Transgender Science Baloney Kit

The discipline of critical thinking is on the wane. It is nearly gone from public discourse, instead being replaced by analysis featuring “feelings”. Don’t get me wrong, feelings have their place but so does critical thinking and rationality—particularly with respect to understand scientific evidence. Carl Sagan, in his book The Demon-Haunted World—Science as a Candle in the Dark, identified some useful tools for detection of faulty arguments that have come to be known as the “Baloney Detection Kit” (his 9 tools are listed here). Many of them apply to analyzing scientific articles and arguments.

Carl Sagan

I want my readers to be able to analyze scientific evidence about being transgender for themselves and not rely on me for detecting baloney. There is a saying, attributed to various religions and authors that says “Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.” So, based on Sagan’s Kit and my experience with articles concerning being transgender, here are six tools that should be in your Transgender Science Baloney Kit, in order of importance.

1. At first, ignore the beginning and end of a scientific paper. Most of the abstract, introduction, discussion and conclusion sections of primary sources are usually BS. They are usually designed to fit into current ways of thinking in order to get future funding. Inevitably, in the conclusion there is an appeal that additional work has to be done on particular issues (which is their next funding proposal). Read what the authors actually did in the procedure section and attend to the data in the results section. Then—make up your own d***ed mind about what the evidence actually showed. Think about the many hypotheses that could account for the results. You may need to analyze other studies to come to a conclusion. And, yes you will have to look up some scientific terms—no problem, they are all in Wiki.

These days, one has to look carefully at the results statistics. Sometimes the differences between groups or treatments is so small as to not be of practical significance. Authors have been known to continue to collect data until statistical significance is achieved and then stop. This is a violation of statistical procedure and is known as “p-hacking”. The “p” variable is a statistic that measures whether the differences could have happened by chance. Lower p values indicate statistical significance and indicate the assumption that the there is no difference to be false. If the authors had continued to collect data, sometimes differences might have lost statistical significance as measured by p. The bottom line is that differences between groups or treatments have to be really big to be believed. There is actually a movement to do away with statistical significance in science and to just judge the size of the effect.

You can always go back and get the analytical opinion of the authors in the rest of the paper but their arguments should not count more than your own. Which leads to the next tool in your Transgender Science Baloney Detection Toolkit.

Cover featuring a McHugh article.

2. There are no authorities, only experts. Authors of papers are human, too. Authorities have been wrong in their declarations in the past and will continue to fail. There are only experts who have read and analyzed the evidence and are willing to summarize the evidence. And, of course, new evidence should change these summaries if indicated.

People who pretend to be authorities push their qualifications in your face. Experts do not need to because they talk about evidence. Some pretender-authorities in the transgender domain include Zucker, Bailey, Blanchard, McHugh, Dorner, Baron-Cohen and others whose arguments are not based on evidence or rational arguments but on unproved notions of transgender causation including improper child rearing, fetishism, delusion, and prenatal hormone levels.

3. Review articles are only useful as bibliographies. Review articles usually try to synthesize what is known from many evidentiary studies. These days, they also appear in non-scientific publications and social media. The synthesis is usually not useful. Their value is in their list of studies, not in the synthesis. At best, they will give you what the cultural Zeitgeist (literally spirit of the times in German) considers to be important references. Many references will often be missed. During my graduate studies I watch several professors go through the painful process of writing review articles for scientific journals (and/or watched their graduate students write the articles). Because of space, much was left out, the level of synthesis was primitive and inexact.

4. Follow citations back to studies containing real evidence. There is now a tendency in the social sciences, particularly gender studies, to cite previous publications to prove a point. But if you go back to these studies you will find no empirical evidence at all. Sometimes there is a cascade of studies that cite previous studies that cite a handful of historical studies that contain no evidence, only opinion. Many times, the design and results of those historical studies do not support its conclusions. Much of gender studies is not built on a firm foundation and can be classed as pseudoscience. Citation of these original historical studies are part of the Zeitgeist that must be cited to show that the authors are aligned with some philosophical position, almost as a religious ritual. In the case of gender studies regarding transgenderism, the philosophical position is typically critical queer “theory”. Critical queer “theory” is not a scientific theory at all but rather a political position to criticize aspects of culture to break it down.

5. Look to see if a study/experiment has been independently replicated. Although repeating the same experiment/study is assumed to be important cornerstone in the philosophy of science, replication is actually rare. This is because many scientific journals refuse to print studies that “merely” follow the same design or those studies with “negative results”. However, recently there have been concerted attempts to replicate findings for samples of scientific studies. The results were poor. Successful attempts in social psychology occurred in only 39% of cases, in economics 61% of cases. Looking at cases in two respected journals, Nature and Science, resulted in only a 62% successful replication rate. A “Replication Crisis” was declared and now there are efforts to encourage replication studies, for example, guaranteeing publication at the start. Of those studies successfully replicated, the differences between groups or treatment observed were only about 75% of the original. For this reason, many scientists are now judging results based on the size of differences, not just the statistics. Some urge abandoning the conduct of statistical comparisons altogether. Big differences are more to be trusted. An interesting result of these studies indicated that experts were able to predict which studies would be successfully replicated. That casts doubt on peer review.

6. Look for studies that seek to disprove hypotheses. Some scientific philosophers support the idea that the only good science comes from studies/experiments that are set up to fairly disprove an idea. This was the view of Karl Popper who came to believe that Freudian psychology and psychodynamics were merely “pseudosciences” because they put forward notions that could not be empirically tested. Real science, like Einstein’s prediction that light would bend around heavenly bodies due to their gravity created by their mass, carried actual risk of being disproved. Observations made during solar eclipses were unable to disprove Einstein’s theories about gravity, space and time. Light bent around the sun because of its gravitational mass. It is only by disproving aspects of theories that we can come up with better ones that describe reality.

Conclusion

Science and pseudoscience studies about transgender people are proliferating and being cited in public and social media. We need to think like scientists to defend ourselves and know objective reality.

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Category: Transgender Science