gresl's comments

> It seems like a decent amount of the evidence regarding puberty blockers was excluded for dubious reasons.

The systematic review commissioned by Cass on the outcomes of puberty blocking interventions is here: https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2023-326669

The authors' quality assessment of each study is here: https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/early/2024/04/09/ar...

Of the 50 studies in that list, which of these do you suspect were excluded for dubious reasons?

> To be precise, the report excluded studies of blockers for not being blinded, in a recreation of the 2003 review of parachute efficiacy

No, studies were excluded for being of poor quality per their rating on the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale, which is a tool used to assess the quality of non-randomized studies.

You can see the review authors' scoring of each study here: https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/early/2024/04/09/ar...

Those excluded have a NOS total score of 4 or less and, as this table shows, a score that low is for multiple reasons including not having a representative cohort and inadequacy of follow-up.

The review itself can be read here: https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/09/archdischild-20...

A good recommendation, thank you.

The small number of individual cases that highlight the flaws in the system are actually very useful. In the case of the fraudulent doctor, this caused the GMC to check all the other thousands of medical practitioners who registered under the same route, once they realised how flawed their original process had been.

Similarly, many people - including the author of the linked article - and numerous institutions are now rethinking the entire concept of pretending that males are female if they self-declare themselves as such. This is based on an increasing amount of cases where appeasing such declarations has caused significant harm or has the clear potential to do so.

For instance, the case of Isla Bryson showed how ridiculous it is to bow down to a male criminal's declaration that he is a woman and, so the ideological argument goes, must therefore be incarcerated in a woman's prison. Though, we already knew this from the Karen White case, where women prisoners were actually materially harmed with the sexual abuse he inflicted on them. These are are numerous other similar cases that demonstrate how harmful this is, and the cost to the safety and dignity of women.

Referring to any male as "she" and "her" because he requests or demands that others do so, and insists that to not do so is impolite, is the thin end of the wedge that enables all the safeguarding abuses and eradication of female-only spaces at the other end. And there's nothing at all polite about that.

No because we know that they aren't actually doctors, and it's just a nom de plume for their artistic output. Just like Dame Edna Everage, who you mentioned, that everyone knows wasn't actually a woman but a character played by male comedian Barry Humphries.

Whereas referring to men who actually do want to be seen as women for whatever reason - such as Scarlet Blake and Isla Bryson, mentioned in the article - as women, even though they are not, is in a similar category to calling Zholia Alemi a doctor.

What about cases like this: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/10/fraudster-po...

Should we refer to this woman as "Doctor", out of politeness?

The term "TERF" isn't really accurate though, it should really be "MERF", if such a term is needed.

Point is, these radical feminists are excluding males from their feminism. I really don't see how that makes them socially conservative.

For example, radical feminists tend to advocate strongly for lesbian rights, based around the fact that lesbian women are female with a sexual orientation exclusively towards others who are female. The right to experience their sexuality free from harassment, the right to enjoy female-only lesbian spaces, the right to keep the word "lesbian" exclusive to them and not have it redefined to include bisexual women or any type of male.

How often do you find social conservatives championing these lesbian rights? I would say very rarely, if ever.