Loneliness, 3

What does your fourth trip to Lake O’Hara look like?

The East side of the valley is dominated by Oesa Valley and Opabin Plateau, arguably the best hikes in the Rockies. Both are a mere six kilometres there-and-back, though, so you can bliss out over both in one day. There are a few alternative routes through each, but that only burns off another day. Lake McArthur is quite good, but it’s eight kilometres there/back and you can’t wander around nearly as much. Mary Lake’s emerald green waters would be an irresistible draw elsewhere, but here they’re merely worth a glance on your way up to Opabin Plateau. That’s maybe three days’ worth of hiking, four if you take your time.

The West side doesn’t offer much. Odaray Grandview does live up to the name, but you have to sign a book before you’re allowed to cross prime grizzly bear habitat, and the trail disappears up a step slope of loose rock well before you reach the Grandview. There are great views hidden on the shelves of Cathedral Mountain, but the cost of entry is grinding through twenty kilometres of dense forest. A ridge of Mount Odaray creates a nice wall behind Morning Glory Lakes, but said dense forest presses you in too close to properly enjoy the view. There’s another half dozen forgettable lakes scattered amongst the trees. Only those desperate for something new on their fourth trip in would wander the West in summer.

But I’m guilty of a lie of omission. I made a big fuss over how exclusive this place is, but that’s only true over the summer months. In winter, the shuttle busses no longer run and so the O’Hara Valley empties out. Some cross-country skiers might venture in, but steep mountains and tonnes of snow turns the East side into a death trap. The West’s dense forest, in contrast, shelters you from the elements and those lakes become clearings of pristine snow. Winter camping can easily turn deadly, but the Elizabeth Parker Hut‘s comfy beds, spacious kitchen, and infinite supply of propane make it luxuriously easy. With room for two dozen, a solo skier should have no difficulty laying out a sleeping bag.

It took a while for the phone operator to convince me the hut was booked solid that weekend. I reluctantly hung up, while a plan B slowly started to form. It was an eleven kilometre ski to reach the temporarily-closed campground; I could then snowshoe for about eight kilometres around Linda and Morning Glory Lakes, eventually climaxing with the always-beautiful Lake O’Hara; and then I only had to snowshoe a kilometre back down the road to return to my skis. Twenty-eight kilometres would be longer than I’d ever hiked during the summer, and snowshoeing takes more effort than hiking, but the eleven kilometre ski out was all downhill. I could do that in a day.

Like all plans, this one began perfectly. I’d been warned about an avalanche chute that crossed the bus route, but one glance had me feeling sorry for it instead. I tossed my skis aside at the spot I’d marked on my GPS, slapped on my bulletproof snowshoes, and headed down the trail to Linda Lakes. The snow cap over them sparkled like diamonds in the winter sun, and I was completely in my element. A local animal must have felt the same vibe, as our tracks were running parallel to one another.

Gradually, I realized the plan had been challenged. Those tracks were from a wild cat of some sort, no doubt on the hunt. That was a rare treat, as the First Nations people of this region considered these felines to be solitary ghosts of the forest. Like all cats, they’re ambush predators. They quietly slink into position, then pounce on their prey from behind and rip out the back of their neck. While it panics and crashes through the bushes, the cat silently purrs along at a distance and waits for their prey to bleed to death.

Hmm. I knelt down closer to the track. Those cute lil’ toe beans had made a razor-sharp impression in the snow. I wasn’t even an amateur tracker, but even I knew that meant the tracks were pretty fresh. How fresh depended heavily on the local weather conditions, and I had only arrived hours earlier. That cat could have trotted by two days ago, or two hours ago. I started looking around the wall of trees surrounding me; the area was pretty flat, but there were still subtle hills and dense brush to hide in. I was, thankfully, not a prey-shaped object to a kitty that would rub up against my knees, buuuuut a hungry ol’ cat might get desperate in the lonely winter months. I didn’t stop casually rubbing the back of my neck until I was well past Morning Glory Lakes and descending into the meadow by the Liz Parker Hut.

Had rabbits booked the place? Scattered across the meadow were human-sized holes, but they seemed too shallow and exposed to act as emergency shelters. Some random trinkets of technology were peppered in and about, with no obvious purpose. A peek in the windows revealed an empty hut, while a glance down the path to O’Hara revealed an embarrassment of snowshoe tracks. Very strange.

