4 ms·

Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any given population. So if the study had 1500 participants that would mean ~7 were transgender. If yo

Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any given population. So if the study had 1500 participants that would mean ~7 were transgender. If you look at the graphs from the study those people could be the outliers but no matter what, it's not really enough people to glean anything useful.

empthought 2y ago
> Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any given population This is not accurate for the cohort under study. 5% of people under age 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary. I would personally be unsurprised if well over 100 individuals in the study identified that way. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-o...
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  You have to be a little bit careful with those kinds of numbers. Once you get down to a few %, actual signal starts to be swamped by troll answers, misclicks, and other sources of error. You'll basically never see a number below a few percent in any poll with a decent sample size. (As an aside, this is one of the things that makes the data on the effectiveness of transition care more remarkable than it even looks. Given the very high probability that a random person is cisgender, even moderate false-positive rates would swamp true-positives. The fact that they don't suggests false-positives are very rare indeed.)
  - empthought 2y ago
    This is a Pew Research study…
    - rachofsunshine 2y ago
      What's your point? Looking at their methodology [1], it's pretty clear those sources of error would still be an issue here: > The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans-estimates-blog-post-methodology_final.pdf https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans...
      - empthought 2y ago
        0.5% (as the original poster opined) is not within the 95% confidence interval of the survey. Anywhere as low as 3.2% or as high as 7.8% is within the confidence interval. I am not sure why you would knee-jerk dismiss this. My point is that it is reasonable to expect between 3% and 8% of the MRI study participants to have been trans. It is not reasonable to think that 0.5% or less would have been trans.
        rachofsunshine 2y ago
        Confidence intervals account for _statistical_ error in which members of the population you happened to survey, not for incorrect data collection like "people randomly select the wrong button sometimes". I'm not dismissing the claim as false, I'm saying that surveys like this are poor evidence that it is true because they are not very good at making precise statements about rare subgroups.
        empthought 2y ago
        I don't understand anything you're saying here. It seems to be denying the validity of any survey methodology, no matter how experienced and legitimate the survey-taker is. Should I doubt that there are really around 5 million religious Jews in the US, because the Pew survey used to estimate this could have had "people randomly selecting the wrong button?" Should I hold it equally likely that there are a mere 500,000 religious Jews? This subgroup is far more rare than the subgroup of 20-35 year olds that identify as transgender or nonbinary. How can we know anything about this subgroup at all, since (according to you) surveys cannot constitute good evidence for anything for a group with such rarity?

empthought 2y ago

> Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any given population This is not accurate for the cohort under study. 5% of people under age 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary. I would personally be unsurprised if well over 100 individuals in the study identified that way. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-o...

rachofsunshine 2y ago
You have to be a little bit careful with those kinds of numbers. Once you get down to a few %, actual signal starts to be swamped by troll answers, misclicks, and other sources of error. You'll basically never see a number below a few percent in any poll with a decent sample size. (As an aside, this is one of the things that makes the data on the effectiveness of transition care more remarkable than it even looks. Given the very high probability that a random person is cisgender, even moderate false-positive rates would swamp true-positives. The fact that they don't suggests false-positives are very rare indeed.)
- empthought 2y ago
  This is a Pew Research study…
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    What's your point? Looking at their methodology [1], it's pretty clear those sources of error would still be an issue here: > The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans-estimates-blog-post-methodology_final.pdf https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/trans...
    - empthought 2y ago
      0.5% (as the original poster opined) is not within the 95% confidence interval of the survey. Anywhere as low as 3.2% or as high as 7.8% is within the confidence interval. I am not sure why you would knee-jerk dismiss this. My point is that it is reasonable to expect between 3% and 8% of the MRI study participants to have been trans. It is not reasonable to think that 0.5% or less would have been trans.
      - rachofsunshine 2y ago
        Confidence intervals account for _statistical_ error in which members of the population you happened to survey, not for incorrect data collection like "people randomly select the wrong button sometimes". I'm not dismissing the claim as false, I'm saying that surveys like this are poor evidence that it is true because they are not very good at making precise statements about rare subgroups.
        empthought 2y ago
        I don't understand anything you're saying here. It seems to be denying the validity of any survey methodology, no matter how experienced and legitimate the survey-taker is. Should I doubt that there are really around 5 million religious Jews in the US, because the Pew survey used to estimate this could have had "people randomly selecting the wrong button?" Should I hold it equally likely that there are a mere 500,000 religious Jews? This subgroup is far more rare than the subgroup of 20-35 year olds that identify as transgender or nonbinary. How can we know anything about this subgroup at all, since (according to you) surveys cannot constitute good evidence for anything for a group with such rarity?