Mick Hartley

Eliza Mondegreen at UnHerd on the suppression of the puberty blocker study exposed in the NYT (yesterday):

At the outset of the National Institutes of Health study, principal investigator Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the most vocal advocates of “gender-affirming care” in the United States, expected that young patients put on puberty blockers would experience “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality” and “increased body esteem and quality of life over time”. But that’s apparently not what the evidence showed. Rather than revise her hypotheses and share her findings with the scientific community, Olson-Kennedy and her team decided to sit on the results. Olson-Kennedy told Ghorayshi that she worried the study’s disappointing findings would be “weaponised” by critics.

Unfortunately, Olson-Kennedy and her team are not alone in taking an “affirmation-only” approach to publishing research findings. Suppressing inconvenient data is a pattern in the field of gender medicine, which has long subordinated scientific research to political expediency. Researchers and clinicians in the field tend to work backwards from their desired conclusions (“gender-affirming care is safe and effective,” “the science is settled”), then tell patients, parents, policymakers, and the public what they think these audiences need to hear in order to fall in line. Forget the ideal of impartial scientific research. What we have here are clinicians and researchers acting as “agents of lawfare,” with one eye on the courts and one eye on their reputations. In the process, they lose sight of their patients.

It's possible of course that simple self-interest plays a large part here: Olson-Kennedy has built her career on the success of "gender-affirming care". But what this surely demonstrates more than anything else is that gender medicine is not science and is not medcine: it's an ideology. Negative results are dismissed because they may harm the cause.

In recent years, the field of gender medicine has sustained itself in an increasingly polarised political climate through a systematic campaign of suppressing, obfuscating, and misrepresenting research. This strategy operates behind the scenes, quietly distorting public understanding of the issue at hand. But such an approach cannot survive scrutiny from mainstream media outlets and exposure in court cases. 

Which, thanks largely to the Cass Report, is what we're now starting to see.

Postscript: JK Rowling sums it up:

“We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.”