I followed both the trail and trails to the picturesque dock at Lake O’Hara that always demanded a photograph. Alas, that beautiful vista had been tarnished: the parade of rabbits had trampled a line into Lake O’Hara’s frozen sparkle, in the direction of the East route up Opabin Plateau.

The traditional West route curls around exposed rock under cliffs and then cuts up one, making it nigh impassible in winter. Years earlier a new route had been cut through the trees to the North-West of the Plateau, to the delight of tourists. This “East” route had steep switchbacks, but was shorter and more gradual than the traditional route, plus the dense forest protected it from rock slides and avalanches… except for the very end, where the trail marched right through a Yukness Mountain avalanche chute. I had thought both routes were death traps in winter, but did the rabbits know something I didn’t? I was supposed to turn back and head to my skis at this point, but I had plenty of stamina left, so my inner cat pounced on the opportunity. I took off over Lake O’Hara in pursuit of my prey.

The bunnies’ secret knowledge were the creeks running out of the Plateau’s many lakes. In summer they were a rocky mess of logs, but in winter you could hop between them and the trail to avoid the worst bits and reach a part that opened up into lumps of snow-covered rocks on a steep slope. While this still led into the avalanche chute, you now had the option of tiptoeing around the edge to reach the safety of the Plateau’s treeline. The tangled tracks bounded up and down this steep slope, so the snow bunnies clearly weren’t worried about an avalanche roaring down the creek. It seemed safe enough, provided I had enough stamina to clamber up steeper terrain than I’d ever snowshoe’d up before. I needed frequent breaks, but nonetheless I was soon walking across the Plateau in winter. I headed West, where I knew of a cliff that would net me an excellent view of the O’Hara valley while I took a short break and reassessed.

My situation was much worse than I had realized. I was down to two handfuls of trail mix, and maybe a quarter of a cup of water. That had to last for what was now a good fifteen kilometres of distance, four of which were snowshoeing over rough downhill terrain. The ascent had drained my “infinite” stamina, and it had barely recovered after the rest stop. But my GPS said I had maybe three hours until the sun set, and the mountains can subtract an hour off that. I had to average more than seven kilometres per hour, while tired and with no food or water to fuel me, if I was heading back to the car. Even if I pulled off that feat, my reward was over two hours of night-time driving while exhausted and barely able to focus.

Alternatively, I could head to the Elizabeth Parker Hut. Yes, that meant crashing someone else’s party, but this was turning into a survival situation. They’d almost certainly forgive my trespass, given the circumstances, and I’d probably enjoy swapping tales from the trail over some donated tea. The wilderness is always safer as a group activity.

My choice was obvious. I collected my backpack, grabbed my poles, and headed back to the car.

We’re still in the early days of researching how LLMs effect loneliness. Nonetheless, I think a picture is coming into focus.

Overall, the analyses showed that students who use chatbots are more socially disconnected than their peers. However, we also found that students who engage in casual conversations and seek emotional support from chatbots are even more socially disconnected than peers who do not use chatbots and more than those who use chatbots for utilitarian, goal-oriented purposes. The more socially disconnected students were more inclined to use chatbots upon situational feelings of loneliness, when in bad mood, and when feeling a need to self-disclose.

Arthur Bran Herbener and Malene Flensborg Damholdt, “Are Lonely Youngsters Turning to Chatbots for Companionship? The Relationship between Chatbot Usage and Social Connectedness in Danish High-School Students,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 196 (February 2025): 103409.

That is the best-conducted study I can find on the subject, and it finds chatting with a general-purpose LLM is associated with increased loneliness, not decreased. Whoops, but the evidence is the evidence, is it not?

Third, we prereg­istered hypotheses concerning why youngsters initiate conversations with chatbots. We hypothesized that loneliness predicts chatbot in­teractions intended to counteract loneliness (H3a), whereas low perceived social support predicts chatbot interactions intended to discuss one’s feelings (H3b). …

In other words, the findings suggest that individuals with higher levels of loneliness are more inclined to seek out chatbots when expe­riencing a situational feeling of loneliness. Likewise, students experi­encing less social support are more inclined to start conversations with chatbots when feeling a need for self-disclosure. A similar pattern was observed in the total group of chatbot users (…).

Ibid.

