I’ve spent the entire day deleting tweets and blocking everyone even slightly linked to the events of the last few days. I’ve blocked a lot of people, but the process of looking at their feeds and seeing the things they say about trans women is utterly demoralising. I’ve never felt so viscerally hated, and they’ve gotten in my head. I can’t stop thinking, maybe they’re right.
I wonder whether he gets how vicious these conversations have become? In the current climate it’s such a misstep to phrase anything that way, but perhaps he doesn’t realise that?
If an orthodox null hypothesis test is deemed invalid the moment the “true” Type I error level departs from its nominal level, then literally every NHST ever conducted is invalid, and the framework is completely useless for practical purposes. In real life, of course, everyone tries a variety of fixes to work around the fact that data are messy. This doesn’t make much sense to me as a serious statistical commentary
Even though there were so many crossdressing events when I was younger, I never participated in them because the jokey “ha ha dudes in dresses” game felt so gross and honestly I kind of knew I’d look nice in a dress and wouldn’t enjoy the “fake” sexual harassment from my “friends”.
Sealioning, mockery, dismissiveness of other people’s lives, sure - that happens but I can’t see how any of this would change. I think it’s terrible, but I don’t think there’s any rule against being an unremitting dickhead towards vulnerable people. Maybe there should be
I think that to their mind, a hypothesis test is only valid if the (unobservable) “actual” Type I error rate is the same as the nominal one. Given that almost any departure from the prespecified decision procedure is sufficient to make that happen, it follows that there is no way to do valid hypothesis testing without a very precise prespecification/preregistration. It strikes me as an absurd thing to actually believe though given the fact that model misspecification is a much more pervasive and severe problem. The moment your statistical model is wrong, you also get Type I errors no longer matching the nominal level. So it’s the argument that proves too much…
As a kid that’s what I was taught about trans women, and it’s hard to really believe that it isn’t true. I feel completely dejected and worthless, and after the events of the last few days I don’t know how to get my self-belief back
There’s a part of me that wants to tweet about the strangeness of having the most personal and deeply intimate things about your life reduced to blank administrative communications. But why bother?
Treating scientific reasoning as hypothesis testing feels like jumping straight to the revelation scene at the end of a murder mystery. Yes, that’s the payoff but it’s not the plot
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not cut out for any of this. I don’t hate any of these people. I do think they’re wrong and cruel, and I don’t like how easy it is for them to undermine my own sense of self
They’ve been following me on twitter. I feel really weird about that. They’ve been basking in the glow of favourable press coverage and meanwhile I’m dealing with transphobes. None of them have said a word while any of this happened and now I feel creeped out. I’m sure they’re nice, but I don’t like feeling like I’m being studied. I’m tired of feeling like a thing
I’m surprised at how much the tattoo means to me actually. It’s hardly an original observation, but it feels like a way of asserting control over my body, something that I guess has been sadly lacking most of my life. So many doctors, administrators, lawyers. I’m not actually all that opposed to the existence of some gatekeeping when it comes to gender transition, but gosh there’s a lot. So many half truths that need to be told, just so that there’s the right document trail, so many people who have some legal right to intervene or decide what kind of body I can have or what labels can be attached to it. But at least I can annotate the damn thing without having to ask permission.
That shame doesn’t really fade
All those “scientific” descriptions of people like me as sexual deviants or fetishists just creeps me out and my confidence is just shattered. I don’t feel like that’s who or what I am, but no-one in my field pushes back against these people. Here I am right in the middle of a psych methods community that is supposedly all about calling out bad science and … nothing. I’m trying to shake it off but the terrible things they say about trans women are so similar to the things I was told growing up, and it’s hard to fight that.
I find it’s pretty common when I feel vulnerable about my sense of my own gender or what it means, that I end up taking a lot of pictures and at least taking comfort in the fact that when I look at those pictures I really do see a woman there and it makes me calmer seeing her, and knowing that this is me. Does that make sense?
I don’t know if he remembers, but met I him a couple of times before I transitioned. I pretty much guarantee he has no idea how condescending he sounds, and would never believe how much differently he treats me now.
You’re working late tonight, right?
I’ve always viewed preregistration as a tool, useful for some purposes and not others, but it sometimes feels as though we’re not having a conversation about when a tool is useful. It’s almost a shibboleth. It seems to become a proxy for a larger - almost moralistic - claim about who and what should belong to the category of “Science”. It seems odd to me
They at least would back off with the right kind of glare. Straight men… hm…
Thank you. I mean yeah, it shouldn’t matter what I see or what you see in the pictures, and yeah there’s a lot of undesirable things that follow if we treat “passing” as the right standard, but I can’t help wanting to pass, and wanting to have my image look like my own mental representation of myself
No-one ever called it rape. Not even me.
I mean, this is entirely true. Scientists can in fact deliberately choose to explore ideas just to learn stuff. It just astounds me that this point has even be said. To me, this idea that science starts with a hypothesis to be tested is the most annoying thing in the entire philosophy of science. Some days I think Popper did more damage to science than anyone else.
