Men and women are not the same:  Women are better with words

As evolutionary biology would lead us to expect from their traditional roles.  Interesting that the researchers did not look at mathematics, though.  Similar data was available

Gender Difference in Verbal Performance: a Meta-analysis of United States State Performance Assessments

Jennifer Petersen

Abstract

A comprehensive, statistical review of gender differences in verbal performance has not been conducted in several decades and the majority of previous work on this topic used published studies that often include small, non-representative samples. The introduction of national legislation in US public schools required schools to assess and publicly report verbal performance, thus providing verbal assessment data for millions of American students. The current study presents a meta-analysis of gender differences in US state verbal assessments. Data were collected from the departments of education in 16 states representing more than 10 million US students in grades 3 through 11. Results indicated a small gender difference favoring females for overall verbal performance (d = 0.29). However, when type of assessment was considered, the female advantages in reading (d = 0.19) and language arts (d = 0.29) were smaller than in writing performance (d = 0.45). The small gender differences in verbal performance increased in a linear pattern from grades 3 to 8 and then remained steady in high school.

SOURCE







Explosive Ivy League Study Repressed For Finding Transgender Kids May Be A Social Contagion

“Rapid-onset gender dysphoria” among teens and young adults may be a social contagion linked with having friends who identify as LGBT, an identity politics peer culture, and an increase in internet use, finds a study out this month from a Brown University professor. The study was quickly yanked from Brown’s news releases after a transgender activist feeding frenzy, and the journal it was published in is reconsidering the publication. There is a parent and researcher-driven petition to stand behind the publication of the first study to look in detail at rapid-onset gender dysphoria.

The petition includes the following graph about gender referrals in the United Kingdom. Anecdotal and news reports, as well as the rapid recent growth in transgender treatment centers, indicates a similar phenomenon inside the United States.

“[T]he parental reports in this study offer important and much-needed preliminary information about a cohort of adolescents, mostly girls, who with no prior history of dysphoria, are requesting irreversible medical interventions, including the potential to impair fertility and future sexual function,” says the petition. “In any other group of children, these grave consequences would be seen as human rights violations unless there was significant and overwhelming evidence these procedures would be beneficial long-term.”

Despite these facts on the ground, Brown issued a statement Tuesday effectively apologizing for publicizing their own professor’s research because, “Brown community members express[ed] concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”

“The spirit of free inquiry and scholarly debate is central to academic excellence,” said the statement from Bess Marcus, the dean of Brown’s School of Public Health. “At the same time, we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work.”

Hm, I wonder if she would worry about “invalidating the perspectives of members of the alternative  health community” after a Brown researcher published a study indicating a vaccine is effective and anti-vaxxers went crazy about it on Twitter. Doubtful.

The reason trans activists went nuts is that the study reinforces what plenty of parents, public health experts, and doctors have been saying: Transgenderism looks a lot like a dangerous fad. It’s telling that their response was to demand suppressing the results. It’s also telling that Brown chose to prioritize the unreasonable demands of a tiny minority above the potential well-being of children and the process of scientific inquiry.

How This Study Came About

The study is authored by Lisa Littman, a behavior and social sciences professor at Brown, and an OB-GYN whose publications are mainly in reproductive health and abortion. Here’s the phenomenon that caused her to conduct the study to learn more:

Parents have described clusters of gender dysphoria outbreaks occurring in pre-existing friend groups with multiple or even all members of a friend group becoming gender dysphoric and transgender-identified in a pattern that seems statistically unlikely based on previous research. Parents describe a process of immersion in social media, such as ‘binge-watching’ Youtube transition videos and excessive use of Tumblr, immediately preceding their child becoming gender dysphoric. These descriptions are atypical for the presentation of gender dysphoria described in the research literature…

Littman recruited for the study by posting on the transgender-critical websites 4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, and YouthTransCriticalProfessionals, seeking parents of adolescents who had quickly come out as transgender. She recruited 256 parents of children ages 11 to 27. They filled out a 90-question survey that took about 30-60 minutes to complete. Eighty percent of their transgender-identifying children were female, and on average the kids came out at age 15.

