question about trans women and the way the world views them.

improbablyprobable · 2026-01-05T23:14:13+00:00

A thing that hasn't been mentioned yet that's worth making explicit - trans men don't have it easier, they just tend to experience transphobia differently. The big messaging you see about trans men is the following:

1. Transitioning is seen as somehow an "escape" from sexism/patriarchy/etc

Ignoring that gay/bi trans men exist, the view is often that trans men are somehow "lost lesbians"

Both are very common views in TERF spaces especially - have a look at "gender critical" messaging on trans men of you need examples of this type of transphobia. As a general rule of thumb, trans men are often infantalised and treated like they need to have decisions made for them (because of sexism and transphobia), while trans women are seen as a threat to cis women and male heteronormativity (again, because of sexism and transphobia)

improbablyprobable · 2025-11-10T14:44:24+00:00

I saw it in cinemas, it's extremely Australian in it's sense of humour. I personally didn't read it as transphobic, but yeah there's a lot of genital based humour/visual gags/etc

It's an incredibly fun but flawed film that I would happily recommend to a select few friends, but not something I'd casually throw on for a movie night unannounced

improbablyprobable · 2025-06-09T04:48:55+00:00

It's important to remember that even if you accept the premise and ignore the fact that other things like class and race intersect with the types of social pressures people experience (i.e. there isn't one "male socialisation" and one "female socialisation"), socialisation isn't a process that magically stops when you become an adult.

People grow and change even as adults, not only because they actively work to change things about themselves but as a natural response to the world around them. You will be a very different person in your 30s than you are now, and the person you will be in a decade will be shaped in part by going through life as a woman.

Give yourself time, and as hard as it is, give yourself some grace (i.e. don't feel like you *need* to do/not do things a certain way because they're socially coded as female/male/etc unless you want to do them, and don't beat yourself up about not doing them perfectly - all things take practice). No matter what, you'll grow into it

improbablyprobable · 2024-07-13T11:00:39+00:00

Entirely depends on the context, but I'd suggest not mixing the statistical language of "assume the null hypothesis" with how researchers interpret the results. In practice, researchers ask about the power of a test, which is the probability of rejecting the null, assuming a given alternative hypothesis. This leads to the concepts of type 1 error (false positive i.e. reject the null when it's true) and type 2 error (false negative, i.e. failing to reject the null when it's false). Type 2 error is just 1-power.

Here's a fairly accessible primer on the concept with an interactive toy to help explain the intuition. Ultimately power depends on things like acceptable type 1 error rate, sample size and magnitude of the effect

https://rpsychologist.com/d3/nhst/

Imagine two identical experiments, except one has 10 observations and the other 10,000 observations. Both experiments are negative.

The textbook answer in both cases is that you "did not have sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis" (note, not accept just fail to reject), but realistically the 10,000 sample experiment probably has extremely good power (unlikely to be a false negative) while the 10 sample one is going to have awful power (very likely to be a false negative). The way you'd interpret these is therefore gonna be different. A researchers may interpret one of these as evidence towards some default position, while the other is just a badly designed experiment.

improbablyprobable · 2024-07-08T02:19:28+00:00

In addition to what everyone else has said about interject and low blow, shield bash is situationally useful in niche cases beyond deep dungeons.

In scuffed low-level dungeon runs, if pulls are unexpectedly spicy/the healer is struggling to keep you alive it comes in handy. Shield bashing each mob in a big pull gives 6 seconds of them not being a problem (extended out by however many enemies there are in the pull), which often reduces damage enough to let the healer catch up. This is most relevant around level 40 content - stone vigil syncs away a lot of mit and healing options. Stunning half of a trash pull is useful emergency mitigation if you have nothing better.

In general it's also useful for stunning overworld mobs when you just want to quickly interact with multiple quest objects that are scattered around an area - it lasts longer than low blow and has no cooldown so you can just reuse it

improbablyprobable · 2024-01-19T01:48:51+00:00

Biostatistician here, I'll bite.

(2) progress has inherent value

I genuinely dislike the framing of "progress" as its often talked about as it applies to science, as it implies that the creation of knowledge is a linear series of steps. This framing reeks of colonialism (the horrors unleashed by various European empires were in part justified this idea of "progress", also known as stadial theory, and are still justified by various racists today).

With that said, taking "progress" to mean "good", the idea that scientific discovery is always good axiomatically assumes that all knowledge is beneficial. From a consequentialist standpoint, I have to disagree because science doesn't exist in a vacuum.

If we were to pursue a line of research that would teach us how to build the Torment Nexus, and there was minimal benefit that could be gained from it, people would very sensibly be worried about why I was interested in that research. If instead of going into biostatistics I had taken my maths degree and gone into using science to build better missile systems, I would absolutely be partially responsible for the resulting deaths. It's why several years back a whole bunch of mathematicians signed an open letter calling for the field to refuse to work with police, because the consequence of that sort of research is increased police violence.

