When Research Contradicts Ideology

A study that contradicts the right’s position on gender affirming care provides a useful example of how right wing writers hand-wave away transphobia’s many contradictions.

by Evan Urquhart

A 2 year longitudinal study in the New England Journal of Medicine has joined previous studies in showing benefits from gender affirming care, finding significantly improved mental health in transmasculine youth who are treated with cross sex hormones.

For those who have been following the research this should come as no surprise. Although gender affirming care for youth once suffered from a paucity of data, the research has begun to catch up. In recent years findings have come in one by one, and have largely tended to point towards medical transition being very effective at improving outcomes, perhaps even more so for youth than for transgender adults.

This would seem to present a problem for right wing media. Although ultimately the basis for the right’s transphobic moral panic are evangelical Christian and Catholic objections to LGBTQ+ people’s acceptance by society, it’s long been convenient for them to pretend that science will someday vindicate their view that gender transition is not an effective treatment for gender dysphoria. As more results come in that contradict this picture, it ought to become harder to claim that science is with the transphobe’s side.

However, the right are geniuses at hand-waving away inconvenient facts. Let’s take a look at how Nathanael Blake, writing for the Federalist, discusses the finding that transasculine youth who recieved tesoterone showed less anxiety and depression and greater life satisfaction after 2 years:

screenshot from the Federalist

So Blake imagines the inconvenient finding might not be accurate, speculates that talk therapy would have better results (something not borne out by any research), and suggests that maybe two years isn’t a long enough longitudinal study, because the “initial energizing, even euphoric” effects of testosterone will surely wear off later, sometime in the future, sometime when the study isn’t still going on.

This isn’t the only criticism of the study leveraged by Blake. He notes the finding that transfeminine youth did not show the same improvements in depression and anxiety the transmasculine patients did. (Transmasculine patients were also a significant majority, 60 percent, of those studied.) He very tastelessly refers to the death by suicide of two youth, out of the more than 300 patients who enrolled, insinuating that two deaths in a highly at-risk population could somehow invalidate the results. The writer also accuses mainstream news stories that have covered the finding of misleading readers, which honestly is pretty rich.

As a scientific criticism, this article in the Federalist does not succeed. As reported by the mainstream press, this study provides yet another data point bolstering the mainstream medical opinion that gender affirming care helps patients with gender dysphoria, and nothing in the Federalist article undercuts that. Instead it offers vague innuendo and suggestions that maybe, somehow the data is wrong.

The writer also ignores the main point of the study, which wasn’t just to repeat earlier research, which has shown improved outcomes for youth who access gender affirming care, but to suggest that the mechanism for this improvement is increasing gender congruence in appearance. In other words, they hypothesize that trans people feel better as their appearance moves closer to a cis-passing ideal. This might seem obvious, but in science it’s important to investigate seemingly-obvious things, and an unintuitive result here could have led to any number of new hypotheses to explain why cross sex hormones improved outcomes whether the person’s appearance became more cis-normative or not.

But, that didn’t happen. The study found improved gender congruence in appearance and better mood to be highly correlated. This in turn led them to suggest that the relatively slower impacts of estrogen might explain or partially explain why transfeminine youth did not show the same improvement in mental health outcomes as transmasculine youth did. (The study also provided a second possibility, which was that bias is experienced more strongly by transfeminine youth than their transmasculine peers, and this bias could be why the transfeminine youth did not show the same improvements on anxiety and depression that other youth did.)

As always, right wing outlets continue to put ideology above data, rejecting any result that doesn’t confirm their biases. It’s also important to note that accusing mainstream media of bias continues to be one of the main tools right wing media employs to dissuade their readers from consuming factual information that may contradict the right wing spin.