Vision: We need to see studies on gender care and mental health

About 100 years ago, philosopher Karl Popper made an important argument. He proposed that democracy needs science, and that, indeed, public attitudes toward science will help determine the potential of democracy.

That is, in a society with citizens who have many world views, beliefs, ideas and traditions, there must be a way to resolve disputes about what policies should be carried out by the government. When there was no way to resolve disputes rationally, there would be re-arrangements, and democracy would once again fall back on the rule of the people.

Therefore, the scientific method provides a relatively objective approach to the resolution of policy conflicts. Let’s say we wonder if our government should invest in preschools. Unbiased experts can be used to measure whether preschool made a significant difference in important outcomes by comparing groups of children in the same condition, some of whom attended preschool and some who never went to school. With adequate care in measurement, controlling for variables and considering other explanations, we can assess whether preschool was worth the public investment. This approach can bring people of different views together by providing a common basis for policy making, thereby strengthening democracy.

But in the years since Popper made this argument, we know that things are not as simple as he thought. For example, the words “There is no evidence that . . .” is used nowadays to suggest that science has shown that the matter is wrong, when instead the expression almost always means that “no one has done any research on this matter.” That may be true, but we cannot say one way or the other, however, such a tactic today is often used to label ideas as “disinformation” and therefore close the necessary arguments.

We have also discovered to our dismay that money can motivate some researchers to abandon impartiality, which has led scientific journals to mandate disclosure of funding and conflicts of interest. Researchers can also overstep their boundaries, so safeguards such as informed consent and confidentiality are now overseen by institutional review boards. Sometimes researchers even distort their results, which has led to the necessary production of datasets for independent simulations.

No matter how much we think we’ve closed the gap, we can’t close it all. Science is not the passionless business that Popper understood it to be, because its experts are people with desires, greed and selfishness.

Even knowing all that, the revelation in The New York Times this week that the scientist refused to publish his results because he didn’t like the results was shocking. Deliberately withholding knowledge from the public about an issue that the public desperately needs and wants to know more about is immoral. And yet here we are.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who directs the adolescent fertility clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, conducted a multi-year, government-sponsored study of whether people on puberty blockers improved symptoms of depression. psychological well-being for a group of 95 children with gender dysphoria. The study started in 2015; the children were followed for two years, and the results were collected and analyzed. Olson-Kennedy then refused to submit them for peer review and publication. In fact, he hid the results.

What were the results? No improvements in mental health outcomes are seen with the use of puberty blockers.

Finally challenged on her decision, Olson-Kennedy said she was “concerned that the results of the study could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use blockers because they don’t affect them,'” he talked about transgender youth.” In other words, he didn’t want policy makers to know that his study showed that puberty blockers do not improve the mental health of dysphoric children.

In the face of a major national debate over medical treatment for children with gender dysphoria, what Olson-Kennedy did amounted to willfully blinding her community to what the scientific evidence shows. what. Although he is now under enough pressure to say he will make the results public, it is clear that he has done something wrong.

In the United Kingdom, Dr. Hilary Cass, the author of a large and comprehensive report on the evidence for sex medicine, says that the delay in Olson-Kennedy’s publication “has led people to believe that people who prevent them from going into sex and femininity improves mental health, and fertility was not enough. the evidence supported that decision.”

However, it was author JK Rowling who summed up the situation best: “We shouldn’t publish research that says we’re harming children because the people who say we’re harming children will use that study as evidence that we are harming children. which may make it harder for us to continue harming children.”

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a push for results on gender-based medical care for children. The advocacy organization, WPATH, funded a similar study by Johns Hopkins University, and refused to allow the researchers to publish the full findings. The Economist found that WPATH wants all of Hopkins’ findings to be “fully scrutinized and scrutinized to ensure that publication does not adversely affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense.” In other words, no adverse effects can or will be reported, regardless of how important such findings may be in the democratic debate about this treatment, which often has irreversible consequences. changes in the body and sexual activity of children.

Those like Olson-Kennedy and WPATH, who try to hide what scientific research tells us, are not only acting unfairly, they are seriously undermining our democracy. Ironically, they also ensure that their status will eventually fall, and that the fall will be widely publicized. The truth will come out, one way or another.

Valerie M. Hudson is a distinguished university professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and a contributor to the Deseret News. His opinion is his own.