Alas, “correlation is not causation” has something to say here. Does chatting with general-purpose LLMs make people more lonely, or do lonely people gravitate to using general-purpose LLMs to alleviate their loneliness? Both would show up as a correlation, and yet both have vastly different implications.

Figure 1 from Herbener et. al (2025). It shows those who use conversational LLMs for social support tend to be lonelier and have less social support, but the effect appears small and the standard deviations are wide.

We’ve also got to be honest about the scale of the effect, it’s really not all that large. “Socially-supportive chatbot-users” means those students who treated the LLM as a social partner or called on it for emotional support, according to these researchers, and only a grand total of 39 students fit in that category. 174, in contrast, were “utilitarian” and only used the LLM like an encyclopedia or servant, and there were 1,365 “non-users” who hadn’t touched the things. Data was collected between December 2023 and March 2024, and to put that in context ChatGPT 4 was released March 2023 and 4 Turbo in November 2023. This was a golden period for LLMs, and yet we’re looking at minuscule changes that could easily be swamped by noise. Has there been a more recent study that better accounts for causation?

We found that increases in emotional isolation predicted significant increases in chatbot use 4 months later (…), consistent with the hypothesis that feeling lonely leads people to seek out chatbots. Importantly, after people increased their chatbot use, they reported increased emotional isolation 4 months later …

Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn, “How Does Turning to AI for Companionship Predict Loneliness and Vice Versa?,” Psychological Science 37, no. 4 (2026): 276–86.

There has, and it found using an LLM for emotional support is indeed linked to increased loneliness, not decreased. But again, the effect size is small. Interestingly, there was no statistical correlation between LLM usage and social isolation, “although the relationship was in the right direction” to suggest precisely that. More interesting for me, though, was Table 1 from the paper. The researchers looked at four distinct “waves” of cohorts that lasted four months, the first starting in November 2023 and the last ending in February 2025. Over that time, there’s very little change in the number who used it for social support. The number who never used it for that may have dipped to 70% in the last wave, but there’s no clear trend down. The fraction who turned to an LLM for that support multiple times a month, or more frequently, has remained stuck at 9% the entire time. It’s a common claim that LLMs only get better over time, and presumably that also means at least minor improvements in their ability to provide emotional support. So why wasn’t there a matching increase in those relying on it for that support?

Perhaps these things aren’t getting better, after all.

Participants were invited to the lab in small groups, where they completed a consent form and a pre-study survey, before being randomly assigned to one of three conditions. … In the human condition, participants were randomly paired with another participant in the session and instructed to begin texting each other daily for 14 days, starting the following day. … In the AI condition, participants were added to a private Discord chatroom with the chatbot Sam, sent one message to confirm the setup worked, and were instructed to begin interacting with Sam daily for the next 14 days. … In the control condition, participants were placed in a private chatroom alone and instructed to write a one-sentence summary of their day each day for 14
days.

Ruo-Ning Li et al., “Is a Random Human Peer Better than a Highly Supportive Chatbot in Reducing Loneliness over Time?,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 125 (July 2026): 104911.

I got that previous study from the citations mentioned in this one. This one seems rigged; didn’t we already discover that group Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was the most effective approach towards loneliness, and one-on-one interventions did poorly?

Participants who messaged with human partners reported significantly lower post-study loneliness (M = 1.85, SE = 0.03) compared to those in the control condition (M = 2.00, SE = 0.04), and compared to those in the AI condition (M = 1.98, SE = 0.04). In contrast, participants who texted with the chatbot did not report significantly different levels of loneliness than those in the control condition …

As an alternative measure of loneliness, we assessed perceived isolation (…). We found the same pattern as the loneliness results: only participants in the human condition reported significantly lower perceived isolation than those in the control condition (…), with no significant difference between the AI and control conditions (…).

We also assessed positive and negative moods both daily, as well as pre- and post-study (…). For positive mood, we again
found the same pattern. Only participants in the human condition showed greater increases in positive mood relative to the AI and control conditions (…), which did not differ from each other (…). For negative mood, however, we found that participants in both the human and AI conditions showed greater improvements compared to the control condition (…). We also assessed social support at the end of the study, which did not significantly differ across conditions (…).

Ibid.

And yet the LLM could not even perform poorly. The researchers also checked how empathetic the LLM was (more so than the humans, on average), and how engaged everyone was in their tasks (the LLM again had the greatest average level of engagement, while the humans usually engaged more with other humans than the LLM), though they also stress there’s a lot of noise and variance in those findings.

