Private schooling appears to be associated with better outcomes but also with being from a richer household. Would you consider splitting out the results of upper-middle and rich to see if the benefits of private still hold?
The point of this kind of analysis is either to find some blindingly obviously large effect or to conclude that there is no such effect. Trying to do subgroup analysis on vague terms like upper-middle class vs. rich seems pretty useless in this context.
It's not a vague term - it's something captured in the survey. The point was to not to analyze between rich and upper middle class but to remove the confounder of household wealth or class from choice of private vs public schooling - thus "and". I thought that was obvious. I don't think its useless if we are interested in the impact of school choice on outcomes.
Hmmmm if I were to homeschool my future kids, one of the primary motivations would be so they wouldn't be brainwashed into being trans... But this shows that that homeschooled kids are the most likely to go trans
No. "Using a national sample of United States adolescents, we found that there were more TGD (transgender and gender diverse) AMAB adolescents than TGD AFAB adolescents in both 2017 and 2019. Additionally, the total percentage of TGD adolescents in our sample decreased from 2.4% in 2017 to 1.6% in 2019. This decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as TGD is incongruent with an ROGD hypothesis that posits social contagion."
Thanks for sharing that! Sometimes a critical point can be lost in a sea of comments. And even if people see and appreciate a point, the poster is unlikely to know here, bereft of a 'like' or 'upvote' signal.
Thanks for the link, I should have read the study more carefully before posting it! It's disappointing that something so apparently poorly put together could pass peer review (yes I know, it's very flawed, but even so). That said, the original ROGD paper sounds worse.
Try another one, with a smaller clinical population, and a different definition of rapid-onset gender dysphoria: "a phenomenon in youth with gender dysphoria emerging at or after puberty, socially influenced through peer contagion, and with contributing factors including poor mental health, neurodevelopmental disabilities, parent-child conflict, and maladaptive coping strategies" - not based on which gender and sex was involved. They asked the question whether a more recent realisation of a trans identity in adolescents was associated with "self-reported mental health measures, mental health and neurodevelopmental disability diagnoses, behaviors consistent with maladaptive coping (eg, self-harm), support from online and/or transgender friends but not parents, and lesser gender dysphoria." They did not find support for these associations in a clinical population. The research was carried out by people from the Trans Youth CAN! research team, so there is obviously potential for bias there. https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(21)01085-4/fulltext
Probably because historically MTFs got more exposure, but now that FTMs are getting exposure, people with relatively mild dysphoria are more likely to realize that transitioning is an option.
There is literally no evidence that rapid onset gender dysphoria exists. The only study that purports to show it is Lisa Littman's study, which posted surveys on ROGD websites to ask parents about their kids' ROGD. There are two glaring flaws with that study, either of which alone would completely invalidate it. First, it's a study about the inner lives of adolescents and young adults that's based entirely on the reports of parents, a demographic that's notoriously clueless about the inner lives of adolescents and young adults. Second, Littman's sample consisted entirely of people on ROGD websites, so of course they said it existed! This is a bit like trying to determine the shape of the Earth by posting a survey on the Flat Earth Society Forums.
Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
>This is a bit like trying to determine the shape of the Earth by posting a survey on the Flat Earth Society Forums.
Supposing someone posted a survey on a pro-trans website asking "do you believe transgenderism exists?" I suspect most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative. Do you think the act of me posting the survey on a pro-trans website invalidates the results of the survey? (Per Scott, this is called "proving too much" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/)
The difference between this question and the flat Earth question (which seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but here we are) is that the shape of the Earth can be directly observed: 99% of the population believing the earth was flat wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to its actual shape. Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
So no, the ROGD question isn't remotely like the flat Earth question.
>Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
Nobody is qualified to offer informed speculation about a person's inner life besides the person in question, and that includes the person's parents. So Littman should have talked to people who supposedly have ROGD, but she never talked to one.
>Supposing someone posted a survey on a pro-trans website asking "do you believe transgenderism exists?" I suspect most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative.
The difference is that transgender people have direct access to their own inner lives.
>The difference between this question and the flat Earth question (which seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but here we are) is that the shape of the Earth can be directly observed: 99% of the population believing the earth was flat wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to its actual shape. Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
Sure, if the person's behavior includes answering questions about their inner life! If you were trying to determine the shape of the Earth, you would actually study the Earth instead of asking people about it, and if you were trying to determine if ROGD exists, you would hopefully talk to people who supposedly have it instead of asking their parents.
99% of people not believing in gender dysphoria wouldn't make it any less real to the people who have it. So if you want to learn about a person's inner experiences, you should ask that person.
>Nobody is qualified to offer informed speculation about a person's inner life besides the person in question
Do you think people can ever be honestly mistaken about their inner experiences? I certainly do. In such cases, we may need to instead substitute testimony from an individual close to that person, who knows them very well and cares about their welfare.
Even if you think that survey responses from the individuals in question is the gold standard, that doesn't imply that survey responses from the individuals' parents are *completely* worthless. They could well be the next best thing.
Besides, several of the questions on Littman's survey had nothing to do with the inner experiences of the teenagers in question and were simple factual questions like "has your child been diagnosed with a developmental disorder or mental illness?" or "did your child express a non-heterosexual sexual orientation prior to coming out as trans?" If you think parents aren't qualified to answer the question of whether their child has ever been diagnosed with autism or depression, I don't know what to tell you.
>So Littman should have talked to people who supposedly have ROGD, but she never talked to one.
I know this isn't quite the same thing, but do you accept the self-reported inner experiences of desistors and detransitioners who assert things like "At one point I sincerely believed I was transgender, but now believe I was mistaken" or "At one point I was suffering from gender dysphoria, but no longer am"?
>The difference is that transgender people have direct access to their own inner lives.
I didn't say "most of the respondents (who are themselves transgender) would answer in the affirmative". I said "most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative", without specifying the respondents' gender identity.
Put it another way: if Littman had posted her survey on a website for the parents of trans children, and a majority of the respondents (who are themselves cisgender) said they sincerely believed that their child was transgender, would your response be "that's ridiculous, no one can know whether someone is really transgender except the person themselves"? Somehow I doubt it; I suspect that instead you'd be praising the parents for uncritically "affirming" their children's stated gender identity. You're dismissing this survey, not on the basis of its methodology, but because it didn't give you the answer you wanted.
>Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
Most people in their peer group? I mean, sure, *some* parents are in tune with their kids' lives, but most parents are pretty clueless as to their kids actual lives. Take drug use, something we have good data on[1]:
>One in 10 parents surveyed believed their own teenage child had used alcohol during the previous year. And just one in 20 believed their teen had smoked marijuana.
>Teens themselves reported a much higher rate of substance use in a separate poll released late last year. About half of 10th-graders said they had used alcohol over the previous 12 months; about one in 4 (28%) reported marijuana use.
Off by a factor of five in both cases. And this is something that should have physical, observable effects. And it's not like parents have low priors on substance use:
>More than half of the parents polled in the latest survey believed general alcohol use among teens -- other than their children -- was higher than reflected in the earlier poll and about a third overestimated marijuana use among other teens.
Parents, in general, are in pretty heavy denial that there's anything "wrong" with their kids, and have a poor understanding of the reality their adolescent children's live. Hell, I can't tell you the number of depressed adolescents and teens I knew (some of whom were ideating suicide) whose parents were totally oblivious or even actively in denial.
It's a fair point, but I might also point out that we shouldn't automatically take kids' word for it either. Teenagers may falsely claim to have used alcohol or drugs in hopes of seeming cool. This was illustrated by the "video nasties" scandal in the UK, in which many schoolchildren earnestly claimed to have seen horror films which *didn't exist*. Even speaking anecdotally, I'm sure everyone had a classmate in secondary school prone to telling tall tales about how sexually active they were.
> Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
The experience itself isn't even very informative. One cannot actually differentiate from a first person perspective the difference between the qualia of "I am actually experiencing the qualia of the opposite sex" and "I mistakenly think I am experience the qualia of the opposite sex". The best that can be done is guesswork. It's very hard for me to imagine this guess would not be heavily influenced by social environment. I'm not even convinced gender as felt phenomenon is coherent outside of a social framework.
>I'm not even convinced gender as felt phenomenon is coherent outside of a social framework.
I disagree - some trans men report phantom penises, similar to amputees' phantom limbs, and that certainly doesn't seem like something that would arise from a social framework - but even if that's true, gender is a felt phenomenon that has a huge effect on some people's quality of life. If someone really wants to have breasts for some reason and is miserable without them, then I don't care why.
I absolutely had ROGD from ages 23-26 or so, and subsequently grew out of it. I was depressed and self-hating, had a lot of trans friends/trans ideology exposure, and began to believe I was a trans man. Fortunately I did not take T (though I wanted to, desperately, for a while). After some deep introspection I realized that my depression was making the idea of becoming a new person an all-consuming obsession. I got some therapy, found a boyfriend and realized I really liked vanilla heterosexual sex, and my gender dysphoria basically went away.
So ROGD definitely *exists.* The question is to what degree.
I think you should be careful with claims that there is "literally no evidence" for some controversial proposition. In the Bayesian sense, even the mere fact that there is a term called ROGD is evidence that it exists.
Obviously, there is a big expansion in the number of adolescent girls suddenly declaring themselves to be boys or nonbinary or whatever, since roughly that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2015. There are countless sources of evidence that this is a huge fad. Some of them were always tomboys, but a lot had been normal girly girls, which is a new social construct.
>Obviously, there is a big expansion in the number of adolescent girls suddenly declaring themselves to be boys or nonbinary or whatever, since roughly that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2015.
Historically MTFs got more exposure than FTMs, and thus biological males were more likely to realize transitioning was an option than females. Now FTMs are getting more exposure, so the number of trans men in America is almost as high as the number of trans women. That's not evidence that it's a fad - transgender rates for both men and women have been steadily increasing since the mid-1900s and show no sign of going down.
If by "that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians" you mean Caitlyn Jenner, she's a trans woman, so why would girls transition to male just to imitate her?
>There are countless sources of evidence that this is a huge fad.
Like what?
>Some of them were always tomboys, but a lot had been normal girly girls, which is a new social construct.
Seemingly manly men have been suddenly coming out as trans women for decades - Jenner is an excellent example. This is simply the opposite sex version of that. Trans men have gotten less exposure in previous decades than trans women, so of course less stereotypical trans men got even less exposure.
It's very clear among my nieces' social group that gender diversity is the ultimate trendy thing. I get the impression of it being like having a favourite colour. It sounds like 2/3rds of the girls are 'non-straight'
You don't really get that much of a say in your kid's gender expression, sexuality, etc. Even if some styles of raising them, or some environments, might make them more likely to repress themselves and stay in the closet forever, any effect there will be marginal, and mostly evaporate once they leave the nest.
What you have much more of a say in is whether they'll still talk to you after discovering who they are.
Well, if a person really wants to be X, even though the path is hard and inconvinient just from the mere fact that they can be X in principle, then the conventional wisdom is that the person already had a strong disposition towards wanting to be X.
Do you believe that majority of boys have a strong disposition towards wanting to be women (and vice versa) so that they need to be kept in dark about the possibility?
I would put it more like some nonzero % of people go through some very difficult times around gender and fitting in as teens and it is a bad idea to present them with life long altering options during this period as a method of coping. On top of that some non-zero % of people just like to do whatever will piss off the "squares" as much as possible, and right now this is sort of the last redoubt. Coming home with piercings or tattoos won't do it anymore.
I absolutely think there are non-negligible social costs to the phenomenon and that for most (though not all) transitioning is probably an aggregate negative decision in terms of life satisfaction if you removed all the social pressure there is to lie about such things and the rationalizing people do after making non-reversable changes.
> I would put it more like some nonzero % of people go through some very difficult times around gender and fitting in as teens
Trivially true. And some of these people are trans, while others have other reasons for not fitting in.
> it is a bad idea to present them with life long altering options during this period
Going trough default puberty is life long altering option. Modern trans activists would really want an option for the people who don't want it not to do it.
> On top of that some non-zero % of people just like to do whatever will piss off the "squares"
I'd like to see some evidence that this contributes to gender transitions in any way before seriously entertaining this idea.
> I absolutely think there are non-negligible social costs to the phenomenon
This cuts both ways. Modern pressure not to change your gender is still much much higher than to change it. As long as absolute majority of transitions successfully improve the QOL and the rate of false positives is tiny we seem to be on the right track.
I'm definitely not the only trans person whose familial reception to coming out was something like "why couldn't you have been merely gay instead, we could have handled that just fine!" Many Such Cases.
Of course, for those who already didn't like their family much to begin with, this reaction has something of the opposite intended effect. I wouldn't say it was a __primary motivation__ or anything - lotsa other easier ways to spite one's face - but it's definitely in the Pro rather than Con column. Being that-which-is-detested-at-some-fundamental-level is an excellent excuse to keep unwanted blood relations at a safe arm's length...for their own benefit as much as mine.
Counterpoint in fairness: this also deters me to some degree from detransitioning, which I entertain from time to time. I __really__ don't want to give The Haters the satisfaction of being proven right. There's some real Pride at stake in assembling a functional life versus a largely-indifferent-or-hostile world, even if it's an unhappy one...sunk cost fallacy is a big thing, even outside monetary decisions. (I'm more wary of claiming generalization here, since I was never "very trans" to begin with.)
So in conclusion, the opinions of "squares" do have some non-negligible degree of influence. And this seems uncontroversial with reversed sign, that external disapproval is a common cause of detransitoning.
That gender can be altered is just a fact. If I tell my child about gravity does that prevent her from being able to fly? Parents are in particular control of these natural processes.
Depends on how you define "men" and "women." What is a fact is that most secondary sex characteristics can be altered with hormones, and primary sex characteristics can be altered with surgery. That leaves only internal sex organs, which don't always work even in people who aren't transgender, and chromosomes, which no one's going to know about without a DNA test.
Look. We can taboo the phrase "becoming women" if you like, and it'll still Just Be A Fact that men can go through a series of social, and optionally surgical, processes whereby which they'll look more like women, and a vast section of the population will agree to treat them as though they were women. That's a choice that they can make.
I don't doubt the sincerity of your insistence on defining "man" and "woman" based on chromosomes — but I don't think it's actually the root of your discomfort with transgenderism, and I think it's needless obfuscation to come back to it as though it were the core of the issue. Or would everything be fine and dandy for you if everything else about the transition process were the same, except that ""trans women"" now acknowledged, if asked, that of *course* they were technically men?
If you're uncomfortable with the thought of a child of yours undergoing hormone therapy and extensive surgery that aren't necessary for their physical health — well, just say that. It may or may not be "correct", but it's an obviously valid and respectable feeling for a (prospective) parent to experience. Being a stickler for chromosomes is really neither here nor there, and just makes you come across as pedantic instead of sincerely concerned.
(You might also be uncomfortable with the mere thought of a son of yours wearing dresses and lipstick and speaking in a high-pitched voice, surgery or no surgery. And while I think taking those feelings as reflective of some grand moral truth would be heavily misguided — they're *still* more obviously heartfelt and natural and sympathetic than chromosomal pedantry!)
"it'll still Just Be A Fact that men can go through a series of social, and optionally surgical, processes whereby which they'll look more like women, and a vast section of the population will agree to treat them as though they were women"
I do not agree to treat them as though they were women, because they are not women. The vast majority of people in the world today agree with my opinion. Would you agree to treat me like a chimpanzee just because I dress like a chimpanzee, eat like a chimpanzee, and convinced a plastic surgeon to mutilate my body to be more like a chimpanzee's? If I insisted that I'm a real chimpanzee and that I'd be offended at any suggestion otherwise, wouldn't you think I was either delusional, mocking you, or insulting your intelligence? If there was a sudden spike in the number of people identifying as chimpanzee and mutilating themselves accordingly, wouldn't you see it as a contagious mental illness that needs to be stopped, not a praiseworthy movement to be encouraged?
Seriously: Second comment here saying the same thing. Raising them to believe anything is not going to work if they are the sort of person who questions what they are told. It just won't.
Unfortunately you are just going to need to hope that your kid turns out well, and you are might need to accept that what 'turning out well' means to them might not be what you had in mind.
It would be strange if this were true since parenting can lastingly effect most forms of behaviour. Of course it can't effect genetics, but I think it's well established that sexuality isn't genetic. I haven't seen anything on whether trans has a genetic component (maybe everyone trying to study it got beaten up by at least one of the trans and anti-trans lobbies).
Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, but they theorize that it is the result of a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences.[1][3][4] They do not view sexual orientation as a choice.[1][3][5]
Quoting ENWP on culture war issues is a good way to start a fight and a poor way to win anyone over; the facts that most conservative media are "deprecated", alt-rightists are actively purged (WP:No Nazis is *technically* not policy, but it might as well be since they ban on the basis of it) and tradcons are not-very-online do tend to tell.
This doesn't make the statement false, but seriously, if you want to convince anti-SJers of something, using WP won't work. We see it as hopelessly compromised on CW issues (actually, most of us see it as hopelessly compromised in general; I have to remind people quite frequently that *outside* CW issues it's great).
I just looked at a review paper one day (but now can't find it) that said the best evidence we have suggests that gender dysphoria develops in the mother's womb. In this case parenting of course can't affect much. If someone can find the paper, please let us know.
Anyway, even if it starts before birth, there are two sides of the coin: a) many kids with GD "grow out of it" later and decide that they don't want to change sex after all, and later they are more happy with life than their peers who did change. And b) kids with strong GD are utterly miserable and make horrible numbers of suicide attempts. These kids get happier and stop trying to kill themselves if they get to change sex. So here we have a difficult and tragic situation: if we let them all easily transfer we'll cause some of them live less satisfying lives later. And if we conceal that possibility from them, we'll have a number of them suffer horrible misery and lose some lives. So of course the correct action is not "never let your kids know that transitioning is possible" and also not "let them easily transition at their whim". The correct way is a difficult process of making sure if they are really suffering horribly and only then letting them change; and this of course gives a lot of false positives and false negatives and we'll still lose a lot of them. I hope AI diagnostics will some day save us from this.
The 'suicide' argument is pretty spurious. GD isn't an isolated disorder, it is accompanied by depression, anxiety and other highly negative mental problems. Disambiguating the effects of those from GD is a non-starter.
But what's your plan then? Most of the suiciders are probably on antidepressants already. If their anxiety and depression are related to their GD then how would you treat their mood without dealing with GD? I'm assuming that you don t consider all GD to be a secondary result of other mood problems. What's the plan?
The intervention for GD used to be 'wait and see' since 90% of sufferers recover naturally by their early 20's. It is only in the last decade that a medication-first approach has been introduced with baleful, lifelong consequences for many sufferers. This is why the UK NHS and other European health services are now reverting back to the traditional treatment.
> I hope AI diagnostics will some day save us from this.
I should imagine that by the time A.I. was good enough to do that reliably, we'd also be in enough of a technological utopia that transitioning back and forth would cease to be an issue, i.e. you could flawlessly transition and detransition more or less at will.
