What Does Transgender Research Really Say?
The UK news organization, Daily Mail, reported that seeing trans people on TV caused young people to seek out medical transition.
Except, no, the actual research didn’t.
First, let me link to what I’m talking about:
Science reporting is notoriously awful (ironically the linked paper also mentions the Daily Mail’s bad reporting of another science issue, the false link between the MMR and autism that destroyed public confidence in vaccines). There isn’t a simple reason for this, but it is worth looking at.
What did the research study actually study?
Looking at the paper, published in the JAMA Network Open “open-access” journal (which does have active peer review and is reputable), this research looked at the number of referrals received by a UK and an Australian children & adolescent gender clinic. In those state-run healthcare systems, these are the primarily organizations that provide medical transition services for part of their country. We know that the number of people seeking help for medical transition has risen over time, and there is a lot of curiosity (and politically-motivated theories) about why this is the case.
The research study asked a very simple question — and, of note, this is the only question the paper addressed with data: Do we see more referrals of young people to these clinics after local news media publishes a transgender story.
There is some nuance to how they defined a transgender story, but we’re essentially talking about news stories. In fact, they used Google News to do the searches (exact search terms are in the article) for local news.
What did the study find?
The study found that, at least in the short-term (1–2 weeks), there may be an association between referrals to gender clinics and the presence of more local news stories that talked about trans people, but no significant correlation after 2 weeks passes. That’s it.
The study did propose some theories as to why this might be — but it’s important to note that these theories were not proven, nor was…