While the author and any social scientist will tell you the study design has many flaws — self selection and self reporting among them — it is comparable in quality to studies that LGBT activists amplify when it serves their narratives. For example, a recent study that found kids of lesbians had outcomes as good or better than that of married biological parents also had self-selected participants who self-reported outcomes. Even though that had only one-quarter the sample size of Littman’s study, it was widely celebrated and published about in prominent outlets.

Littman found a number of things that make transgender narratives look terrible. For example, she explored the horrifyingly irresponsible lies anonymous internet users frequently offer to confused kids who were apparently free to browse for this information online. The below graph from the study quotes common “advice” transgender activists gave children over these kinds of forums.

It is also notable that 86 percent of the parents who took this survey said they support same-sex relationships and 88 percent “believe trans people deserve the same rights and protections as everyone else.” Similar numbers supported their kids’ decision to adopt opposite-sex hairstyles, clothes, and so forth. Of the children who told their parents they wanted to see a gender therapist, 82 percent took them.

In other words, this is a highly open and supportive sample of parents who are largely fine with cross dressing and non-heterosexuality but not on board with chopping off their daughters’ breasts or giving their sons female hormones. It’s really hard to see how they can be fairly faulted for wanting other options and more thought before rushing to mutilate and sterilize their children. Instead of harming transgender people’s best interests, instead this study amplifies the concerns of people who clearly care deeply about gender dysphoric kids.

Here’s What the Study Found

The study offers insights into how gender dysphoria seems to develop among those who declare it suddenly. Among the children studied, 59 percent identified as heterosexual prior to expressing gender dysphoria. This is a disproportionately high percent of non-heterosexual kids (41 percent), although homosexuality and especially lesbian activity is highly fluid and tends to dissipate, especially for teens and females. Eighty-seven percent of the children studied became gender dysphoric after friends did, after increasing their time online, or both.

Eighty-seven percent of the children studied became gender dysphoric after friends did, after increasing their time online, or both.

None of the young people Littman studied would have met the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for diagnosing childhood gender dysphoria, the study says. However, a very high rate, 62 percent, had been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder or neurodevelopmental disability before their gender dysphoria began.

Nearly half of these children (48 percent) “experienced a traumatic or stressful event prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria,” the study says, such as parental divorce, a death in the family, a romantic breakup, rape or attempted rape, school bullying, family relocation, or a serious illness. Nearly half (45 percent) had been harming themselves before coming out trans. The parents of most of these children also reported they were bad at handling strong negative emotions.

“The majority of respondents (69.4%) answered that their child had social anxiety during adolescence; 44.3% that their child had difficulty interacting with their peers, and 43.1% that their child had a history of being isolated (not associating with their peers outside of school activities),” says the study. One parent explained that her daughter “had very high expectations that transitioning would solve their problems,” the study says. The parent wrote that the child “discontinued anti- depressant quickly, stopped seeing psychiatrist, began seeing gender therapist, stopped healthy eating. [She] stated ‘none of it’ (minding what she ate and taking her Rx) ‘mattered anymore.’ This was her cure, in her opinion.”

This makes it obvious why transgender activists do not want this information public. It suggests many gender dysphoric young people hit a rough patch in life (or several), have poor or immature coping skills, and got the message from peers, online, or both that transgenderism was a handy, simple explanation for their feelings that also offered instant social acceptance and attention.

High Correlation to Peers Who Promote LGBT Sexuality

The study includes other eye-opening information, such as case studies of several children’s stories. Here are three:

“A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends were taking group lessons together with a very popular coach. The coach came out as transgender, and, within one year, all four students announced they were also transgender.”

“A 21-year-old natal male who had been academically successful at a prestigious university seemed depressed for about six months. Since concluding that he was transgender, he went on to have a marked decline in his social functioning and has become increasingly angry and hostile to his family. He refuses to move out or look for a job. His entire family, including several members who are very supportive of the transgender community, believe that he is ‘suffering from a mental disorder which has nothing to do with gender.'”

“A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends are part of a larger friend group that spends much of their time talking about gender and sexuality. The three natal female friends all announced they were trans boys and chose similar masculine names. After spending time with these three friends, the 14-year-old natal female announced that she was also a trans boy.”

The study also describes links between social acceptance and even obsession with alternative sexuality as being a high risk factor for children contracting gender dysphoria:

Parents described intense group dynamics where friend groups praised and supported people who were transgender-identified and ridiculed and maligned non-transgender people. Where popularity status and activities were known, 60.7% of the [children with gender dysphoria in the study] experienced an increased popularity within their friend group when they announced a transgender-identification and 60.0% of the friend groups were known to mock people who were not transgender or LGBTIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or asexual).