Is there much evidence that parenting actually lastingly affects any form of behavior? As I recall, many things that people expect are the result of parenting actually have a large genetic component, while peer environment has more effect on behavior than parenting.
"What you have much more of a say in is whether they'll still talk to you after discovering who they are"
I see this sanctimonious little messaging in a lot of places, and it always irritates me. Usually because the person posting it would have a completely different reaction if it went the other way.
A - my parents cut me out of their lives and won't even talk to me anymore because they claim they're disappointed in me. They refuse to accept me for who I am!
Response - the monsters, they're toxic, you're better off without them, anyone who decides to cut off family contact just because you think differently to them is not someone who understands what it means to be family, they're not your real parents (and so on and so forth)
B - I've decided to cut my parents out of my lives and not even talk to them anymore. I have to be who I am and if they can't handle that, too bad!
Response- so brave and stunning and valid! you are a champion! you don't have to live with toxicity and if that means cutting off contact then that is what you have to do, if they can't change their minds about how they think then that's on them (and so on and so forth).
Maybe the parents don't want to talk to the kids, either? Maybe they'll be happier if the source of turmoil and distress in their lives is gone?
This cuts both ways. If parents are expected to unconditionally love and support their children no matter what, then the children have to do some accepting and tolerating too. Parents do have hopes and expectations for their children, and it's hard when those don't work out.
Too many of these kinds of posts that I read are all "I am owed EVERYTHING in the world, but I don't owe anything back in return!"
Absolutely there are different expectations and norms for what is okay in a parent/child relationship.
I see people saying "you should work to pay for your child's food", but if you force your child to work to make money for the household, suddenly people get up in arms about child labor or something. Totally different reaction the other way, huh?
Parents do have a responsibility to raise the child they have birthed into this world until that child's independent, and for that duration, it indeed does not cut both ways because the child is dependent and not mentally mature.
Once the child's independent and mature (varies, but often around 25), then I'm fine with children or parents deciding that the relationship is toxic and stepping back from it, regardless of the fictional view you've put in my mouth.
A parent creates their child and has enormous power over them for at least a decade and a half. Imagine thinking that doesn't impact the relationship in any way.
Children aren't owed everything in the world, and owe quite a bit to the world in return. They are owed everything their parents have to give and they owe nothing to their parents. Sorry.
"They are owed everything their parents have to give and they owe nothing to their parents."
No wonder moderns are not having kids but own pets instead. Much less hassle, much more dependable return of affection.
Children owe *nothing* to their parents? At all? Not to be abusive to them? Not to steal anything that's not nailed down to feed a drug habit? Not to be in a reciprocal relationship of affection but instead be a giant, entitled, perpetual toddler?
Ok slight overstatement - children owe the same duty of care to their parent as they do to any passerby on the street. No they don't have an entitlement to steal from and abuse them, but they also have no duty to maintain a relationship with them. That's not perpetual toddlerdom, it's the opposite. It's growing up. I have a good relationship with my parents but it's certainly not built on a sense of duty to them. Rather I appreciate their kindness and effectiveness in raising me and think of them as a resource. Like with my friends that also makes me want to be a resource to them. A relationship built on love, not duty.
But going the other way is different. Obviously in addition to love I have a duty to my daughter. Otherwise she'd die.
There's a lot of cultural variation in notions of whether and what parents owe children and children owe parents. It seems to me there's no one correct standard to even argue for.
It sounds like you have a clear idea for what you think is rightly owed in either direction of the parent/child relationship. Even in this one weird country I live in (the U.S.), subcultures of class, ethnicity, geography, specific family history show widely varying expectations around this. Notorious edge cases include things like are kids owed a college education paid for if parents can afford (or borrow) to pay, do parents have a duty to pay or help pay for things like addictions counseling, legal fees when kids get in trouble with the law, wedding expenses, or for various kind of enrichment experiences. That's just the money owed sense of it and obviously it gets way more variable when it comes to emotional support/boundaries -- rights of grandparents to visit grandkids, rights of parents to express opinions about how their grown children parent, what a parent feels a child owes a stepparent in terms of respect or emotional connection, what fathers and mothers feel they're owed differently, etc.
It seems to me Walrus isn't wrong, you're not wrong, Mek's not wrong and what each parent/child pair feel owed or feel they owe is going to get negotiated in each context. There's no objectively right way in this and it's been widely contentious for a really long time.
Agree that it's more complex than I'm making it (by a lot!) but get extremely irritated by folks who equate adult children choosing not to have a relationship with their parents to a parent cutting off a child. Having just had a child of my own, and having worked with folks who have had parents voluntarily end the relationship, it's not at all equivalent. An adult who chooses not to have a relationship with their parents is being hurtful, but a certain amount of separation is expected (in the U.S.) and even encouraged. A parent who chooses not to have a relationship with their adult child is crippling a life they brought into the world emotionally, materially, and spiritually.
Especially in the context of "discouraging lifestyles I disagree with," it's completely understandable for an adult whose parents do not support the things that make them happy to choose not to associate with those parents.
I don’t have a great argument for rejecting your perspective. It’s intuition all the way down. Imo children of parents who weren’t negligent or cruel owe everything to their parents, and parents of adult children have lesser duties to them.
I’m childless though so obviously much less informed than you.
Is there any evidence that would convince you you are wrong about this? Because it seems to be unfalsifiable, any lack of evidence is just evidence it's being suppressed.
Guessing that if this survey was done 20 years in future the results would look very different. When today’s readers were growing up there was almost no discussion in public schools around gender transition.
I believe both that “brainwashing” can have a significant effect on a child's decisions but that the main cause of homeschooled kids becoming queer is that their parents where unconventional in the first place.
If you are a normie, your further decision to homeschool your kids will not affect that.
If I really didn't want my children to become transsexual I would do the usual of protective factors against autism (not have children late, good diet for the mother etc.)
However I have a second, extremely politically incorrect hypothesis that transsexuality is mostly caused through social isolation, the contact with trans ideology happens almost always in extremely eternally online circles, like niche discords, niche gaming communites (speedrunning, fighting games), niche music (bunch of super niche metal analysts or musicians became trans). It is always social isolation and too much time spent before the computer screen that predates gender change in my observation. It isn't quite sound, but if you are seriously worried about this the best think would be to just make sure that the kid has a normal social life, which is great for a thousand other reasons aswell...
I know almost nothing about ftm transgender except that it is most likely more common than mtf transgender and drastically underreported on because all the reactionaries only care about theis sons cutting their dicks off. I am however open to the idea that ftm transgender follows different mechanics than ftm transgender.
"I know almost nothing about ftm transgender except that it is most likely more common than mtf transgender"
Historically not the case, so far as I understand
"because all the reactionaries only care about their sons cutting their dicks off"
Whereas being fine with your daughter cutting her tits off is better?
Given that transgenderism seems to cluster along with a lot of mental health problems, convince me that it is not a mental illness. "Grr argh fascist" is not an argument.
> Given that transgenderism seems to cluster along with a lot of mental health problems, convince me that it is not a mental illness
Plenty of things correlate with mental health issues. Having chronic pain? You bet that correlates with depression. Bullied in school? Obviously. Sexually abused as a child? Yup, that can cause trauma.
By the bar of "correlates with mental health problems", we'd have to classify everything from "being in debt" to "childhood trauma" as a mental illness. That does not seem very convincing to me.
To use the phraseology of the OP, having chronic pain does not correlate with "cutting your dick off". I submit that wanting to cut your dick off is not a healthy or normal signal.
> cluster along with a lot of mental health problems
[Semi-ironically]
It is also cluster along with high-functional autism which is how actual mental health looks like, so there.
> convince me that it is not a mental illness.
There is some specific mental condition which can be looked at as a part of neuro-divergent spectrum. There is some physiological reason why people are trans, or rather why they experience bodily dysphoria. And thus you can look at dysphoria as a disease and gender transition as a way to cure it. Not sure what this changes other than the fact that we now agree that gender-correcting procedures are supposed to be part of the universal healthcare.
You would want proof that gender transition is an effective cure for dysphoria though, and idk if that exists. It's a hell of a series of surgeries and hormonal supplements that wreck your body to get the benefit for a placebo effect .
I doubt it is monocausal, I am sure there are a variety of reasons people transition. I do think it is worth diving into why it is growing so quickly. In the past (~20 years ago) in my circles it really seemed mostly the method of cope by female abuse victims. Girls who had had horrible relationships with men, and wanted to retreat into a different identity because being a girl sucked. Then once they had a good relationship suddenly the desire evaporated (this includes someone who was "trans" for years and months from starting hormones/surgery). Now that is anecdata, but it always made sense to me.
Didn't have any experience with MTF so have less thoughts about that. It does seem to be consuming/overlapping a bit with the gay community.
My sister-in-law I would bet huge money on would identify as trans if she was a teen today. A bit autistic, struggled in school, always very butch (worked as a carpenter for a while), but in the most passive feminine way.
Was in love with another close female friend for a decade or more. Was living with a stoner loser guy that whole time platonically, and they still live together today 10 years later semi-platonically (I think there is now something romantic there) despite her identifying as a lesbian. As far as I know she has maybe never actually dated a woman.
You are onto something there. I am currently digging into Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) because the US army thinks it can be used to prevent the Obesity epidemic (https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/186/3-4/344/6006387, there are a bunch of papers more if you follow the trail).
IPT has a huge focus on your social role, they basically have four categories of errors which lead to various mental illnesses like depression (or for the army Loss of Control (Loc) eating), two of these failure conditions are loss of a social role and being challenged in your social role, with therapeutic maneuvers that include mourning the loss of a role and accepting the new one, or resolving intra-role challenges.
If social roles are so important for people that their brains go bust if they lose one, it only makes sense that being the loser of a social role (man who has no family, no influence, no power no nothing OR woman who has no family, no man, no social network, no connections) is a somewhat unbearable standpoint, as you are locked into a role you are thoroughly failing at. As such a "role reversal", a wiping clean of the slate, may be attractive for these persons.
There is another thing which I picked up in anti-woke Marxist circles, they say that capitalism inherently will offer more and more specialised micro roles, in which the subject is reframed into the perfect consumer through an infinite array of possible identities which all are inherently subject to the systems of capitalism. Not that I necessarily buy into Marxist theory, but it is interesting to keep that theory in mind.
> However I have a second, extremely politically incorrect hypothesis
Alternative, and quite obvious, common sense explanation is that the causation is reversed. Trans kids have troubles fitting in IRL, thus spend a lot of time online, hanging out with the people with the same niche interests.
It's sort of depressing to be reading your hypothesis on niche blog ACX (at 6AM...at least it's not on my phone?) while listening to Scandinavian metal and building MtG decks. And also remembering that the first people I came out to...were my Extremely Online MMO buddies, who knew for almost a decade before my irl friend (singular) and family.
Although, for the record, I learned of the concept via Wikipedia. Sex ed in my school/family was...ehm...lacking. There were some feeble attempts to found a chapter of Gay-Straight Alliance at my highschool, but they got laughed off campus. "We don't have any of those here!" (Narrator voice: Everyone became LGBT once they left for college.)
Now I am moderatly entertained that a bunch of cis people attack the hypothesis and the one trans person meets it perfectly. I have almost zero interaction with trans people or even lgbt irl (allegedly the former best friend of the sister of one of my friends became trans, but I have never even seen her in person). However the extremely online people I know know way more transsexuals than me, and my normie friends know even less (never even heard of one!). This got me thinking if maybe trans is related to social isolation or extreme online behaviour.
It is a bit cruel of a question, but because of the other IPT comment I wrote, did you feel like you failed at your previous gender role before transitioning?
Btw, green player here, hyped for toxic in green in ONE.
I do think part of the causality issue is that...if a trans person doesn't pass very well, or is otherwise fearful of being publically out, then of course you'll only know them at arm's-length through the Internet, if at all. Social life funges against personal risk, and all that. Conversely if they're at an advanced level...it's referred to in-community as "going stealth", of not bothering to identify oneself as trans outside ~any circumstances., even to other LGBT people. A somewhat rarefied bunch, but they're out there, confounding heuristics. Like I'm way more explicitly out here than anywhere in IRL...people generally can't tell, and if they mistake me for a gay dude instead, I don't bother correcting them. Just another unremarkable cashier at the grocery store either way, albeit one with strange fashion tastes. Thus contributing to "I don't know any trans people" in my own small way.
Hmm, yes, that's a plausible hypothesis I'd entertain. I've thought sometimes that if I were significantly more masculine, things woulda turned out differently...had romantic success ever, had better outlets for exercise (I actually don't hate sports and have some athletic/gym talent potential, but getting hazed in boys' locker rooms does a lot to beat such aspirations outta you), had better male role models. Most of the other guys I knew growing up were also loser nerds like me, or they were hulking football-team ogres who...seemed to revel in stupidity. Not exactly attractive paths to take! So it seemed logical to just nope outta that dynamic and choose a different character class. There wasn't really a thing like "nonbinary" at the time, so Doing Something Else Which Is Not That meant...female.
In similar vein, there's a pretty close Everett branch where I just end up being a typical gay guy instead. Good chunk of the same access to feminine mannerisms and fashion, less radical changes, greater acceptability, much better social prospects. Sadly I was raised in a pretty homophobic environment, so that never seemed like an acceptable choice until far, far too late. Didn't even realize I also liked boys until well into transition...
I guess it's weird in some ways to frame it as "a choice", cause that's rarely the typical narrative. For me though, childhood and disposition left me pretty...ambivalent gender-wise? I don't think I even had a firm grasp that there were strong dividing lines between guys and girls, masculine and feminine, until puberty or thereabouts. So the idea of arbitrary path-dependence horrified me when it sure looked like that path sucked a lot. Of course people are going to fail at gender roles if you assign ones that don't fit to begin with. (This is the only redeeming part of the "toxic masculinity" discourse, that the default Male roles available for lotsa people are fairly constraining, compared to what's on offer for Female.)
(Phyrexia is awful and I hate it and it can die in a fire. Rip Nahiri :( The only good thing to ever come out of Mirrodin is Equipment as a card type...but goddamn those mythic rare haymaker swords are dumb too. Like the new R/G protection one...throw that on Moraug? Main, land drop, additional combat, combat, post-main, additional land drop, additional combat.... Add in double strike, Scaretiller, and Tiller Engine for shits and giggles. Or additional-combat additional-main cards, how about Aggravated Assault? So dumb.)
I really appreciate the response! Transsexuality is just an intellectual curiosity for me, I don't really have any "skin in the game" as I am content with my gender role and don't know any lgbtq people irl anyway, as such I have to thank you for honoring my heartless investigations. Interestingly just yesterday, when I went boozing for titanic amounts, I heard about another ftm transgender in my far expanded acquintance circle, although in that case the prior girl already showed masculine behaviour before transition, he wanted to pick fights and get into physical brawls even before taking testosterone lol.
For a while I thought that transsexuality was accidentally solved through Jungian psychoanalysis, more specifically the concept of the shadow, even more specifically the concept of the animus for women or the anima for men. Basically people who can't accept the element of their soul that is of the mirrored gender get overcome by it, just as not accepting your shadow has you always becoming subservient to it. By now I have distanced myself a bit from that, especially since I am not really sure where I stand in the Jung vs Freud/Lacan split of psychoanalysis.
Contact with IPT through "whatever the hell the military is doing to get its recruits to be less fat" however has put me hot on the trail of "interpersonal role transition". The rise of transsexuality across the world could be a sign of traditional gender roles failing (leaving the discussion of wether that is by principle and spectrum based gender roles are more advanced/superior or wether that is because of terrible execution of traditional gender roles in postmodern societes aside) and people manually choosing a role transition if they can't find a satisfying subrole in the limits of their assigned gender role.
Both female and male gender roles seem corrupt to me at the time, with feminity having to suffer with some really weird stuff from 3rd and 4th wave feminism (I am strongly opposed to intersectionality), and traditional masculinity is literally getting pathologised with intentions to add toxic masculinity to certain mental illness catalogues (trashdaddy Zizek on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKGa6g8Kk5g)
I kinda believe in a weird Nietzschean sense of Will to Power (although even Nietzsche did not know what that means as he never finished his book on that), in that most people don't really have a lot of control over the things that are happening in their lifes, and having control over such choices due to hightened consciousness is generally unusual. As such for me the question would be less "Is there a choice between becoming trans or not in general?" and more "Is it a choice for each individual?". Basically how high your individual will to change yourself is decides wether it is a manual choice to change or wether you are changed by your environment.
(Fuck Nahiri, I am a simp for Sorin Markov and his daughterfu Avacyn. I am generally ambivalent to Phyrexians, but I love that they are killing Gatewatch members indiscriminately, including the compleation of Jace and his gf Vraska. I am really tired of the Marvel-style Gatewatch storytelling that dominated MTG recently. Will probably not stay that way for long, but at least it is a chance for stakes to appear. Gameplay wise I just want any monoG strategy to be viable in standard again, Teething Wurmlet artifact etb is kinda shit although very fun. Thinkin' about Teething Wurmlet into Skrel Hive in Selesnya)
From personal experience, highly-engaged in-person communities with similar political views to those isolated online cliques have even higher rates of gender changes than the similar online communities. (Specifically, an especially far-left college and its surroundings.) Screen time is definitely not a factor; being integrated into a community that is pro-X will, obviously, result in more X, and equally obviously people who are isolated want community more thaneothers.
From personal experience, highly-engaged in-person communities with similar political views to those isolated online cliques have even higher rates of gender changes than the similar online communities. (Specifically, an especially far-left college and its surroundings.) Screen time is definitely not a factor; being integrated into a community that is pro-X will, obviously, result in more X, and equally obviously people who are isolated want community more thaneothers.
I'd say that social media is more responsible than schools, although peer groups at school influenced by social media are an indirect cause. A lot of amateur gender therapists on social media think every teen with questions about their gender is trans and every trans person needs HRT yesterday.
Yeah in my experience with two teenage daughters it is much less the schools themselves than the peers and the peers are largely driven by social media.
If you want to tilt the odds in your favor keeping the kids off of phones/social media and sending them to a parochial school probably is your best bet.
CW, nitpick: imo “in your favor” is a potentially counter productive framing because of its judgmental connotation. Kids resent parental judgment. Parents can suppress them for a while but sooner or later the cat’s out of the bag anyway.
The thing that is most clear from your comment is that you don't have kids. When/if you do have kids, you are going to be super disappointed about how much control you have over things like their gender expression and other life choices.
"Well gosh, I just couldn't teach my kid not to be a rapist/serial killer/racist, there is no way parents can control life choices!"
These kinds of arguments are not accepted when it's policies the progressive side want to push - of course you can teach your kid not to partake in rape culture. Of course you can raise an anti-racist baby. Of course you can influence your children not to pollute and to be environmentally aware.
No, you can't control children as if they are robots, they have their own minds and personalities. But we do expect to be able to teach them values. And until they're old enough to leave the house and live on their own, yes parents definitely can have control over "gender expression", or whatever fashionable new term is in vogue next week.