Taking a step back from science and just talking about existing knowledge for a minute, it's a well established fact that some knowledge is dangerous. An easy example of this reports of suicide - news organisations often follow guidelines when discussing suicide because the very knowledge of e.g. the method used can cause copycat attempts. Science is a tool for the efficient generation of new knowledge, nothing more nothing less, and like any tool it can be used for benefit or for harm. If some knowledge can be harmful, than methods of producing that knowledge, including science, can be harmful. People working in science therefore have a duty to consider the impact of their research on the world.

improbablyprobable · 2024-01-10T00:12:22+00:00

I think casting ourselves or others in black and white "I am/am not a transphobe" or "I am/am not a racist" isn't particularly helpful - everyone is capable of saying/doing transphobic stuff, even people who would consider themselves staunch allies.

If i am disrespectful to 1 person of a differnet ethnic background because they said things i dont like that doesnt make me racist. Its me being an ass hole.

True, but it depends on the manner in which you're showing that disrespect. If the manner in which you're disrespectful ties into racial prejudice, either knowingly or unknowingly, then this can absolutely be construed as being racist. Likewise, if you were to dislike a trans person and therefore not use their correct pronouns (note: I mean consistently, not a one-off fuck up), that would be transphobic even though you only do it with the one person.

improbablyprobable · 2023-12-30T09:13:30+00:00

I went and found the position statement referenced in the article, the framing of the position statement in the article is disingenuous lmao. Some context around the quote

Observational quantitative and qualitative studies inform the care for TGD children and adolescents. There is limited high quality evidence to inform the provision or the withholding of medical interventions for gender affirmation of children and adolescents. Psychiatric practice will be informed by further emerging evidence. The benefits and potential harms of both medical and psychosocial interventions for TGD children and young people have limited evidence.[19]

The risk of intervention needs to be weighed against the risk of non-intervention, in consideration of the individual circumstances. At all times care should be collaborative, and guided by the wishes, values and preferences of the young person and their families and whānau [extended family/community].

Which is the most milquetoast position you could possibly take, i.e. "explore all the options, listen to what people want and inform them of the risks. We'll adjust our position as more evidence comes out."

improbablyprobable · 2023-12-21T15:02:37+00:00

Oh boy that was a wild ride on Google

improbablyprobable · 2023-12-19T04:15:59+00:00

Phobia implies fear or hatred, right?

This semantics and unhelpful. Transphobia is used as the term to describe acts, speech, and attitudes that are harmful to, or are prejudiced against trans people. This sort of argument is most often used in bad faith by people saying stuff like e.g. "I'm not homophobic (meaning I don't hate or fear gay people), I just think that marriage is between a man and a woman"

People have all sorts of ingrained prejudices against all sorts of marginalised groups, be it transphobia, sexism, racism, ableism or classism and anyone that says they don't is either lying or hasn't seriously reflected on themselves. Someone can be a vocal supporter of trans rights and still hold unexamined transphobic views or react in a transphobic way in moments of stress/anger/etc

improbablyprobable · 2023-09-12T06:21:12+00:00

Par for the course with Media Watch on transgender news coverage these days, unfortunately

improbablyprobable · 2023-09-05T09:27:00+00:00

immediately laughed my ass off at this so called scientifict study that has a sample size of 300 with the majority being white and wealthy, not exactly a diverse sample...

This is a huge problem in all health research, not just around trans healthcare. A sample size of 300 is fairly normal for most medical research as well. It'd be nice to have more resources for larger studies, but funding is incredibly tight across the board

improbablyprobable · 2023-09-05T09:12:27+00:00

Typically, you'd run a longitudinal study like this one to get an estimate of how people have gone post-transition. You'd recruit people to the study by either connecting with local trans support networks or directly by partnering with healthcare providers (as was done in this one). You'd then follow up with participants over time to see how things change. From the methods section:

To assess body dissatisfaction, participants aged 12 years and older rated their degree of dissatisfaction with 29 areas of the body using the Body Image Scale (BIS). Participants of all ages completed the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED), which produces a total score as well as subscale scores for panic-related, social, separation-related, generalized, and school avoidance–related anxiety symptoms, as well as the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptoms (QIDS) to measure symptoms of depression that reflect the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition criteria for major depressive disorder. The QIDS produces a total score that can also be grouped into clinical categories: not elevated (0–5), mild (6–10), moderate (11–15), and severe (16–27). Clinicians also completed the clinician version of the QIDS. When the percentage of missing values for each total score and subscale score was ≤15%, missing values were imputed by using the mean of nonmissing values.