The study also may indicate that school “anti-bullying” programs typically created by LGBT activist organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign may help accelerate children identifying as transgender by pushing peers and authority figures to profusely express their support. It also may suggest that Marxist-style identity politics that brand heterosexuality as oppressive increase gender dysphoria. Perhaps this is one reason a 2013 study found that anti-bullying programs actually increase bullying.

‘They are constantly putting down straight, white people for being privileged, dumb and boring.’
“Great increase in popularity among the student body at large. Being trans is a gold star in the eyes of other teens,” wrote one parent on the study response form. Another wrote, “not so much ‘popularity’ increasing as ‘status’ … also she became untouchable in terms of bullying in school as teachers who ignored homophobic bullying …are now all at pains to be hot on the heels of any trans bullying.”

Children who contracted gender dysphoria in the study were highly likely to have peer groups with a culture of directing animosity towards people who are white, straight, and male. “They are constantly putting down straight, white people for being privileged, dumb and boring,” one study participant wrote. Another wrote: “In general, cis-gendered people are considered evil and unsupportive, regardless of their actual views on the topic. To be heterosexual, comfortable with the gender you were assigned at birth, and non-minority places you in the ‘most evil’ of categories with this group of friends.”

The peer groups of rapid-onset gender dysphoric children also routinely mocked family members and adults, the study found, alienating these distressed children from their most likely sources of help. A handful of study participants who heeded their children’s petition to be removed to a different social environment reported the children were much happier and ceased describing themselves as transgender. One of these children “expressed a strong desire to ‘…get out of the culture that if you are [heterosexual], then you are bad or oppressive or clueless.'”

Social Contagion Is a Well-Documented Human Behavior

“The results of the study support the possibility that social contagion, rather than an innate, immutable sense of incongruence between body and mind, may be at work in some of these cases,” says the open letter petitioning Brown to stand behind Littman’s work.

The petition is the work of 4thWaveNow, a networking and information website for gay-friendly parents and researchers concerned about transgender politics. As mentioned above, Littman recruited parents for her study on the site, which trans activists are ridiculously claiming is a “far-right” “hate” site. 4thWaveNow clearly leans politically liberal and strongly supports non-heterosexuality. These are parents who are righteously concerned about manipulating and mutilating children for the sake of a highly politicized narrative that has little real support beyond its ability to create a business and political industry that profits from despair.

We are allowing people to get fame and profit by lying to vulnerable people and facilitating procedures that very likely do more harm than good.

I’m a free market supporter, but I also see that markets function on desire, and not all desires are good. It’s good to desire to mother a child. It’s not good to meet that desire by renting a womb and buying the medical machinery and human parts to make one. It’s good to desire social acceptance and a strong identity. It’s not good to address that desire by pretending to be a male when you are a female, or vice versa. Believing and acting on lies hurts people, often badly.

Rather than blaming the market mechanisms by which people pursue these bad answers to their desires, it’s more appropriate to set boundaries defining what longings are good and not, and what are healthy and morally right ways to satisfy them. Markets cannot do this. This is what a society is for. And because our society is failing in this duty, through things like suppressing the research, discussion, and inquiry that facilitates it, we are allowing people to get fame and profit by lying to vulnerable people and facilitating procedures that very likely do more harm than good.

This is what we call exploitation. It’s an old human story. Social hysterias like the Dutch tulip craze, Salem witch trials, lynchings, buying stock in a mythical America where the streets were paved with gold, and countless other contagions are a persistent feature of human history. Often it is intermixed with buying and selling because where there is desire, there is exchange. People did, and still do, buy and sell human beings. Now we are also buying and selling, mixing and matching human body parts. There ought to be both social and legal limits on things like this, and far better ones than we have now.

Desire drives exchange. Thus it’s big business to create desires for products and services. In so doing, business takes on the social and especially religious function of defining, refining, and directing our desires. The answer is to take that responsibility back for ourselves, and inform our desires, and ensure our children’s desires are formed, with history, research, ethics, religion, and other products of an advanced and successful culture.