You can engage in all the ridiculous reductio arguments you want, but the fact remains that, yes, parents obviously have *some* influence on their kids and also that that influence is both weaker and less direct than just about any parent would like. To take your example, I don't think that there are many parents raising their kids to be serial killers, and yet serial killers exist. I don't think there are many parents raising their kids to be trans or gay for that matter, and yet all of these types of people exist.
I can't even get my kid to stop doing self-defeating things that are explicitly in her self interest not to do, much less dump a set of my preferred values into her. Of course, she is acculturating to my upper middle class values simply by virtue of marinating in this environment, but there's not much I can do to deviate from this even with respect to aspects of the environment that I find distasteful.
You can easily hide behind vague generalities like "we expect to be able to teach kids values" (of course), so I want to be explicit here: no, I don't think parents have much control over "gender expression," and attempts to assert such control are likely to have unanticipated consequences, not least because they almost certainly come bundled with a bunch of other parental hang-ups that will be screamingly obvious to the kid.
"Gender expression" is a weasel term. What does it mean? Boys dressing up in skirts and eyeliner? That's been around for a long time.
Boys who think they're girls and girls who think they're boys?
Women wearing trousers? That's no longer a sign of "dressing like a man", but acceptable for everyone.
Be more clear as to what you mean. If you mean "Billy thinks he's a girl" then say that. Teenagers have been "expressing" themselves with clothing, hair colour and the rest of it.
If you mean "expressing my gender in a different way to the norms around expressing my gender" then parents will and do try to stop their kids doing dumb shit like tattoos and piercings. Maybe modern parents are more chill with it - or maybe not. I think it's still an indication of lower socio-economic class.
Yes when Billy and Susie go off to college, she can put a ring in her nose like she's cattle and he can wear makeup. Then they grow the fuck up and put away childish things.
And any parent who stands by and shrugs and goes "Nothing I can do" when their child is making foolish decisions, is considered neglectful. Are you *trying* to get your child to stop doing self-defeating things, or are you just shrugging and going "nature over-rides nurture"?
I imagine you are trying to influence away from damaging behaviour, even with all your words around "it's innate, parenting won't do much". And if your child was going out and hurting others or causing damage, damn sure you'd step in to put a stop to that, never mind any "parents don't have much control over their kids' life choices".
When they live as independent adults, they can make all the life choices they want, even if that means bad ones. But what parent will at least not try to stop their child making bad choices?
And *that's* where the disagreement lies. Belt of Truth says it's only "reactionaries" who care about "their sons cutting their dicks off". If someone thinks "cutting your dick off is a fine lifestyle choice, Billy" then of course they are going to object to the idea that a parent can - or should - have any control over this kind of lifestyle choice. Billy is really Susie, nothing I can do about that and I shouldn't even try.
But if it's innate for Billy to be Susie, it's just as innate for Billy to like torturing animals or fantasise about murdering the kids in his class. Yet nobody thinks that "oh no, you shouldn't even try to interfere with Billy's expression or his life choices" there.
No, I'm not going to be more clear about what I mean, because it's perfectly obvious. I'll just repeat myself: parents have indirect and limited control over their kids, whose values are mostly determined by the cultural milieu in which they are raised, of which parents are one small part.
The most obvious example of this is immigrant parents. If you are, say, from China and your kids are born in America and go to school in America, your kids will be American. They will be a little bit Chinese, but they aren't in any way shape or form going to fit in with a bunch of Chinese school kids in China. And if you go to heroic efforts to raise them Chinese in America, the most likely outcome is that they will find you annoying, overbearing, and out of touch. They will do what they need to to humor you and make the peace. You will have some influence over your kid, just not a ton.
I'm pretty sure there is no area more so than childrearing that people like to project their ideological biases, fantasies, and delusions onto. So, you know, join the club. In answer to your question about whether I try to get my child to stop doing self-defeating things: I spend endless amounts of time and energy trying to get her to stop doing self-defeating things. These efforts just don't work very well, because I am battling her personality.
I can certainly ban certain behaviors, and that may work for a while. I can tell my kid that she can't get a tattoo while I'm supporting her, and most likely she will obey me. But I'm not under any illusion that I'm winning this argument in the long term if she has different ideas. (This is hypothetical. My kid is eight and deathly afraid of needles.)
If you want to pour your energy into convincing your child that dressing a certain way violates the natural order, have at it. Most likely they were going to conform to gender norms anyway, since that's what most people do. And if they weren't going to, you might be able to shame them out of it. But if you think your kid isn't going to pick up on the emotional energy driving your weird culture war obsessions, well, good luck to you. Most likely they won't share that energy, and they will just do what they need to do to humor you.
"parents have indirect and limited control over their kids, whose values are mostly determined by the cultural milieu in which they are raised, of which parents are one small part."
And you'll surely notice that many people talking about this here have been mentioning their ability (as parents) to control the social/cultural environment in which their kids are raised.
Thus the mentions of various school types and keeping them off social media and the like.
"If you are, say, from China and your kids are born in America and go to school in America, your kids will be American. They will be a little bit Chinese, but they aren't in any way shape or form going to fit in with a bunch of Chinese school kids in China."
This is something I have experience with, so I'd say that your take should be nuanced a bit. The parents can certainly increase the odds of the kid fitting in with Chinese school kids in China. Most obviously, they can move to China. If they stay in America, they can find a school where most of the students are first-generation Chinese, so that most of the kid's friends will probably be Chinese. If they can't do that, they can at least teach the kid the Chinese language and the basics of Chinese culture. The cultural milieu in which the kids are raised can be changed by the parents.
Can you raise a child to not be autistic? Some mental traits aren't so simple to change.
You can control if a child *expresses* their gender identity, in a "you're not allowed to wear skirts" sense, but I'm not aware of any therapy or parenting strategy that can make a trans person not *want* to be a particular gender. And the brute force "no, you're not allowed to identify as a woman in my house" is unlikely to be good for your relationship with them.
One confounder I'll note among the trans, mid-20's people I've known: a disproportionate share seem to come from environments with very strong, fairly essentialist views on gender roles--so "I like cooking and sewing, and hate open aggression" translates to "I must be a girl" more than in some other environments.
I think there is a lot to this and more generally to the notion that a lot of the "gender dysphoria" among kids has less to do with biological gender than with gender roles. It is worth noting that it's surprisingly common in lots of traditional societies with strong gender norms for there to be an accepted "third gender" in which someone switches roles. And also that terms like gay and transgender don't map cleanly to this social arrangement. E.g.:
Meh I am a bit skeptical of this kind of claim. A lot of the examples I have been provided in the past are post hoc modern creations presented as traditional practices when you dive deep into them. Or are jsut twisting words around to mean other things.
I mean in 19th century England you could call someone a "fop" or "dandy", that didn't mean there were "three accepted genders". Some of the analysis really reeks of that kid of stretching. Always be skeptical of new anthropological claims that match modern political needs.
I think you are really wrong about this, but I don't have deep anthropological expertise here. For what it's worth, the phenomenon in the article I link to is 1) absolutely real -- I have been to Samoa and it is a widely known and generally accepted aspect of many Polynesian cultures; 2) long, long predates current arguments about contemporary gender norms; and 3) definitely exists elsewhere. For example, there is analogous situation in the Balkans dating back to the 1500s.
This has nothing to do with "fops" or "dandies." It is a practice in which in which members of one gender choose to live as the other gender in all manners of dress, social custom, and even pronouns. Often this is legally recognized and certainly it is culturally recognized, often even in societies where homosexuality is taboo. Be as skeptical as you want, but this stuff happens.
>I mean in 19th century England you could call someone a "fop" or "dandy", that didn't mean there were "three accepted genders".
So, to be clear, your evidence that a gender-non-conforming "third gender" doesn't historically exist is that you can immediately point to examples of widely accepted categories of gnc individuals in western history?
Right, but that's just a cultural quirk of description, not a categorical one. You could just as easily say the same about e.g. ASD individuals, or people with schizophrenia, but just because we didn't have the same language or categories to talk about them doesn't mean they didn't exist.
This is more or less my take. We’re not used to living in a world where men and women are all allowed, much less encouraged, to do each other’s traditional “stuff”. The stronger the messaging about “boy things” and “girl things”, the harder it might be to feel good about thinking/feeling/liking certain stuff without feeling disqualified from one gender or another.
I didn’t grow up with terribly strict rules here despite coming from a relatively socially conservative home. I think this is why I find it much easier to grasp being trans than non-binary. I just can’t imagine a thought that would disqualify me from simply being a woman, or qualify any aspect of myself as male. In my head, “woman” is an incredibly stretchy category, and nothing short of actually wanting to completely be a man could evict even a little bit me from that. The challenge non-binary people pose to me is that in validating their identities, which proceed from different first principles, I’m implicitly accepting that there are thoughts and ideas that are “male” and *should* push me out of my own binary. And I balk at that, because to me the whole idea of egalitarianism was that the ideas and thoughts lose their binary connotations and became available to me in my identity as a woman.
I haven’t resolved this. I really liked having biology as the be-all-end-all of gender, because it seemed so much better than classing objects, thoughts and feelings by gender. But I want to be hospitable to trans people, so I’m cool with having other signals be strictly gendered. I need them myself to inhabit my own identity to my satisfaction. An inscrutable identity is no identity at all for most of us.
I think what we have today is the product of rising egalitarianism, so not a bad thing. But weird side effect of things not being so strictly gendered is that it becomes harder to feel comfortable as one gender or another, and that’s enough to tip people with certain mental presets and environmental influences over some line. The downside is that we’ve all lost some powerful tools to inhabit our identities, innate and/or created. I think gender roles are really necessary to self-actualize, and as much as we try to break them down they’re constantly re-forming. My best guess is that some set of external signals will coalesce around the idea of being non-binary, it will become legible and boring and the numbers will level out. Learning about all this in school will probably just accelerate that process.
Anecdata, but my experience of this is exactly opposite. In my social circle, it's the more progressive families that have higher trans rates (teens rather than mid-20s, if anyone thinks that makes a difference).
Socially progressive and essentialist gender ideas are in practice not a contradiction imo. Sure, we don't ussualy associate these two together. And when asked directly, someone who identifies as progressive will say that eg girls can be tough too and boys can be caring and men can clean and women can cook.
However, what is the actual behavior in those circles? Who works more, who takes care of children more, what clothes are worn by who, who wears make-up, who are football fans.
Anecdata: 2 young adults from progressive circles with understanding parents, accepted by their social circle. Reasons they identify as trans: 1. feeling like they don't fit in with the boys, having a soft personality, has hobbies they think are female, likes to wear skirts. And 2. not liking girly stuff, hates make-up and dresses, feels uncomfortable compared to other women, has hobbies they think are manly.
So how come the rate of transgenderism is much higher now, where essentialist views on gender are uncommon, than they were in the past, when they were universal?
You are reading too much causality into correlation - this is observational, not prospective. People are forgetting that children aren't randomly assigned schooling methods. The children who end up in different schooling environments certainly differ significantly from each other.
Specifically relevant for our example, is that a significant percentage of homeschooled students (I don't know whether that is ~10% or ~90% or somewhere in between) are home-schooling because brick and mortar schools did not work out or were obviously non-viable.
Oftentimes, this is due to the children having social issues and not fitting in. Remember, autistic people are much likelier to experience gender dysphoria than non-autistic people.
So it is not shocking that homeschooled people would have a high frequency of trans identity.
It still seems likely enough that putting them in a public school would only make it worse.
Additionally, the survey results are from 3 years ago, and more significantly, describe the results of readers largely decades past their years of public schooling or alternatives.
Seeing a lack of positive correlation between those who attended public schools in the 80s and 90s and those who identity as trans, is *not* a reason to assume to that the lack of positive correlation would remain between those in public schools in this decade and trans identity some decades later.
FWIW, we were part of a few homeschooling groups in two states as our son was growing up and there was always a significant minority of homeschoolers who have ASD and the parents are homeschooling because there were adequate family resources to pull that off and it seemed easier to them than navigating all the services necessary for their children to make schooling workable.
My impression is that homeschoolers break down into:
* majority are doing for religious reasons (as many as 80% I think?)
* secular homeschooling because kids are off of one bell curve or another (includes kids with ASD)
* homeschooling for ideological reasons
* homeschooling for parent/child-rearing philosophy reasons
* homeschooling for life circumstance reasons (traveling careers, etc)
My unscientific impression is that of the minority of secular homeschoolers, the ones homeschooling because kids are off a bell curve in some way is as large as the three categories that come after. I say this in support of the idea that the percentage of transgender homeschoolers may be influenced by the percentage of transgender people with ASD.
Based on what I know of the homeschooling community -- more than most, but not a member of that community -- it is possible that the higher likelihood of a homeschool kid being trans may be that the kid was homeschooled because he/she did not fit in at school. So the parents pull the kid out to homeschool because regular school was not going well because the kid didn't fit in. Then some of those kids who didn't fit in, it turns out, did not fit in because they were trans.
"Hmmmm if I were to homeschool my future kids, one of the primary motivations would be so they wouldn't be brainwashed into being trans... But this shows that that homeschooled kids are the most likely to go trans"
As a general rule, I am cautious about using homeschooling AVERAGES when trying to draw conclusions about homeschooling for specific situations.
Two anecdotes to illustrate:
*) A homeschooling colleague (former Stanford STEM prof, at the time working for a biotech startup) from a few decades back uses a three-bin clustering to describe homeschoolers:
a) The stereotypically religious who read the Bible every day
b) Sandal wearing granola parents who read John Holt
c) Those who are focused on academics and find schools such as Palo Alto High School unacceptable
[NOTE: His gross stereotyping for effect :-)]
One *can* average everyone in all three bins together as "homeschoolers" but if someone plans to homeschool they probably know which bin they fit into. The other bins might not be relevant for prediction purposes.
*) A YMCA swim instructor from 20 years back (who was one of the best people I have ever seen with children) noted that the kids she saw binned out as:
a) Public school: More resilient then the public school kids if not as 'high powered' (e.g. smaller vocabularies for age). Handled setback well.
b) Private school: Less resilient, more high powered, less self-directed
c) Homeschoolers: Completely all over the map and totally unpredictable.
The key point here is (c) ... again, one could generate an average, but it might not be very useful if the spread is wide and the spread is not randomly distributed for any specific situation.
Homeschooling means that more of your peer group is family, siblings and perhaps children of your parents' friends, less random age peers. So whether that means more woke, pro trans, or whatever or less depends on the composition of those peer groups.
I agree, with the caveat that some less structured or less supervised homeschooled kids may be more online than school kids and that may increase the influence of social media.
At a slight tangent, I wonder to what extent social media interactions end up age segregated. That's one of the things I don't like about the conventional model of schooling. When I was fourteen I should have been arguing with adults and socializing with kids my age or younger.
Our home unschooled daughter did her online socializing largely on World of Warcraft, which I would expect to result in a not very age segregated pattern — her mother and I were on too. SSC, ACX and DSL all have a wide mix of ages. I don't know to what extent that's true of social interactions on FB or Discord or ... .
There's nothing inherent to the task of homeschooling a child that makes them more likely to be trans. I think your fear is misplaced. Scott warned about the low sample size for this question, the percentages are so close it's hard to argue these findings are significant, no?
eh, purely speculation, but IMO your choice of co-parent, and your relationship with your future kids will have a lot more to do with that, than what form of education you choose.
I wouldn't generalize this survey result that much given the vagueness of the term "have changed their gender", which is not the same as attempting to change their sex. This likely includes things like people who identify as "genderfluid" because it sounds cool but don't actually behave any differently from anyone else.
It's still weird that homeschools and public schools have equal amounts of both, but it's hard to tell what the mix is from this data alone, and I still anticipate public schools having higher rates of kids actually attempting to medically transition.
Parents who choose different approaches to schooling are different, and their children thus differ, wherever you stand on the nature/nurture thing. Children also often have input, and children who push in different directions are different.
This is beyond confounded, and can't be fixed by tossing a couple of variables in the magic unconfounding jar.
Apologies if this comes across as rude, but this is the kind of social science statistical analysis that really winds me up.
Scott has definitely shown merely correlations, and these don't necessarily imply causations. However, it is even less likely that something causes the opposite of what it's correlated with, or that it is a strong cause for something it's not correlated with, so there is still useful data to update your priors on here (though more in the direction of 'X probably doesn't cause Y, or at least don't cause it much' than 'X definitely causes Z').
Actually, things very often cause things they're uncorrelated or anticorrelated with. For example, consider someone driving on a hilly highway while intentionally keeping their speed constant. Their speed will not be very correlated with the amount of fuel usage or whether they're going up or down hill. However, both of those factors have a strong causal effect on speed.
For another example, consumption of full fat dairy products is correlated with lower childhood obesity compared to low fat dairy products. However, it could be that parents with obese children choose to give them lower fat dairy products because they think it will help - and the parents could be right! Maybe it helps, but doesn't fully return the child's weight to baseline. (I don't know whether full fat dairy causes obesity. My point is simply that the correlation doesn't tell us much.)
> However, it is even less likely that something causes the opposite of what it's correlated with, or that it is a strong cause for something it's not correlated with
Yeah, kind of like how the correlation between ibuprofen use and headaches makes it very unlikely ibuprofen could cause the opposite.
Good point! The relevant link there though is that headaches cause ibuprofen. The correlation is because of a causation, but you have to consider the temporal relationship to work out which way round the causation runs. So long as we're confident that the survey respondents feelings about school came after they went to school, then we can rule out this confounder.
OP was talking about the parents, which come (temporally) before the education. The hypothesis is that the parents cause the style of education, and they also (through nature or nurture, take your pick) cause certain values/beliefs in their kids. These values/beliefs will inform how people answer questions such as ”did you hate high school?” Hence the education style will correlate with the responses, but there is no causal link. Both are a function of mom and dad. This cannot be ruled out without control, and it’s hard to see how one could control for it.
So, you're suggesting that eg. the kind of kid most likely to enjoy home-schooling is one whose parents are most likely to try home-schooling? That's still very useful information, even if it doesn't generalise to most children and parents!
At least for 2022 sample (but they purposely make it pretty stable over time), 750 Verbal was 98th percentile, while 740 Math was 94th percentile. The scores for each section range from 200-800.
> So, most students take the SAT, why is this? I thought SAT was specifically related to / used for college admission?
It's given to high school students, who are usually encouraged to at least consider college as an option. People who score highly can be offered scholarships which may enable them to pursue options they might not otherwise be able to afford.
Note that a total score of 1300 was 96.55 percentile in 1984.
This survey data is from 2020, so a survey taker who was about 43 would likely have taken the harder test. I think the ages in the survey are rounded to the nearest decade. About 13% of respondents are 50 older, so approximately that many took the harder test.
The test has changed a number other times as well, not just 1994. 2016 may have been the next largest change. While both changes have been characterized by some as making the test easier, the changes were orthogonal to just turning the difficulty knob and any changes to score distribution are secondary effects.
Thanks for correcting me. I now see that the scores were renormed in 1995, after the changes introduced in 1994. I guess this is why scores before the mid-90s look so different, instead of the test getting "easier."
Verbal scores were boosted maybe 70 points from 1994 to 1995, but Math scores only about 10 points.
