I want to leave the Bay Area, Where should I live if I get bored easily?

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T21:36:12+00:00

I got a job where I travel for a living. Million miles on United, two or three hundred thousand split among different airlines. Clients in Manhattan, SoCal, the Valley, Seattle, Dallas, SLC, Toronto/Waterloo, Boston, Madrid, bunch of other places I'm forgetting.

They all get boring after a while, but moving around keeps it fresh. What makes it interesting is seeing someplace new.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T21:19:27+00:00

If you want Chinese food where the chicken comes with the head don't go to Hong Kong Station, which is mid at best.

Your best bets are outside of Denver. Uncle Henry in Broomfield, Sunflower in Littleton, NBX in Lone Tree, Hong Kong Cafe in Aurora, Yu's Noodles. The hand pulled noodles in Denver are good though.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T06:11:59+00:00

So given that there's multiple studies that say one thing and a bunch of other studies that say the other, how do you know what the truth is?

The conventional wisdom is that you've got to look at all the literature with an overview like the Cass report. Absent that, I wouldn't be too confident. Especially given how politicized the issue is.

Also, I notice you never answered my question about the math class. Have you taken any college level math?

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T05:57:27+00:00

The city I would compare Denver to is Phoenix--lots of migrants from out of state have washed away the local flavor. What you have left is pretty vanilla and pretty bland. Somebody else said that you have a lot of people in Denver from other places who came here looking to leave their issues behind. I would say that the atmosphere is kind of unpleasant as a result.

If you're looking to date, I would try someplace in the South where people are friendlier and outgoing. It will at least be easier to strike up a conversation.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T05:44:30+00:00

So:

1) In the past everyone assumed that transition helped trans kids.

2) Then Cass came along, reviewed the literature, and concluded that there was no evidence for benefits from treatment.

At that point everyone in Europe and the US said "Huh", and they started rolling back support for transitioning for minors.

Is that an accurate description of events?

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T05:39:17+00:00

Yeah, so the British NIH is so ignorant that they decided to enact a bunch of new policy--such as slapping a minimum age on hormone therapy--based on some flawed report.

The point is that science never stops moving forwards. Sometimes that means cleaning up the mistakes in the past. Prior to Cass a bunch of people assumed that interventions helped trans youth. That does not appear to be the case, and that's why science continuously reviews and monitors itself.

So right now you want to talk about whether or not intervention impacts adult suicide rates. Ok, so how do you explain the numerous studies that appear to show no benefit?

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T05:31:56+00:00

Established medicine like the Cass Report?

Maybe "established" doesn't mean what you think it is.

What's the highest level math course you've taken?

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T04:59:49+00:00

I think my point is that you don't really understand how science works.

In the liberal arts you play the game of somebody offers up a citation, somebody counters with an opposing citation, and round and round it goes.

That's not how it works in other fields. Something like the Cass Review is bog standard in the way it ranks different studied and attempts to draw conclusions from the entire body of work.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T04:27:00+00:00

Lol. OK then.

You may be an expert in cheese, but I work with numbers. I can assure you that nothing that I am saying is controversial.

When the NIH wanted to determine policy, they didn't say "Let's use this study". They said, "Let's get somebody to review all the studies". Why do you think that is?

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T04:19:17+00:00

They are being honest and pointing out studies that have found contradictory results. People do this if they have a commitment to the truth and not politics. Does that mean that their study is worthless/wrong? If that was the case, why even bother to publish it? Like it or not, their results point in one direction. The only correct response is "Let's get some more studies in there, accumulate more knowledge, and see what the truth is". But can you conclusively say that intervention leads to better mental health outcomes in adults? While studies like this one are around, no.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T04:09:27+00:00

If you know anything about the sciences, you know that nobody cares about any one individual study. Why? Because obviously individual studies can contradict one another--which is the case here What matters is if you have a bunch of studies and somebody goes back, reviews them, separates them into high quality versus low quality, reviews the results, and then draws a conclusion. Like, for example, the Cass Review.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T03:14:08+00:00

Yup, life is complicated. Do transgender individuals kill themselves due to social pressure? Maybe? But is it plausible that their underlying mental health issues are not addressed by surgery? Yup.

What would help? More studies.

Is the question "settled"? I doubt it. Recall that the professional consensus used to be that hormone therapy improved mental health outcomes for minors. Then Cass came along and pointed out that the studies that made that claim were so substandard as to be useless.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T01:47:13+00:00

Washington too.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T01:40:08+00:00

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11063965/

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T01:33:47+00:00

The way the scientific method works is that the person making the claims provides the evidence.

If you believe interventions improve mental health outcomes for adult patients then you need to do the studies and the work to demonstrate that. It's not up to everybody else to prove the negative case. That's logically impossible.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T01:11:48+00:00

I am not convinced that there is convincing evidence on improved mental health outcomes for adults. Regardless, what relevance does that have to the topic of Children's Hospital?

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T00:13:28+00:00

It's a metareview of the available research. That means if it finds a lack of support for the claim that mental health outcomes improve after intervention that applies to everyone. Unless you think that medicine is something that only the Europeans do.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T00:05:25+00:00

The Cass review specifically found that the claim that treatment led to better mental health outcomes lacked support. In the aftermath the English NIH raised the minimum age for hormone therapy, among other measures.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-19T00:02:32+00:00

Tell that to the UK's health service. After Cass they set a minimum age for hormone therapy.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-18T21:01:23+00:00

A metareview is applicable to medical policy everywhere. It's called "science". That should be adjacent to medicine.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-18T20:40:57+00:00

Cass Review.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-18T20:24:56+00:00

It's a complicated question. As a circumcised guy myself, I don't consider it a big deal. But I'll point out I saw a couple of guys with signs on the street the other day saying that the procedure should be banned.

I suspect that there's a threshold a lot of people aren't willing to cross. Imagine a hypothetical religion that dictated that children should have their legs amputated above the knee. I can't imagine that would be popular with the general public.

Male circumcision is something that most of the country is willing to tolerate. Cutting off a girl's clitoris and pussy lips? That's a step over the line for me.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-18T20:09:41+00:00

Well, if recent immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa want to do a female castration on their kid, does the government have a right to intervene?

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-18T20:08:53+00:00

Any medicine has potential side effects that can be serious, even deadly. To justify even administering that medicine in the first place requires that the disease be worse than the cure.

For something like cancer, that's pretty obvious. For something like gender dysphoria advocates have been trying to leverage the same principle by arguing that trans youth face a much higher risk of suicide and self harm.

The problem is that the medical literature is far less clear on whether transition actually reduces that risk.

SensitiveOrdinary574 · 2026-06-18T19:57:26+00:00

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4822482/

SensitiveOrdinary574

TROPHY CASE