Can I find a study that suggests LLMs could help people become less lonely? Certainly!

In short, interacting with an AI companion improved their baseline loneliness levels on par only with interacting with another person, whereas a common technological alternative did not. Furthermore, participants underestimated the degree to which AI companions improved their loneliness relative to their true feelings after interacting with such AI.

Julian De Freitas et al., “AI Companions Reduce Loneliness,” arXiv:2407.19096, preprint, arXiv, July 9, 2024.

Small- or zero-effect sizes imply you’re going to get scientific studies with contradictory outcomes entered into the record, so I shouldn’t have difficulty finding studies which show LLMs help with loneliness. And yet, I do; the one I linked to above was the only clear-cut single study I could find, and it’s authored by economists with some serious methodological problems. Even that can only find that the equivalent of GPT-3 was about as effective as reducing loneliness as a one-on-one chat with a stranger, which again is one of the least effective treatments.

Findings indicate a generally significant positive correlation between AI use and loneliness (…). Specifically, interactions with physically embodied AI are marginally significantly associated with decreased loneliness (…), whereas engagement with physically disembodied AI is significantly linked to increased loneliness (…). Among older adults (aged 60 and above), AI use is significantly positively associated with loneliness (…), while no significant correlation is observed (…) in younger individuals (aged 35 and below).

Xu Dong et al., “A Meta-Analysis of Artificial Intelligence Technologies Use and Loneliness: Examining the Influence of Physical Embodiment, Age Differences, and Effect Direction,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 28, no. 4 (2025): 233–42.

This meta-analysis does show an LLM can reduce loneliness, provided you put it in a human-like puppet or toy that can be physically interacted with. The typical chatbot experience, in contrast, seems to make people more lonely instead, and that’s the picture that seems to be coming into focus.

How could that be?

What you do and where you are after you run out of water can dramatically shift your expected lifespan. Andreas Mihavecz’s was longer than eighteen days, but he was sitting in a room with a comfortable temperature and enough humidity for a tiny bit of water to condense on the walls. Add some activity, push the temperature to the extremes, lower the humidity, and your time can be up within ten hours.

almost missed it (2026): a photo of a trail signpost that's nearly been covered by at least one and a half metres of snow, with a tree just barely in frame behind it.

I was two hours from my car and surrounded by enough aerated frozen water to bury me up to my mouth, in some places. Dying of thirst was technically possible, but only with effort.

The forty days without food meme assumes plenty of water and sloth, which didn’t apply to me, and again: two hours. No, my primary concern at that point was a lack of cognition. Those hungry leg muscles needed fuel, so my body would starve my brain to satisfy them. But that meant I had a poorer grasp on reality, and was more prone to making terrible decisions, and those can be fatal even under the best of circumstances. You can mitigate that by bouncing your bad ideas off of others, but I was alone.

Cognition is kind of my thing, however, and I knew the area well. I could cope with a bit of self-inflicted stupidity. And so I headed back to the car.

As I swiftly strode back along the open Plateau, I finally ran into some of the bunnies! The four of us casually clomped towards each other, and I learned these “rabbits” were actually university students performing a hydrography study. It made me seriously reconsider my chosen area of expertise. My clock was ticking, alas, so I only enjoyed the companionship for a few minutes before I broke off to resume my thoughtless dash.

Half way down the access road, though, I noticed the front of my legs were moving funny. I had been generating a tonne of heat snowshoeing through the trees, but now that I was standing in a headwind those lightweight Nike trackpants weren’t enough insulation for my bare legs. My skin was starting to freeze. I pulled to the side of the road, carefully popped off my skis, removed half the contents of my backpack in small increments, and struggled to cover my thin trackpants with a thinner pair of snowpants.

By this time, exhaustion had been chewing away at me. I was seeing spots and feeling lightheaded, which meant slowing my descent to prevent injury. But I’ve never been a good skier, so that took a fair bit of physical and mental effort to accomplish, which in turn aggravated my vision and balance issues. Slowing down would also rob me of precious daylight. Balancing all that, after the equivalent of downing a few beers, took most of my concentration. The pause to insulate let me recover a bit, and rub some sensation back into the front of my legs, but it also lightened my cognitive load enough to allow for a proper assessment of the situation.