The goal should be to minimize harm as much as possible. We do that by thinking before acting, and part of that thinking is talking. Research is also thinking, in a particularly rigorous fashion. This is why trans activists try to suppress talking and thinking. That shows very clearly their true goals are not for bettering human society. It also provides even greater urgency that we refuse to heed their wild, petulant, dangerous demands.

SOURCE





The British thought police turn men into the enemy

Melanie Phillips

Moves to add misogyny to the list of hate crimes are motivated by intolerance and prejudice

Tomorrow, the Commons will debate Creasy’s amendment to the “upskirting” bill, which would add misogyny as an aggravating factor.

The MP is said to hope that this will be the first step to making it a hate crime, along with offences motivated by hostility based on race, religion, trans identity, sexual orientation or disability. She claims that the public backs such a move. A two-year pilot scheme by Nottinghamshire police, which recognised public harassment of women as misogynistic hate crime, is said to have received overwhelming support.

Yet laws already exist prohibiting violence against women, discrimination or harassment. So why does misogyny need to be made a crime? “Upskirting,” says Creasy, “is a classic example of a crime in which misogyny is motivating the offence.”

Really? What’s the evidence for that? It seems to be nothing other than the apparently unchallengeable belief that unwanted behaviour towards women is invariably motivated by prejudice against them. This is a false and damaging generalisation. Since the perception of such a hate crime involves someone’s subjective view that she is the victim of male prejudice, it can expand to cover a vast range of behaviour. Such expansion is already on display in the Nottinghamshire scheme. This includes wolf-whistling, groping, indecent exposure, sexually explicit language, unwanted sexual advances and online abuse.

Some of these are, and should be, treated as offences in their own right. Others may be inappropriate, socially maladroit, oafish or evidence of pathological deviancy. But are they invariably motivated by hatred or dislike of all women? Are all of them serious enough to use up already overstretched police resources? And what about all those women who ogle men, address sexually suggestive remarks or insults to them, touch them inappropriately or speak of men in general with disdain?

Should misandry — hatred of, contempt for or prejudice against men — also be made a hate crime? And while we’re in the mood, why not make misanthropy a hate crime, thus criminalising all those with a generally grumpy view of their fellow human beings? Indeed, since hatred is part of the human condition, why not expand the criteria to criminalise most of the population? Under hate crime doctrine, however, bigotry is reserved only for the powerful. Men are deemed to be the patriarchy that runs the show. So by definition men cannot be victims of women.

That’s why Zakia Soman, a women’s rights activist and one of the “experts” who decided in a recent Thomson Reuters poll that America was one of the ten countries perceived as most dangerous for women, explained this dubious ranking on the grounds that “our society is ruled by misogyny and patriarchy”. Feminists used to fight the disempowering perception that “biology is destiny”. When it comes to their view of men, however, biology is guilt.

Far from creating a more decent, civilised society, existing hate crimes have helped promote a climate of intolerance, bullying and social division based on suspicion, recrimination and blame.

Hate crime was first introduced in the US in the Eighties and was problematic from the start. This was because it did not seek to address any deficiency in the laws designed to safeguard people from harm.

It was instead part and parcel of “identity politics” in which groups define themselves as victims. Victimisation is deemed to be proof of an unjust society; in identity politics, virtually everyone outside the supposedly dominant establishment is a victim. Hate crime is a symbol of solidarity with them.

It is said to be more serious than regular crimes because the prejudice involved aggravates the harm done to the victim. Really? How? It doesn’t increase the injury sustained from an assault or the potential threat posed by harassment.

The aggravating factor is surely nothing more than the offence or revulsion felt by the victim at the crime’s presumed hateful motivation. So the extra punishment is instead for values thought to be objectionable.

Hate crimes thus don’t police deeds but thought. They are an attempt to drive out attitudes that the self-appointed cultural police deem to be beyond the pale. Now actual police are being used to enforce them.

Their arbitrary nature will inevitably mean the invidious targeting of certain individuals. The Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson, for example, says boys are the victims of “gender equality” and that men are generally dominant in society because they are better at being in charge.

For that, he is of course labelled a misogynist of the deepest hue. If Creasy has her way, will Peterson be arrested for hate crime if he should return to Britain for one of his wildly successful public appearances?

Making misogyny a crime presupposes that male attitudes to women need to be regulated in and of themselves. It therefore makes men the enemy, not just of women but of decent and civilised values.

