Medical journals are ranked by prestige, like universities and restaurants, based on criteria that might be more in the eye of the beholder than based on objective criteria. In the medical world, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine are ranked number one and two, respectively, despite both having had to retract shoddy published COVID papers over “data integrity questions.”
JAMA, or the Journal of the American Medical Association, is number five on the “best medicine journals” list. It would be reasonable to expect such journals to be publishing cutting-edge medical research papers rather than nonsense better suited for supermarket tabloids.
JAMA, a few weeks ago, published a research letter stating the obvious about males and females. The title of the letter sounded innocuous: “Prostate cancer in transgender women in the Veterans Affairs Health System, 2000-2022.”
YouTube screen grab
It’s a surprise that transgender veterans were much of a thing 23 years ago. Then again, there was Corporal Max Klinger, the cross-dressing medic in the movie and TV series M*A*S*H.
The first sentence of the letter—“Transgender women retain their prostate even after gender-affirmation surgery and thus remain at risk of prostate cancer”—shows the study authors to be masters of the obvious. What did they expect? That men who declare themselves to be women, take estrogen, possibly receive breast implants, and undergo surgical castration are suddenly no longer biological males? As another military veteran character, Gomer Pyle, would say, “Shazam!”
The rationale for the study is that there are only 10 case reports of prostate cancer in transgender women. So what? These are biological males with prostates and are lumped into males with prostate cancer, the most common non-skin cancer in America, affecting 1 in 8 men.
