Research, engagement, and harmed communities

It has been an interesting couple of days over on Bluesky. About two weeks ago, I had an undergraduate student decide to cover my most recent research article exploring the impacts of anti-trans legislation. She did a phenomenal job. The problem is, some folks in the trans community had issues with the headline. The headline was... Fine. But it wasn't what people wanted. I could have shaken my head and moved on with my life. But I decided to engage. 

I saw some folks who, seeing commentary by a random person on Bluesky, immediately made assumptions. They thought they knew who I was, what the work was about, and what they gained from the work existing (i.e., nothing). But I saw others who were scared because of harms done by academics. 

Did I say "harms done by academics"?

There are a lot of great academics who highlight and attempt to address disparities, who aim to understand gender development among trans adolescents and adults, who center their work in the trans community. There others who perpetrate harm. 

We see this in the work that focused on "desistance," much of which attempted to legitimize the idea that therapy could stop people from being transgender. My colleagues and I sought to push back against that in a recent work: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-49819-001

There is harm in claims about "transsexual typologies"  pathologizes trans identities (often framing trans identities as a paraphilia). This has been pushed back against. Moser did an excellent job years ago with this, critiquing it while noting that the weird measure that Blanchard came up with demonstrated "autogynephilia" among cis women, too.

And theories about "social contagion," which have been pushed back against by numerous academics like Florence Ashley and others. The claims about social contagion come from articles that have so many methodological flaws.

And then there is the Cass Review, the US version of the Cass Review (which was like the Cass Review, but somehow worse?), calls for therapeutic methods that prioritize "making people comfortable with their 'biological sex'", reports that apparently "demonstrate" that supporting trans people make you violent.

There have been, and are, harms that are being done to the trans community. These harms also extend to the folks who support the trans community. Some of these folks are still tenured professors. Some have retired but still manage to do damage. This isn't even getting into the potential damage that has been done by recent journalism. 

It's no wonder people immediately assume the worst.

That's why I made a choice. I'm not mad at folks who are taking pot shots at my research or at the article. Instead, I chose to engage. I think engaging with people online and in these spaces is important. I don't know if I will change people's minds. I don't know if I convinced anyone to take a second the next time they see new research or the next time they see a "Study says" headline. But maybe one or two people think, "Well damn. Cat was decent, so maybe we give this next person a little grace." 

And maybe we, as academics, can start the long and difficult process of rebuilding trust with a community that sees these bad actors and thinks that all academics are, at best, suspect. A community who has been harmed over and over.  Doing research is still important, but it's not enough.

It's not going to be easy, but we have to make a serious effort. And we have to be the ones to come to the table, hat in hand, with apologies