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"After reading the article, I had a strong feeling that the author is probably selling related drugs and has a financial incentive to classify everything as tra

"After reading the article, I had a strong feeling that the author is probably selling related drugs and has a financial incentive to classify everything as trans symptoms." For the record, this is just totally false, Zinnia does not sell drugs (do you mean HRT? That would be illegal in the US without a medical or pharmacy license). "she's calling herself "adult demon anti-cis pro-trans activist" elsewhere" Pretty sure that's a joke. "they published in the "highly prestigious" journal "Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd" which allows anyone who is willing to pay the fees to publish practically anything." Wiley is the publisher, not the journal. The journal is the European Journal of Neuroscience. I went and checked, and I can see no evidence that this journal is predatory or doesn't meet normal academic peer review standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Journal_of_Neuroscience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Journal_of_Neuroscien... "their working definition is based purely on self-reported feelings after the fact and, therefore, unsuitable for any scientific analysis." Most things in psychiatry (depression, anxiety, etc.) are based on self-reported feelings, does that make psychiatry "unsuitable for scientific analysis"? Heck, there's a whole academic field about the economics of happiness, which is obviously subjective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics "and you can see that their paper was rejected in the first round" Requesting revisions does not mean rejection, it's a normal part of academic peer review.

fxtentacle 6y ago
I also did not find any evidence of Zinnia benefiting financially from drug sales. But just reading her writing, I couldn't shake the feeling that Zinnia has a very strong interest in increasing the rate of "gender dysphoria" diagnosis. Plus it is very obvious that Zinnia is not a neutral researcher on this topic. As for the journal, EJN has an impact factor of 2.9. As a student, I used to publish stuff for fun in an IF 4.3 journal. So I'd consider EJN in the "motivated hobbyists" category. For comparison, Nature (the article discussed here) has an IF of 24.3. Edit for your edit: Requesting revisions is OK, but accepting a paper that was rejected in the first round and DID NOT fix the issue that caused it to be rejected ... that looks suspicious.
- sascha_sl 6y ago
  Zinnia is in fact not a researcher. She just writes on her and other trans people's experience. It is an incredible show of bias on your side that you expect my response to an uncited comment to hold up to the standards of the original article, while you don't for the comment I initially responded to.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    I took your response as your opinion and it was argued well, which is why I took the time to read your references. But it did give me a weird feeling that your link 1 pretends to be science when it isn't and link 2 pretends to be solid science when it's just an opinion piece written by researchers. My statement was clearly identifiable as my private unscientific opinion on the topic, so I consider it safe for outsiders to read. But articles on medical topics that pretend to be science when they are not, that can cause a lot of pain if outsiders read it without being aware that it's only sudo science. That's why I thought it would be useful to criticize your references.
- hackpert 6y ago
  I am generally inclined to regard IF arguments for disregarding research as rather disingenuous. Yes, there are predatory journals which will publish anything if paid, but IF as a metric to judge a journal which doesn't seem to be obviously fraudulent is a farce at best, because IF is also heavily correlated with readership which may not be large for relatively niche topics (to be fair, I haven't actually looked at other articles in EJN). For example, consider Annals of Mathematics, one of the most "prestigious" math journals, has an IF of 3.027. I'm not trying to claim anything about the science in this particular article because I haven't read it in enough detail but a PI I worked with had this habit of dismissing research based on journal IFs, which was pretty annoying.

fxtentacle 6y ago

I also did not find any evidence of Zinnia benefiting financially from drug sales. But just reading her writing, I couldn't shake the feeling that Zinnia has a very strong interest in increasing the rate of "gender dysphoria" diagnosis. Plus it is very obvious that Zinnia is not a neutral researcher on this topic. As for the journal, EJN has an impact factor of 2.9. As a student, I used to publish stuff for fun in an IF 4.3 journal. So I'd consider EJN in the "motivated hobbyists" category. For comparison, Nature (the article discussed here) has an IF of 24.3. Edit for your edit: Requesting revisions is OK, but accepting a paper that was rejected in the first round and DID NOT fix the issue that caused it to be rejected ... that looks suspicious.

sascha_sl 6y ago
Zinnia is in fact not a researcher. She just writes on her and other trans people's experience. It is an incredible show of bias on your side that you expect my response to an uncited comment to hold up to the standards of the original article, while you don't for the comment I initially responded to.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I took your response as your opinion and it was argued well, which is why I took the time to read your references. But it did give me a weird feeling that your link 1 pretends to be science when it isn't and link 2 pretends to be solid science when it's just an opinion piece written by researchers. My statement was clearly identifiable as my private unscientific opinion on the topic, so I consider it safe for outsiders to read. But articles on medical topics that pretend to be science when they are not, that can cause a lot of pain if outsiders read it without being aware that it's only sudo science. That's why I thought it would be useful to criticize your references.
hackpert 6y ago
I am generally inclined to regard IF arguments for disregarding research as rather disingenuous. Yes, there are predatory journals which will publish anything if paid, but IF as a metric to judge a journal which doesn't seem to be obviously fraudulent is a farce at best, because IF is also heavily correlated with readership which may not be large for relatively niche topics (to be fair, I haven't actually looked at other articles in EJN). For example, consider Annals of Mathematics, one of the most "prestigious" math journals, has an IF of 3.027. I'm not trying to claim anything about the science in this particular article because I haven't read it in enough detail but a PI I worked with had this habit of dismissing research based on journal IFs, which was pretty annoying.