There is a huge problem when activists care more about their cause than the truth.
I know nothing of this particular field, but I do know I can go out on the internet and find well-meaning people writing a very similar story about a scientist commited to the truth being hounded by ill-informed activists on the topic of, for example, climate change. And, to my point, I can find that story written from both sides of the debate.
Who would have thought the temperature of the earth would become a political football? On the other hand, people have been freaking out for literally decades about the mildest of gender controversies, like men not cutting their hair short, or women wanting to wear trousers, so there's a whole backlog of drama that this current issue builds on.
Even worse, I worry about people who twist the community and goals to their own ends (some examples show up at times on reddit's TumblrInAction), but I understand that this is probably a minority. At the same time, I can't help but feel like there is a small, growing hostility towards cisgendered people...
Now let's have a look at that article:
"For starters, the most cited study (Steensma) which alleges a 84 percent desistance rate, did not actually differentiate between children with consistent, persistent and insistent gender dysphoria, kids who socially transitioned, and kids who just acted more masculine or feminine than their birth sex and culture allowed for. In other words, it treated gender non-conformance the same as gender dysphoria. Worse, the study could not locate 45.3 percent of the children for follow up, and made the assumption that all of them were desisters. Indeed, other studies used to support this also suffered from similar methodological flaws."
Yowch. That's some seriously dodgy science there - almost half the subjects lost to follow-up, assigning a particular outcome to the drop-outs, questionable selection criteria... And the NY Mag completely ignores the actual methodological issues, instead dismissing them as ideological complaining from trans activists.
This is pretty sleazy too: "they just haven’t come up with scientifically convincing explanations for why the studies would all be wrong, and all in the same way". The studies in question took a group of people who met some definition of gender variance and looked at how many transitioned. The more strict the definition they used, the higher the proportion that transitioned - and the NY Mag are arguing that the studies showing the highest proportion of non-transitioners are right and indisputable because all the studies showed some positive proportion of non-transitioners, which is the only thing they could show.