Had a long conversation with my partner this morning and we both feel this site is doing me a lot of harm, so I think I need to walk away, at least for a while. I really appreciate your generosity and support
Submitted my updated birth certificate to human resources today, so hopefully I can get a new staff ID photo that actually looks like me soon!
I think it’s a bad idea, to be honest. The last 24 hours on twitter have really made me reassess my willingness to take on any public role
When puberty kicked in I never really understood why I felt so differently about it to the other boys - to me, the sudden change in voice and body hair and so on was just gross, and I felt a constant sense of shame and disgust at my appearance. But again I had no idea why, and nothing to compare it to. Most of all I had no words and no positive images of trans women to look up to.
I’m sorry. It’s the inevitable and exhausting consequence of trying to express a different perspective on this topic. I’d offer support in thread, but I meant what I said about staying away.
I do wish he hadn’t said that last bit. It’s taken the whole focus off the strongest point … we (or they, since I can’t really participate) are all talking about the least defensible claim rather than the central point
It never occurred to me to consider myself transgender because the only concept I had for that came from the media, which invariably portrayed trans women as crossdressing gay male prostitutes
I guess if you’ve never been harassed you must have so little grasp of how it works that you keep doing stupid things like that
In the same way that seeing myself in the mirror helps affirm who I am, understanding how other people perceive me - especially people who never knew me before transition - works as another kind of mirror, and it’s hugely validating.
I have to worry about my right to use public toilets, whether I’ll have my genitals groped at airports, whether my identity documents will be believed, whether I have access to medical care, whether my rape “really” counts, whether I’m allowed to participate in society as a normal person, and what do they want to talk about… are trans people being too mean to this poor journalist?
Oh, I agree that’s been good here, but I don’t think that community has reached that point - realistically, very few things would ever reach the threshold for being perceived as a problem, because “the line” for what counts as bad behaviour (per Hannah Gadsby’s speech) is controlled by the people most likely to engage in that behaviour, rather than by those who are more likely to be on the receiving end of it
I know you don’t know me, but I just wanted to say thank you for your comments. I really appreciate it.
A doctor had to refer me to a psychiatrist; A psychiatrist had to write a letter diagnosing me with gender dysphoria; The letter went to another doctor who referred me to an endocrinologist; The endocrinologist had to write a letter asserting I am receiving appropriate medical treatment for dysphoria; A lawyer had to certify all the documents; The whole packet had to be sent to the South Australian state government to get the birth certificate and name updated; A new set of paperwork needs to be sent to the Federal government to obtain a replacement passport; In additional to the birth certificate showing gender change and name change, I need valid photo ID to show at the passport interview; To get the photo ID I need to go to the New South Wales state government and request a new license; I think when it arrives I can then go to the passport office; Then I can apply for travel approval
I think that’s where tidyeval is useful
Right? I feel like I know so many “not cishet” people, and there are sooooooo many variants, and literally every one of them feels like a losing hand
I’m not someone who always knew I was transgender, and I still don’t have a strong internal sense of “my gender identity”, whatever that is supposed to mean. I did always feel like “something was wrong” but I had no words to describe it. As a child I had no way of expressing the idea that I wanted to be seen as just like the other girls, or to articulate my discomfort with my body or with the social categories to which I’d been assigned.
I froze.
I think they’re close to interchangeable. The reason I switched to “frame” for that paper is that the sampling mechanisms there were all simple “admissibility rules” - is this observation eligible for inclusion (part of the frame) or not. It seems to me that sampling assumptions are more general. I think if it seems appropriate to you, go for it
I started changing how I presented in small ways, and big. Every time I made a change, I felt a huge sense of relief and… familiarity? The more my reflection started to change and look like that of a woman, the more I could see myself in her. I’d never noticed how much I’d tried to avoid looking at myself, how uncomfortable it made me feel to see me the way everyone else could see. I didn’t even realise I was transitioning until a couple of years in, when suddenly I realised that this background feeling of disgust was just gone.
I’m so tired of reaching out, of begging and pleading with people to see how bad their behaviour is. There’s a part of me that would like to retain some dignity, you know?
Staff ID photos are always terrible, but for the first time I have some photo ID that has my own name. I can’t stop crying out of relief
Hopefully I’m a small enough target that this won’t spread. I’ve seen this pattern enough times
I think we have more experience with codes of conduct within programming communities. Even here though, when we ask people to think about CoC violations they usually think of the easy cases, and those almost never crop up. Sure, anyone would speak out against an old-school misogynist who expresses nothing but contempt and hatred for women, but those men don’t really exist in these spaces. Yet misogyny itself persists through all the little things, and it’s only by being willing to step forward in the hard cases that you can have a genuinely inclusive culture.
Sorry I’m going to be late to the hiring meeting - I have to take my daughter to the doctor
I got a tattoo today! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’m 41 and I’m really happy & kind of surprised I’ve made it this far. The semicolon is a little cliched but I like it
I wrote a blog post today about the strangeness of being a trans woman in academia. It’s just a collection of snippets of things I’ve written the last week or so, stripped of their original context.