"In the first edition of my book Why Gender Matters, published by Doubleday in 2005, I devoted a chapter to kids who are psychologically “gender-atypical.” I suggested that these kids are somewhere in between male and female. But the Stanford study provides little support for that claim. I am hopeful that the researchers will do follow-up studies specifically looking at individuals who are gender-nonconforming, gender-atypical, and who have gender dysphoria, to see whether and how those characteristics influence these findings."
If you look at the graphs from the study those people could be the outliers but no matter what, it's not really enough people to glean anything useful.
This is not accurate for the cohort under study. 5% of people under age 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary. I would personally be unsurprised if well over 100 individuals in the study identified that way.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-o...
(As an aside, this is one of the things that makes the data on the effectiveness of transition care more remarkable than it even looks. Given the very high probability that a random person is cisgender, even moderate false-positive rates would swamp true-positives. The fact that they don't suggests false-positives are very rare indeed.)
> The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans...
My point is that it is reasonable to expect between 3% and 8% of the MRI study participants to have been trans. It is not reasonable to think that 0.5% or less would have been trans.
I'm not dismissing the claim as false, I'm saying that surveys like this are poor evidence that it is true because they are not very good at making precise statements about rare subgroups.
Should I doubt that there are really around 5 million religious Jews in the US, because the Pew survey used to estimate this could have had "people randomly selecting the wrong button?" Should I hold it equally likely that there are a mere 500,000 religious Jews? This subgroup is far more rare than the subgroup of 20-35 year olds that identify as transgender or nonbinary. How can we know anything about this subgroup at all, since (according to you) surveys cannot constitute good evidence for anything for a group with such rarity?
If the only source we had for the percentage of the population that was religiously Jewish was a poll, then yes, I would say you should take that number with a hefty grain of salt. But that isn't the only data we have. We have data from many polls, the census, back-of-the-napkin estimates based on the number of places of worship and average attendance, past demographic knowledge, fertility rates and immigration, and so on.
Even then, there's substantial error in those estimates - the US Census Bureau itself, arguably the most sophisticated demographic operation in the history of mankind, estimates that they double-counted ("erroneous enumeration") roughly ten million Americans, shrugged and went "yeah someone probably lives there" ("whole-person imputation") for another eight million, and missed eighteen million [1]. And that's just for total population (they think the error is larger among subgroups).
And numbers for trans people are highly variable (by as much as 1.5 orders of magnitude) among major sources I'm aware of. For example, the Williams Institute [2] finds ~1.5% trans ID among young people (a third of Pew's number), and binary trans people outnumbering nonbinary ones 2:1 (inverting Pew's ratio). The Canadian census shows <1% [3] among young people.
And corroborating sources are harder to get, both because there's a lot of disagreement about who exactly "counts" (Pew uses "transgender" and "nonbinary" as separate categories, the Williams Institute considers the latter a subset of the former) and because corroborating evidence is often only available for subsets of the population (like people who sought medical care related to their identity).
So yeah, I stand by what I said: a single survey does not tell you very much about a rare subgroup, in this or any other context. It is data, but it should be taken with a substantial grain of salt, especially when it comes to a group like trans people whose boundaries are fuzzy and highly controversial even internally. Certainly I don't think the statistical MOE tells even close to the full story, since it doesn't even for MUCH simpler questions (typical polling error in elections is ~twice the MOE on a much more clearly-defined question, for example).
[1] https://www.prb.org/resources/how-accurate-was-the-2020-cens....
[2] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Tr...
[3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220...
As for trans. Humans, unlike most animals, cannot even have sex without being taught. The reason is humans for many generations, million years probably, lived in groups and learned how to do it. Those who didn't have genetically hardcoded knowledge how to make kids by the time they grew up they knew it any way. It wasn't necessary and with the time it was almost lost. The same with gender identification. Everywhere boys and girls where brought up differently. So, we lost hadcoded self identification. Today human kids may grow up thinking they are dogs, or wolfs, or sheep. If they happened to grow up with animals.
Conclusion is it's parents responsibility to give kids the right identity. Failure to do it, some brainwashed wokes don't do it intentionally, results in miss self-identification. Add to that 'doctors' multi-billon industry preying on them and some schools playing along to keep parents uninformed. There was a couple of months back interesting article about navy seal who had mental problems. He was brainwashed into believing he was a woman, and needs treatment and surgeries, payed by government. Later he realized he was just used to make money, and became a man again. The same happens to kids en mass. Because they are easy targets.
We do not know what influences the way brains choose some kind of identity.
And obviously we as a society created this stark contrast between male and female. Look at animal kingdom
How so? Many species of animals show sexual dimorphism.