Steve Kirsch: Vaccines cause The Trans and The Gay!

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived over three years ago, with COVID-19 vaccines arriving unexpectedly quickly nine months later, I’ve had a mantra about the anti-COVID-19 vaccine movement: Everything old is new again. In other words, there isn’t a single antivax trope created for COVID-19 vaccines that didn’t have clear precedents from long before the pandemic. Whether the trope was that the disease isn’t dangerous (to “most people”) or that COVID-19 vaccines permanently alter your DNA, kill you, cause cancer, make our women infertile, or any number of other bad things attributed to them, there truly was nothing new under the sun in that antivaxxers had been making the same claims about vaccines in general, particularly childhood vaccines, long before the pandemic. True, there were new twists added to old antivaccine tropes, such as the cancers caused by the vaccine not being your run-of-the-mill cancers but super-deadly “turbo cancers” and people weren’t just killed by vaccines, but they “died suddenly,” but overall every trope made up for COVID-19 vaccines was conceptually the same as old antivax tropes. Moreover, as I pointed out, the longer the pandemic went on, the more “new school” COVID-19 antivaxxers came to embrace “old school” antivax pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, including the false claims that vaccines turn our kids gay or transgender.

This time, it’s tech bro turned most rabid of rabid antivaxxers, Steve Kirsch, a man who is so deluded that he thinks that he can do epidemiology with online polls on his antivax Substack. Paddling boldly down the river of pseudoscientific antivax stupid, yesterday Kirsch pulled an “Oops, I did it again” and posted to his Substack the results of yet another online survey entitled Survey indicates sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender dysphoria are all primarily caused by vaccination that links vaccines to The Gay and The Trans, because, again, everything old is new again, and Steve Kirsch really is that deluded, incompetent, and downright stupid. Seriously, you might want to sit down before you read this (if you’re, for example, reading this on your phone while standing) and, if you’re in front of your computer or laptop, put down anything you might be drinking, as coffee or soft drinks do bad things to your keyboard if you spit them up in astonishment and shock that someone can write something so out of touch with science—nay, out of touch with reality. Ready?

Here we go:

Thanks to your help in responding to my last survey, it took less than 3 hours to answer the question as to whether sexual orientation, gender identity and gender dysphoria are influenced by vaccines.

The answer to all three is yes: the greater someone is vaccinated, the more likely they are to exhibit each of these traits. 

For all three measures, the odds ratios were 4.8 or higher which means that the attributable fraction is 79.2%. 

In other words, vaccines are responsible for nearly 80% of the effect size.

So the mystery is over. We now know the cause.

There’s nothing that screams “Good science!” to me faster and more intensely than an online poll analyzed after just three hours. (Seriously, Kirsch announced and posted the results of his “survey” on the same day, yesterday.) The hilarious thing is: Even if this poll sampled a group representative of the American population at large, it couldn’t do what Kirsch claims that it does. Let’s take a look at the actual survey, to show you why. Here is the entirety of the “survey” in screenshots:

Seriously, I kid you not. That’s it. That’s all. Do you also notice something? It’s a survey asked only of people or their immediate family members who are either gay/lesbian, nonbinary, or trans. He’s not even asking the same questions of people who could make up a control group, namely heterosexual people who are cisgender. Even if the data weren’t utter bullshit, how do you determine odds ratios from “data” like this?

No, seriously. Somehow Kirsch thinks he’s managed to calculate odds ratios:

Here are the odds ratio between the fully vaccinated/fully unvaccinated. Odds ratios >2 are traditionally associated with causality:

1. Sexual orientation: 4.78
2. Gender identity: 4.81
3. Gender dysphoria: 5.54

These effects are huge and consistent.

Also, the odds ratios for partially vaccinated are in line with the fully vaccinated: in general, the greater the number of vaccines someone has, the more likely they are to have a trait that differs from traditional norms.

So the vaccines themselves are the elephant in the room here and the driver of the response, not environment, upbringing, social pressure, etc.