That is a hateful calumny. In other words, the real hatred involved in the crime of misogyny doesn’t lie with the male sex. It resides instead in the minds of those whose prejudice against men now risks labelling their chromosomes as accessories to crime.

SOURCE





Australia: Retired Anglican Bishop says the views of Australia's Christian Prime Minister go AGAINST the Bible

In good Anglican style, Dr Browning is a very secular Bishop. His doctoral thesis was on global warming and he despises the many Bible condemnations of homosexuality (Jude 1:7; 1 Timothy 1:8-11; Mark 10:6-9; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 1 Corinthians 7:2; Leviticus 18:32; Leviticus 20:13; Genesis 19:4-8). So it ill behooves him to criticise the Biblical beliefs of Scott Morrison

And his account of scripture is very incomplete. He objects to the offshore detention of illegal immigrants on the basis (apparently) of the injunction to the ancient Israelites in Deuteronomy 10:19, "Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt"

But the NT version of that clearly refers to spiritual differences. 1 Peter 2:11 says: "Dear friends, I urge you as strangers and exiles to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul". It is now the Christians themselves who are strangers to the world around them and they are urged to separate themseves from it. So separating ourselves from law-breaking migrants is entirely scriptural.

And it is Morrison, not the Bishop, who is obedient to the Bible when it comes to his practice of sending his children to a Christian school so they will not be subjected to pro-homosexual propaganda.  Something that is "an abomination to the Lord" is fine and dandy with the fake bishop


A former bishop has claimed Scott Morrison's beliefs are against the Bible, with the statement coming just after devout Christian Prime Minister revealed he sends his children to private school to avoid the 'values of others'.

Mr Morrison said he sends his daughters, aged nine and 11, to an independent Baptist school rather than the local public school to avoid sexual education classes requiring children to role-play bisexual teenagers with multiple partners.

Dr George Browning, a former bishop of the Anglican Church of Australia, said Christians have a right to be concerned that Mr Morrison will 'behave in a way that is out of step with true biblical values' due to his views on asylum seekers, climate change and social welfare.

Dr Browning said Mr Morrison's maiden speech to parliament in 2008 in which he quoted Bishop Desmond Tutu while detailing the values he derived from his faith were not reflected in his actions as a politician.

'Given these are clues to the values that Mr Morrison holds dear, we have the right to be somewhat surprised by the stand, or lack of it, that he has taken on several issues, the first and most obvious being refugees and asylum seekers,' he wrote in a column for The Melbourne Anglican.

'On the matter of "strangers and aliens" the Bible is unequivocally clear - we are to welcome and embrace them.

'It is a matter of national shame that we have mistreated so terribly those who have come to our shores. Those still incarcerated on Manus and Nauru are prisoners of a political ideology that has very little to do with the ongoing security of Australian borders.'

Dr Browning said Mr Morrison's views on climate change showed he did not 'stand up for truth'. 'That the Australian government has abjectly failed to produce a policy to address this truth is quite shocking,' he said.

'Thirdly, in using the quote from Desmond Tutu, Mr Morrison nails his colours to the mast of a preferential bias towards the poor and needy. This of course is the bias of Jesus himself.

'Is this bias demonstrated in successive budgets over which Mr Morrison has had the responsibility of shaping? It is hard to see it.'

Australians have a right to feel the values Mr Morrison 'espoused as a Christian' are 'being ignored', Dr Browning aruged.

Mr Morrison told 2GB on Monday that he did not want the 'values of others being imposed on my children in my school'.

'I don't think that should be happening in a public school or a private school. It's not happening in the school I send my kids to, and that's one of the reasons I send them there.'

Mr Morrison said his objection to elements of the controversial Safe Schools program was why he wants to protect the religious freedoms of private schools.

The activities in question are part of the Building Respectful Relationships program, written by Deakin University associate professor Debbie Ollis, which is mapped to the curriculum in Victoria.

One exercise titled 'Different perspectives on sexual intimacy' requires students to use character cards to do 20-minute role-plays.

Mr Morrison went on to tell Mr Jones he backed federal funding for public education, which is run by the states and territories.

'[But] how about we just have state schools that focus on things like learning maths and science,' he added.

Mr Morrison is a devout Christian and attends the Hillsong Pentecostal mega church.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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