The pre-1995 Verbal SAT test was hard. In 1991, only nine boys (and no girls) got perfect 800s on both math and verbal, although 800 on the math was not uncommon among, say, Rice U. students.
Henry Harpending called the old SAT Verbal. the best high-end IQ test in the world.
As a voucher enthusiast I am surprised that private and home schools don’t have more of a lead over public schools in terms of satisfaction. Maybe it’s because of the high achieving selection of ACX readers? Kids who are smart are more supported by teachers and administrators?
There's a wide range in quality of public education in this country. Many ACX readers probably grew up with upper-middle-class suburbs with high-quality public schools. Vouchers make most sense in poorer, especially urban districts with lower-quality schools.
Hm. Maybe it's different in a bigger city; but growing up, there were three or four main public high-schools, and all of them were equally awful — the well-off universally sent their kids to one of the three spendy private high-schools. (Being Texas, all three were varying degrees of religious too — although, honestly, I'm sort of glad about that; Biblical knowledge has actually sort of come in handy, and it certainly helped develop my skepticism, heh.)
I would guess this varies by region. In the Bay Area, for example, Cupertino is known for having really good public schools, and affluent parents will live in Cupertino so they can send their kids to the public schools there.
There's a cycle of good schools -> increased local housing demand from affluent parents -> increased housing prices -> less affluent families priced out; most schoolchildren are from affluent houses -> even better schools.
To elaborate on your point of ACX readers being high achieving, the relationship between alternative schooling methods and satisfaction could be like the relationship between height and basketball prowess.
Height may be positively correlated to basketball prowess, but among those extremely talented at basketball (the NBA), one may not find that taller players have more prowess. However, being tall makes it much likelier that someone will be in the group of highly talented players in the first place.
Similarly, being homeschooled could make it much likelier that one will be successful, but after conditioning the sample based on that feature, we may no longer see the association.
However, if this were correct, we would expect that the percentage of ACX readers who be disproportionately home-schooled and private schooled compared to the general population, just as we find that NBA players are much taller than the general population.
I don't know if this is the case, as I don't know the age distribution in the sample, and the rate of schooling by type at the time that they were being educated.
The home/public difference seems very impressive to me. I wouldn't expect too much private/public difference, most private schools seem like the same model as public schools, only ritzier.
Fair enough, but I have now been convinced voucher type private schooling won’t increase education scores vs public (contrary to my priors) and now we have the possibility that they won’t increase satisfaction much either. But I guess the case is still there of parental choice, possibly cost and the argument that if a voucher system isn’t any worse than a public system, a voucher system should be the default not the public one because freedom.
On what basis would you think that vouchers wouldn't increase education scores? If it is on the basis of the comparison of SAT scores of public schools and private schools in this sample, note that private school outperformed public by 15 points in the verbal section, and outperformed them in math by 14 points.
As for an actual study of vouchers, Thomas Sowell looked at the performance of pupils in charter schools that shared buildings with non-charter public schools, and drew from the same population, but granted slots based on lottery.
Lastly, and this is most relevant for Scott's point about private / public, I suspect that the marginal benefit of private schools (or other non-homeschool options, like public charter schools) vs. public schools would be larger among worse schools than better schools.
This extreme failure seems very easy for an alternative school to improve - any students testing proficient would be an infinite improvement!
In a high performing public school, however, there is less room for possible improvement.
The sorts of disadvantaged students who would benefit the most from alternatives to traditional schools (e.g. by learning something, instead of nothing), would hardly be represented in this sample regardless of whether they got the better option, so we would not expect to see large performance benefits to the homeschooled cohort.
The key quote was “the best-identified studies suggest that winning a voucher has an effect on achievement that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. “
As they say a lot of studies are difficult to interpret due to selection effects. In fact I think Scott has coined the phrase “if an analysis of an education intervention shows benefits and if it can be due to selection it is due to selection “. Maybe the studies you quoted refute this, I certainly hope so.
As I said I remain a voucher supporter for other reasons.
The main advantage of the private religious schools I attended was that the school could "un-invite" kids who made a nuisance of themselves. What remained were the reasonably well-behaved students who, even if they weren't great academic performers, weren't going to prevent anyone else from learning.
Since the survey has a question related to childhood class, you could check. Here's the percentage of respondents rating 3 or less to school satisfaction who also answered both the "childhood class" and "school type" questions:
Rich kids in private schools -> 7.4%
Rich kids in public schools -> 16.5%
Upper Middle Class in private schools -> 14.4%
Upper Middle Class in public schools -> 21.2%
Middle Class in private schools -> 14.1%
Middle Class in public schools -> 23.0%
Working-lower Class in private schools -> 25%
Working-lower Class in public schools -> 32.6%
Poor in private schools -> 41.7%
Poor in public schools -> 43.2%
No, I don't think it's history class. I'd guess it's private schools' ability to reject the most disruptive students. The "poor" results weaken that interpretation, but there are other reasons why being poor in a private school might be unpleasant.
Maybe because private schools are better at differentiating lessons for gifted students? Whereas the public schools force gifted students to complete tediously easy worksheets and won’t let them bring their own books into class and never give them the opportunity to learn anything new.
Maybe it's just my demographic, but the narrative I always heard about public schools is that they support middling students the most, especially when standardized tests are involved. The reason being that students at the top are going to pass anyway and students at the bottom are going to fail no matter what. I no longer feel quite as sure that this is true looking back compared to how I felt about it when I was actually in school though.
When I was in school (80s/90s), there were definitely a lot of programs to provide extra resources for gifted students; now that my kids are in school (middle & high), things are much more lockstep and deviations are only available for the left side of the distribution.
I understand that there is a general skepticism about p value and statistical hypothesis testing, but without even a standard deviation those values are pretty much useless.
Yeah, Scott really should have reported confidence intervals for those measurements. Maybe he should partner with someone who's better at statistics? That would also let him do that regression he wanted to do.
Yes, that's why I suggested to report the std instead of doing statistical testing. This would give at least a small indication of the overlapping of the distributions, and will tell you a lot about how to change your beliefs. E.g. let's say we have something like
Rate of life satisfaction
Government school: 5.63 with a std of ~3
Religious school: 5.87 with a std of ~3
It's an minuscule difference which I won't give much weight to, compared to having the same results with a std of let's say 0.1.
I believe this method to be better than the confidence interval which as you suggested would result in very high confidence due to the massive amount of respondants. But do we really care about the REAL population mean? Or do we care more about the spread of the responses? I would argue for the latter. (Sorry for overexplaining)
Thanks! In fact, I guess most people would want to answer questions such as "how likely is that my child will be better off doing homeschooling than public school?" - then we don't care whether on average, amongst 8000 people, we can spot a small difference. We care about the distributions. So since the spread is pretty high I would say that deciding between one will, in most cases, not matter at all.
There are still an awful lot of families for whom the stats don't matter, because it's more about what they realistically have access to.
We homeschool because we can't afford private, and the local public schools are crap. None of these stats would change our income, or the performance of our local schools.
Thanks for raising this. This was my gut reaction when reading the numbers but I didn't know what to ask for. The SDs here I read as indicating that none of these results are significant. Is that how you also read it?
The long thread above about fear of homeschooling being a contributor to transgenderism seemed a very big thing to load onto a smaller sample size with small differences. But the correlations relating to other variables drawn from the whole sample also seem insignificant.
No, this is not the correct interpretation. The results are significant which means that there is an aggregated difference amongst the groups. It also means that if you repeat the survey again you will get a fairly similar mean.
The problem with the means is that it doesn't give you a strong idea about how variable those results are from an individual to another. Eg if your child goes to private school there is a 0.01% (made up number) chance they will do better in life than if they go to a public school.
This would be significant, but is it a number we should care about? Whatever is your answer, sometime this is the question we wanna answer, not the presence of some aggregated difference. Notice the mean alone won't allow you to get this info.
The number above can be computed exactly with a few assumptions, with the mean and std provided above by Scott. But it's late now in Italy, maybe tomorrow!
Is this a raw standard deviation or a standard error of the mean? Can you also post the sample sizes for each group?
If this is indeed an SEM, it changes the interpretation of the article to be basically a null result. I don't know that reporting the means or inviting people to opine on them is justified by the data.
Agreed, this is pretty mileading. 6.72 vs 6.56 is way less than. A standard error, and not even close to being statistically significant. Scott should have just posted "there were no significant differences on all these measures."
Here is the probability that an individual from each group will have a better outcome (e.g. LIFE/SOCIAL SATISFACTION) than an individual from Public school. Remember that the baseline is 50%, which indicates that there is a 50/50 chance that the individual will do better/worse in, for example, "religious" school than public school, and this happens if the means and stds from the 2 groups are the same:
APPROVAL RATING
home: 74.051%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 54.371%
private: 64.640%
unschooling: 56.494%
LIFE SATISFACTION
home: 53.040%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 51.747%
private: 51.165%
unschooling: 40.303%
SOCIAL SATISFACTION
home: 53.723%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 53.600%
private: 55.109%
unschooling: 48.164%
Another way of looking at this: subtract 50% from each value, and now they indicate the increase in likelihood that an individual from a school is gonna do "better" than an individual from public school.
Example: if you put your child to a private school, there is 5.1% increase in chance that they will have a higher SOCIAL SATISFACTION than a person from a public school.
Gender non-conformity is quite strongly associated with poverty, so it is not a good measure of weirdness when your categories are correlated with poverty. Specifically, higher rate of gender non-conformity in home schooled population may be partially statistically explained by the higher rate of poverty.
"Specifically, higher rate of gender non-conformity in home schooled population may be partially statistically explained by the higher rate of poverty."
Are the home schooled more likely to be living in poverty as children? My impression was that since parents had to be responsible for their children's education and would be assessed to make sure the kids were reaching standards, that it would be better-off parents doing this - one parent at least who can be full-time at-home with the kids and able to get textbooks and do the kind of "now kids let's learn about X" experiments and field trips and visits to museums and art galleries and so on.
Though if kids are being 'home schooled' because they dropped out of school and there are other circumstances where they're living in broken homes, that would correlate with poverty.
Looking up the demographics, there are some fascinating results:
"Analysis: The NHES 2012 and NHES 2016 found sharp increases in the rate of homeschooling among Hispanic students. According to NHES estimates, the number of Hispanic children being homeschooled rose from just over 250,000 to just under 450,000 between 2012 and 2016.
Analysis: Between the NHES 1999 and the NHES 2016, the percentage of students being homeschooled by parents without a high school diploma or GED rose while the number of students being homeschooled by parents with a graduate or professional degree fell. The rise in the number of students being homeschooled by parents who have not completed high school or a GED is consistent across the NHES 2012 and NHES 2016; in 2012, 11% of homeschooled students fell into this category; in 2016, 15% did.
Analysis: The NHES 2003 found that homeschooled students were as likely as other students to be poor and more likely to be near-poor. After 2003, the NHES stopped reporting the percentage of students who were near-poor, so it is impossible to know whether this finding holds true today. The elevated rate of near-poverty among homeschooled students may have been the result of some homeschooling families’ giving up a second income.
Analysis: In contrast to previous surveys, which have typically found roughly the same level of poverty among homeschooling families as among other families, the NHES 2016 found that homeschooled students were more likely than other students to live below the poverty level. This change is likely related to shifts in racial demographics and levels of parental education also evident in the 2016 survey.
Analysis: The NHES 2012 found that homeschooled children were more likely than other children to live in households with two parents (biological, adoptive, step, or foster). Roughly one in five homeschooled children lived in a household with one parent (compared with nearly a third of students overall).
Analysis: The NHES 2012 found that homeschooled children were more likely than other students to have two parents with one in the labor force. While the survey found that over a third of homeschooled children have two parents in the labor force, what this looks like in practice is unclear; in some cases a homeschooling parent may stay home to educate their children while taking on flexible work on the side. "
So very roughly - homeschooling is mostly white kids, though with increasing numbers of Hispanic kids. Parents are less educated and less well off *but* households are more stable, with two-parent families and at least one parent working.
Are these parents who don't trust what is happening in public schools with regard to education, or think public schools are too dangerous? Why pull the kids out of public school to homeschool them?
Some states don't require assessment of the students.
Also, two parents with one in the workforce is the classical setup for homeschooling as the non-working parent has to provide daycare since schools aren't utilized. This means generally you get one parent with a higher than average income but an aggregate household income that can be lower. I knew very few families that were exceptions to this.
This causes some weird things with class, where the profession and culture of the family is higher than the income would suggest.
Yes, this. I could nearly double our household income by going back to work instead of homeschooling our kids. We're kind of poor, on paper. That's voluntary.
I do notice that in Scott's stats, the rate of homeschooling goes down as income goes up-- I'm curious if that's true of the population at large, or if the SSC readership is too much of an outlier to draw conclusions from.
Yeah I was really surprised recently when a Hispanic woman with just a HS degree who was working for me on a project and whose husband always worked away from the home said she was homeschooling her youngest kid. She put in a lot of hours on the project each day (and was good), and I was wondering when the "schooling" was happening.
"My impression was that since parents had to be responsible for their children's education and would be assessed to make sure the kids were reaching standards"
Not true in California, where we home unschooled our kids.
We're in that demographic-- near-poor, two parents, one working, homeschooling the kids.
Why? Because even if we were both working, we couldn't afford to live in a good school district, or pay tuition. The local schools here are crap. The best we can do for our kids is teach them ourselves, and for that, it's worth living on one modest income.
I think home schooled children in US come from slightly poorer but more educated families on average https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/homeschool-demographics/ , at least more recently and this is also seen from the ACX survey. Which makes sense to me, as one of the logical pathways to home schooling is to have educated parents who cannot afford to live near a good school.
I think that this isn't the right way of looking at those numbers. As someone else pointed out: only 1 in 3 households with children have a stay-at-home parent, whereas a stay-at-home parent is basically the default for homeschool families. Intuitions about a two-parent-two-income family that earns $125k compared to a two-parent-two-income family that earns $65k aren't the same for a two-parent-one-income family that earns $65k.
One of the logical pathways is to have educated parents who cannot afford to live near a good school. Another way is to have well-paid parents who can afford to have one not work.
I see a lot of reports that there are high rates of poverty among transgender adults. It wasn't clear to me that that meant they were also raised in poverty. And nothing I saw pertained to gender non-conformity in childhood.
"13.6% of foster youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning, 13.2 % reported some level of same-sex attraction, and 5.6% identify as transgender. This means that there are between 1.5 to 2 times as many LGBTQ youth living in foster care as LGBTQ youth estimated to be living outside of foster care"
Presumably being in foster care means coming from homes and families with problems, and more likely to be living in poverty. For the gender non-conforming, they have a figure of 11.1% along with the above 5.6% transgender figure.
For general rate of transgenderism in adults and youth:
"In this study, we use data from the 2017 and 2019 YRBS and the 2017- 2020 BRFSS to find that:
Over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older.
Among U.S. adults, 0.5% (about 1.3 million adults) identify as transgender. Among youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S., 1.4% (about 300,000 youth) identify as transgender.
Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.
Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. We find that youth ages 13 to 17 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).
The racial/ethnic distribution of youth and adults who identify as transgender appears generally similar to the U.S. population, though our estimates mirror prior research that found transgender youth and adults are more likely to report being Latinx and less likely to report being White compared to the U.S. population."
For transgender youth, racial/ethnic identification is as follows:
Latinx - 1.8%
AIAN (American Indian Alaskan Native) - 1.8%
All other races - 1.5%
Black - 1.4%
White - 1.3%
Asian - 1.0%"
If we take non-white/non-Asian populations to be more likely to be living in poverty, that probably answers the question:
Private schooling appears to be associated with better outcomes but also with being from a richer household. Would you consider splitting out the results of upper-middle and rich to see if the benefits of private still hold?
The point of this kind of analysis is either to find some blindingly obviously large effect or to conclude that there is no such effect. Trying to do subgroup analysis on vague terms like upper-middle class vs. rich seems pretty useless in this context.
It's not a vague term - it's something captured in the survey. The point was to not to analyze between rich and upper middle class but to remove the confounder of household wealth or class from choice of private vs public schooling - thus "and". I thought that was obvious. I don't think its useless if we are interested in the impact of school choice on outcomes.
Hmmmm if I were to homeschool my future kids, one of the primary motivations would be so they wouldn't be brainwashed into being trans... But this shows that that homeschooled kids are the most likely to go trans
Makes me think twice about it
Almost like the things you think "brainwash" people into being trans are totally not the reason people become trans.
You don't think rapid onset gender dysphoria exists as a result of social pressure?
Not him, but of course not.
Definitely not
Yes. Esp for girls.
No. "Using a national sample of United States adolescents, we found that there were more TGD (transgender and gender diverse) AMAB adolescents than TGD AFAB adolescents in both 2017 and 2019. Additionally, the total percentage of TGD adolescents in our sample decreased from 2.4% in 2017 to 1.6% in 2019. This decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as TGD is incongruent with an ROGD hypothesis that posits social contagion."
From this article: https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/3/e2022056567/188709/Sex-Assigned-at-Birth-Ratio-Among-Transgender-and
Jesse Singal argued (persuasively, in my view) that the results of this study do not remotely imply what the authors claim: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-new-study-on-rapid-onset-gender
Thanks for sharing that! Sometimes a critical point can be lost in a sea of comments. And even if people see and appreciate a point, the poster is unlikely to know here, bereft of a 'like' or 'upvote' signal.
Thanks for the link, I should have read the study more carefully before posting it! It's disappointing that something so apparently poorly put together could pass peer review (yes I know, it's very flawed, but even so). That said, the original ROGD paper sounds worse.
Try another one, with a smaller clinical population, and a different definition of rapid-onset gender dysphoria: "a phenomenon in youth with gender dysphoria emerging at or after puberty, socially influenced through peer contagion, and with contributing factors including poor mental health, neurodevelopmental disabilities, parent-child conflict, and maladaptive coping strategies" - not based on which gender and sex was involved. They asked the question whether a more recent realisation of a trans identity in adolescents was associated with "self-reported mental health measures, mental health and neurodevelopmental disability diagnoses, behaviors consistent with maladaptive coping (eg, self-harm), support from online and/or transgender friends but not parents, and lesser gender dysphoria." They did not find support for these associations in a clinical population. The research was carried out by people from the Trans Youth CAN! research team, so there is obviously potential for bias there. https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(21)01085-4/fulltext
At a cursory glance, that study looks a lot more robust than Turban's.
"Additionally, the total percentage of TGD adolescents in our sample decreased from 2.4% in 2017 to 1.6% in 2019. "
So the number of TGD adolescents decreased by a *third* in two years, and this is evidence *against* TGD being a social fad?
My thought exactly!
While the majority of transgender people have been male-to-female, the recent trend seems to be an increase in female-to-male.
Why this is so, is what is being argued over. Why are girls and young women deciding they would be better off as men?
Probably because historically MTFs got more exposure, but now that FTMs are getting exposure, people with relatively mild dysphoria are more likely to realize that transitioning is an option.
Because nobody is more fad-prone than adolescent girls.
If it's a fad, then why don't most of them lose interest and desist after a few years, like they lose interest in any other fad?
