Eyes way open

Oh god maybe we haven’t sufficiently taken into account the role of sheer stupidity.

Pink News headline:

Trans adults twice as likely to die as cis adults, eye-opening study finds

Very eye-opening.

The author of this howler is the reliable Vic Parsons.

Trans adults are twice as likely to die as cis adults, according to an analysis of almost 50 years of medical records from an Amsterdam gender clinic.

The headline you could “meh” because headlines are notoriously prone to error (and are usually composed by an editor), but now we’re in the subhead and still saying it. And all the way into the article…

Trans women had particularly high risks of death, and are nearly three times more likely to die than cis women and twice as likely as cis men, with the most common causes including HIV-related illnesses, heart disease, lung cancer and suicide.

Trans men had similar mortality rates to cis men, but were twice as likely to die as cis women, especially from non-natural causes like suicide.

Still he doesn’t spot it.

Thick as a brick.

It will be all over Twitter before the paint has dried.

Comments

11 responses to “Eyes way open”

  1. Nullius in Verba Avatar
    Nullius in Verba

    Trans adults have a 200% chance of death? Does that mean they die twice?

    I’m confused again.

  2. GuyRT Avatar

    So there’s a good chance I’m immortal? That would explain why I haven’t died yet.

  3. Blood Knight in Sour Armor Avatar
    Blood Knight in Sour Armor

    There’s no way that they’ve got fifty years of data on transmen… They were basically unheard of until some time in the 90s (hence Blanchard’s taxonomy)

  4. Holms Avatar

    FACT: Trans people have a 100% chance of dying.

    FACT: Trans people’s chance of dying is twice that of me.

    FACT: I have a 50% chance of dying. Fuck yeah!

  5. Mike Haubrich Avatar
    Mike Haubrich

    I’ll tell that Grim Reaper I no longer objected to being referred to as ‘cis.’

  6. Sackbut Avatar

    Re 50 years of data, the study says they have records going back to 1972.

    We did a retrospective cohort study of adult transgender people who visited the gender identity clinic of Amsterdam University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. Data of transgender people who received hormone treatment between 1972 and 2018 were linked to Statistics Netherlands. People were excluded if they used alternating testosterone and oestradiol treatment, if they started treatment younger than age 17 years, or if they had ever used puberty-blockers before gender-affirming hormone treatment. Standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) were calculated using general population mortality rates stratified by age, calendar period, and sex. Cause-specific mortality was also calculated.

    Christine Jorgensen had sex reassignment surgery in 1951, having heard about it earlier, so there were earlier examples as well.

    The study looks to my inexpert eyes to be a reasonable mortality risk study, the description of which is getting butchered by the Pink News article.

    If you want to look at the Lancet article without sullying your screen with Pink News, here it is.

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(21)00185-6/fulltext

  7. Sackbut Avatar

    FWIW, the study summary says:

    This observational study showed an increased mortality risk in transgender people using hormone treatment, regardless of treatment type. This increased mortality risk did not decrease over time. The cause-specific mortality risk because of lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, HIV-related disease, and suicide gives no indication to a specific effect of hormone treatment, but indicates that monitoring, optimising, and, if necessary, treating medical morbidities and lifestyle factors remain important in transgender health care.

    That sounds like a tentative condemnation of hormone treatment to me.

    I note with amusement that Pink News has a sub-head “trans people more likely to die by suicide than cis people”. So trans people need not fear cis people, as cis people pose a lower risk than the trans people themselves. Good to know.

  8. Holms Avatar

    The conclusion of that study shows that hormone therapy increases deaths due to suicide, and so directly refutes a major TRA claim: that gender dysphoric kids need urgent transition treatment so as to minimise their risk of suicide. Pink News brushes right by this to conclude that trans people are even more vulnerable, even more oppressed than previously thought.

  9. John the Drunkard Avatar
    John the Drunkard

    A report on unequal mortality that manages not to mention alcohol, smoking, drug use?

  10. Sackbut Avatar

    JtD, those are, I suspect, included under “lifestyle factors”.

  11. ktron Avatar

    Tee Hee – classic case of math skills fail?

    This comes from the same failed realm as you the supposed “economic losses” we incur daily due to [insert problem here]

    The media routinely present the idea of “loss of income” when at most it is the “loss of potential business transactions”. The most flippant example being “workers” taking days off due to illness as loss of income to their employers . . .

    . . . but if their employers are “selling” anything remotely useful, the buyers will still buy it, maybe a day or two later, but there will at most be a delay, not a loss.

    If you totalled all the reported economic losses supposedly caused by any number of things, we would be so helplessly in debt, that no one would ever get out o bed in the morning.

    just for fun, a related example of how the internetz side-track and obfuscate, as in looking for a “definition of ‘Thick as a Brick’ “‘

    https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Thick%20As%20A%20Brick