Would I live? Probably, but the sky had already dimmed noticeably and I was behind schedule. Would I have enough daylight to get to my car? Just barely, if I picked up the pace a bit. Would I encounter any wildlife? Some animals became more active at dusk, but if I kept my eyes up and periodically shouted a warning that shouldn’t be a problem. Would I enjoy the rest of the trip down? No, and I cursed the pause that had let me realize that.

I spent at least fifteen minutes sitting in the car, letting myself warm up a bit and puzzling out how to stay awake when every instinct told me to take a nap. That task would be much easier if I drove half an hour to Lake Louise, which had gas stations where I could refuel myself on expensive snacks. By the time I backed the car up to leave, it was pitch black out and impossible to navigate without headlights. I got damn lucky in Lake Louise, the attendants were debating whether to close early for the night when I pulled up to a pump. They instead got to listen to a tale of miraculous survival, while I stuffed myself with overpriced beef jerky and guzzled Gatorade.

I hope your fourth trip to Lake O’Hara looks a little less exhausting.

Heard This One Before?

Tell me if you’ve heard of this before: a government responds to the noise around gender-affirming care by setting up an independent review board. This board is tasked with reviewing the evidence, and coming up with guidelines that will inform government policy about the process.

It sure sounds an awful lot like the Cass Review, doesn’t it? The report which has been repeatedly used to deny health care to transgender people, despite withering critiques from the scientific community.

Our concern here is that the Review transgresses medical law, policy, and practice, which puts it at odds with all mainstream U.S. expert guidelines. The report deviates from pharmaceutical regulatory standards in the United Kingdom. And if it had been published in the United States, where it has been invoked frequently, it would have violated federal law because the authors failed to adhere to legal requirements protecting the integrity of the scientific process.

The Review calls for evidentiary standards for GAC that are not applied elsewhere in pediatric medicine. Embracing RCTs as the standard, it finds only 2 of 51 puberty-blocker and 1 of 53 hormone studies to be high-quality. But more than half of medicines used in pediatrics have historically been prescribed off-label on the basis of limited evidence. Physicians have noted that requiring robust evidence for pediatric use of every drug would greatly limit drug treatments for children, who are already considered by researchers to be “pharmaceutical orphans.” Indeed, Cass has herself admitted that RCTs are probably infeasible in the GAC setting; “they’re difficult studies to design because you can’t blind people,” she notes, since patients will see bodily changes when given GAC-related pharmaceuticals.

Daniel G. Aaron and Craig Konnoth, “The Future of Gender-Affirming Care — A Law and Policy Perspective on the Cass Review,” New England Journal of Medicine 392, no. 6 (February 6, 2025): 526–528.

Cass Review commentary positions non-affirmative approaches as “neutral,” contrasting them to affirmative approaches that are framed as “ideological.” There is no recognition of the ideology underpinning approaches that deny the existence or validity of trans children. Cass Review reports do not consider the harms of approaches that deny or reject a trans child’s identity (…). Instead, Cass Review reports provide a sympathetic description of non-affirming professionals, centering the pressure they feel under to adopt an affirmative approach …

A significant indication of cisnormative bias can be seen in the absence of recognition of the existence of trans children across all Cass Review reports. A review expected to define best practices for trans children’s healthcare chooses to entirely avoid the word trans when referring to the children or adolescents who access UK Children’s Gender Services. Whilst including seven references to “transgender adults,” the interim report does not include even one reference to a trans child, adolescent or young person. Trans children are instead reduced to definition as “gender questioning children and young people” (Report 5, p. 11) or “children and young people needing support around their gender” (Report 5, p. 7). This framing conflates trans children, including those who have socially transitioned and are settled and confident in their affirmed identity, with children who are questioning their gender. This conflation erases the existence of trans children.

Cal Horton, “The Cass Review: Cis-Supremacy in the UK’s Approach to Healthcare for Trans Children,” International Journal of Transgender Health (March 14, 2024): 1–25.

When governments start weighing in on health care practice, the results are almost always terrible.

[… pause for dramatic effect …]

[Read more…]

History Says Trans Rights

A key rule I follow when reading academic works: follow the citations, and see if they align with their description in the citing document.