There is literally no evidence that rapid onset gender dysphoria exists. The only study that purports to show it is Lisa Littman's study, which posted surveys on ROGD websites to ask parents about their kids' ROGD. There are two glaring flaws with that study, either of which alone would completely invalidate it. First, it's a study about the inner lives of adolescents and young adults that's based entirely on the reports of parents, a demographic that's notoriously clueless about the inner lives of adolescents and young adults. Second, Littman's sample consisted entirely of people on ROGD websites, so of course they said it existed! This is a bit like trying to determine the shape of the Earth by posting a survey on the Flat Earth Society Forums.
Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
>This is a bit like trying to determine the shape of the Earth by posting a survey on the Flat Earth Society Forums.
Supposing someone posted a survey on a pro-trans website asking "do you believe transgenderism exists?" I suspect most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative. Do you think the act of me posting the survey on a pro-trans website invalidates the results of the survey? (Per Scott, this is called "proving too much" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/)
The difference between this question and the flat Earth question (which seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but here we are) is that the shape of the Earth can be directly observed: 99% of the population believing the earth was flat wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to its actual shape. Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
So no, the ROGD question isn't remotely like the flat Earth question.
>Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
Nobody is qualified to offer informed speculation about a person's inner life besides the person in question, and that includes the person's parents. So Littman should have talked to people who supposedly have ROGD, but she never talked to one.
>Supposing someone posted a survey on a pro-trans website asking "do you believe transgenderism exists?" I suspect most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative.
The difference is that transgender people have direct access to their own inner lives.
>The difference between this question and the flat Earth question (which seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but here we are) is that the shape of the Earth can be directly observed: 99% of the population believing the earth was flat wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to its actual shape. Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
Sure, if the person's behavior includes answering questions about their inner life! If you were trying to determine the shape of the Earth, you would actually study the Earth instead of asking people about it, and if you were trying to determine if ROGD exists, you would hopefully talk to people who supposedly have it instead of asking their parents.
99% of people not believing in gender dysphoria wouldn't make it any less real to the people who have it. So if you want to learn about a person's inner experiences, you should ask that person.
>Nobody is qualified to offer informed speculation about a person's inner life besides the person in question
Do you think people can ever be honestly mistaken about their inner experiences? I certainly do. In such cases, we may need to instead substitute testimony from an individual close to that person, who knows them very well and cares about their welfare.
Even if you think that survey responses from the individuals in question is the gold standard, that doesn't imply that survey responses from the individuals' parents are *completely* worthless. They could well be the next best thing.
Besides, several of the questions on Littman's survey had nothing to do with the inner experiences of the teenagers in question and were simple factual questions like "has your child been diagnosed with a developmental disorder or mental illness?" or "did your child express a non-heterosexual sexual orientation prior to coming out as trans?" If you think parents aren't qualified to answer the question of whether their child has ever been diagnosed with autism or depression, I don't know what to tell you.
>So Littman should have talked to people who supposedly have ROGD, but she never talked to one.
I know this isn't quite the same thing, but do you accept the self-reported inner experiences of desistors and detransitioners who assert things like "At one point I sincerely believed I was transgender, but now believe I was mistaken" or "At one point I was suffering from gender dysphoria, but no longer am"?
>The difference is that transgender people have direct access to their own inner lives.
I didn't say "most of the respondents (who are themselves transgender) would answer in the affirmative". I said "most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative", without specifying the respondents' gender identity.
Put it another way: if Littman had posted her survey on a website for the parents of trans children, and a majority of the respondents (who are themselves cisgender) said they sincerely believed that their child was transgender, would your response be "that's ridiculous, no one can know whether someone is really transgender except the person themselves"? Somehow I doubt it; I suspect that instead you'd be praising the parents for uncritically "affirming" their children's stated gender identity. You're dismissing this survey, not on the basis of its methodology, but because it didn't give you the answer you wanted.
>Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
Most people in their peer group? I mean, sure, *some* parents are in tune with their kids' lives, but most parents are pretty clueless as to their kids actual lives. Take drug use, something we have good data on[1]:
>One in 10 parents surveyed believed their own teenage child had used alcohol during the previous year. And just one in 20 believed their teen had smoked marijuana.
>Teens themselves reported a much higher rate of substance use in a separate poll released late last year. About half of 10th-graders said they had used alcohol over the previous 12 months; about one in 4 (28%) reported marijuana use.
Off by a factor of five in both cases. And this is something that should have physical, observable effects. And it's not like parents have low priors on substance use:
>More than half of the parents polled in the latest survey believed general alcohol use among teens -- other than their children -- was higher than reflected in the earlier poll and about a third overestimated marijuana use among other teens.
Parents, in general, are in pretty heavy denial that there's anything "wrong" with their kids, and have a poor understanding of the reality their adolescent children's live. Hell, I can't tell you the number of depressed adolescents and teens I knew (some of whom were ideating suicide) whose parents were totally oblivious or even actively in denial.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20110915/parents-view-of-teen-drug-use-your-kid-not-mine
It's a fair point, but I might also point out that we shouldn't automatically take kids' word for it either. Teenagers may falsely claim to have used alcohol or drugs in hopes of seeming cool. This was illustrated by the "video nasties" scandal in the UK, in which many schoolchildren earnestly claimed to have seen horror films which *didn't exist*. Even speaking anecdotally, I'm sure everyone had a classmate in secondary school prone to telling tall tales about how sexually active they were.
> Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
The experience itself isn't even very informative. One cannot actually differentiate from a first person perspective the difference between the qualia of "I am actually experiencing the qualia of the opposite sex" and "I mistakenly think I am experience the qualia of the opposite sex". The best that can be done is guesswork. It's very hard for me to imagine this guess would not be heavily influenced by social environment. I'm not even convinced gender as felt phenomenon is coherent outside of a social framework.
>I'm not even convinced gender as felt phenomenon is coherent outside of a social framework.
I disagree - some trans men report phantom penises, similar to amputees' phantom limbs, and that certainly doesn't seem like something that would arise from a social framework - but even if that's true, gender is a felt phenomenon that has a huge effect on some people's quality of life. If someone really wants to have breasts for some reason and is miserable without them, then I don't care why.
I absolutely had ROGD from ages 23-26 or so, and subsequently grew out of it. I was depressed and self-hating, had a lot of trans friends/trans ideology exposure, and began to believe I was a trans man. Fortunately I did not take T (though I wanted to, desperately, for a while). After some deep introspection I realized that my depression was making the idea of becoming a new person an all-consuming obsession. I got some therapy, found a boyfriend and realized I really liked vanilla heterosexual sex, and my gender dysphoria basically went away.
So ROGD definitely *exists.* The question is to what degree.
I think you should be careful with claims that there is "literally no evidence" for some controversial proposition. In the Bayesian sense, even the mere fact that there is a term called ROGD is evidence that it exists.
Maybe so. But it's not strong evidence.
Obviously, there is a big expansion in the number of adolescent girls suddenly declaring themselves to be boys or nonbinary or whatever, since roughly that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2015. There are countless sources of evidence that this is a huge fad. Some of them were always tomboys, but a lot had been normal girly girls, which is a new social construct.
>Obviously, there is a big expansion in the number of adolescent girls suddenly declaring themselves to be boys or nonbinary or whatever, since roughly that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2015.
Historically MTFs got more exposure than FTMs, and thus biological males were more likely to realize transitioning was an option than females. Now FTMs are getting more exposure, so the number of trans men in America is almost as high as the number of trans women. That's not evidence that it's a fad - transgender rates for both men and women have been steadily increasing since the mid-1900s and show no sign of going down.
If by "that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians" you mean Caitlyn Jenner, she's a trans woman, so why would girls transition to male just to imitate her?
>There are countless sources of evidence that this is a huge fad.
Like what?
>Some of them were always tomboys, but a lot had been normal girly girls, which is a new social construct.
Seemingly manly men have been suddenly coming out as trans women for decades - Jenner is an excellent example. This is simply the opposite sex version of that. Trans men have gotten less exposure in previous decades than trans women, so of course less stereotypical trans men got even less exposure.
I think young people are VERY susceptible to social pressures - and imaginative too!
It's very clear among my nieces' social group that gender diversity is the ultimate trendy thing. I get the impression of it being like having a favourite colour. It sounds like 2/3rds of the girls are 'non-straight'
Exactly. Data and studies are weak evidence compared to what we see with our dear young relatives and friends.
You don't really get that much of a say in your kid's gender expression, sexuality, etc. Even if some styles of raising them, or some environments, might make them more likely to repress themselves and stay in the closet forever, any effect there will be marginal, and mostly evaporate once they leave the nest.
What you have much more of a say in is whether they'll still talk to you after discovering who they are.
If you raise your child to believe men can become women, then yes, you are massively influencing their gender expression and sexuality.
Well, if a person really wants to be X, even though the path is hard and inconvinient just from the mere fact that they can be X in principle, then the conventional wisdom is that the person already had a strong disposition towards wanting to be X.
Do you believe that majority of boys have a strong disposition towards wanting to be women (and vice versa) so that they need to be kept in dark about the possibility?
I would put it more like some nonzero % of people go through some very difficult times around gender and fitting in as teens and it is a bad idea to present them with life long altering options during this period as a method of coping. On top of that some non-zero % of people just like to do whatever will piss off the "squares" as much as possible, and right now this is sort of the last redoubt. Coming home with piercings or tattoos won't do it anymore.
I absolutely think there are non-negligible social costs to the phenomenon and that for most (though not all) transitioning is probably an aggregate negative decision in terms of life satisfaction if you removed all the social pressure there is to lie about such things and the rationalizing people do after making non-reversable changes.
> I would put it more like some nonzero % of people go through some very difficult times around gender and fitting in as teens
Trivially true. And some of these people are trans, while others have other reasons for not fitting in.
> it is a bad idea to present them with life long altering options during this period
Going trough default puberty is life long altering option. Modern trans activists would really want an option for the people who don't want it not to do it.
> On top of that some non-zero % of people just like to do whatever will piss off the "squares"
I'd like to see some evidence that this contributes to gender transitions in any way before seriously entertaining this idea.
> I absolutely think there are non-negligible social costs to the phenomenon
This cuts both ways. Modern pressure not to change your gender is still much much higher than to change it. As long as absolute majority of transitions successfully improve the QOL and the rate of false positives is tiny we seem to be on the right track.
I'm definitely not the only trans person whose familial reception to coming out was something like "why couldn't you have been merely gay instead, we could have handled that just fine!" Many Such Cases.
Of course, for those who already didn't like their family much to begin with, this reaction has something of the opposite intended effect. I wouldn't say it was a __primary motivation__ or anything - lotsa other easier ways to spite one's face - but it's definitely in the Pro rather than Con column. Being that-which-is-detested-at-some-fundamental-level is an excellent excuse to keep unwanted blood relations at a safe arm's length...for their own benefit as much as mine.
Counterpoint in fairness: this also deters me to some degree from detransitioning, which I entertain from time to time. I __really__ don't want to give The Haters the satisfaction of being proven right. There's some real Pride at stake in assembling a functional life versus a largely-indifferent-or-hostile world, even if it's an unhappy one...sunk cost fallacy is a big thing, even outside monetary decisions. (I'm more wary of claiming generalization here, since I was never "very trans" to begin with.)
So in conclusion, the opinions of "squares" do have some non-negligible degree of influence. And this seems uncontroversial with reversed sign, that external disapproval is a common cause of detransitoning.
That gender can be altered is just a fact. If I tell my child about gravity does that prevent her from being able to fly? Parents are in particular control of these natural processes.
We are going to have to agree to disagree on whether men can become women
Depends on how you define "men" and "women." What is a fact is that most secondary sex characteristics can be altered with hormones, and primary sex characteristics can be altered with surgery. That leaves only internal sex organs, which don't always work even in people who aren't transgender, and chromosomes, which no one's going to know about without a DNA test.
I define it as XX vs XY chromosome.
Exceptions can be made for the 0.001% of the population that is a hermaphrodite or has a weird chromosome condition
Look. We can taboo the phrase "becoming women" if you like, and it'll still Just Be A Fact that men can go through a series of social, and optionally surgical, processes whereby which they'll look more like women, and a vast section of the population will agree to treat them as though they were women. That's a choice that they can make.
I don't doubt the sincerity of your insistence on defining "man" and "woman" based on chromosomes — but I don't think it's actually the root of your discomfort with transgenderism, and I think it's needless obfuscation to come back to it as though it were the core of the issue. Or would everything be fine and dandy for you if everything else about the transition process were the same, except that ""trans women"" now acknowledged, if asked, that of *course* they were technically men?
If you're uncomfortable with the thought of a child of yours undergoing hormone therapy and extensive surgery that aren't necessary for their physical health — well, just say that. It may or may not be "correct", but it's an obviously valid and respectable feeling for a (prospective) parent to experience. Being a stickler for chromosomes is really neither here nor there, and just makes you come across as pedantic instead of sincerely concerned.
(You might also be uncomfortable with the mere thought of a son of yours wearing dresses and lipstick and speaking in a high-pitched voice, surgery or no surgery. And while I think taking those feelings as reflective of some grand moral truth would be heavily misguided — they're *still* more obviously heartfelt and natural and sympathetic than chromosomal pedantry!)
"it'll still Just Be A Fact that men can go through a series of social, and optionally surgical, processes whereby which they'll look more like women, and a vast section of the population will agree to treat them as though they were women"
I do not agree to treat them as though they were women, because they are not women. The vast majority of people in the world today agree with my opinion. Would you agree to treat me like a chimpanzee just because I dress like a chimpanzee, eat like a chimpanzee, and convinced a plastic surgeon to mutilate my body to be more like a chimpanzee's? If I insisted that I'm a real chimpanzee and that I'd be offended at any suggestion otherwise, wouldn't you think I was either delusional, mocking you, or insulting your intelligence? If there was a sudden spike in the number of people identifying as chimpanzee and mutilating themselves accordingly, wouldn't you see it as a contagious mental illness that needs to be stopped, not a praiseworthy movement to be encouraged?
Define 'gender' please. It seems like a most nebulous concept to me.
Seriously: Second comment here saying the same thing. Raising them to believe anything is not going to work if they are the sort of person who questions what they are told. It just won't.
Unfortunately you are just going to need to hope that your kid turns out well, and you are might need to accept that what 'turning out well' means to them might not be what you had in mind.
It would be strange if this were true since parenting can lastingly effect most forms of behaviour. Of course it can't effect genetics, but I think it's well established that sexuality isn't genetic. I haven't seen anything on whether trans has a genetic component (maybe everyone trying to study it got beaten up by at least one of the trans and anti-trans lobbies).
Is there data you've seen to the contrary?
Sexuality isn't genetic?! Not 100% sure but:
Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, but they theorize that it is the result of a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences.[1][3][4] They do not view sexual orientation as a choice.[1][3][5]
Quoting ENWP on culture war issues is a good way to start a fight and a poor way to win anyone over; the facts that most conservative media are "deprecated", alt-rightists are actively purged (WP:No Nazis is *technically* not policy, but it might as well be since they ban on the basis of it) and tradcons are not-very-online do tend to tell.
This doesn't make the statement false, but seriously, if you want to convince anti-SJers of something, using WP won't work. We see it as hopelessly compromised on CW issues (actually, most of us see it as hopelessly compromised in general; I have to remind people quite frequently that *outside* CW issues it's great).
I just looked at a review paper one day (but now can't find it) that said the best evidence we have suggests that gender dysphoria develops in the mother's womb. In this case parenting of course can't affect much. If someone can find the paper, please let us know.
Anyway, even if it starts before birth, there are two sides of the coin: a) many kids with GD "grow out of it" later and decide that they don't want to change sex after all, and later they are more happy with life than their peers who did change. And b) kids with strong GD are utterly miserable and make horrible numbers of suicide attempts. These kids get happier and stop trying to kill themselves if they get to change sex. So here we have a difficult and tragic situation: if we let them all easily transfer we'll cause some of them live less satisfying lives later. And if we conceal that possibility from them, we'll have a number of them suffer horrible misery and lose some lives. So of course the correct action is not "never let your kids know that transitioning is possible" and also not "let them easily transition at their whim". The correct way is a difficult process of making sure if they are really suffering horribly and only then letting them change; and this of course gives a lot of false positives and false negatives and we'll still lose a lot of them. I hope AI diagnostics will some day save us from this.
The 'suicide' argument is pretty spurious. GD isn't an isolated disorder, it is accompanied by depression, anxiety and other highly negative mental problems. Disambiguating the effects of those from GD is a non-starter.
But what's your plan then? Most of the suiciders are probably on antidepressants already. If their anxiety and depression are related to their GD then how would you treat their mood without dealing with GD? I'm assuming that you don t consider all GD to be a secondary result of other mood problems. What's the plan?
The intervention for GD used to be 'wait and see' since 90% of sufferers recover naturally by their early 20's. It is only in the last decade that a medication-first approach has been introduced with baleful, lifelong consequences for many sufferers. This is why the UK NHS and other European health services are now reverting back to the traditional treatment.
> I hope AI diagnostics will some day save us from this.
I should imagine that by the time A.I. was good enough to do that reliably, we'd also be in enough of a technological utopia that transitioning back and forth would cease to be an issue, i.e. you could flawlessly transition and detransition more or less at will.
Is there much evidence that parenting actually lastingly affects any form of behavior? As I recall, many things that people expect are the result of parenting actually have a large genetic component, while peer environment has more effect on behavior than parenting.
"What you have much more of a say in is whether they'll still talk to you after discovering who they are"
I see this sanctimonious little messaging in a lot of places, and it always irritates me. Usually because the person posting it would have a completely different reaction if it went the other way.
A - my parents cut me out of their lives and won't even talk to me anymore because they claim they're disappointed in me. They refuse to accept me for who I am!
Response - the monsters, they're toxic, you're better off without them, anyone who decides to cut off family contact just because you think differently to them is not someone who understands what it means to be family, they're not your real parents (and so on and so forth)
B - I've decided to cut my parents out of my lives and not even talk to them anymore. I have to be who I am and if they can't handle that, too bad!
Response- so brave and stunning and valid! you are a champion! you don't have to live with toxicity and if that means cutting off contact then that is what you have to do, if they can't change their minds about how they think then that's on them (and so on and so forth).
Maybe the parents don't want to talk to the kids, either? Maybe they'll be happier if the source of turmoil and distress in their lives is gone?
This cuts both ways. If parents are expected to unconditionally love and support their children no matter what, then the children have to do some accepting and tolerating too. Parents do have hopes and expectations for their children, and it's hard when those don't work out.
Too many of these kinds of posts that I read are all "I am owed EVERYTHING in the world, but I don't owe anything back in return!"
Absolutely there are different expectations and norms for what is okay in a parent/child relationship.
I see people saying "you should work to pay for your child's food", but if you force your child to work to make money for the household, suddenly people get up in arms about child labor or something. Totally different reaction the other way, huh?
Parents do have a responsibility to raise the child they have birthed into this world until that child's independent, and for that duration, it indeed does not cut both ways because the child is dependent and not mentally mature.
