Politics Can't Be Allowed To Stop Science

Whether the issue is puberty blockers or facilitated communication, we need to know the facts first.

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

The New York Times’s Azeen Ghorayshi has a bombshell article in the paper this week looking at how a leading doctor and medical researcher decided not to publish the results of a study that showed that puberty blockers did not appear to approve the mental health of transgender youth.

The key paragraphs:

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

It seems that Dr. Olson-Kennedy is afraid that opponents of the use of puberty blockers for these children will utilize her study to make their arguments. She herself an advocate for the use of these medical interventions for children who identify as transgender.

The problem here is that scientific truth is not supposed to be dependent on what people use that truth to do. The point of doing a study is to find out what’s true, not necessarily what should be.

This situation reminds me of the science around Facilitated Communication/Rapid Prompting Method/Spelling 2 Communicate, the subjects of the investigation that I published on Monday.

As I noted in that piece, the new variants of this controversial communications method — where a facilitator uses a letterboard or stencil to help nonverbal, often autistic kids spell out their thoughts — have never been thoroughly studied in a scientific setting.

There isn’t one scientific paper published that looks at authorship — who’s actually talking, the student or the facilitator — through something like a double-blind test for Rapid Prompting Method or Spelling 2 Communicate.

What I didn’t get into in that original piece is why this is. One of the reasons why is because the scientific process has been actively undermined.

Brendan Borrell, a contributing writer at The Transmitter, documented some of the attempts to do double-blind studies. In one instance, he found that an autism researcher at the University of Georgia successfully recruited a child who was using a version of Rapid Prompting Method for a rigorous study.

But the mother of that child later got in touch with activists in favor of Rapid Prompting Method, and she decided to pull her consent for the research. This meant the researcher had to withdraw the study (which reportedly found that the method did not work for her son).

In both cases, we see examples of activists deciding that they don’t want to have research published that could be used by political opponents who take the opposite position as them on an issue.

But in doing so, they’re also tacitly admitting that getting facts out there will undermine their position. While undermining scientific research might benefit their position in the short-run, their inability to acknowledge the truth of what is being discovered only weakens their position in the long-run. It makes them look like they’re hiding something.

We should always know the truth, regardless of whatever position we hold. We shouldn’t let activists suppress science, even if we happen to agree with their overall position.