Why two cases outweigh two hundred experts in the press
Dr Helen Webberley on Times Radio: the gender debate, with Jo Coburn, Times Radio
One story from a newspaper, or one person speaking from experience, carries more weight than what the medical establishment actually says. When something goes wrong it feels like evidence; when hundreds of experts agree, it feels like politics.
What I was pushing back on there is the way we selectively trust evidence depending on which conclusion it points to. WPATH's Standards of Care represent the work of more than 200 gender specialists who reviewed the entire body of medical literature and submitted their conclusions to peer review. That is how medicine is supposed to work. A single case, however affecting, is not a counter-argument to that process: it is one data point, and medicine has always known that one data point, however vivid, does not overturn a systematic review. The reason this asymmetry matters is that it is not random. Alarming individual stories get amplified; the careful, unglamorous consensus does not. And the people who pay for that imbalance are the ones waiting for care.
More from this conversation