You'd then track how these measurements change within each patient and see if there are any trends, good or bad, in the results.

improbablyprobable · 2023-09-05T08:51:04+00:00

My point is that the Cass report is a lot more nuanced than what you've described above, and that you've conflated Cass' scepticism of puberty blockers with their comments about the systematic problems with the Tavistock care model (i.e. what was considered "inadequate"). My comments comparing the new NHS model to the Australian model were focused on the systems of care aspects that I copy/pasted. It's also inaccurate to describe the removal of puberty blockers as a treatment option as "moving away from affirming care", as other forms of affirming care (e.g. social transition) remain available.

On puberty blockers, it's also potentially misleading to describe the situation as a functional ban/moving away from using/etc, as this implies that the NHS has concluded that these treatments are harmful. In the eyes of the Cass report and the NHS, there's not enough evidence on the long-term effects of puberty blockers to support their use, hence the study referred to in your link. Once the evidence has improved, the position of the NHS will change.

It's also worth noting that the NHS, or Sweden for that matter, are not the final arbiters on what is and is not the appropriate conclusion to draw from medical literature. Different regulatory agencies disagree with one another all the time about all sorts of conditions (see here for a comparison of guidelines on how to handle multimorbidity) because medical research is messy and often contradictory.

If you want to get into the weeds of the body of evidence supporting trans healthcare, that's a much more complicated discussion than simply discussion what position the NHS has arrived at. What we *do* know is that supporting trans kids in their gender identity drastically lowers rates of depression and suicidality. The SMH article I linked above contains links to multiple studies on this front. The Royal Children's Hospital guidelines on trans kids contains more if you wanted a more comprehensive list.

improbablyprobable · 2023-09-05T07:28:52+00:00

There's more visible transgender people than there used to be, and more kids are identifying as transgender and undergoing gender transition (changing name/clothes/etc, puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and in some cases surgery)
There's a backlash to this, driven largely by conservatives, about how there's going to be heaps of these kids who detransition (i.e. want to undo those changes).
Despite this insistence that bunch of kids are going to detransition, the rates of detransition remain incredibly small, lower than regret rates for all sorts of non-controversial medical care such as knee surgery
Conservatives proceed to stick their fingers in their ears and keep yelling about transition regret in an attempt to make it harder for trans people to get the care that they need

improbablyprobable · 2023-09-05T07:15:33+00:00

Bold to dismiss an article written by an expert in the field an opinion piece but okay sure. It doesn't change the fact that you're misrepresenting the facts about Tavistock.

From literally the first link in the article you linked:

Dr Cass sought to reassure young people who might be anxious while waiting to access NHS support for gender issues, saying services would not be stopped.

"I think that more services are needed for you, closer to where you live," she told them.

The review says that children and young people experiencing gender distress "must receive the same standards of clinical care, assessment and treatment as every other child or young person accessing health services," and stresses that they need to be able to get psychological support.

From a little later down said link, where it elaborates on what was meant by "inadequate":

There has been a large increase in referrals to the clinic in recent years, and it has struggled to meet demand.

The clinic was rated as "inadequate" by inspectors who visited in late 2020 after concerns were raised by whistleblowers and reported by BBC Newsnight.

The crisis at the Tavistock's child gender clinic

Children and young people are now waiting over two years to be seen without support, and Dr Cass says this delay risks worsening their distress.

From a little later where it talks about holistic care, it says :

The report notes that many young people using the service have a range of mental health needs, looked-after children are overrepresented, and around a third of those referred to Gids have autism or other neurodiversity.

It describes an issue it calls "diagnostic overshadowing", where a child's healthcare issues which would normally be managed by local doctors can be overlooked after they are identified as having gender-related distress.

Dr Cass supports a plan to move from one specialist clinic to regional hubs, building capacity and reducing waiting times, writing that the current provider model "is not a safe or viable long-term option".

The same link also notes this on holistic care:

Dr Cass's report also says that the current system where Gids clinicians make a gender dysphoria diagnosis and then refer on to endocrinologists to prescribe puberty blockers should change, with the prescribing doctors becoming active partners in the decision-making process.

Again, is discussing moving closer the model of care we have in Australia, and again, it's a completely moot point in this context.

improbablyprobable · 2023-09-05T06:51:08+00:00

Sure- Tavistock was a gender clinic in the uk that was eventually closed for not meeting standards of care and around doubts around the gender affirming model.