This essay contends that Rykener ought to be understood as a transgender woman because she lived and worked for periods of her life as a woman, and other people in her social milieu accepted her as such. More specifically, I argue that Rykener relied on “gender labor” — the labor others perform to inscribe gender—to place herself within the series “women” (a collective of women not reliant on biologically essentialist definitions for membership). By using the framework of gender labor to argue Rykener is a woman, I provide a new way of reading gendered subjectivity — particularly transgender subjectivity — in the archive. Indeed, the historical document — discovered at the top of a 1395 Plea and Memoranda roll at the London Records Office — gives significant space to the various ways in which Rykener lived as a woman.

Henningsen, Kadin. ““Calling [herself] Eleanor”: Gender Labor and Becoming a Woman in the Rykener Case.” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. Vol. 55. No. 1. Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, 2019.

We tend to equivocate between the present and the past, projecting our own views onto historical people despite a very different lived context. Nonetheless, Henningsen makes a strong case that at least one transgender person existed in 1395, a whopping six centuries ago. This contradicts a not-insignificant number of transphobes who want to claim transgender people are a modern fad or social contagion that never existed in the past.

[Read more…]

Richard Dawkin’s Discontinuous Mind

I mostly agree with Dawkins on this:

Everywhere you look, smooth continua are gratuitously carved into discrete categories. Social scientists count how many people lie below “the poverty line”, as though there really were a boundary, instead of a continuum measured in real income. “Pro-life” and pro-choice advocates fret about the moment in embryology when personhood begins, instead of recognising the reality, which is a smooth ascent from zygotehood. An American might be called “black”, even if seven eighths of his ancestors were white. …

If the editor had challenged me to come up with examples where the discontinuous mind really does get it right, I’d have struggled. Tall vs short, fat vs thin, strong vs weak, fast vs slow, old vs young, drunk vs sober, safe vs unsafe, even guilty vs not guilty: these are the ends of continuous if not always bell-shaped distributions.

Imposing discrete boundaries on something which lacks them is quite dangerous, indeed. It’s also necessary to survive: imagine if I had to stop and consider whether or not a portion of a wall could be opened via the application of force, and where that force should be applied, instead of going “looks like a door with a twist handle, lemmie twist it to escape the fire behind me.” Some level of imposed boundaries are a must, otherwise words cannot exist, but it’s also important to remember these are abstractions imposed for convenience instead of fundamental features of the universe.

As a biologist, the only strongly discontinuous binary I can think of has weirdly become violently controversial. It is sex: male vs female. You can be cancelled, vilified, even physically threatened if you dare to suggest that an adult human must be either man or woman. But it is true; for once, the discontinuous mind is right.

…. Oooo-kay. Dawkins is claiming that biology has a discrete boundary, between the vast majority of the subject that lacks discrete boundaries, and one small portion (sex determination) which has discrete boundaries on a fundamental level. This smells heavily of special pleading. What makes sex determination distinct from the rest of biology? [Read more…]

Harriet Hall Is No Skeptic

Whoops! When I wasn’t looking, Harriet Hall had a peek at what her critics have been saying and created a revised version of her review of Shrier’s book. The last thing I’d like to do is spread misinformation about Hall’s views, so I spent some time going line by line through both her original review and the revised one, to see what changed.

[CONTENT WARNING: Transphobia, skeptics being capital-S Skeptics]

[Read more…]

A Transgender Athlete Reader

Remember this old thing?

Rationality Rules was so confident nobody would take him to task, his “improved” video contains the same arguments as his “flawed” one. And honestly, he was right; I’ve seen this scenario play out often enough within this community to know that we try to bury our skeletons, that we treat our minorities like shit, that we “skeptics” are just as prone to being blind followers as the religious/woo crowds we critique. And just like all those other times, I cope by writing words until I get sick of the topic. Sometimes, that takes a while.

In hindsight, “a while” turned out to be seven months and about seventeen blog posts. Why on Earth would I spend so much time and effort focused on one vlogger? I don’t think I ever explained why in those posts, so let’s fix that: the atheist/skeptic movement has a problem with transphobia. From watching my peers insinuate Ann Coulter was a man, to my participation in l’affair Benson, I gradually went from “something feels off about this” to “wow, some of my peers are transphobes.”