I was curious how Kirsch calculated odds ratios from his “data.” His analysis, such as it was, was done using an Excel spreadsheet. Looking at his analysis, what I see is Kirsch dividing, for instance, the number of people who identify with their gender assigned at birth by the total number of responses to come up (I guess) with the percentage of people who are cisgender and then calculates it for each vaccine category. Then he does the same thing for people who are attracted to the opposite gender and then for people who are “happy with their biological sex” compared to total. No, I’m serious. It’s just that simplistic and stupid, as if asking people if they are “happy with their biological sex” is all that you need to do to diagnose gender dysphoria. If you don’t believe me, take a look:

If you’re a statistician or epidemiologist, try not to laugh too hard. Remember, I did tell you to sit down if you’re standing and to make sure that you don’t have a drink of any kind in your hand or mouth as you read this. Now, take extra caution. Kirsch claims that he can infer from his “data” a dose-response relationship between vaccination and the chance of being gay or trans. One wonders what statistical tests he did to demonstrate this, as he sure doesn’t lay them out. Of course, garbage in, garbage out; so it’s basically impossible to infer anything from Kirsch’s data, because, make no mistake, as data Kirsch’s results are the most rancid, putrid garbage you can imagine.

You know, I realize that I just used this video yesterday, but, truth be told, it’s even more appropriate to this. Heck, truth be told, it’s even more appropriate for basically everything Kirsch has been saying and writing about vaccines ever since COVID-19 vaccines were developed:

It gets worse, though. Seriously, it does. Not satisfied with his faux “survey,” he has to start doing what he always does and cherry picking pseudoscientific rubbish and anecdotes to support his claims:

There is a pediatric clinic which has not had any gender/sex cases in 25 years. They’ve had over 5,000 kids and no cases. They do not vaccinate.

The overall incidence of orientation traits is over .5%.

So in 5,000 unjabbed kids, they should have had 25 cases, but had 0.

This can happen by chance with probability 1.39e-11.

So this was not bad luck.

The only major thing this pediatric clinic did differently was they did not vaccinate.

So that’s an interesting datapoint that would be impossible to explain away if the primary cause (e.g., for 80% of the cases) was something other than vaccines.

Of course, this sort of nonsense claim for an alternative medicine clinic was a staple among antivaxxers before the pandemic. Just substitute “autism” for “sexual orientation,” “gender dysphoria,” and “gender identity.” Indeed, I well remember the late Dr. Meyer Eisenstein and his claim going back 20 years that he had no autistic children in his non-vaccinating practice or Dr. Paul Thomas, who makes a similar claim that his unvaccinated patients have a much lower prevalence of autism and neurodevelopmental disorders than his vaccinated patients. Of course, as I like to say, if you don’t look for a diagnosis, you’re far less likely to find it, and if you don’t think that gender dysphoria is real or that it should be treated with gender-affirming care you’re almost certainly not going to diagnose it correctly—or even at all. I don’t know which practice to which Kirsch is referring, but I do know that the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria have changed in 25 years, that we now screen for it in a way that we never did before, and that the treatment has evolved. What are the odds that an “alternative medicine” antivax clinic that doesn’t vaccinate (but I repeat myself) follows guidelines with respect to screening for and diagnosing gender dysphoria? Moreover, as I’ve discussed before, there is less of a stigma to being homo- or bisexual than there was even 25 years ago, especially among younger people. The same is true of being transgender, although those stoking the moral panic over transgender being a “social contagion” and the essentialist “gender critical fear mongering” portraying gender-affirming care some sort of affront to nature and/or God are trying their best to ramp up the stigma again.

None of this should surprise you. Antivax and transphobia are the two crappy tastes that taste crappy together, and antivaxxers ranging from Toby Rogers to Bill Maher have embraced transphobia along with their antivax views and started to blame the increased number of diagnoses of gender dysphoria on vaccines, because of course they are. As for the “biological plausibility” cited by Kirsch, he’s referring to a post by A Midwestern Doctor, an anonymous quack who totally buys into antivax lies like “shedding.” He might now be due for a heaping helping of not-so-Respectful Insolence later, as dealing with his long, pseudoscience-filled post would take longer than I have to write this one. Suffice to say that it’s bad. It’s really, really bad.

But, back to Kirsch. Even Kirsch, as deluded as he is, still seems to understand that there are…problems…with his “survey.” So, of course, he tries his best to address them with science, data, and reason.

