Radical and Mathematical

I'm sure it's often thankless and feels like it's not affecting anything but you never know if a lesbian in alberta who's never thought about that before or never had the facts to back it up might be reading :+)

Source: Documentary lauds Hollywood stuntwomen, who do everything men do but in high heels (Sept. 22, 2020)

One of the most sought-after stuntwomen in Hollywood, Ms. [Zoe] Bell crashes through glass, slams into book cases and leaps from tall buildings. She has done stunts on more than 20 films and television series, including "Alias," "Kill Bill" and "Xena: Warrior Princess." Asked if she could accomplish a 22-story spinning fall from a skyscraper for 2004's "Catwoman," Ms. Bell thought for a moment and said, "Yes, I can." To get the chilling fall just right, she did it four times. "It's not until after you've been hit by a car and landed all right that the fear kicks in," she said. Stuntwomen often face greater dangers than their male cohorts. While stuntmen wear pads under their clothing, stuntwomen in action films are often minimally clothed; there is no place to hide padding or protective gear in their bikinis or ball gowns. Doubling for Sharon Stone, Ms. Bell had to do the high fall in "Catwoman" in high heels. "Because that's how women fight and die—in heels," she said, with a slight roll of her eyes.

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So women made their own chess teams where they could compete together but also didn’t have to worry about sexism from other male coaches and male players.

In fact, we find that gender bias inhibits women chess players; when women are told they are playing against men in online games, for example, they consistently play les aggressively, because we all still live in a sexist society and yes that even affects how we play chess. When women think they’re playing against other women they revert back to aggressive play. (And let’s not ignore the historic dismissal of female chess players by male chess players. Bobby Fischer’s “women are not so smart” quote for example)

So yes. We still allow women to have separate chess competitions, because at it turns out sometimes “equal opportunity” doesn’t actually lead to equality, even in a game like chess.

The mind turns from a focus on seeking success (being bold and creative) to a focus on avoiding failure, which involves being cautious, careful and conservative. A mind that is struggling with negative stereotypes and anxious thoughts is not in a psychologically optimal state for doing taxing intellectual tasks.

Stereotype effects have been seen in women who: record their sex at the beginning of a quantitative test (which is standard practice for many tests); are in the minority as they take the test; have instructors or peers who hold sexist attitudes or have just watched women acting in air-headed ways in commercials."

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

Add to that the pressure of having to represent all women: indeed, every time a woman fails against a man it is held as proof of the unfitness and inferiority of our entire sex. I also remember a study that showed men try harder when facing a woman, they really make it a point to destroy her, because it's not just a game to them it's about maintaining their dominance. Worth noting that male chess players have been sexually harassing and threatening female chess players since the begining. You make a piss poor political commentator if you refuse to take any of this into account (or are simply ignorant of those facts) as you complain about women not wanting to compete in a male environment.

Honestly, these people just keep outing themselves. It's like they're negging women or something.

Men are KNOWN to sexually harass women, we KNOW women perform worse among men because of rampant and internalized misogyny (see the points above). So women want their own spaces to get away from that.

The fact that these people are incapable of understanding that women don't want to deal with misogynistic bullshit from men, and instead default to "if you don't put up with men sexually harassing you in chess, you admitting that you're weaker than them. You're lesser? Are you dumber than men, is that it? You're just a stupid woman? That's why you don't want to compete with men who statistically put you in danger? You're inferior?"

Transition - The permanent, surgical removal and reconstruction of one or more sexual organs, as well as hormonal replacement, which carries significant side-effects and long-term - and not always positive - changes to mental and physical health.

The actual study and the kids bop version you’ll actually understand. I even screenshot the important part cause your fingers are too broken for Google.

Statistically not an issue. Address other surgeries with much higher regret rates first instead of targeting trans people if you’re SO CONCERNED

For starters, the paper on knee surgery that was linked to in the article that claimed to know about what the regret rate for knee surgery is never actually tells us what the regret rate for knee surgery is. Because is it a paper on the dissatisfaction rate for knee surgery. Which is a different thing to regret. You can compare the two papers defintions of their key terms here:

Literally, the majority of the participants that reported dissatisfaction with knee surgery reported that the surgery was overall beneficial. Dissatisfaction in this context means that the effects of the surgery are still causing them some level of unhappiness, not necessarily that they wish that they had never had the surgery to begin with.

Compare that with the definition of regret provided by the paper on GAS.

Regret is the explicit feeling that one would be better off had they not had the surgery. In other words, the majority of people who expressed dissatisfaction with knee surgery would not meet the definition of regret provided by the GAS paper. So it's a complete apples to oranges comparison to pretend that one group of people saying they are more unhappy than they expected to be after receiving a surgery is the same as another group of people who explicitly stated that they believe their lives would be better off had they not received a given surgery.

But that's more of a failure on the reporting, where the author at Gendergp failed to understand (or pretended to not understand) that two different papers were measuring two different things rather than a flaw with the papers themselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with measuring either regret or dissatisfaction, though I do find it interesting that I have never seen an attempt at measuring dissatisfaction rates of transgender surgeries. I'm not saying such a study doesn't exist, just that I've never seen it.

Where things really fall apart is when you compare the methodologies used to arrive at these numbers. First let's look at the knee surgery paper:

The authors attempted to contact all 356 patients who had received total knee athroplasty at three hospitals in Sweden. Now, when conducting a survey, one of the most important things to look at is the loss to follow-up. You want this number to be as low as possible, as a high loss to follow-up can add bias to results, often because there is a specific group of people who have been lost, causing the remaining population to become biased.

The knee surgery paper reported a 2.3% loss to follow-up. Which is well within the 5% you hope for with surveys like this. And those who were lost to follow-up were not included in the final numbers when comparing satisfied patients with dissatisfied patients. By contrast, the GAS paper completely failed to report on what the loss to follow-up even was (though reading between the lines, my guess is that it was most of the patients being reported on), their methodology seems to have been to wait around and see if anyone contacted their doctors to express regret. Anyone who didn't explicitly do so seems to have been counted as someone who didn't regret their surgery, even if the doctors made no attempt to contact them to see how they actually felt about their surgery.

Given that the majority of people who detransition do not report their detransition to their doctors (this paper claims 76% of patients fail to do this) this is already creating a sampling bias so large as to make any conclusions the paper draws unreliable. But when you look at what they actually did decide to count as regret, it gets downright ludicrous.

The only people who were actually counted as having regretted gender affirming surgery (which in the context of this study means everything from facial cosmetic surgery to genital reassignment surgery) in this study were people who contacted their doctors in order to get their surgery reversed. This is such a ridiculously narrow definition of what "regret" is that if the same standard were applied when measuring the regret rate of knee surgery, then the paper on knee surgery would show a regret rate of 0%, as it didn't report a single person trying to get their surgery reversed.

So when advocates of transgender surgeries claim that these surgeries have a lower regret rate than other surgeries, you have to include the asterix that this is only true if the definition of what regret for transgender surgeries is is so narrow, and the methodology for measuring that regret so sloppy, that if you were to apply the same standards to the surgeries they are comparing themselves to, then those other surgeries would have a regret rate of zero.

For me, the interesting contrast between transgender surgery paper and the knee surgery paper was the difference in a research team that is actively trying to find as much information (including negative information) about the effects of their surgery as they possibly can, and a team that is trying to cover their own asses by manipulating statistics to make the surgery in question seem like it has a far higher rate of positive outcomes than it actually does.