As I picked apart the arguments made by transphobes, I started to see patterns. Much like with religious and alt-Right extremists, there’s a lot of recycling going on. Constantly, apologists are forced to search for new coats of paint to cover up old bigoted arguments. I spotted a shift from bathroom rhetoric to sports rhetoric in early 2019 and figured that approach would have a decent lifespan. So when Rationality Rules stuck to his transphobic guns, I took it as my opportunity to defuse sports-related transphobic arguments in general. If I did a good enough job, most of these posts would still be applicable when the next big-name atheist or skeptic tried to invoke sports.

My last post was a test of that. It was a draft I’d been nursing for months back in 2019, but after a fair bit of research and some drastic revisions I’d gotten Rationality Rules out of my system via other posts. So I set it aside as a test. If I truly was right about this shift to sports among transphobes, it was only a matter of time until someone else in the skeptic/atheist community would make a similar argument and some minor edits would make it relevant again. The upshot is that a handful of my readers were puzzled by this post about Rationality Rules, while the vast majority of you instead saw this post about Shermer and Shrier.

The two arguments aren’t quite the same. Rationality Rules emphasizes that “male puberty” is his dividing line; transgender women who start hormone therapy early enough can compete as women, according to him, and he relies on that to argue he’s not transphobic at all. Shermer is nowhere near as sophisticated, arguing for a new transgender-specific sporting category instead. Shrier takes the same stance as Rationality Rules, but she doesn’t push back on Shermer’s opinions.

But not only are the differences small, I doubt many people had “women are inherently inferior to men in domain X” on their transphobe bingo card. And yet, the same assertion was made at two very different times by three very different people. I consider this test a roaring success.

One consequence is that most of my prior posts on Rationality Rules’ arguments against transgender athletes still hold quite a bit of value, and are worth boosting. First, though, I should share the three relevant posts that got me interested in sports-related apologia:

Trans Athletes, the Existence of Gender Identity, … / … and Ophelia Benson: The first post proposed two high-level arguments in favour of allowing transgender athletes to compete as the gender they identify with. The second is mostly about calling out Benson for blatant misgendering, but I also debunk some irrational arguments made against transgender athletes.

I Think I Get It: My research for the prior two posts led me to flag sport inclusion as the next big thing in transphobic rhetoric. The paragraph claiming “they think of them as the worst of men” was written with Benson in mind, but was eerily predictive of Shermer.

And finally, the relevant Rationality Rules posts:

EssenceOfThought on Trans Athletes: This is mostly focused on EssenceOfThought‘s critique of Rationality Rules, but I slip in some extras relating to hemoglobin and testosterone.

Rationality Rules is an Oblivious Transphobe: My first crack at covering the primary factors of athletic performance (spoiler alert: nobody knows what they are) and the variation present. I also debunk some myths about transgender health care, refute some attempts to shift the burden of proof or argue evidence need not be provided.

Texas Sharpshooter: My second crack at athletic performance and its variance, this time with better analysis.

Rationality Rules is “A Transphobic Hack“: This is mostly commentary specific to Rationality Rules, but I do link to another EssenceOfThought video.

Special Pleading: My second crack at the human rights argument, correcting a mistake I made in another post.

Rationality Rules is a “Lying” Transphobe: I signal boost Rhetoric&Discourse‘s video on transgender athletes.

“Rationality Rules STILL Doesn’t Understand Sports”: A signal boost of Xevaris‘ video on transgender athletes.

Lies of Omission: Why the principle of “fair play” demands that transgender athletes be allowed to compete as their affirmed gender.

Begging the Question: How the term “male puberty” is transphobic.

Rationality Rules Is Delusional: Rob Clark directs me to a study that deflates the muscle fibre argument.

Cherry Picking: If transgender women possess an obvious performance benefit, you’d expect professional and amateur sporting bodies to reach a consensus on that benefit existing and to write their policies accordingly. Instead, they’re all over the place.

Separate and Unequal: I signal boost ‘s comic on transgender athletes.

Rationality Rules DESTROYS Women’s Sport!!1!: I take a deep dive into a dataset on hormone levels in professional athletes, to see what would happen if we segregated sports by testosterone level. The title gives away the conclusion, alas.

That takes care of most of Shermer and Shrier’s arguments relating to transgender athletes, and the remainder should be pretty easy. I find it rather sad that neither are as skilled at transphobic arguments as Rationality Rules was. Is the atheist/skeptic community getting worse on this subject?

A Good Start

It certainly didn’t seem like that at first blush, though.

