experimental trials is a nuance that doesn't affect the >99% of patients that aren't part of a trial, and thus cannot be prescribed these substances.

Your linked publication doesn't actually interview patients who've worked with clinicians or otherwise try and dig into real-world evidence about what this clinical practice does. It's just one author postulating her opinions as fact, with no effort to back up her claims with evidence.

Thanks. I'm well acquainted with Hacker News' proclivities for mob censorship, but I didn't know a ton about this specific incident.

> I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.

I've been a member of this site for fifteen years. I know that nearly any material - not abstract - defense of transgender rights will get downvoted into invisibility, as will any attempt to name transphobia, no matter how civilly presented or exhaustively-cited.

For that same reason, I also know that it's not a worthwhile use of time to delve into substantive "debate" on these topics in this thread, or any place where transphobia is being trafficked openly, for that matter (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45508592).

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