When it comes to medical facts, who would you trust more — the Hershey company or the US Assistant Secretary of Health? Lately, I’m not so sure. At least when a few years back Hershey-funded researchers announced chocolate had health benefits most sensible people concluded … they would say that. But when Admiral Rachel Levine recently claimed that Republican bills preventing doctors giving kids puberty blockers would “drive people to suicide”, every mainstream media outlet quoted “her” reverentially. Yet the medical evidence Levine relied on is embarrassingly poor. Strange how a male who thinks he’s a woman doesn’t have a grasp of facts.

The press release ignored the small print

Levine justified the claim that puberty blockers and other hormone injections for adolescents were life-saving, based on a study by the Trevor Project which campaigns on suicide among young LGBTQ+ people. A cynic might wonder if a study finding robust mental health was ever likely to emerge from a non-profit desperate to raise funds to pay for its staff and operations. That aside, its Survey on LGBTQ+ Mental Health from 2021 is only one of an increasing number of misleading research papers churned out by the LGBTQ+ lobby to try to browbeat legislators and the public. 

The study revealed 14 per cent of those who got gender affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) claimed to have attempted suicide, while 23 per cent of those who didn’t get it but had wanted it … said they’d attempted suicide. Case proven? Not really. In fact, what the Survey doesn’t point out is that the leading trans health organisation WPATH’s own medical guidelines make it clear young people who want GAHT should be screened beforehand for mental health problems including suicidality. In other words, it should be no surprise at all that those who get gender affirming care suffer less suicidality. Those obviously suffering from depression are supposed to be filtered out. 

No news coverage I saw mentioned this rather large proviso. Nor did it mention the paper’s reminder that when it came to the reduced suicidality figures, “causation cannot be inferred”. In other words don’t read too much into this. Just a shame then, that in its Press Release the Trevor Project laid on the causation inferences with a trowel. Indeed it went further, blaming political attempts to limit puberty blockers and “harmful rhetoric” as a possible cause for the mental health issues they were supposed to be investigating objectively.

Queer Theory teaches LGBTQ+ researchers that scientific facts merely reflect the impact of hierarchical power relations, so increasingly many don’t bother even to appear dispassionate. Dr Jack Turban is a case in point. An outspoken advocate for GAHT, he went so far as to suggest doctors should ignore an Arkansas law limiting such interventions. His own paper from 2020 became a cause célèbre when it too suggested puberty blockers lowered suicidality. Pink News, the gay news outlet, claimed it showed blockers “literally save lives”. American news outfits were no less uncritical.

Reality and claims were at odds. The press release and coverage ignored the small print where Turban admitted that lower suicidality might be explained because the guidelines, in this case of the Endocrine Society, urge doctors to ensure any mental health issues are “well-controlled”. In Turban’s words, “it is plausible that those without suicidal ideation had better mental health when seeking care”. They also ignored the fact that while suicidal thoughts were lower among those who got blockers, the per cent who actually ended up hospitalised after an attempt was almost double among those who’d taken them. That doesn’t sound like it’s saving lives. Literally or otherwise. I didn’t see a single mainstream outlet bother to analyse the paper and discover this.

It’s no wonder the LGBTQ+ movement has lost touch with reality

In the absence of robust science journalism, a slew of studies has been rushed out in the UK by various LGBTQ+ lobby groups to support their latest demand. A so-called “trans conversion therapy ban” aims to force therapists to affirm trans identities in young people. One major study openly in support of such a ban by Coventry University, paid for by the UK government, was published in October 2021. It claimed conversion therapy for both gays and trans people was widespread and terrifying. The study soon disintegrated as critics pointed out it had interviewed a mere 30 people, a third of whom, rather embarrassingly reported relatively benign experiences. Only three trans people were interviewed who said they’d experienced an attempt to change their gender identity. If trans conversion therapy is such a major issue, you’d think they could find more than three people out there. 

We can get a sense of the campaign’s grasp on truth from the fact that one of its leaders, Jayne Ozanne, recently claimed people were being correctively raped and beaten up “across Britain” to try to convert them. If they were, the culprits could be arrested today, since strangely enough corrective rape and beating people up are criminal offences already.

Perhaps it’s no wonder the LGBTQ+ movement has lost touch with reality now that it’s embraced Queer Theory’s mish-mash of cranky speculation. Queer Theory emerged out of French post-structuralist academia that judged scientific findings a “constructed reality”. This justified Bruno Latour disputing the claim that Ramses III died of TB. He argued the tuberculosis bacillus had only been discovered in 1882 and so could not properly be said to have existed before then. By contrast Foucault’s claim homosexuals were invented by the Victorians seems relatively sane.

No one is saying that science is immune to bias or that exploring the real material world is philosophically simple. That’s no excuse for the flagrant dishonesty of the “research” produced by the LGBTQ+ lobby. It makes Hershey’s science appear world class — at least that didn’t leave a bad taste in the mouth.