Scientists Claim Keeping Men From Girls Locker Rooms Causes Men To Commit Suicide

Our latest misuse of statistics producing midwit science is found in the peer-reviewed paper “State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA” by Wilson Y Lee and others in Nature: Human Behavior.

Ponder the title.

Pondered well, did you?

It’s fitting we recently discussed bias in science and how scientists are good at finding evidence which fits their beliefs, but lousy, like most everybody else, at finding evidence which disconfirms their beliefs. The bias is rank here, first in their title with the words “anti-transgender laws”. By which they mean laws insisting men keep out of girls showers, and the like, are “anti-transgender”. I purposely wrote the opposite but equivalent headline for today’s post to contrast.

The second, and far larger, error is to suppose that people who are delusional enough to believe they are the opposite sex, or even believe they possess no sex at all, or that their sex can change with the tide, are instead perfectly sane and healthy. As implicitly are the army of Experts, celebrities and rulers who tell the delusional that surrendering to your fantasies is right and proper.

Well, the title is propaganda, but maybe the study itself is good. Here’s their Abstract (with my paragraphifications):

From 2018 to 2022, 48 anti-transgender laws (that is, laws that restrict the rights of transgender and non-binary people) were enacted in the USA across 19 different state governments. In this study, we estimated the causal impact of state-level anti-transgender laws on suicide risk among transgender and non-binary (TGNB) young people aged 13–17 (n = 35,196) and aged 13–24 (n = 61,240) using a difference-in-differences research design.

We found minimal evidence of an anticipatory effect in the time periods leading up to the enactment of the laws. However, starting in the first year after anti-transgender laws were enacted, there were statistically significant increases in rates of past-year suicide attempts among TGNB young people ages 13–17 in states that enacted anti-transgender laws, relative to states that did not, and for all TGNB young people beginningin the second year.

Enacting state-level anti-transgender laws increased incidents of past-year suicide attempts among TGNB young people by 7–72%. Our findings highlight the need to consider the mental health impact of recent anti-transgender laws and to advance protective policies.

Note carefully they claim to have found a causal “impact”. These are mighty words, as regular readers know. The bar to claim cause is extraordinarily high. Have the jumped that hurdle?

No. They only show, in models and not the data itself, “significance”. And you cannot get cause from “significance.”

Recall: what does “significance” mean? It means getting a wee P (or the mathematically equivalent narrow confidence interval). And what does getting a wee P mean? “Significance.” All classical parameter-based statistical methods need to go. But never mind.

We’ll also pass by the scientism of the last sentence. Even if it were true they found higher suicide rates in the delusional were caused by these new laws, nothing follows from that. To decide what to do is a moral, and not a scientific, question.

Here are their methods:

Potential respondents were recruited via targeted advertisements on social media (that is, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat).

That is enough right there to damn the study. Self-selected people answering questions directly related to their self-selection (good joke!) might prove something about why people chose to join this effort (I almost said “study”), but that’s about it. Here’s the real meat (with my paragraphifications and emphasis):

Attempted suicide. Past-year suicide attempts were assessed using an item based on the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). Young people who reported ever having seriously considered suicide were asked, ‘During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?’ Response options were (1) zero times, (2) one time, (3) two or three times, (4) four or five times and (5) six or more times.

The first analysis in this study focuses on the number of times that TGNB young people reported attempting suicide in the past year. This outcome was coded by taking the lower bound of each response option (that is, zero, one, two, four and six, respectively).

We also investigated the effect of these laws on attempting suicide at least once in the past year by coding responses as (0) did not attempt suicide in the past year (including those who did not seriously consider suicide) and (1) attempted suicide in the past year.

Young people who declined to answer questions on suicide attempts (n = 5,222; 8.5% of total sample) were excluded from the analyses of past-year suicide attempts.

Excluding these people will artificially boost the claimed “attempts”. In olden days, medical journals would have required the authors to do an “intent to treat” analysis, which means treat everybody as if they participated, so you don’t end up fooling yourself or your readers. No longer, alas.

Anyway, do you see the dog that didn’t bark? It isn’t there, so it will be difficult. But have a try before reading further.

The measures say nothing about who committed suicide. Not a word.

We don’t know who killed themselves because of these laws. We don’t know of anybody who killed themselves because of other reasons. There is nothing about suicide, actual suicide.

There are only words about people, addled by incessant propaganda and who self-selected into the effort to discuss the effects this propaganda had, who claimed they tried to commit suicide. (About delusional people who commit suicide we already know: what’s unstudied is the culpability of Experts.)

Did they? How do you know? Shall we take this self-selected sample’s word for it? Remembering, of course, these folks start at mentally troubled, and that they might want to show displeasure at laws which do not pander to them. Why should we believe them? Because Feelings? Because How dare you question me, suicide is terrible!

The entire effort is of no value. Except as yet another exhibit in how science has become ideologically captured.

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