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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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This is a really weird mix of stuff that has hints to my intuition of potential quackery while also linking to a wide variety of studies that seem real enough but aren't particularly related. I note from a quick scan of the internet that there's some criticism of Dr Will Powers as being a quack and with this in mind the references to 'anecdotal' research strike me as quite odd for a researcher. There's very little to support your claims and little opportunity to review the relevant primary sources with regard to overlap of GD with CAH. There's also a lot of unsupported claims and hypotheses. The suspicion I have is that the numerous citations are meant to give credence to the unsupported commentary. It has the hint of grift, a la Robert Malone to me.

If you could point to just the original articles you find persuasive for a particular claim it would mean we can both endure effort to interrogate the truth claims in a more concise zone. I mean I don't implicitly rule out that some biological conditions could overlap with GD, but I don't see the evidence here. The closest link for your claims, looking at CAH and GD is a review behind a paywall and I can't see the original sources. Reviews are only as good as the sources.

Dr. Powers has a plausible theory. That is all I can say about it. 50 years later it might turn out to just be bullshit; I wouldn't be surprised either way. "Hypermobile/autistic/ADHD/trans/queer/mentally ill" is definitely a cluster, though.

I've got no problem with exploring hypotheses, just that it's a hard discipline to obtain high-quality evidence and to make attributions, and also to divide these up from the framing or epistemological assumptions. We have to delineate what we actually know, and then we can explore what we need to find out to fill the gaps, this is the scientific process and it's different from intuitive prediction, opinion-making.

As an example of the first, prompted by the blog shared by Rae I found this paper on prevalence of GD for females with CAH:

https://www.academia.edu/20952414/Increased_Cross_Gender_Identification_Independent_of_Gender_Role_Behavior_in_Girls_with_Congenital_Adrenal_Hyperplasia_Results_from_a_Standardized_Assessment_of_4_to_11_Year_Old_Children

There is support that the prevalence of GD may indeed higher with this group than the general population (one study cited 5.2% of the CAH sample had GD, of which 30% transitioned, which was a lot higher than the GD population of that time. This in turn is suggestive of a biological basis, or marker, of GD in the brain for this subset of people, who we also know have had a condition of some sort of masculinisation of the brain, which could be relevant. Notably it isn't a measure of the prevalence of CAH within those that experience GD, or any comparison with trans identification, though the constructs have a 'gender identity' component.

We now have the usual concerns about the value of this citation. Is there selection bias? (The authors accept that, yes, there potentially could be). Is there any potential for bias in the instrument used, how valid/reliable has it been shown to be? Was the statistical method suitable - is factor analysis appropriate? They use only the first components (what proportion of the variance is explained?). Are the assumptions of normal errors on the latent factor regression upheld in the ANCOVA, have outliers/leverage points been checked, addressed, what is the control group? (There's a suggestion other studies were used in the control group, is that valid?. Etc.. etc... What do other studies say, is there any high-quality evidence with a larger sample with a transparent, non-biased selection process?

As a data point alone we are forced to conclude on the demands of evidence based medicine that it is low-quality evidence. It is suggestive for further study.

Secondly, the article also talks about GD, it says nothing about trans, or what trans is. While, particularly in more recent times, people with GD may become trans (whatever that is), and so we have association, that still leaves 'what trans is' and whether there is a causal connection from GD to trans.

How do we discern or frame this question? Is there a meaningful, essential or explanatory category that trans or (trans/CAH) exists in, such that we can postulate a causal path from some biological underpinning to an identity that tracks in an equivalent space other people would recognise within the scope of gendered identity, thus enabling it to achieve some kind of universality, OR, is trans a subjective, constructed category that is layered on phenomenological experience of gender dysphoria, which itself could be a consequence of underlying biological underpinnings, but which could be alleviated or reconciled in different ways, as social constructs can of course be adapted in many different ways.

I have no problem with looking at biological origins for dysphoria and even trying to connect these to concepts of gender, trans but my problem is the style of argumentation I see where some plausible aspect of biology in brain formation is mixed in with unclear notion of trans where implicit metaphysical assumptions are smuggled in that can then influence the reason making process, eg epistemological assumptions.

We also have to wrestle with the awful challenge of trying to parse research and scientific literature and being honest about the degree of certainty we can have based on it. I see people catapult off the smallest potential associations into somehow validating entire constructs of trans as transcendence and transhumanism, hiding the incoherence that can exist in the overall framework, eg, an essential gender reality whilst also pointing to socially constructed norms of gender (privileging another transcendent norm).

My short take is we will find all sorts of different trans, some with biological associations, making trans an incoherent concept unless we qualify it in certain ways.