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asymmetricinfo's profile
Megan McArdle
Megan McArdle
Megan McArdle
Verified account
@asymmetricinfo

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Megan McArdleVerified account

@asymmetricinfo

Columnist at the Washington Post. Opinions my own. Email me: Megan.McArdle -at- http://washpost.com  Buy my book, The Up Side of Down http://amzn.to/1a3i2tK 

Washington, DC
Joined September 2008

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    1. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

      Hello, Twitter. It's time to tweetstorm my latest print column. It's about trans kids.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-should-we-listen-to-on-gender-dysphoric-children-everyone/2018/06/19/a62f8882-73fd-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?utm_term=.b40603e73a58 …

      19 replies 25 retweets 62 likes
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    2. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

      It's also about selection bias, which is where it shades over onto my beat.

      2 replies 2 retweets 7 likes
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    3. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

      It was touched off by Jesse Singal's long, exhaustively researched, and very thoughtful Atlantic feature on the topic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ …

      10 replies 3 retweets 18 likes
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    4. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

      I'm going to take the highly unusual step of actually outlining the central argument of the column, because this is such a sensitive topic, and misunderstandings are so quick to happen.

      2 replies 2 retweets 10 likes
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      Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

      When it comes to talking about what we should do about trans kids, the consensus on the left, and especially in a lot of culturally powerful institutions, seems to be that we should let trans adults tell us what's best for kids with gender dysphoria.

      9:04 AM - 20 Jun 2018
      • 3 Retweets
      • 12 Likes
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      4 replies 3 retweets 12 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          That seems obvious and intuitive. After all, they've been through it. Who would know better?

          1 reply 2 retweets 7 likes
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        3. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          Well, actually, there's another group of folks who experience gender dysphoria as kids. Their gender dysphoria resolves, a phenomenon known as desistance, and they embrace the gender that matches their natal anatomy.

          6 replies 3 retweets 16 likes
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        4. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          We don't know what percentage of kids will desist today, or would desist in a world in which there was no anti-trans bigotry. But it might be a majority; current studies show strong majorities, but they're contested by trans activists.

          3 replies 3 retweets 11 likes
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        5. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          It's what's known to statisticians as a "dark figure": there is some number of kids who will desist, but we can't see what that number is.

          1 reply 2 retweets 13 likes
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        6. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          But if that number is significant--and especially if that's a majority--that introduces an enormous problem with the "let trans adults tell us what to do" idea.

          6 replies 3 retweets 14 likes
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        7. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          So there's a general policy problem with "dark figures": people hate not having numbers. I get this all the time as a writer.

          2 replies 1 retweet 9 likes
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        8. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          An editor will say "We need this number" and I'll say "Yes, that would be splendid, but unfortunately, that data doesn't exist." And the editor will push me to use whatever number is closest.

          1 reply 2 retweets 7 likes
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        9. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          (To be clear, my editors at WaPo and Bloomberg have always been very willing to hear "There's no data, and the data we have isn't close enough to be useful. I will omit the names of the places where this has happened, in the hopes that they have reformed.)

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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        10. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          It's just a natural human tendency. You don't have information; you grab a proxy bit of information. Unfortunately, we then generally forget that we're using a proxy and treat it as if it's the number we actually want.

          2 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
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        11. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          This is an absolutely huge problem with, for example, the way journalists and others use statistics about false claims of rape.https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/06/what_we_dont_know_about_false.html …

          1 reply 2 retweets 12 likes
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        12. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          So consider what happens to gender dysphoric people. Roughly there are two paths: they decide to transition, or they decide they identify more with their natal anatomy. What do they then do?

          2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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        13. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          For trans people, transition is one of the central facts of their lives. They form a community. They form activist groups to combat ongoing discrimination. They're very vocal, because they've suffered greatly, and still are from ongoing social bias.

          1 reply 2 retweets 7 likes
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        14. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          People who never transitioned don't have anything like that. (Detransition is a separate question). It's not a central part of their lives in the same way; they don't form identities and communities around it.

          2 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
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        15. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          So on these issues, trans adults are going to have a unified, loud, prominent voice. Desisters will be a whisper, if that.

          2 replies 1 retweet 17 likes
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        16. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          As I noted in the column, I absolutely believe trans adults when they say that medical intervention as early as possible would have been best for them.

          2 replies 1 retweet 7 likes
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        17. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          I'm a 6'2 cis woman. Distracted people frequently call me "sir". This caused me great distress as a young woman, because it didn't match my self-conception of myself as a woman. And it's a tiny fraction of what trans people go through.

          2 replies 1 retweet 16 likes
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        18. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          It seems just bleeding obvious that trans adults will be better off if they got treatment during puberty so that their phenotype matches their self-conception.

          2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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        19. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          But if the desisters are a majority, we can have a situation where the trans adults can be absolutely right about what's best for them, and still not right about what's best for the majority of gender dysphoric kids. Which is why the phenomenon of desistance is so controversial.

          3 replies 8 retweets 32 likes
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        20. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          And when we're designing guidelines we absolutely must remember that this skew exists, that the data we're getting--"What would have been best for trans adults?" is not necessarily the data we want--"What is best for the greatest number of gender dysphoric kids".

          1 reply 3 retweets 20 likes
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        21. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          To be clear, we don't know if desisters are the majority. We're on an information frontier, and the irreversibility of puberty is forcing us to make hard choices with imperfect information. I'm just saying: we need to be conscious at all times that the information is imperfect.

          2 replies 2 retweets 21 likes
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        22. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          And not just grab our favorite statistic, and shout louder at each other, as if we had data we don't.

          2 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
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        23. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          So far, most of the questions about the column have been quibbles over word choice. So I'll just answer all of them at once: it's a print column. I have a hard word limit. This prevents me from adding modifiers that would reduce ambiguity. Try to read charitably.

          3 replies 3 retweets 12 likes
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        24. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          Which brings me to the end of this tweetstorm, at least for now. If I get more questions, I'll probably reopen it. In the meantime, I'll close by saying that this is not a brief against listening to trans adults. We absolutely SHOULD listen to them. They've been there.

          3 replies 1 retweet 8 likes
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        25. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          Meanwhile, read the column, which touches on other things I didn't get to here, like the hope that we can finesse these issues by setting up high-quality gender clinics.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-should-we-listen-to-on-gender-dysphoric-children-everyone/2018/06/19/a62f8882-73fd-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?utm_term=.b40603e73a58 …

          6 replies 1 retweet 8 likes
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        26. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          Okay, so actually I'm going to reopen this right now, and make one more point, to conservatives: yes, there are people who have detransitioned, and some of them appear to have gotten bad medical advice.

          3 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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        27. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          But conservatives frequently treat these people as if they're some sort of measure of the "real" truth about gender identity treatment. That's silly.

          2 replies 0 retweets 14 likes
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        28. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          *Any* medical intervention is going to be given to some patients who shouldn't have gotten it. Those people will be worse off. Often much worse off. There are people who have had the wrong leg amputated, so they ended up as double amputees. That's not an argument against surgery.

          5 replies 2 retweets 24 likes
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        29. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          We don't know how many people have been pushed into an inappropriate transition by bad medical care. There's no data. There's a bunch of articles using the same three anecdotes. I feel terrible for those people, but this is basically useless for assessing policy.

          4 replies 0 retweets 16 likes
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        30. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 20 Jun 2018

          We should get the data. I urge you to go get the data if this is an issue you feel strongly about, or donate to someone else who will do the work to get the data. But don't treat your anecdote as the data you don't have.

          2 replies 2 retweets 24 likes
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        31. End of conversation

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