Jesse Singal

> Second, I don't know of any treatments for gender dysphoria (in trans people, not people with other conditions that've been misdiagnosed) that "fix" the mind and actually work. Gender reassignment, on the other hand, works, in the sense that it improves peoples' lives (see https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/transgender-teens-receiving-... for example).

There seems to be a prevalent problem in this area (and perhaps others too) to where the reporting on the "science" seems to be a lot more positive than the science itself. The original article alludes to this -- "stop questioning the science" like it's an open and shut case.

For that particular study, a more accurate headline would be: "In Our Pre-Registration We Expected To Find Improvements on Eight Measures but We Only Found Improvements on Two, Which Were Very Small, and Only For Natal Females."[1] It's not as snappy, but it's more accurate.

That complex and fairly ambiguous outcome gets summarised into an overall optimistic story by the press, which then in turn gets digested into "gender reassignment .. works", not just on HN but on forums all over the internet.

It's not just that study though -- whenever the field is looked at holistically the evidence for the effectiveness of these treatments is not strong.[2][3] and the evidence for such treatments on children (the subject of the article) is even weaker.

Ultimately I believe adults have the right to do as they wish with their own bodies, however when it comes to…

> Last time this topic came up, I tried so very very hard, to find credible sources about wtf this website or it's users did exactly, and couldn't (found some but it was very light). I mean it's there on Wikipedia sure, but if you keep digging it starts repeating and self-referencing other websites that are just as "not credible" or relying on "other websites" that I can't take them seriously on their claims.

Paywalled, but: "How Journalists Botched Their Coverage Of #DropKiwiFarms" https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-journalists-botched-their-coverage

Author is credible enough, I think. Quoting wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

"Jesse Singal is an American journalist. He has written for publications including New York magazine, The New York Times and The Atlantic."

"Singal's political orientation has often been described as liberal but "heterodox", though he has expressed an aversion to the latter term as a descriptor of his work"

==

I'll quote some parts:

> briefly, so as not to ignore one of the most serious allegations, I also think the oft-repeated claim that Kiwi Farms directly caused or “was linked to” multiple suicides, is, when presented without any further context, misleading — not to mention an irresponsible way to report on suicide. On this front, I can’t really do anything but link (https://archive.ph/34wUy) to Moon’s own post on the #DropKiwiFarms controversy. YOU SHOULD NOT ACCEPT HIS CLAIMS AT FACE VALUE. But many of them are easily…

This is a very disingenuous take. "If You Disagree With Me, You Want People To Die" is also not the best way to signal your openness to an honest debate.

> The truth is, hormone therapy saves lives. Some of those lives will be teenage lives.

The truth is - the current research about that is lacking, we know that there are serious (and good faith) arguments against claiming that puberty blockers are reversible, and we know that many clinics simply don't collect data about people post transition or distort whatever data they do collect:

"For those late to this: In April I published a very long post laying out the severe flaws in a study about puberty blockers and hormones University of Washington researchers published in JAMA Network Open, and how they exaggerated the results when describing them to the media and to UW’s own PR apparatus. The very short version is that the study has so many flaws that it does not provide us with any evidence whatsoever supporting the idea that kids who went on gender-affirming medicine (GAM) experienced beneficial outcomes relative to the kids who did not.

In fact, any genuine comparison between the GAM and no-GAM kids 12 months out is impossible, because 80% of the kids who didn’t go on GAM had dropped out of study by the final wave of data collection, leaving just six remaining. That is far too small a sample to draw any conclusions from. (The paper gave no explanation as to why some kids went on GAM and others didn’t, making it…

No, this sounds exactly like Twitter.

On Twitter, self-appointed mobs of the morally righteous call for violence against children [0], farm lulz from the killings of police officers [1], dox strangers to get them fired over off-color jokes [2], and endlessly harass and threaten certain conservative journalists and activists [3]. Actual Twitter employees harassed right-wing reporter Andy Ngo [4] after a real-world mob attack sent him to the ER with a brain hemmorhage, an event which "ACAB Twitter" continues to celebrate and remind him about.

The trolls on Twitter blend in by being a few medium-sized fish in the ocean. The trolls on Kiwi Farms are more visible as big fish in their own small pond. They're ideologically flipped compared to Twitter trolls, but fundamentally alike in their methods, moral posturing, and disregard for basic human decency. They're all an enormous net-negative for humanity.

[0] https://medium.com/@RevolutionaryId/twitter-democratizing-mobbing-high-profile-individuals-calling-for-violence-against-the-covington-ad18fae84840

[1] https://twitter.com/halfsleeps/status/1320955923205033984

[2] https://news.yahoo.com/journalist-apologizes-for--hasjustinelandedyet-twitter-uproar-after-pr-exec-s-aids-joke-164616178.html

[3] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/its-insane-were-having-a-debate-over

[4] https://archive.is/VGuZy

>Substack's CEO explicitly said they won't ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down... four of the Nazis. Four.

Dash annoyingly doesn't cite his source on this claim, but I think he's referring to Casey Newton reporting offensive content to Substack in January 2024.[0]

Newton made it seem like he reported dozens of blogs, but Jesse Singal's reporting indicated that Newton could only find six Substack blogs he believed violated Substack's rules, and Substack removed five of them.[1] The details are hazy because Newton refused to answer Singal's questions about his reporting.

So, Dash's presentation is very skewed. A more accurate telling would be "when confronted with six blogs that a reporter believed violated Substack's rules, Substack removed five of them."

[0] https://www.platformer.news/substack-says-it-will-remove-nazi/

[1] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/platformers-reporting-on-substacks

sciencebasedmedicine.org used to be one of my go-to places on the internet, along with the Cochrane library (which is more concerned with evidence based medicine). But they've shown themselves to be as dogmatic as they come:

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-science-based-medicine-botched

Such a pity. That is an explosive topic that needs to be examined carefully and honestly, but it is clear that Gorski and Novella are only interested in one narrative. And Novella is the author of one of the best works on critical thinking:

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/your-deceptive-mind-a-scientific-guide-to-critical-thinking-skills.html

I'm not saying that the Ivermectin article isn't reliable, but Singal's piece is utterly devastating to their credibility.