Sunday 8 November 2015

Interview with Swedish researcher Cecilia Dhejne about her often misquoted 2011 study

Heya everybody,

I have written a number of times about the misrepresentation of the 2011 Swedish study by Cecilia Dhejne, et al., (see here for an example).

Cristan Williams, writer at the The Transadvocate has now gone directly to the horse’s mouth and interviewed Cecilia Dhejne in person. This has become the more necessary because trans-haters have continued their misrepresentation of scientific evidence and even claimed links between certain crimes and transsexualism. I so wonder about these people … why do they do that? Presenting facts in a dishonest way is surely the best way to show you have no ground to stand on?

Have a read of the interesting article at Fact check: study shows transition makes trans people suicidal.

Peace and Light ✨. Have a good Sunday!

Danish post-SRS study without conclusive results

Heya everybody,

I know I have been behind with updating the website with the latest studies … so much going on and so little time :)

This is just to mention one new study from Denmark, published in the Nordic Journal of Psychiatry (2015). The study called Long-term follow-up of individuals undergoing sex reassignment surgery: Psychiatric morbidity and mortality investigated a small number of people (104 individuals, which is nevertheless nearly all people having undergone sex reassignment surgery in Denmark from 1978 to 2010).

The authors Simonsen, Giraldi, et al. found that prior to surgery, 27.9 % of the subjects had been diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses, in comparison to 22.1 % after surgery. This difference was not significant. The authors state that: Despite the over-representation of psychiatric diagnoses both pre- and post-SRS the study found that only a relatively limited number of individuals had received diagnoses both prior to and after SRS. This suggests that generally SRS may reduce psychological morbidity for some individuals while increasing it for others.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to read and understand the entire study. I wonder whether the data has been adjusted for age, demographics, the overall increase in psychiatric diagnoses over the past thirty years, lifetime in years before and after surgery, etc. Even with that in mind, the numbers are quite small – with 29 individuals diagnosed before surgery and 23 individuals after. As usual, it would be great to have better and larger studies.

Peace and Light ✨