Jack Turban's bogus science
by Malcolm Clark
Dr Jack Turban sounds like he walked out of a Trollope novel. Unfortunately, this puberty blocker pusher extraordinaire is real and insists on publishing garbage dressed up as “science” every year or so. Like all his work his latest paper makes grand claims, but turns out on closer analysis to be a damp squib. In fact, you might say Turban is the king of damp squibs.
You may remember he claimed he’d proved puberty blockers save lives. His paper was full of flaws. It was based on a survey run by an agitprop trans rights organisation that recruited through activist “networks” and encouraged respondents to overegg their answers by framing the survey as an important way to improve trans lives.
Above all, the paper failed to emphasise that young people who obtained puberty blockers were screened for extreme mental health issues so it was no surprise they had fewer suicidal thoughts than those who hadn’t been given them. Despite that screening, Turban himself acknowledges that those who had been given puberty blockers were actually much more likely to have been hospitalised after attempting suicide. Pink News and the usual suspects literally ignored that fact.
The paper was a shocker. His latest is no better, though it too has been greeted with rave reviews. Obviously.
His latest paper disputes that more kids are identifying as trans and that a feature of this increase is it affects more girls. Err, but Jack, here's Polly Carmichael from the Tavistock no less, and other scientists, saying exactly both these things.
Here’s their quote about the "exponential rise"
And here’s the graph that shows an increase in the proportion of girls.
Perhaps Pink News and Turban are now claiming the Tavistock promotes "transphobic dog whistles"...in which case they should be delighted that it’s being shut down.
So what’s going on? Turban bases his work on data from the CDC which carries out regular surveys of High School kids. That’s all very interesting but the concern of gender critical people has focused on the kids attending gender identity clinics.
These are the kids at most risk of being medicalised. Turban is like a geologist who turns up in, say Iceland, where there’s that new lava flow but decides to study a different volcano nearby. I mean, it’s all very interesting but it’s not what everyone else is talking about.
Then there’s the fact the CDC Survey doesn’t investigate what those kids who say they are trans mean by the word. A girl who thinks she’s a boy may answer her sex is male. Turban says she wouldn’t but he can’t be sure. That means there’s huge uncertainty about his figures.
Then there’s the issue of whether LGB kids are feeling pressure to identify as trans. Here Turban misrepresents the claims of gender critical campaigners. We don't major on bullying though there IS evidence some homophobic parents and clinicians push gay kids towards trans.
BBC Newsnight revealed that happened at the Tavistock. But bullying and stigmatisation wasn't the focus of Lisa Littman or Abigail Shrier, whom Turban spends time rubbishing in his new paper. He knows they said something else because he has quoted their work explicitly.
What both redoubtable defenders of young gay people said was that young lesbians in particular and tomboys in general are led to feel there's much less cachet in being gay than there is in being trans. That's a very different argument. Here's Shrier's quote.
That’s the problem of Turban using data from a survey that was never designed to interrogate the nuances of kids identities….but instead focuses on big blunt stuff like whether they experience bullying. But even if we stick to bullying, Turban’s conclusions are suspect.
He says that trans kids experience significantly more bullying than gay kids. Err…but what do we mean by "trans kids"? What if, just imagine as an exercise, some of those trans kids are gay but identify as trans because they are the most gender non-conforming of gay kids.
I was moderately gender non-conforming at school and got bullied. Then I took the advice of my sister and punched the lights out of the kid who was my tormentor. I was never bullied again. But a nice, more shy boy might not have done that. It's those kids we worry about.
Perhaps the truth is that some gay kids report less bullying than another group of kids, some of whom may be genuinely “trans” but the majority of whom are very butch girls and very fem boys, many of whom are same-sex attracted. Y'see Turban has proved nothing at all.
Even if we accept all the kids who say they are trans really are trans, Turban admits another flaw in his work. The only kids in the CDC survey are those who kept attending school. Those who didn't perhaps because of severe bullying would not have shown up in the figures.
What IF….some gay kids were bullied so badly that they didn't go to school and so didn't participate? They would not show up and his figures yet again could not reasonably support his grand claims. So has Turban proved anything meaningful? Unfortunately not.
In summary: he ignores completely the copious evidence that there is an exponential rise in girls being referred to gender clinics. He hasn't disproved that the rise in schools is being driven by girls because of the limits of the CDC survey's questions on sex and gender.
He can't rule out there are different levels of bullying between LGB and "trans" kids because a % of the "trans" kids could be the most gender non-conforming gay kids who get bullied because of *that* not being "trans". There's also something more shocking he ignores.
Across our schools and on social media coming out as a young lesbian is almost as difficult now as it used to be before the advance of gay rights. Even supine gender identity fans like Gay Times have been acknowledging this.
In a recent study, "two-thirds of lesbians said they put off coming out because of negative stereotypes about them. Being perceived as ‘cringey or awkward’ was the most common reason". But other reasons included
being seen as "old-fashioned" or "anti-trans".
Turban's latest paper is pitifully bad research made worse by being wedged into his pre-conceived activist agenda. If you want to read more about his paper's many flaws my old mucker from BBC Horizon days Nathan Williams has done some sterling work.
“Doctor” Jack Turban has swallowed the ‘gender’ cult spin — hook, line, and sinker. Not only has he bought it all, he’s enthusiastically pushing the nonsense that is poorly disguised as ‘science.’
He’s a goner, no matter which way he wriggles. He’s dangling on the ‘trans’ fishing line, running out of air and energy. Either he removes the hook that is killing his career, thereby dropping him into a sea of lawsuits, or he remains on the cult line until he is no longer viable.
Either way, he faces a loss of his prestige and potential criminal charges. He's obviously non-scientifically picking and choosing his research to prop up his shaky ideology. Another so-called expert who is more interested in his own reputation and ego than the health of children. God, let’s hope there’s consequences for all the stupid and selfish people like him who’ve caused so much damage in the name of ‘trans liberation.’
A number of years back there was a doctor called Andrew Wakefield who did a study and (I read it) suggested there *could* be some kind of link between ingredients in vaccines and autism. He also pointed out that *further investigation would be needed*.
Now, its clear with new evidence this was not the case but, he was hounded out and vilified for saying this.
Yet here are doctors across the world saying far more heinous and wrong things that NO additional studies will find to be true - that sex doesn't exist, that stopping puberty with toxic drugs isn't harmful, that it is **possible** to "change sex" which is what is being said when they say a person - no matter their age - is "trans".
The fundament basis of this ideology is a LIE. Its not "flawed" or "misinformation" or "misinterpretation of data, whether good or bad". Not one person can change their sex to the opposite or their sex class. It is a biological and scientific impossibility. Just as impossible as a human flapping their arms in t-shirt and jeans and stepping off a very tall building because they same they can fly!
It is blatant, out and out, wilful LIES.
Every single doctor who supports this ideology, or has kept silent and "treated" children or adults as if they *could* change sex, should be criminalised for the harm they have done.