Once the child's independent and mature (varies, but often around 25), then I'm fine with children or parents deciding that the relationship is toxic and stepping back from it, regardless of the fictional view you've put in my mouth.
A parent creates their child and has enormous power over them for at least a decade and a half. Imagine thinking that doesn't impact the relationship in any way.
Children aren't owed everything in the world, and owe quite a bit to the world in return. They are owed everything their parents have to give and they owe nothing to their parents. Sorry.
"They are owed everything their parents have to give and they owe nothing to their parents."
No wonder moderns are not having kids but own pets instead. Much less hassle, much more dependable return of affection.
Children owe *nothing* to their parents? At all? Not to be abusive to them? Not to steal anything that's not nailed down to feed a drug habit? Not to be in a reciprocal relationship of affection but instead be a giant, entitled, perpetual toddler?
Ok slight overstatement - children owe the same duty of care to their parent as they do to any passerby on the street. No they don't have an entitlement to steal from and abuse them, but they also have no duty to maintain a relationship with them. That's not perpetual toddlerdom, it's the opposite. It's growing up. I have a good relationship with my parents but it's certainly not built on a sense of duty to them. Rather I appreciate their kindness and effectiveness in raising me and think of them as a resource. Like with my friends that also makes me want to be a resource to them. A relationship built on love, not duty.
But going the other way is different. Obviously in addition to love I have a duty to my daughter. Otherwise she'd die.
There's a lot of cultural variation in notions of whether and what parents owe children and children owe parents. It seems to me there's no one correct standard to even argue for.
It sounds like you have a clear idea for what you think is rightly owed in either direction of the parent/child relationship. Even in this one weird country I live in (the U.S.), subcultures of class, ethnicity, geography, specific family history show widely varying expectations around this. Notorious edge cases include things like are kids owed a college education paid for if parents can afford (or borrow) to pay, do parents have a duty to pay or help pay for things like addictions counseling, legal fees when kids get in trouble with the law, wedding expenses, or for various kind of enrichment experiences. That's just the money owed sense of it and obviously it gets way more variable when it comes to emotional support/boundaries -- rights of grandparents to visit grandkids, rights of parents to express opinions about how their grown children parent, what a parent feels a child owes a stepparent in terms of respect or emotional connection, what fathers and mothers feel they're owed differently, etc.
It seems to me Walrus isn't wrong, you're not wrong, Mek's not wrong and what each parent/child pair feel owed or feel they owe is going to get negotiated in each context. There's no objectively right way in this and it's been widely contentious for a really long time.
Agree that it's more complex than I'm making it (by a lot!) but get extremely irritated by folks who equate adult children choosing not to have a relationship with their parents to a parent cutting off a child. Having just had a child of my own, and having worked with folks who have had parents voluntarily end the relationship, it's not at all equivalent. An adult who chooses not to have a relationship with their parents is being hurtful, but a certain amount of separation is expected (in the U.S.) and even encouraged. A parent who chooses not to have a relationship with their adult child is crippling a life they brought into the world emotionally, materially, and spiritually.
Especially in the context of "discouraging lifestyles I disagree with," it's completely understandable for an adult whose parents do not support the things that make them happy to choose not to associate with those parents.
I don’t have a great argument for rejecting your perspective. It’s intuition all the way down. Imo children of parents who weren’t negligent or cruel owe everything to their parents, and parents of adult children have lesser duties to them.
I’m childless though so obviously much less informed than you.
This is an excellent point. Well said.
I really wonder what the current crop of teens and 20-somethings are going to do when they hit 50 and run out of authorities to rebel against.
Is there any evidence that would convince you you are wrong about this? Because it seems to be unfalsifiable, any lack of evidence is just evidence it's being suppressed.
Guessing that if this survey was done 20 years in future the results would look very different. When today’s readers were growing up there was almost no discussion in public schools around gender transition.
I believe both that “brainwashing” can have a significant effect on a child's decisions but that the main cause of homeschooled kids becoming queer is that their parents where unconventional in the first place.
If you are a normie, your further decision to homeschool your kids will not affect that.
There is a really strong data link between autism and transsexuality. Also Scott found out that they react fundamentally different to optical illusions (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P2nYKqwmHdYKARTG8/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions).
If I really didn't want my children to become transsexual I would do the usual of protective factors against autism (not have children late, good diet for the mother etc.)
However I have a second, extremely politically incorrect hypothesis that transsexuality is mostly caused through social isolation, the contact with trans ideology happens almost always in extremely eternally online circles, like niche discords, niche gaming communites (speedrunning, fighting games), niche music (bunch of super niche metal analysts or musicians became trans). It is always social isolation and too much time spent before the computer screen that predates gender change in my observation. It isn't quite sound, but if you are seriously worried about this the best think would be to just make sure that the kid has a normal social life, which is great for a thousand other reasons aswell...
Counter-example: Elliot Page?
Things can occur for multiple causes, and remember fame, like isolation, is its own stressor.
I know almost nothing about ftm transgender except that it is most likely more common than mtf transgender and drastically underreported on because all the reactionaries only care about theis sons cutting their dicks off. I am however open to the idea that ftm transgender follows different mechanics than ftm transgender.
"I know almost nothing about ftm transgender except that it is most likely more common than mtf transgender"
Historically not the case, so far as I understand
"because all the reactionaries only care about their sons cutting their dicks off"
Whereas being fine with your daughter cutting her tits off is better?
Given that transgenderism seems to cluster along with a lot of mental health problems, convince me that it is not a mental illness. "Grr argh fascist" is not an argument.
> Given that transgenderism seems to cluster along with a lot of mental health problems, convince me that it is not a mental illness
Plenty of things correlate with mental health issues. Having chronic pain? You bet that correlates with depression. Bullied in school? Obviously. Sexually abused as a child? Yup, that can cause trauma.
By the bar of "correlates with mental health problems", we'd have to classify everything from "being in debt" to "childhood trauma" as a mental illness. That does not seem very convincing to me.
To use the phraseology of the OP, having chronic pain does not correlate with "cutting your dick off". I submit that wanting to cut your dick off is not a healthy or normal signal.
> cluster along with a lot of mental health problems
[Semi-ironically]
It is also cluster along with high-functional autism which is how actual mental health looks like, so there.
> convince me that it is not a mental illness.
There is some specific mental condition which can be looked at as a part of neuro-divergent spectrum. There is some physiological reason why people are trans, or rather why they experience bodily dysphoria. And thus you can look at dysphoria as a disease and gender transition as a way to cure it. Not sure what this changes other than the fact that we now agree that gender-correcting procedures are supposed to be part of the universal healthcare.
You would want proof that gender transition is an effective cure for dysphoria though, and idk if that exists. It's a hell of a series of surgeries and hormonal supplements that wreck your body to get the benefit for a placebo effect .
I doubt it is monocausal, I am sure there are a variety of reasons people transition. I do think it is worth diving into why it is growing so quickly. In the past (~20 years ago) in my circles it really seemed mostly the method of cope by female abuse victims. Girls who had had horrible relationships with men, and wanted to retreat into a different identity because being a girl sucked. Then once they had a good relationship suddenly the desire evaporated (this includes someone who was "trans" for years and months from starting hormones/surgery). Now that is anecdata, but it always made sense to me.
Didn't have any experience with MTF so have less thoughts about that. It does seem to be consuming/overlapping a bit with the gay community.
My sister-in-law I would bet huge money on would identify as trans if she was a teen today. A bit autistic, struggled in school, always very butch (worked as a carpenter for a while), but in the most passive feminine way.
Was in love with another close female friend for a decade or more. Was living with a stoner loser guy that whole time platonically, and they still live together today 10 years later semi-platonically (I think there is now something romantic there) despite her identifying as a lesbian. As far as I know she has maybe never actually dated a woman.
You are onto something there. I am currently digging into Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) because the US army thinks it can be used to prevent the Obesity epidemic (https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/186/3-4/344/6006387, there are a bunch of papers more if you follow the trail).
IPT has a huge focus on your social role, they basically have four categories of errors which lead to various mental illnesses like depression (or for the army Loss of Control (Loc) eating), two of these failure conditions are loss of a social role and being challenged in your social role, with therapeutic maneuvers that include mourning the loss of a role and accepting the new one, or resolving intra-role challenges.
If social roles are so important for people that their brains go bust if they lose one, it only makes sense that being the loser of a social role (man who has no family, no influence, no power no nothing OR woman who has no family, no man, no social network, no connections) is a somewhat unbearable standpoint, as you are locked into a role you are thoroughly failing at. As such a "role reversal", a wiping clean of the slate, may be attractive for these persons.
There is another thing which I picked up in anti-woke Marxist circles, they say that capitalism inherently will offer more and more specialised micro roles, in which the subject is reframed into the perfect consumer through an infinite array of possible identities which all are inherently subject to the systems of capitalism. Not that I necessarily buy into Marxist theory, but it is interesting to keep that theory in mind.
> However I have a second, extremely politically incorrect hypothesis
Alternative, and quite obvious, common sense explanation is that the causation is reversed. Trans kids have troubles fitting in IRL, thus spend a lot of time online, hanging out with the people with the same niche interests.
It's sort of depressing to be reading your hypothesis on niche blog ACX (at 6AM...at least it's not on my phone?) while listening to Scandinavian metal and building MtG decks. And also remembering that the first people I came out to...were my Extremely Online MMO buddies, who knew for almost a decade before my irl friend (singular) and family.
Although, for the record, I learned of the concept via Wikipedia. Sex ed in my school/family was...ehm...lacking. There were some feeble attempts to found a chapter of Gay-Straight Alliance at my highschool, but they got laughed off campus. "We don't have any of those here!" (Narrator voice: Everyone became LGBT once they left for college.)
Now I am moderatly entertained that a bunch of cis people attack the hypothesis and the one trans person meets it perfectly. I have almost zero interaction with trans people or even lgbt irl (allegedly the former best friend of the sister of one of my friends became trans, but I have never even seen her in person). However the extremely online people I know know way more transsexuals than me, and my normie friends know even less (never even heard of one!). This got me thinking if maybe trans is related to social isolation or extreme online behaviour.
It is a bit cruel of a question, but because of the other IPT comment I wrote, did you feel like you failed at your previous gender role before transitioning?
Btw, green player here, hyped for toxic in green in ONE.
I do think part of the causality issue is that...if a trans person doesn't pass very well, or is otherwise fearful of being publically out, then of course you'll only know them at arm's-length through the Internet, if at all. Social life funges against personal risk, and all that. Conversely if they're at an advanced level...it's referred to in-community as "going stealth", of not bothering to identify oneself as trans outside ~any circumstances., even to other LGBT people. A somewhat rarefied bunch, but they're out there, confounding heuristics. Like I'm way more explicitly out here than anywhere in IRL...people generally can't tell, and if they mistake me for a gay dude instead, I don't bother correcting them. Just another unremarkable cashier at the grocery store either way, albeit one with strange fashion tastes. Thus contributing to "I don't know any trans people" in my own small way.
Hmm, yes, that's a plausible hypothesis I'd entertain. I've thought sometimes that if I were significantly more masculine, things woulda turned out differently...had romantic success ever, had better outlets for exercise (I actually don't hate sports and have some athletic/gym talent potential, but getting hazed in boys' locker rooms does a lot to beat such aspirations outta you), had better male role models. Most of the other guys I knew growing up were also loser nerds like me, or they were hulking football-team ogres who...seemed to revel in stupidity. Not exactly attractive paths to take! So it seemed logical to just nope outta that dynamic and choose a different character class. There wasn't really a thing like "nonbinary" at the time, so Doing Something Else Which Is Not That meant...female.
In similar vein, there's a pretty close Everett branch where I just end up being a typical gay guy instead. Good chunk of the same access to feminine mannerisms and fashion, less radical changes, greater acceptability, much better social prospects. Sadly I was raised in a pretty homophobic environment, so that never seemed like an acceptable choice until far, far too late. Didn't even realize I also liked boys until well into transition...
I guess it's weird in some ways to frame it as "a choice", cause that's rarely the typical narrative. For me though, childhood and disposition left me pretty...ambivalent gender-wise? I don't think I even had a firm grasp that there were strong dividing lines between guys and girls, masculine and feminine, until puberty or thereabouts. So the idea of arbitrary path-dependence horrified me when it sure looked like that path sucked a lot. Of course people are going to fail at gender roles if you assign ones that don't fit to begin with. (This is the only redeeming part of the "toxic masculinity" discourse, that the default Male roles available for lotsa people are fairly constraining, compared to what's on offer for Female.)
(Phyrexia is awful and I hate it and it can die in a fire. Rip Nahiri :( The only good thing to ever come out of Mirrodin is Equipment as a card type...but goddamn those mythic rare haymaker swords are dumb too. Like the new R/G protection one...throw that on Moraug? Main, land drop, additional combat, combat, post-main, additional land drop, additional combat.... Add in double strike, Scaretiller, and Tiller Engine for shits and giggles. Or additional-combat additional-main cards, how about Aggravated Assault? So dumb.)
I really appreciate the response! Transsexuality is just an intellectual curiosity for me, I don't really have any "skin in the game" as I am content with my gender role and don't know any lgbtq people irl anyway, as such I have to thank you for honoring my heartless investigations. Interestingly just yesterday, when I went boozing for titanic amounts, I heard about another ftm transgender in my far expanded acquintance circle, although in that case the prior girl already showed masculine behaviour before transition, he wanted to pick fights and get into physical brawls even before taking testosterone lol.
For a while I thought that transsexuality was accidentally solved through Jungian psychoanalysis, more specifically the concept of the shadow, even more specifically the concept of the animus for women or the anima for men. Basically people who can't accept the element of their soul that is of the mirrored gender get overcome by it, just as not accepting your shadow has you always becoming subservient to it. By now I have distanced myself a bit from that, especially since I am not really sure where I stand in the Jung vs Freud/Lacan split of psychoanalysis.
Contact with IPT through "whatever the hell the military is doing to get its recruits to be less fat" however has put me hot on the trail of "interpersonal role transition". The rise of transsexuality across the world could be a sign of traditional gender roles failing (leaving the discussion of wether that is by principle and spectrum based gender roles are more advanced/superior or wether that is because of terrible execution of traditional gender roles in postmodern societes aside) and people manually choosing a role transition if they can't find a satisfying subrole in the limits of their assigned gender role.
Both female and male gender roles seem corrupt to me at the time, with feminity having to suffer with some really weird stuff from 3rd and 4th wave feminism (I am strongly opposed to intersectionality), and traditional masculinity is literally getting pathologised with intentions to add toxic masculinity to certain mental illness catalogues (trashdaddy Zizek on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKGa6g8Kk5g)
I kinda believe in a weird Nietzschean sense of Will to Power (although even Nietzsche did not know what that means as he never finished his book on that), in that most people don't really have a lot of control over the things that are happening in their lifes, and having control over such choices due to hightened consciousness is generally unusual. As such for me the question would be less "Is there a choice between becoming trans or not in general?" and more "Is it a choice for each individual?". Basically how high your individual will to change yourself is decides wether it is a manual choice to change or wether you are changed by your environment.
(Fuck Nahiri, I am a simp for Sorin Markov and his daughterfu Avacyn. I am generally ambivalent to Phyrexians, but I love that they are killing Gatewatch members indiscriminately, including the compleation of Jace and his gf Vraska. I am really tired of the Marvel-style Gatewatch storytelling that dominated MTG recently. Will probably not stay that way for long, but at least it is a chance for stakes to appear. Gameplay wise I just want any monoG strategy to be viable in standard again, Teething Wurmlet artifact etb is kinda shit although very fun. Thinkin' about Teething Wurmlet into Skrel Hive in Selesnya)
From personal experience, highly-engaged in-person communities with similar political views to those isolated online cliques have even higher rates of gender changes than the similar online communities. (Specifically, an especially far-left college and its surroundings.) Screen time is definitely not a factor; being integrated into a community that is pro-X will, obviously, result in more X, and equally obviously people who are isolated want community more thaneothers.
From personal experience, highly-engaged in-person communities with similar political views to those isolated online cliques have even higher rates of gender changes than the similar online communities. (Specifically, an especially far-left college and its surroundings.) Screen time is definitely not a factor; being integrated into a community that is pro-X will, obviously, result in more X, and equally obviously people who are isolated want community more thaneothers.
I'd say that social media is more responsible than schools, although peer groups at school influenced by social media are an indirect cause. A lot of amateur gender therapists on social media think every teen with questions about their gender is trans and every trans person needs HRT yesterday.
Yeah in my experience with two teenage daughters it is much less the schools themselves than the peers and the peers are largely driven by social media.
If you want to tilt the odds in your favor keeping the kids off of phones/social media and sending them to a parochial school probably is your best bet.
CW, nitpick: imo “in your favor” is a potentially counter productive framing because of its judgmental connotation. Kids resent parental judgment. Parents can suppress them for a while but sooner or later the cat’s out of the bag anyway.
The thing that is most clear from your comment is that you don't have kids. When/if you do have kids, you are going to be super disappointed about how much control you have over things like their gender expression and other life choices.
"Well gosh, I just couldn't teach my kid not to be a rapist/serial killer/racist, there is no way parents can control life choices!"
These kinds of arguments are not accepted when it's policies the progressive side want to push - of course you can teach your kid not to partake in rape culture. Of course you can raise an anti-racist baby. Of course you can influence your children not to pollute and to be environmentally aware.
No, you can't control children as if they are robots, they have their own minds and personalities. But we do expect to be able to teach them values. And until they're old enough to leave the house and live on their own, yes parents definitely can have control over "gender expression", or whatever fashionable new term is in vogue next week.
You can engage in all the ridiculous reductio arguments you want, but the fact remains that, yes, parents obviously have *some* influence on their kids and also that that influence is both weaker and less direct than just about any parent would like. To take your example, I don't think that there are many parents raising their kids to be serial killers, and yet serial killers exist. I don't think there are many parents raising their kids to be trans or gay for that matter, and yet all of these types of people exist.
I can't even get my kid to stop doing self-defeating things that are explicitly in her self interest not to do, much less dump a set of my preferred values into her. Of course, she is acculturating to my upper middle class values simply by virtue of marinating in this environment, but there's not much I can do to deviate from this even with respect to aspects of the environment that I find distasteful.
You can easily hide behind vague generalities like "we expect to be able to teach kids values" (of course), so I want to be explicit here: no, I don't think parents have much control over "gender expression," and attempts to assert such control are likely to have unanticipated consequences, not least because they almost certainly come bundled with a bunch of other parental hang-ups that will be screamingly obvious to the kid.
"Gender expression" is a weasel term. What does it mean? Boys dressing up in skirts and eyeliner? That's been around for a long time.
Boys who think they're girls and girls who think they're boys?
Women wearing trousers? That's no longer a sign of "dressing like a man", but acceptable for everyone.
Be more clear as to what you mean. If you mean "Billy thinks he's a girl" then say that. Teenagers have been "expressing" themselves with clothing, hair colour and the rest of it.
