New research has revealed trans people are more likely to come from poorer backgrounds and have worse mental health.
title is some crazy unsubstantiated clickbait, and the article itself is a massive nothing burger. Basically, there are more trans people recorded in the poorer parts of the UK, and they generally have poorer mental health than cis people. Which is entirely unsurprising and unhelpful at this broad of an analysis.
To be clearer, the distinction I’m drawing is that the title implies causation when all the study is is a correlation. “There are more trans people in poorer areas” is not the same statement as “poor people are more likely to be trans.”
Just checked the study and it’s already adjusted for population. https://bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000499
I don’t understand why you’d jump to the assumption that they didn’t factor in such an obvious thing, especially since the researcher already lists possible explanations for the discrepency in the article:
“We do not know why more individuals from deprived areas had a transgender code in their records, and if this really means that there are more transgender people in those areas, or if they are simply more likely to be recorded as such in the NHS GP [general practitioner] records. Transgender people face stigma and discrimination in society, potentially leading to exclusion from employment, education and family support, which might make them more likely to move to deprived areas. Some areas might also be more ‘trans friendly’ than others. Another possibility is that transgender people in affluent areas were more likely to access specialist gender care privately, bypassing their GP and the long NHS gender clinic waiting list entirely.”
Well, that’s the thing. I didn’t jump to that conclusion. I can see how the way I worded it may make it seem that way though.
And that passage is part of my point. The title makes it seem like being poor will make you more likely to be trans, while the study itself in fact says the opposite. That there are a number of different explanations for their observations, and that one shouldn’t draw the conclusion that being poor makes you trans. The title of the article is clickbait at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.
I’d been thinking the title meant trans people are more likely to be poor. And because I’d recently seen a meme about right-wingers blaming LGBTQ people for things, thought this was a good article some of those right-wingers might need to see. Like, look, you can’t blame trans people for your problems because they’re also likely to be poor. But I might be assuming a lot about how things might be interpreted here, because I did not expect all this, lol.
Why is it unsurprising that trans people are more common in poorer areas?
“There are more trans people in poorer areas” is not the same statement as “poor people are more likely to be trans.”
That’s not what the title says? “trans people more likely to come from poorer backgrounds” is the same statement as “There are more trans people in poorer areas” and it doesn’t imply causation at all.
That’s what it’s sneakily implying, though. The point is exactly to get people who glance at the headline to correlate poverty and transness and then go click on the article to examine this injustice. Then you’re meant to come in in the comments and say ‘hey, it didn’t say that’ as a gotcha that’s literally built into the article.
This isn’t news, it’s guerilla theater.
Reduced to its lowest common denominator the actual headline should be ‘poor people outnumber rich people’, but that wouldn’t get any clicks.
Yes, the title is implying a corrolation because that’s exactly what the study found. ‘poor people outnumber rich people’ wouldn’t be a good title because the article is specifically about trans people and omitting that doesn’t achieve anything, and is also wrong since the study is already adjusted for population. It doesn’t say there are more trans people in poorer areas, it says there are more trans people per 100 000 people in poorer areas.
Why do you people always assume you know more than academic resarchers
“more people are poor than rich”
Staggering results, I’m floored, who knew??
Trans people are likely to have a sink in their house. Maybe it’s sinks
Original full text is free.
Being a trans child of transphobic parents intuitively seems a specific flavor of high ACE score but I’m glad McKechnie et al. did the retrospective analysis. And this is in a country with socialized medicine!
