In my opinion this is a valuable step forward but was inadequate to assess for the problem at hand. Only 59% of patients who were surveyed responded which opens up to a significant bias and seems to be too few patients surveyed to detect the outcome in question. I agree that the vast majority are satisfied or do not have regrets, but it seems unrealistic that it would be 100% satisfaction. Who can claim 100% satisfaction for any kind of medical procedure?
I saw a series of studies once for HRT (not a surgery, but relevant to transgender research and major bodily changes) that said that 90% of patients reported either an improvement or at least no change in their quality of life after HRT compared to before. Of the 10% who reported a worse quality of life or stopped treatment, the majority of causes were due to external factors such as harassment/hate crimes or being disowned by friends and family. The least commonly reported cause was post HRT regret, and the vast majority of that 10% said that they would be restarting HRT as soon as they safely could.
Not only is that a huge success rate, but it also says something about the percentage of people who would respond to such a survey, as going “stealth” as it’s referred to, can be a major component of transgender people’s safety considerations. If people don’t know your trans, you can’t be assaulted for it. And considering the sexual assault rate for trans women in the US is 80%, they have reason to worry about that sort of thing. Also, a quick Google search tells me that the average response rate for medical surveys is 76% for in-person surveys, 65% for postal, and online surveys are 46% for website based and 51% for email surveys. So that 59% isn’t too far outside the range as long as it isn’t in-person surveys.
Isn’t this the opposite of science?
Why not post “finding faith saves lives” ?
It would be equally empirical.
I agree. “Study” is a bit strong here, they asked 2 questions and got 139 replies. Despite the bullying, my gender affirming care has done wonders for my mental health.
I think the purpose is to add the findings to a separate pool of data.
Ok but both are still completely unscientific, as is the entire field of psychology. It’s fine to call it research, but to conflate it with science is 100% false.
I know.
What are you even trying to say
There is no objectively falsifiable hypothesis, or imperially reproducible result.
Don’t bring science into politics, that’s what religions and governments have tried to do for years as part of propaganda / anti-science campaigns. It never goes well even if you think it’s morally correct, because scientific reality does not always align with, nor does it care about current morality. Nevertheless science is objectively true.
There are falsifiable hypotheses in this study.
Here’s the study. Go get access to the full text and read it https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2808129
The existence and wellbeing of trans people is not politics.
The authors did note that they had to exclude survey results for 13 respondents because they puzzlingly rated maximal or nearly maximal levels of both satisfaction and regret. The authors speculated that these respondents may have misread the instructions and misunderstood that the scales were reverse scored for the two ratings.
lol exclude the data that doesn’t match your hypothesis and you can probe anything.
How would you interpret the data of someone who said they both have extreme regret and exteeme satisfaction with a procedure?
I would too conclude that the survey was flawed.
To be honest, I could believe that a lot of surveys just discard results that can’t process, for whatever reason.
Can confident conclusions be made from such surveys? Probably not.
“Study number 7592043 shows that gender affirming care is effective”
You lot:
“idk… just seems like there isn’t enough data… just asking questions, etc etc.”
Nope.
I do believe it’t effective. I don’t believe 0% regrets.
You can’t include nonsensical data. The correct thing to do is note it in the paper, like they did.
