The Placebo Is the Point. A new paper highlights the fundamental bias in the world of “gender-affirming” research.

City Journal ^ | December 12, 2022 | Leor Sapir

[karpov]

A paper published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior makes an important point about the environment in which “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries are offered to minors. Positive outcomes from hormonal interventions, argues psychiatrist Alison Clayton, the article’s author, may be attributable to placebo effects generated by clinical encounters and the social context in which they take place, rather than to the underlying psychotropic effects of the drugs themselves.

Clayton’s basic intuition makes sense. If you take a teenager in emotional distress and tell her that drug X will solve her problems, while treatment Y will make them worse, and then bring her to a clinical setting where medical professionals repeat that message, it should come as no surprise that the teenager experiences emotional relief when you give her X, or distress when you give her Y—regardless of the psychotropic effects of X. The patient may regard the giving of X symbolically as adults listening to her and empathizing with her inner turmoil. “The ‘Hawthorne effect,’” writes Clayton, “describes the phenomenon where clinical trial patients’ improvements may occur because they are being observed and given special attention. A patient who is part of a study, receiving special attention, and with motivated clinicians, who are invested in the benefits of the treatment under study, is likely to have higher expectations of therapeutic benefits.”

It is indeed the case that promoters of “gender-affirming care” have created what Clayton calls “a perfect storm for the placebo effect.” In the left-of-center media, puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones and (less frequently) surgeries are hailed as “medically necessary” and suicide-preventing measures for teens in distress, supposedly over having been wrongly “assigned” their sex at birth. Skeptics of these interventions are denounced as cruel deniers of life-saving medicine to youth at high risk of suicide.

[karpov]

In the short term, giving a child with gender dysphoria cross-sex hormones may give him or relief because something is being done, but these hormones stunt growth and have bad long-term effects.

[consult]

This article is actually a letter to the editor. However it puts forth a very good argument. The teens that go into the system for “”gender affirming care” perhaps have some outcomes better due to their intense ongoing relationship with the medical field....rather than the drugs and surgeries are being subjected to. Thus the placebo affect which even simple suggestion can lead to immense psychosomatic effects (upwards of 36%) compared to no such treatment.

[Jeff Chandler]

I imagine the parent(s) of the gender bender “medical treatment” victims just revel in all that positive attention and affirmation of their virtue.

[Chicory]

We do not even know all the ways puberty affects the systems in the person. There are ling and brain changes during puberty as well, and when they say loss of sexual function, it means they are unable to experience any sexual feelings, including orgasm.

[Chicory]

When you give girls and women testosterone, it is like speed or something. It is a really powerful effect. No wonder they feel better!

Additionally, men have a higher tendency towards violence because of testosterone. Guess what? A female’s tendency to violence increases when she is given testosterone.

Unfortunately, a male’s tendency to violence is *not* correspondingly reduced by taken estrogen.