If you mean "expressing my gender in a different way to the norms around expressing my gender" then parents will and do try to stop their kids doing dumb shit like tattoos and piercings. Maybe modern parents are more chill with it - or maybe not. I think it's still an indication of lower socio-economic class.
Yes when Billy and Susie go off to college, she can put a ring in her nose like she's cattle and he can wear makeup. Then they grow the fuck up and put away childish things.
And any parent who stands by and shrugs and goes "Nothing I can do" when their child is making foolish decisions, is considered neglectful. Are you *trying* to get your child to stop doing self-defeating things, or are you just shrugging and going "nature over-rides nurture"?
I imagine you are trying to influence away from damaging behaviour, even with all your words around "it's innate, parenting won't do much". And if your child was going out and hurting others or causing damage, damn sure you'd step in to put a stop to that, never mind any "parents don't have much control over their kids' life choices".
When they live as independent adults, they can make all the life choices they want, even if that means bad ones. But what parent will at least not try to stop their child making bad choices?
And *that's* where the disagreement lies. Belt of Truth says it's only "reactionaries" who care about "their sons cutting their dicks off". If someone thinks "cutting your dick off is a fine lifestyle choice, Billy" then of course they are going to object to the idea that a parent can - or should - have any control over this kind of lifestyle choice. Billy is really Susie, nothing I can do about that and I shouldn't even try.
But if it's innate for Billy to be Susie, it's just as innate for Billy to like torturing animals or fantasise about murdering the kids in his class. Yet nobody thinks that "oh no, you shouldn't even try to interfere with Billy's expression or his life choices" there.
No, I'm not going to be more clear about what I mean, because it's perfectly obvious. I'll just repeat myself: parents have indirect and limited control over their kids, whose values are mostly determined by the cultural milieu in which they are raised, of which parents are one small part.
The most obvious example of this is immigrant parents. If you are, say, from China and your kids are born in America and go to school in America, your kids will be American. They will be a little bit Chinese, but they aren't in any way shape or form going to fit in with a bunch of Chinese school kids in China. And if you go to heroic efforts to raise them Chinese in America, the most likely outcome is that they will find you annoying, overbearing, and out of touch. They will do what they need to to humor you and make the peace. You will have some influence over your kid, just not a ton.
I'm pretty sure there is no area more so than childrearing that people like to project their ideological biases, fantasies, and delusions onto. So, you know, join the club. In answer to your question about whether I try to get my child to stop doing self-defeating things: I spend endless amounts of time and energy trying to get her to stop doing self-defeating things. These efforts just don't work very well, because I am battling her personality.
I can certainly ban certain behaviors, and that may work for a while. I can tell my kid that she can't get a tattoo while I'm supporting her, and most likely she will obey me. But I'm not under any illusion that I'm winning this argument in the long term if she has different ideas. (This is hypothetical. My kid is eight and deathly afraid of needles.)
If you want to pour your energy into convincing your child that dressing a certain way violates the natural order, have at it. Most likely they were going to conform to gender norms anyway, since that's what most people do. And if they weren't going to, you might be able to shame them out of it. But if you think your kid isn't going to pick up on the emotional energy driving your weird culture war obsessions, well, good luck to you. Most likely they won't share that energy, and they will just do what they need to do to humor you.
"No, I'm not going to be more clear about what I mean, because it's perfectly obvious".
Yes, I think it is.
"parents have indirect and limited control over their kids, whose values are mostly determined by the cultural milieu in which they are raised, of which parents are one small part."
And you'll surely notice that many people talking about this here have been mentioning their ability (as parents) to control the social/cultural environment in which their kids are raised.
Thus the mentions of various school types and keeping them off social media and the like.
"If you are, say, from China and your kids are born in America and go to school in America, your kids will be American. They will be a little bit Chinese, but they aren't in any way shape or form going to fit in with a bunch of Chinese school kids in China."
This is something I have experience with, so I'd say that your take should be nuanced a bit. The parents can certainly increase the odds of the kid fitting in with Chinese school kids in China. Most obviously, they can move to China. If they stay in America, they can find a school where most of the students are first-generation Chinese, so that most of the kid's friends will probably be Chinese. If they can't do that, they can at least teach the kid the Chinese language and the basics of Chinese culture. The cultural milieu in which the kids are raised can be changed by the parents.
Can you raise a child to not be autistic? Some mental traits aren't so simple to change.
You can control if a child *expresses* their gender identity, in a "you're not allowed to wear skirts" sense, but I'm not aware of any therapy or parenting strategy that can make a trans person not *want* to be a particular gender. And the brute force "no, you're not allowed to identify as a woman in my house" is unlikely to be good for your relationship with them.
One confounder I'll note among the trans, mid-20's people I've known: a disproportionate share seem to come from environments with very strong, fairly essentialist views on gender roles--so "I like cooking and sewing, and hate open aggression" translates to "I must be a girl" more than in some other environments.
I think there is a lot to this and more generally to the notion that a lot of the "gender dysphoria" among kids has less to do with biological gender than with gender roles. It is worth noting that it's surprisingly common in lots of traditional societies with strong gender norms for there to be an accepted "third gender" in which someone switches roles. And also that terms like gay and transgender don't map cleanly to this social arrangement. E.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%CA%BBafafine
Meh I am a bit skeptical of this kind of claim. A lot of the examples I have been provided in the past are post hoc modern creations presented as traditional practices when you dive deep into them. Or are jsut twisting words around to mean other things.
I mean in 19th century England you could call someone a "fop" or "dandy", that didn't mean there were "three accepted genders". Some of the analysis really reeks of that kid of stretching. Always be skeptical of new anthropological claims that match modern political needs.
I think you are really wrong about this, but I don't have deep anthropological expertise here. For what it's worth, the phenomenon in the article I link to is 1) absolutely real -- I have been to Samoa and it is a widely known and generally accepted aspect of many Polynesian cultures; 2) long, long predates current arguments about contemporary gender norms; and 3) definitely exists elsewhere. For example, there is analogous situation in the Balkans dating back to the 1500s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sworn_virgins
This has nothing to do with "fops" or "dandies." It is a practice in which in which members of one gender choose to live as the other gender in all manners of dress, social custom, and even pronouns. Often this is legally recognized and certainly it is culturally recognized, often even in societies where homosexuality is taboo. Be as skeptical as you want, but this stuff happens.
Did you read the "motivations" section of that article?
This. Not once in the endless list of motivations was there any mention of "actually being a man". Balkan sworn virgins are not transgender.
>I mean in 19th century England you could call someone a "fop" or "dandy", that didn't mean there were "three accepted genders".
So, to be clear, your evidence that a gender-non-conforming "third gender" doesn't historically exist is that you can immediately point to examples of widely accepted categories of gnc individuals in western history?
No its more than GNC individuals were not necessarily considered "third genders" in the sense people now claim.
Right, but that's just a cultural quirk of description, not a categorical one. You could just as easily say the same about e.g. ASD individuals, or people with schizophrenia, but just because we didn't have the same language or categories to talk about them doesn't mean they didn't exist.
This is more or less my take. We’re not used to living in a world where men and women are all allowed, much less encouraged, to do each other’s traditional “stuff”. The stronger the messaging about “boy things” and “girl things”, the harder it might be to feel good about thinking/feeling/liking certain stuff without feeling disqualified from one gender or another.
I didn’t grow up with terribly strict rules here despite coming from a relatively socially conservative home. I think this is why I find it much easier to grasp being trans than non-binary. I just can’t imagine a thought that would disqualify me from simply being a woman, or qualify any aspect of myself as male. In my head, “woman” is an incredibly stretchy category, and nothing short of actually wanting to completely be a man could evict even a little bit me from that. The challenge non-binary people pose to me is that in validating their identities, which proceed from different first principles, I’m implicitly accepting that there are thoughts and ideas that are “male” and *should* push me out of my own binary. And I balk at that, because to me the whole idea of egalitarianism was that the ideas and thoughts lose their binary connotations and became available to me in my identity as a woman.
I haven’t resolved this. I really liked having biology as the be-all-end-all of gender, because it seemed so much better than classing objects, thoughts and feelings by gender. But I want to be hospitable to trans people, so I’m cool with having other signals be strictly gendered. I need them myself to inhabit my own identity to my satisfaction. An inscrutable identity is no identity at all for most of us.
I think what we have today is the product of rising egalitarianism, so not a bad thing. But weird side effect of things not being so strictly gendered is that it becomes harder to feel comfortable as one gender or another, and that’s enough to tip people with certain mental presets and environmental influences over some line. The downside is that we’ve all lost some powerful tools to inhabit our identities, innate and/or created. I think gender roles are really necessary to self-actualize, and as much as we try to break them down they’re constantly re-forming. My best guess is that some set of external signals will coalesce around the idea of being non-binary, it will become legible and boring and the numbers will level out. Learning about all this in school will probably just accelerate that process.
Anecdata, but my experience of this is exactly opposite. In my social circle, it's the more progressive families that have higher trans rates (teens rather than mid-20s, if anyone thinks that makes a difference).
Socially progressive and essentialist gender ideas are in practice not a contradiction imo. Sure, we don't ussualy associate these two together. And when asked directly, someone who identifies as progressive will say that eg girls can be tough too and boys can be caring and men can clean and women can cook.
However, what is the actual behavior in those circles? Who works more, who takes care of children more, what clothes are worn by who, who wears make-up, who are football fans.
Anecdata: 2 young adults from progressive circles with understanding parents, accepted by their social circle. Reasons they identify as trans: 1. feeling like they don't fit in with the boys, having a soft personality, has hobbies they think are female, likes to wear skirts. And 2. not liking girly stuff, hates make-up and dresses, feels uncomfortable compared to other women, has hobbies they think are manly.
If you look at the regional variation it's the opposite of what you've observed.
So how come the rate of transgenderism is much higher now, where essentialist views on gender are uncommon, than they were in the past, when they were universal?
You are reading too much causality into correlation - this is observational, not prospective. People are forgetting that children aren't randomly assigned schooling methods. The children who end up in different schooling environments certainly differ significantly from each other.
Specifically relevant for our example, is that a significant percentage of homeschooled students (I don't know whether that is ~10% or ~90% or somewhere in between) are home-schooling because brick and mortar schools did not work out or were obviously non-viable.
Oftentimes, this is due to the children having social issues and not fitting in. Remember, autistic people are much likelier to experience gender dysphoria than non-autistic people.
So it is not shocking that homeschooled people would have a high frequency of trans identity.
It still seems likely enough that putting them in a public school would only make it worse.
Additionally, the survey results are from 3 years ago, and more significantly, describe the results of readers largely decades past their years of public schooling or alternatives.
Seeing a lack of positive correlation between those who attended public schools in the 80s and 90s and those who identity as trans, is *not* a reason to assume to that the lack of positive correlation would remain between those in public schools in this decade and trans identity some decades later.
FWIW, we were part of a few homeschooling groups in two states as our son was growing up and there was always a significant minority of homeschoolers who have ASD and the parents are homeschooling because there were adequate family resources to pull that off and it seemed easier to them than navigating all the services necessary for their children to make schooling workable.
My impression is that homeschoolers break down into:
* majority are doing for religious reasons (as many as 80% I think?)
* secular homeschooling because kids are off of one bell curve or another (includes kids with ASD)
* homeschooling for ideological reasons
* homeschooling for parent/child-rearing philosophy reasons
* homeschooling for life circumstance reasons (traveling careers, etc)
My unscientific impression is that of the minority of secular homeschoolers, the ones homeschooling because kids are off a bell curve in some way is as large as the three categories that come after. I say this in support of the idea that the percentage of transgender homeschoolers may be influenced by the percentage of transgender people with ASD.
Based on what I know of the homeschooling community -- more than most, but not a member of that community -- it is possible that the higher likelihood of a homeschool kid being trans may be that the kid was homeschooled because he/she did not fit in at school. So the parents pull the kid out to homeschool because regular school was not going well because the kid didn't fit in. Then some of those kids who didn't fit in, it turns out, did not fit in because they were trans.
"Hmmmm if I were to homeschool my future kids, one of the primary motivations would be so they wouldn't be brainwashed into being trans... But this shows that that homeschooled kids are the most likely to go trans"
As a general rule, I am cautious about using homeschooling AVERAGES when trying to draw conclusions about homeschooling for specific situations.
Two anecdotes to illustrate:
*) A homeschooling colleague (former Stanford STEM prof, at the time working for a biotech startup) from a few decades back uses a three-bin clustering to describe homeschoolers:
a) The stereotypically religious who read the Bible every day
b) Sandal wearing granola parents who read John Holt
c) Those who are focused on academics and find schools such as Palo Alto High School unacceptable
[NOTE: His gross stereotyping for effect :-)]
One *can* average everyone in all three bins together as "homeschoolers" but if someone plans to homeschool they probably know which bin they fit into. The other bins might not be relevant for prediction purposes.
*) A YMCA swim instructor from 20 years back (who was one of the best people I have ever seen with children) noted that the kids she saw binned out as:
a) Public school: More resilient then the public school kids if not as 'high powered' (e.g. smaller vocabularies for age). Handled setback well.
b) Private school: Less resilient, more high powered, less self-directed
c) Homeschoolers: Completely all over the map and totally unpredictable.
The key point here is (c) ... again, one could generate an average, but it might not be very useful if the spread is wide and the spread is not randomly distributed for any specific situation.
Homeschooling means that more of your peer group is family, siblings and perhaps children of your parents' friends, less random age peers. So whether that means more woke, pro trans, or whatever or less depends on the composition of those peer groups.
I agree, with the caveat that some less structured or less supervised homeschooled kids may be more online than school kids and that may increase the influence of social media.
At a slight tangent, I wonder to what extent social media interactions end up age segregated. That's one of the things I don't like about the conventional model of schooling. When I was fourteen I should have been arguing with adults and socializing with kids my age or younger.
Our home unschooled daughter did her online socializing largely on World of Warcraft, which I would expect to result in a not very age segregated pattern — her mother and I were on too. SSC, ACX and DSL all have a wide mix of ages. I don't know to what extent that's true of social interactions on FB or Discord or ... .
There's nothing inherent to the task of homeschooling a child that makes them more likely to be trans. I think your fear is misplaced. Scott warned about the low sample size for this question, the percentages are so close it's hard to argue these findings are significant, no?
eh, purely speculation, but IMO your choice of co-parent, and your relationship with your future kids will have a lot more to do with that, than what form of education you choose.
But it may be that homosexual children are more likely to not fit into earlier society, and thus be more likely to help been homeschooled.
I wouldn't generalize this survey result that much given the vagueness of the term "have changed their gender", which is not the same as attempting to change their sex. This likely includes things like people who identify as "genderfluid" because it sounds cool but don't actually behave any differently from anyone else.
It's still weird that homeschools and public schools have equal amounts of both, but it's hard to tell what the mix is from this data alone, and I still anticipate public schools having higher rates of kids actually attempting to medically transition.
Parents who choose different approaches to schooling are different, and their children thus differ, wherever you stand on the nature/nurture thing. Children also often have input, and children who push in different directions are different.
This is beyond confounded, and can't be fixed by tossing a couple of variables in the magic unconfounding jar.
Apologies if this comes across as rude, but this is the kind of social science statistical analysis that really winds me up.
Scott has definitely shown merely correlations, and these don't necessarily imply causations. However, it is even less likely that something causes the opposite of what it's correlated with, or that it is a strong cause for something it's not correlated with, so there is still useful data to update your priors on here (though more in the direction of 'X probably doesn't cause Y, or at least don't cause it much' than 'X definitely causes Z').
Actually, things very often cause things they're uncorrelated or anticorrelated with. For example, consider someone driving on a hilly highway while intentionally keeping their speed constant. Their speed will not be very correlated with the amount of fuel usage or whether they're going up or down hill. However, both of those factors have a strong causal effect on speed.
For another example, consumption of full fat dairy products is correlated with lower childhood obesity compared to low fat dairy products. However, it could be that parents with obese children choose to give them lower fat dairy products because they think it will help - and the parents could be right! Maybe it helps, but doesn't fully return the child's weight to baseline. (I don't know whether full fat dairy causes obesity. My point is simply that the correlation doesn't tell us much.)
> However, it is even less likely that something causes the opposite of what it's correlated with, or that it is a strong cause for something it's not correlated with
Yeah, kind of like how the correlation between ibuprofen use and headaches makes it very unlikely ibuprofen could cause the opposite.
Good point! The relevant link there though is that headaches cause ibuprofen. The correlation is because of a causation, but you have to consider the temporal relationship to work out which way round the causation runs. So long as we're confident that the survey respondents feelings about school came after they went to school, then we can rule out this confounder.
OP was talking about the parents, which come (temporally) before the education. The hypothesis is that the parents cause the style of education, and they also (through nature or nurture, take your pick) cause certain values/beliefs in their kids. These values/beliefs will inform how people answer questions such as ”did you hate high school?” Hence the education style will correlate with the responses, but there is no causal link. Both are a function of mom and dad. This cannot be ruled out without control, and it’s hard to see how one could control for it.
So, you're suggesting that eg. the kind of kid most likely to enjoy home-schooling is one whose parents are most likely to try home-schooling? That's still very useful information, even if it doesn't generalise to most children and parents!
Absolutely cracking first article on the survey results for this year - keep em coming!!
This is from a few years ago - when I was doing this year's survey I remembered that past surveys existed and did a little more work with them.
I'm very curious now how those 2020 SSC results relate to the 2023 ACX results.
Also, can someone translate SAT scores for me?
Second that, mentioning the average score or some more context would be helpful for non-US readers.
Here's a document with percentile correlations: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
At least for 2022 sample (but they purposely make it pretty stable over time), 750 Verbal was 98th percentile, while 740 Math was 94th percentile. The scores for each section range from 200-800.
Thanks. 98th and 94th percentile as for all SAT users I understand.
Would be even 99th or 98th for a nationally representative sample the source says.
So, most students take the SAT, why is this? I thought SAT was specifically related to / used for college admission?
And yes, that's obviously an impressive score.
> So, most students take the SAT, why is this? I thought SAT was specifically related to / used for college admission?
It's given to high school students, who are usually encouraged to at least consider college as an option. People who score highly can be offered scholarships which may enable them to pursue options they might not otherwise be able to afford.
A substantial majority of US high school graduates go to college (and presumably a larger number at least seriously consider it).
The test was changed in 1994 and is now easier.
Wikipedia has the percentiles for some years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Percentiles_for_total_scores_(2006)
Note that a total score of 1300 was 96.55 percentile in 1984.
This survey data is from 2020, so a survey taker who was about 43 would likely have taken the harder test. I think the ages in the survey are rounded to the nearest decade. About 13% of respondents are 50 older, so approximately that many took the harder test.
The test has changed a number other times as well, not just 1994. 2016 may have been the next largest change. While both changes have been characterized by some as making the test easier, the changes were orthogonal to just turning the difficulty knob and any changes to score distribution are secondary effects.
Thanks for correcting me. I now see that the scores were renormed in 1995, after the changes introduced in 1994. I guess this is why scores before the mid-90s look so different, instead of the test getting "easier."
