To think I used to admire Peter Tatchell.
So, who cares, right? So 80 “cis lesbians” do get pressured to have sex with men pretending to be women, so what? Bitches. Karens.
A lot of people make the point that Simon makes:
How many people was that claim based on? 27.
Bros before hos.
Comments
8 responses to “A mere 80 women”
Lesbians are so old-fashioned. Tatchell is the guy celebrating our bisexual future, where labels don’t matter. Unless you are trans. Then labels do matter. Or something.
What was that Daniel Kahneman said about the WYSIATI* fallacy? How many women have had similar experiences for each of the 80 whom the BBC talked to?
* What you see is all there is.
Is Tatchell’s logic really “small number of complainants therefore zero complainants”? Also, who ‘found’ it to be a misleading claim? If he is using the neutral voice to mean himself, he is also a prat on top of anything else.
Journalists don’t require the same sample sizes as scientists. It’s a longstanding joke-but-with-a-lot-of-truth among journalists that “three instances is enough to write a trend story.” By those standards, 80 is pretty damn good. And that’s not even getting into how those sources are found — I see lots of think pieces that are basically “I found three people in my circle of friends who are doing X, therefore X is a big thing you should be aware of.”
There are some obvious flaws with doing journalism that way, but let’s not pretend that the BBC created a new, lower standard for this story.
The sample size for this piece is a red herring, anyway, and has no significance. All it means is that 80 women said this has happened to them. It could have been a story if only one lesbian reported it had happened to her, or a thousand. People who objected based on sample size are doing skepticism wrong. There was no claim in the article that a certain percentage of the lesbian population reported this has been their experience with men.
It’s not an extraordinary claim, either, but if he wants a scientific survey he can commission one from an independent pollster who knows how to build a satisfactory sample size and ask the sample population a simple question: “Do you get harassed by men claiming to be transbians?”
Tatchell is smart enough to know better, but he just doesn’t want to admit that his precious “all women” would behave badly.
Very much this. Those objections come from people (like Tatchell) who are almost entire ignorant of statistical methods beyond having heard the words “sample size” and “scientific survey” a few times. I have several favorite historical stories about “sample size” that I used to relate to my statistics/probability students as cautionary tales.
Sounds like it’s campfire time, James! Need to her those stories with flickering shadows.
I’m picking the journalists didn’t do a whole of population survey to find ‘only’ 80 affected lesbians. people, quite rightly, get upset about injustices affecting just one or two people. If you can uncover 80 without significant effort that should set off alarm bells.