Rooky error

Comments

4 responses to “Rooky error”

1. 

   Mosnae

   Nov 17, 2025 4:08 PM

   Oh, so there are less than a thousand trans people in the UK? Because otherwise, it’s clearly not possible for 70% of 457 trans people to constitute “the majority of trans people.” And one cannot reasonably extrapolate from this figure, because the sample is not representative. (Or rather, there is no reason whatsoever to believe it is representative, and there are lots of reasons to believe it is heavily biased.)
2. 

   Acolyte of Sagan

   Nov 17, 2025 6:13 PM

   This is peak hypocrisy. In Ophelia’s recent post, https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2025/biter-bit/ , about Jolyon’s whinging that the BBC was anti-trans, the whiny whiner was quoted as saying

   In 2021, the BBC admitted it had breached standards on accuracy after publishing a news story with the sensational headline that some lesbians felt “pressured into sex by some trans women”.

   The ‘inaccuracy’ was that the poll of lesbians used to determine the claim that many had felt pressured to have sex with trans ‘women’ was ‘self-reporting’; i.e. only lesbians were asked to respond to the poll.

   How is that in any way different from this self-reporting, trans-only poll?
3. 

   Mike Haubrich

   Nov 18, 2025 5:23 AM

   The ‘inaccuracy’ was that the poll of lesbians used to determine the claim that many had felt pressured to have sex with trans ‘women’ was ‘self-reporting’; i.e. only lesbians were asked to respond to the poll.

   When this came out and there was this nonsense backlash, I realized that the blowback was from people who learned their skepticism from social media. How often have you been asked to produce a “Peer reviewed study” to back a claim, when it’s not appropriate to the argument? And further they will demand a sufficient sample size of randomly selected participants in a controlled environment. But they are not actually trained in how research works, there isn’t this shortcut that you can use by listening to “Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” or reading a book by Carl Sagan. If you don’t understand the difference between a survey and a study, you need to go back to square one.

   It’s one thing to know the language of science, quite another to know how it works. And skeptics need to know the limits of their own knowledge in order to understand phenomena before they lecture other people on what is nonsense and what is likely true.
4. 

   maddog1129

   Nov 18, 2025 7:52 AM

   The lesbians were the ones who either were or were not being subjected to pressure. Who else besides lesbians would be expected to know whether any lesbians were being pressured by TIMs into having corrective rape sex? And it’s not like there weren’t plenty of male “lesbians” accusing the real lesbians — the women kind — of being transphobic, hateful bigots for excluding the men from their “dating pool.”. The guys were announcing their intent all over the place.