Verbal scores were boosted maybe 70 points from 1994 to 1995, but Math scores only about 10 points.
The pre-1995 Verbal SAT test was hard. In 1991, only nine boys (and no girls) got perfect 800s on both math and verbal, although 800 on the math was not uncommon among, say, Rice U. students.
Henry Harpending called the old SAT Verbal. the best high-end IQ test in the world.
Checking the public results, those aged 50 (rounded to the closest decade) and older had a mean verbal score of 709 (SD 64), with 414 responding.
Thirty-three reported a perfect 800.
As a voucher enthusiast I am surprised that private and home schools don’t have more of a lead over public schools in terms of satisfaction. Maybe it’s because of the high achieving selection of ACX readers? Kids who are smart are more supported by teachers and administrators?
There's a wide range in quality of public education in this country. Many ACX readers probably grew up with upper-middle-class suburbs with high-quality public schools. Vouchers make most sense in poorer, especially urban districts with lower-quality schools.
Hm. Maybe it's different in a bigger city; but growing up, there were three or four main public high-schools, and all of them were equally awful — the well-off universally sent their kids to one of the three spendy private high-schools. (Being Texas, all three were varying degrees of religious too — although, honestly, I'm sort of glad about that; Biblical knowledge has actually sort of come in handy, and it certainly helped develop my skepticism, heh.)
I would guess this varies by region. In the Bay Area, for example, Cupertino is known for having really good public schools, and affluent parents will live in Cupertino so they can send their kids to the public schools there.
There's a cycle of good schools -> increased local housing demand from affluent parents -> increased housing prices -> less affluent families priced out; most schoolchildren are from affluent houses -> even better schools.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-attend-Monta-Vista
To elaborate on your point of ACX readers being high achieving, the relationship between alternative schooling methods and satisfaction could be like the relationship between height and basketball prowess.
Height may be positively correlated to basketball prowess, but among those extremely talented at basketball (the NBA), one may not find that taller players have more prowess. However, being tall makes it much likelier that someone will be in the group of highly talented players in the first place.
Similarly, being homeschooled could make it much likelier that one will be successful, but after conditioning the sample based on that feature, we may no longer see the association.
However, if this were correct, we would expect that the percentage of ACX readers who be disproportionately home-schooled and private schooled compared to the general population, just as we find that NBA players are much taller than the general population.
I don't know if this is the case, as I don't know the age distribution in the sample, and the rate of schooling by type at the time that they were being educated.
The home/public difference seems very impressive to me. I wouldn't expect too much private/public difference, most private schools seem like the same model as public schools, only ritzier.
Fair enough, but I have now been convinced voucher type private schooling won’t increase education scores vs public (contrary to my priors) and now we have the possibility that they won’t increase satisfaction much either. But I guess the case is still there of parental choice, possibly cost and the argument that if a voucher system isn’t any worse than a public system, a voucher system should be the default not the public one because freedom.
On what basis would you think that vouchers wouldn't increase education scores? If it is on the basis of the comparison of SAT scores of public schools and private schools in this sample, note that private school outperformed public by 15 points in the verbal section, and outperformed them in math by 14 points.
More significantly, these represent just the tails of distributions for both, so are not very representative of their respective means, (besides for the issue in my other comment (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ssc-survey-results-on-schooling-types/comment/12005613) about conditioning on success).
As for an actual study of vouchers, Thomas Sowell looked at the performance of pupils in charter schools that shared buildings with non-charter public schools, and drew from the same population, but granted slots based on lottery.
He found consistent significant higher scores in the charter schools vs. the non-charter public schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_Schools_and_Their_Enemies.
Lastly, and this is most relevant for Scott's point about private / public, I suspect that the marginal benefit of private schools (or other non-homeschool options, like public charter schools) vs. public schools would be larger among worse schools than better schools.
E.g. in a third of public schools in Baltimore, not a single student in the whole school tested proficient in math (https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/13-baltimore-city-high-schools-zero-students-proficient-in-math).
This extreme failure seems very easy for an alternative school to improve - any students testing proficient would be an infinite improvement!
In a high performing public school, however, there is less room for possible improvement.
The sorts of disadvantaged students who would benefit the most from alternatives to traditional schools (e.g. by learning something, instead of nothing), would hardly be represented in this sample regardless of whether they got the better option, so we would not expect to see large performance benefits to the homeschooled cohort.
However, the broader studies I've seen have all pointed to not just homeschoolers outperforming public schoolers (e.g. https://www.nheri.org/homeschool-sat-scores-for-2014-higher-than-national-average/) but charter schools students outperforming equivalent peers, as cited from Sowell.
My response was based on reading of this paper: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jel.20150679
The key quote was “the best-identified studies suggest that winning a voucher has an effect on achievement that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. “
As they say a lot of studies are difficult to interpret due to selection effects. In fact I think Scott has coined the phrase “if an analysis of an education intervention shows benefits and if it can be due to selection it is due to selection “. Maybe the studies you quoted refute this, I certainly hope so.
As I said I remain a voucher supporter for other reasons.
The main advantage of the private religious schools I attended was that the school could "un-invite" kids who made a nuisance of themselves. What remained were the reasonably well-behaved students who, even if they weren't great academic performers, weren't going to prevent anyone else from learning.
I think the survey shows that private schools are better if you want your kids to avoid misery.
25% of public school attendees rated satisfaction at 3 or lower vs. only 13% for private school attendees.
4% public school rated it 1 vs. 2% private.
*edited comment because percents were off by 2x
Yeah, the net worth and social status of the parents is unrelated, it was definitely the improved history classes.
Since the survey has a question related to childhood class, you could check. Here's the percentage of respondents rating 3 or less to school satisfaction who also answered both the "childhood class" and "school type" questions:
Rich kids in private schools -> 7.4%
Rich kids in public schools -> 16.5%
Upper Middle Class in private schools -> 14.4%
Upper Middle Class in public schools -> 21.2%
Middle Class in private schools -> 14.1%
Middle Class in public schools -> 23.0%
Working-lower Class in private schools -> 25%
Working-lower Class in public schools -> 32.6%
Poor in private schools -> 41.7%
Poor in public schools -> 43.2%
No, I don't think it's history class. I'd guess it's private schools' ability to reject the most disruptive students. The "poor" results weaken that interpretation, but there are other reasons why being poor in a private school might be unpleasant.
Maybe because private schools are better at differentiating lessons for gifted students? Whereas the public schools force gifted students to complete tediously easy worksheets and won’t let them bring their own books into class and never give them the opportunity to learn anything new.
Maybe it's just my demographic, but the narrative I always heard about public schools is that they support middling students the most, especially when standardized tests are involved. The reason being that students at the top are going to pass anyway and students at the bottom are going to fail no matter what. I no longer feel quite as sure that this is true looking back compared to how I felt about it when I was actually in school though.
When I was in school (80s/90s), there were definitely a lot of programs to provide extra resources for gifted students; now that my kids are in school (middle & high), things are much more lockstep and deviations are only available for the left side of the distribution.
No child left behind == no child gets ahead.
I understand that there is a general skepticism about p value and statistical hypothesis testing, but without even a standard deviation those values are pretty much useless.
EDIT: nvm I confused std and confidence interval, ignore me.
I'm confused - Scott is reporting results from his survey, how could there be standard deviations? He's not doing any statistical analysis.
Thanks, I mixed up std and confidence interval - edited my comment
Yeah, Scott really should have reported confidence intervals for those measurements. Maybe he should partner with someone who's better at statistics? That would also let him do that regression he wanted to do.
There were 8000 respondents, which means even very minor differences are statistically significant, but that doesn't mean they matter in real life.
Yes, that's why I suggested to report the std instead of doing statistical testing. This would give at least a small indication of the overlapping of the distributions, and will tell you a lot about how to change your beliefs. E.g. let's say we have something like
Rate of life satisfaction
Government school: 5.63 with a std of ~3
Religious school: 5.87 with a std of ~3
It's an minuscule difference which I won't give much weight to, compared to having the same results with a std of let's say 0.1.
I believe this method to be better than the confidence interval which as you suggested would result in very high confidence due to the massive amount of respondants. But do we really care about the REAL population mean? Or do we care more about the spread of the responses? I would argue for the latter. (Sorry for overexplaining)
Thanks for the explanation. Here are some standard deviations:
APPROVAL RATING:
Home: 7.04 +- 2.40
Public: 5.63 +- 2.38
Religious: 5.87 +- 2.40
Private: 6.44 +- 2.26
Unschooling: 6.00 +- 2.74
LIFE SATISFACTION;
Home: 6.72 +- 2.30
Public: 6.56 +- 2.10
Religious: 6.65 +- 2.06
Private: 6.62 +- 2.12
Unschooling: 6.03 +- 2.56
SOCIAL SATISFACTION
Home: 5.93 +- 2.36
Public: 5.73 +- 2.22
Religious: 5.92 +- 2.23
Private: 6.00 +- 2.20
Unschooling: 5.63 +- 2.50
Thanks! In fact, I guess most people would want to answer questions such as "how likely is that my child will be better off doing homeschooling than public school?" - then we don't care whether on average, amongst 8000 people, we can spot a small difference. We care about the distributions. So since the spread is pretty high I would say that deciding between one will, in most cases, not matter at all.
There are still an awful lot of families for whom the stats don't matter, because it's more about what they realistically have access to.
We homeschool because we can't afford private, and the local public schools are crap. None of these stats would change our income, or the performance of our local schools.
Thanks for raising this. This was my gut reaction when reading the numbers but I didn't know what to ask for. The SDs here I read as indicating that none of these results are significant. Is that how you also read it?
The long thread above about fear of homeschooling being a contributor to transgenderism seemed a very big thing to load onto a smaller sample size with small differences. But the correlations relating to other variables drawn from the whole sample also seem insignificant.
No, this is not the correct interpretation. The results are significant which means that there is an aggregated difference amongst the groups. It also means that if you repeat the survey again you will get a fairly similar mean.
The problem with the means is that it doesn't give you a strong idea about how variable those results are from an individual to another. Eg if your child goes to private school there is a 0.01% (made up number) chance they will do better in life than if they go to a public school.
This would be significant, but is it a number we should care about? Whatever is your answer, sometime this is the question we wanna answer, not the presence of some aggregated difference. Notice the mean alone won't allow you to get this info.
The number above can be computed exactly with a few assumptions, with the mean and std provided above by Scott. But it's late now in Italy, maybe tomorrow!
Is this a raw standard deviation or a standard error of the mean? Can you also post the sample sizes for each group?
If this is indeed an SEM, it changes the interpretation of the article to be basically a null result. I don't know that reporting the means or inviting people to opine on them is justified by the data.
Agreed, this is pretty mileading. 6.72 vs 6.56 is way less than. A standard error, and not even close to being statistically significant. Scott should have just posted "there were no significant differences on all these measures."
I did some calculation:
Here is the probability that an individual from each group will have a better outcome (e.g. LIFE/SOCIAL SATISFACTION) than an individual from Public school. Remember that the baseline is 50%, which indicates that there is a 50/50 chance that the individual will do better/worse in, for example, "religious" school than public school, and this happens if the means and stds from the 2 groups are the same:
APPROVAL RATING
home: 74.051%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 54.371%
private: 64.640%
unschooling: 56.494%
LIFE SATISFACTION
home: 53.040%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 51.747%
private: 51.165%
unschooling: 40.303%
SOCIAL SATISFACTION
home: 53.723%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 53.600%
private: 55.109%
unschooling: 48.164%
Another way of looking at this: subtract 50% from each value, and now they indicate the increase in likelihood that an individual from a school is gonna do "better" than an individual from public school.
Example: if you put your child to a private school, there is 5.1% increase in chance that they will have a higher SOCIAL SATISFACTION than a person from a public school.
python code: https://paste.ofcode.org/EmGPgKgC2qvhNRmCrCbmCU
Finally, I do believe this is a better metric in a lot of cases.
However, final disclaimer, I am not a statistician, but I work in a field related to Psychology and ML.
Gender non-conformity is quite strongly associated with poverty, so it is not a good measure of weirdness when your categories are correlated with poverty. Specifically, higher rate of gender non-conformity in home schooled population may be partially statistically explained by the higher rate of poverty.
"Specifically, higher rate of gender non-conformity in home schooled population may be partially statistically explained by the higher rate of poverty."
Are the home schooled more likely to be living in poverty as children? My impression was that since parents had to be responsible for their children's education and would be assessed to make sure the kids were reaching standards, that it would be better-off parents doing this - one parent at least who can be full-time at-home with the kids and able to get textbooks and do the kind of "now kids let's learn about X" experiments and field trips and visits to museums and art galleries and so on.
Though if kids are being 'home schooled' because they dropped out of school and there are other circumstances where they're living in broken homes, that would correlate with poverty.
Looking up the demographics, there are some fascinating results:
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/homeschool-demographics/
"Analysis: The NHES 2012 and NHES 2016 found sharp increases in the rate of homeschooling among Hispanic students. According to NHES estimates, the number of Hispanic children being homeschooled rose from just over 250,000 to just under 450,000 between 2012 and 2016.
Analysis: Between the NHES 1999 and the NHES 2016, the percentage of students being homeschooled by parents without a high school diploma or GED rose while the number of students being homeschooled by parents with a graduate or professional degree fell. The rise in the number of students being homeschooled by parents who have not completed high school or a GED is consistent across the NHES 2012 and NHES 2016; in 2012, 11% of homeschooled students fell into this category; in 2016, 15% did.
Analysis: The NHES 2003 found that homeschooled students were as likely as other students to be poor and more likely to be near-poor. After 2003, the NHES stopped reporting the percentage of students who were near-poor, so it is impossible to know whether this finding holds true today. The elevated rate of near-poverty among homeschooled students may have been the result of some homeschooling families’ giving up a second income.
Analysis: In contrast to previous surveys, which have typically found roughly the same level of poverty among homeschooling families as among other families, the NHES 2016 found that homeschooled students were more likely than other students to live below the poverty level. This change is likely related to shifts in racial demographics and levels of parental education also evident in the 2016 survey.
Analysis: The NHES 2012 found that homeschooled children were more likely than other children to live in households with two parents (biological, adoptive, step, or foster). Roughly one in five homeschooled children lived in a household with one parent (compared with nearly a third of students overall).
Analysis: The NHES 2012 found that homeschooled children were more likely than other students to have two parents with one in the labor force. While the survey found that over a third of homeschooled children have two parents in the labor force, what this looks like in practice is unclear; in some cases a homeschooling parent may stay home to educate their children while taking on flexible work on the side. "
So very roughly - homeschooling is mostly white kids, though with increasing numbers of Hispanic kids. Parents are less educated and less well off *but* households are more stable, with two-parent families and at least one parent working.
Are these parents who don't trust what is happening in public schools with regard to education, or think public schools are too dangerous? Why pull the kids out of public school to homeschool them?
Some states don't require assessment of the students.
Also, two parents with one in the workforce is the classical setup for homeschooling as the non-working parent has to provide daycare since schools aren't utilized. This means generally you get one parent with a higher than average income but an aggregate household income that can be lower. I knew very few families that were exceptions to this.
This causes some weird things with class, where the profession and culture of the family is higher than the income would suggest.
"Some states don't require assessment of the students."
California is one of those states.
Yes, this. I could nearly double our household income by going back to work instead of homeschooling our kids. We're kind of poor, on paper. That's voluntary.
I do notice that in Scott's stats, the rate of homeschooling goes down as income goes up-- I'm curious if that's true of the population at large, or if the SSC readership is too much of an outlier to draw conclusions from.
Yeah I was really surprised recently when a Hispanic woman with just a HS degree who was working for me on a project and whose husband always worked away from the home said she was homeschooling her youngest kid. She put in a lot of hours on the project each day (and was good), and I was wondering when the "schooling" was happening.
"My impression was that since parents had to be responsible for their children's education and would be assessed to make sure the kids were reaching standards"
Not true in California, where we home unschooled our kids.
We're in that demographic-- near-poor, two parents, one working, homeschooling the kids.
Why? Because even if we were both working, we couldn't afford to live in a good school district, or pay tuition. The local schools here are crap. The best we can do for our kids is teach them ourselves, and for that, it's worth living on one modest income.
I think home schooled children in US come from slightly poorer but more educated families on average https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/homeschool-demographics/ , at least more recently and this is also seen from the ACX survey. Which makes sense to me, as one of the logical pathways to home schooling is to have educated parents who cannot afford to live near a good school.
I think that this isn't the right way of looking at those numbers. As someone else pointed out: only 1 in 3 households with children have a stay-at-home parent, whereas a stay-at-home parent is basically the default for homeschool families. Intuitions about a two-parent-two-income family that earns $125k compared to a two-parent-two-income family that earns $65k aren't the same for a two-parent-one-income family that earns $65k.
One of the logical pathways is to have educated parents who cannot afford to live near a good school. Another way is to have well-paid parents who can afford to have one not work.
Can you share a reference for that?
I see a lot of reports that there are high rates of poverty among transgender adults. It wasn't clear to me that that meant they were also raised in poverty. And nothing I saw pertained to gender non-conformity in childhood.
Seems to be a decent source of data here, though it has more about poverty with adults (trans or LGBT+) than youth as such.
There is a report from 2014 on LGBT youth in Los Angeles in foster care, how that scales up to the national level I don't know:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/sgm-youth-la-foster-care/
"13.6% of foster youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning, 13.2 % reported some level of same-sex attraction, and 5.6% identify as transgender. This means that there are between 1.5 to 2 times as many LGBTQ youth living in foster care as LGBTQ youth estimated to be living outside of foster care"
Presumably being in foster care means coming from homes and families with problems, and more likely to be living in poverty. For the gender non-conforming, they have a figure of 11.1% along with the above 5.6% transgender figure.
For general rate of transgenderism in adults and youth:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
"In this study, we use data from the 2017 and 2019 YRBS and the 2017- 2020 BRFSS to find that:
Over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older.
Among U.S. adults, 0.5% (about 1.3 million adults) identify as transgender. Among youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S., 1.4% (about 300,000 youth) identify as transgender.
Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.
Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. We find that youth ages 13 to 17 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).
The racial/ethnic distribution of youth and adults who identify as transgender appears generally similar to the U.S. population, though our estimates mirror prior research that found transgender youth and adults are more likely to report being Latinx and less likely to report being White compared to the U.S. population."
For transgender youth, racial/ethnic identification is as follows:
Latinx - 1.8%
AIAN (American Indian Alaskan Native) - 1.8%
All other races - 1.5%
Black - 1.4%
White - 1.3%
Asian - 1.0%"
If we take non-white/non-Asian populations to be more likely to be living in poverty, that probably answers the question:
https://federalsafetynet.com/poverty-statistics/
"Poverty Rate
Black - 19.5%
Hispanic, any race - 17.1%
Asian - 9.3%
White, not Hispanic - 8.1%"
Another source gives it as:
"https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
Timeframe: 2021
White 9.50%
Asian/Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander 10.20%
Multiple Races 14.10%
Hispanic 17.60%
Black 21.70%
American Indian/Alaska Native 25.90%"
Thank you for posting all that!