Just kidding. This is how he addresses them:

I have more unvaccinated readers than most journalists. This enables me to get reasonable sample sizes for people in the fully vaxxed vs. unvaxxed cohorts with just 750 responses. Other writers would need 100X as many respondents to get an equivalent number of responses from fully unvaccinated people.

The mix of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated respondents is irrelevant to the odds ratio calculation.

In other words, if all of my readers are all “anti-vaxxers” it simply doesn’t matter. If half of them are fully unvaccinated, it doesn’t skew the results at all; in fact, it makes the results more accurate.

So claims that the survey is unduly “biased” are without merit; all surveys are biased. The question is whether the biases impact the outcome.

If I got it wrong, please show us the correct data. 

AFAIK, nobody wants to collect the data for some reason.

So Kirsch is basically estimating that his readership is—shall we say?—100-fold enriched for antivaxxers compared to the average “journalist.” (Never mind that he isn’t a journalist by any stretch of the imagination.”) I also find it hilarious that he doesn’t realize that, by design, his “survey” doesn’t have a response set that could serve as a control group, namely people who identify as the same gender as their birth, are happy about it, and are heterosexual. More importantly, it occurs to him not at all that additional bias comes from the high likelihood that one’s beliefs about vaccines can influence how a respondent might answer some of these questions. Seriously, Kirsch is so ignorant that he doesn’t even have a whiff of a hint of knowledge of what he does not know about designing surveys and doing epidemiological studies, not that his black hole-level density of ignorance stops him from bolding making proclamations, like this one linking vaccines to The Gay and The Trans.

I’m also amused by his claim that all surveys are biased, which is true but there’s an entire set of disciplines in survey design and epidemiology that are designed to minimize biases inherent in carrying out surveys. Kirsch being Kirsch seems to think that it’s not up to him to show that his survey isn’t biased. It’s up to you. Moreover, he doesn’t even make an attempt, as epidemiologists and professional pollsters do, to demonstrate that whatever biases might exist in his poll don’t affect the result. He simply can’t imagine how they would and assumes that that’s enough and that odds ratios greater than two are associated with causality for The Gay and The Trans. (Let’s just put it this way. It’s way more complicated than that.) It’s also not as though there aren’t data out there about vaccine uptake as a function of sexual orientation. For example, there are data suggesting that uptake of COVID-19 vaccines is somewhat higher among gay and lesbian adults than among heterosexuals, but there was no difference noted between people who are transgender or nonbinary and those who are not, although among LGBTQ+ people there do not appear to be significant differences in the rate of being unvaccinated. It’s not my purpose here to do a full review on vaccine status versus sexual orientation and/or gender identity, just to point out that Kirsch didn’t even bother to look, so confident is he in his self-taught “epidemiology.” Overall, there is no good evidence to support a link between vaccines and the likelihood a child is gay or trans. Certainly, Kirsch’s “survey” doesn’t count as anything even resembling good evidence,

Then, Kirsch, as he likes to do, makes an appeal to incredulity, namely that he can’t imagine from his “data” any other explanation:

So if it isn’t the vaccine, I’m baffled as to what else it could be that fits the evidence.

So far, not a single person has suggested an alternative that is a better fit to the observed data.

So the vaccine is simply the most likely hypothesis because it’s the only hypothesis consistent with the data.

Kirsch can be as “baffled” as he likes. Again, garbage in, garbage out. If the design and execution of your survey are garbage, then nothing that comes from it, even if you analyze it seemingly correctly, will be anything but garbage.

In the end, I’m not at all surprised that Kirsch “went there” and did what he does best (carry out a risibly incompetent online survey, this one in record time, and make wrong conclusions from it that fit his preconceived bias) and tried to link The Trans and The Gay with vaccines. He has been going down this rabbit hole a quite a while, and it was only a matter of time before it led him here after he passed one of the other despicable antivax tropes a while back, namely that vaccines cause a syndrome misdiagnosed as shaken baby syndrome. Truly, there is no depth to which Kirsch will not descend, and he, more than almost anyone else, deserves the Billy Madison retort.