If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Saying it's a direct A/B comparison is seriously overstating it. Transitioning is itself a huge confounder, and if it were true that time before/after were exactly comparable, that would debunk one of the main justifications for allowing sex-changes in the first place!
Note the willful incomprehension of the author about the possible effects of things like testosterone. 'Opposite seems to be true' my ass. But I suppose materialism and individual differences should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story about endemic sexism and racism...
(Sadly, this is only the second most infuriating statistical argument I've seen today. The first is a linear regression in the Washington Post about whippings vs productivity for slaves, in which they claim it shows whipping works. Aside from the usual correlation!=causality problem, their scatterplot clearly shows that there is not such a small positive correlation: their model does not fit the data because most slaves were never whipped so it's not Gaussian but more like a zero-inflated model, and in the population that was whipped a non-zero number of times, more whippings correlate dramatically with decreased cotton production. At a guess, male slaves were much more likely to act out or run away or get into fights or refuse to produce, and would be whipped for it. It borders on malpractice to present this graph baldly without including sex as a covariate or better yet doing a mixture model - certainly any model diagnostics would flag this regression as bogus. The author's bio says he's a professor at Columbia who "studies the roots of poverty and violence in developing countries, especially Africa"; all I can think is that if that's what passes for analysis for him, then no wonder Africa remains poor and violent.)
I think you're misreading the author here. In that paragraph she's discussing two different hypotheses. The first is that increased testosterone makes post-transition trans men more confident, and the second is that the process of transitioning itself makes them more confide... (read more)