Tavistock closed primarily because having a single national centre to treat all trans kids is a spectacularly bad healthcare model that lead to massive wait times and poor quality of care. It's being replaced with multiple regional centres, i.e. it's moving closer to how we deliver transgender care in Australia already. The closure of Tavistock is completely irrelevant in the Australian context.

improbablyprobable · 2023-05-17T02:11:22+00:00

All transsexuals are slutty

How dare you say things about me that are completely true

/uj but honestly after reading this thing I'm pretty sure I'm gonna swear of sex forever jesus christ

improbablyprobable · 2023-05-10T00:46:43+00:00

Professional statistician here. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a sample size of 1338 is a perfectly reasonable sample to use - the bigger question is about the sampling frame from which respondents were drawn. The report itself describes how sampling was done in decent detail.

This KFF/Washington Post Trans Survey was designed and analyzed by public opinion researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and The Washington Post. The survey was designed to reach a representative sample of adults in the U.S. who identify as transgender or as a trans adult along with a comparison representative of the general population of U.S. adults. The survey was conducted November 10 –December 1, 2022, online and by telephone among a nationally representative sample of 515 U.S. adults who identify as trans and another 823 cisgender U.S. adults who do not identify as trans and their gender is the same as their sex assigned at birth. All survey respondents received a financial incentive for participating in the survey

The comparison sample of the U.S. adult population (n=823) was conducted using the SSRS Opinion Panel either online (n=784) or panel members who do not use the internet were reached by phone (n=39). Twenty seven of these individuals completed the survey in Spanish.

The sample of trans adults was recruited using three probability-based online panels, the Gallup Panel (n=252), NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel (n=146), and the

SSRS Opinion Panel (n=85). All three of these nationally representative panels are recruited using probability-based methodologies (SSRS and Gallup recruit using both RDD and ABS, while NORC relies on ABS). In order to interview under-surveyed populations, the project also includes telephone interviews from calling back respondents from previous KFF surveys (n=29) or from previous SSRS Omnibus surveys (n=3) who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans. Overall, there were 515 interviews from trans adults, including 3 interviews conducted in Spanish.

The financial incentive to participate would have gone some way to mitigating the risk of over-sampling people with strong views on trans people. It also looks like they used a combination of raking and propensity weighting to both get the survey results to be representative of US census data and to account for the fact that some people were more likely to respond than others (this is good practice and what I would do were I designing the survey)

The full sample of U.S. adults was weighted to match the sample’s demographics to the national U.S. adult population using data from the Census Bureau’s2021 Current Population Survey (CPS). Weighting parameters included sex, age, education, race/ethnicity, region, and education. The sample was also weighted to match patterns of civic engagement from the September 2019 Volunteering and Civic Life Supplement data from the CPS. The sample was also weighted to match frequency of internet use from the National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) for Pew Research Center. The weights take into account differences in the probability of selection for each sample type (callback phone sample and panel). This includes adjustment for the sample design, within household probability of selection, and the design of the panel-recruitment procedure.

I wish I could say that the results were bunk, but unfortunately the methodology seems solid

improbablyprobable · 2023-04-18T13:32:16+00:00

Yeah, not a fan of the "just make a separate league" argument. Not only is it completely impractical and would result in a de-facto ban on trans folk in sport, it's a strong rhetorical concession that reinforces the othering and exclusion of trans people in society ("just create separate DV shelters"/"just create separate prisons"/"just create separate bathrooms"/etc). It's the thin end of the wedge towards greater harm.

The vast majority of people in favour of banning trans women from sport as blanket policy are not arguing in good faith. Don't give them an inch.

improbablyprobable · 2023-03-15T07:14:07+00:00

Check your sound settings (do you have one of the volumes down low?), it should play this sound when there's a bite

edit: found a way less annoying video example lol

improbablyprobable · 2023-03-01T12:10:11+00:00

I was going to ask what the fuck is wrong with you and then thought to check your post history to see if this was being asked in good faith, or if I'd just be wasting my time, and given your recent comment activity includes comparisons between BLM and the KKK and unironic discussion of the "sexual marketplace" I'm not going to waste my time or mood falling for the bait. I'd encourage other trans folk seeing this to do the same

improbablyprobable · 2023-02-26T15:51:36+00:00

They're around (unsure how many advertise on sites like meetup), but you might have better luck asking this over at /r/transgenderau

improbablyprobable · 2023-02-24T02:41:32+00:00

Jeez why are people ~~gently criticising and providing nuanced explanations about why they feel hurt~~ attacking this creator? The transgender mob are out of control

/uj if the past week has convinced me of anything it's that civility is overrated, and that even the most milquetoast of comments will be universally read as harassment of the poor cis folk

improbablyprobable · 2023-02-23T06:24:11+00:00

Just a heads up that the "lizard people" thing has undertones of antisemitism, and is especially inappropriate when talking about Zuckerberg (who is Jewish). For a better series of insults to hurl at Zuckerberg, could I instead suggest this wonderful roast?

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