Further, we wish to make it clear that Dr. Hall still remains an editor of SBM in good standing. She has worked tirelessly to promote SBM and its principles, contributing over 700 articles to SBM since 2008, all without any compensation or possibility of reward beyond public service. However, at SBM quality matters first, and so we have to remain open to correction when necessary.

Hold on. Harriet Hall has repeatedly shared medical misinformation and lied about the scientific evidence, on a website that claims to promote “the highest standards and traditions of science in health care,” and it hasn’t impacted your view of her at all? Both Steven Novella and David Gorski are not concerned that her flagrant disregard of the science here might spill over to other topics she’s discussed? You’re fine with being used to launder medical misinformation, so long as the actors “remain open to correction?” Yeeesh, I just lost a lot of respect for Science-Based Medicine.

Their response to Hall’s article is also hyper-focused on the scientific literature, with only a few exceptions. That can be quite dangerous, as Allison points out.

Frankly, for a trans person, there’s something surreal and erasing in seeing cis people feuding with cis people over whether we exist. I mean, I am grateful that there are cis people being allies for us … But the fact that people have to come up with logical arguments and “evidence” that our transness is “real,” thus keeping the question alive of whether we do, in fact, exist, keeps giving me the creepy feeling that maybe I’m just a figment of my own imagination. […]

I was just reading HJ Hornbeck’s post about trans athletes, which has all kinds of “scientific,” “objective” evidence that gender dysphoria, gender identity, etc. are real. The problem with going down that path is not only that it concedes the possibility that it could be “disproven,” but also that trans people who don’t fit into the definitions and criteria in those “proofs” are then implicitly left out of the category “real trans.”

When writing about issues at the core of someone’s identity, you need to prioritize humanism over evidence. Hence why I went out of my way to point out the scientific literature is not the final word, that it is not prescriptive. If you doubt me, consider one of the after-effects of ACT UP:

The upshot of all this: “What they were able to revolutionize was really the very way that drugs are identified and tested,” says France. This included scrapping the prevailing practice of testing drugs on a small number of people over a long period of time in favor of testing a huge sample of people over a much shorter period — significantly speeding up the time it took to conduct drug trials.

Similarly, ACT UP insisted that the researchers and pharmaceutical companies that were searching for a cure for AIDS also research treatments for the opportunistic infections that were killing off AIDS patients while they waited for a cure. In the process, says France, “ACT UP created a model for patient advocacy within the research system that never existed before.”

Today it seems natural that people suffering from a disease — whether that’s breast cancer or diabetes — should have a voice in how it is researched and treated. But France says this was decidedly not the norm before ACT UP.

By just reciting the scientific record as if it is a holy book, you roll back the clock to a time when scientists acted as gatekeepers rather than helpers. Instead, start from a patient-centred care perspective where patient rights are placed first. The quality of the science will improve, if anything, and you won’t condescend or impose on the people effected. Novella/Gorski do make some attempts at this, to be fair, but I thought they were easy to miss.

At the same time I was filing away that objection away, though, Novella and Gorski’s follow-up article was really starting to grow on me. It calmly and patiently shoots down a number of arguments made by Shrier and Hall, and the meat of the article doesn’t hold back. They earn their conclusion:

Abigail Shrier’s narrative and, unfortunately, Dr. Hall’s review grossly misrepresent the science and the standard of care, muddying the waters for any meaningful discussion of a science-based approach to transgender care. They mainly rely on anecdotes, outliers, political discussions, and cherry-picked science to make their case, but that case is not valid. […]

At this point there is copious evidence supporting the conclusion that the benefits of gender affirming interventions outweigh the risks; more extensive, high-quality research admittedly is needed. For now, a risk-benefit analysis should be done on an individual basis, as there are many factors to consider. There is enough evidence currently to make a reasonable assessment, and the evidence is also clear that denying gender-affirming care is likely the riskiest option.

I could have used some more citations (shock surprise), but there’s enough there to establish that Novella/Gorski have done their homework. Also, did I mention this is only part one?

Part II of this series will include a far more detailed discussion of the key claims in Abigail Shrier’s book and where she goes wrong by an expert in the care of trans children and adolescents.

Giving a front-line expert a platform to share their insights will do wonders to counter the misinformation. Until that time, we still have a solid takedown of Shrier and Hall’s views on transgender people’s health. Despite my objections, it’s well worth a read.