Michael Biggs’s research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

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Publications (21)

Figure 1. psychological functioning before puberty suppression with Gnrha. the circle shows the mean T-score at baseline. the line traces the 95% confidence interval. N = 54 at amsterdam, 41 at london. Data from de Vries et al. (2011, table 2) and Carmichael et al. (2021).
Figure 2. Change in psychological functioning after puberty suppression with Gnrha. the bar shows the change in T-score from baseline; negative values indicate reduced problems. the line traces the 95% confidence interval. N = 54 at amsterdam, 41 at london. Data reported from de Vries et al. (2011, table 2) and Carmichael et al. (2021).
The Dutch Protocol for Juvenile Transsexuals: Origins and Evidence
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  • Full-text available

September 2022

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721 Reads

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32 Citations

Michael Biggs

It has been a quarter of a century since Dutch clinicians proposed puberty suppression as an intervention for “juvenile transsexuals,” which became the international standard for treating gender dysphoria. This paper reviews the history of this intervention and scrutinizes the evidence adduced to support it. The intervention was justified by claims that it was reversible and that it was a tool for diagnosis, but these claims are increasingly implausible. The main evidence for the Dutch protocol came from a longitudinal study of 70 adolescents who had been subjected to puberty suppression followed by cross-sex hormones and surgery. Their outcomes shortly after surgery appeared positive, except for the one patient who died, but these findings rested on a small number of observations and incommensurable measures of gender dysphoria. A replication study conducted in Britain found no improvement. While some effects of puberty suppression have been carefully studied, such as on bone density, others have been ignored, like on sexual functioning.

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Queer Theory and the Transition from Sex to Gender in English Prisons

April 2022

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165 Reads

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3 Citations

Journal of Controversial Ideas

Michael Biggs

Social theory describes and explains the world but can also transform it. The generative power of theory has been shown for disciplines that emulate natural sciences, like economics and psychiatry. I argue that queer theory has similar power, using the case of prison policy in England and Wales. The theory’s privileging of gender over sex helped to transform the criteria for incarcerating males in women’s prisons: from genital surgery to legal status, and then to gender identity. The implementation of queer theory enables us to unpack two distinct meanings of gender performance. The first is dramaturgical, where the individual gives off the appearance of femininity or masculinity through body modification, clothing, and gesture. The second meaning of performance is illocutionary, where the individual verbally declares themself to be man or woman. This case demonstrates the impact of queer theory on institutional policy and elite opinion, even under a Conservative government.

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Suicide by Clinic-Referred Transgender Adolescents in the United Kingdom

January 2022

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3,034 Reads

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21 Citations

Michael Biggs
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Figure 1. Whites' support for affirmative action, 2006-2011.
Summary of results: counties.
Summary of results: respondents.
Did local civil rights protest liberalize whites’ racial attitudes?

July 2020

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59 Reads

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8 Citations

Research & Politics

Michael Biggs

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Christopher Barrie

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Mazumder investigates the long-term effect of protest on political attitudes. He finds that whites have more liberal views on race and are more likely to be Democrats in counties where Civil Rights protest was reported in the early 1960s. The analysis omits a crucial predictor of protest and of racial attitudes: college education. We include the proportion of adults with a college degree and the number of college students at the county level. The inclusion of these variables, along with some other contextual variables from the original dataset, cuts the effect of protest by about half. Protest is no longer statistically significant in eight out of nine combinations of outcome variables and protest measures. The size of the effect remains trivial when we shift analysis from the county to the individual level. Even accounting for the individual’s own education, the county’s proportion of college graduates is strongly associated with racial liberalism. This finding emphasizes the importance of education as a contextual variable. Our conclusion highlights two methodological lessons. First, causal inference should be paired with sustained historical inquiry that specifies plausible mechanisms. Second, statistical tests for sensitivity can induce complacency about the risk of confounding.

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The educational contexts of islamist activism: Elite students and religious institutions in Egypt

March 2017

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43 Reads

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17 Citations

Mobilization An International Quarterly

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Michael Biggs

The literature on student activism finds that protesters come from prestigious universities and from the social sciences and humanities. Studies of political Islam, however, emphasize the prominence of engineering and medical students from secular institutions. Contributing to both literatures, this paper investigates Islamist students targeted by security forces in Egypt following the coup of 2013. Matching 1,352 arrested students to the population of male undergraduates, it analyzes how the arrest rate varied across 348 university faculties. We find that activists came disproportionately from institutions that provided a religiously inflected education. This contradicts the conventional emphasis on secular institutions. Most importantly, we find that Islamists tended to come from faculties that required higher grades and that admitted students who studied science in secondary school. Controlling for grades, engineering and medicine were not especially prominent. These findings suggest that Islamist students conform to the more general pattern: political activism attracts the academic elite.

Citations (19)

... The Danish cohort of TGD youngsters has not yet been described, and systematic long-term outcome studies on health, safety, and well-being are limited internationally [32,44]. Given this lack of data, along with the controversies surrounding hormone therapy [32,54], the debate over detransitions, and the changed composition of the referred TGD group, there is a pressing need for structured, large-scale data collection and research focused on treatment outcomes, detransitions, and profiles of youngsters who do not receive GAHT. There is also a growing interest in reporting experiences from healthcare centers worldwide [55,56]. ...

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Gender Incongruence in Danish Youth (GenDa): A Protocol for a Retrospective Cohort Study of Danish Children and Adolescents Referred to a National Gender Identity Service
The Dutch Protocol for Juvenile Transsexuals: Origins and Evidence
Michael Biggs

... De los anteriores países nombrados, Suecia, Finlandia y Reino Unido se encuentran dando pasos atrás en lo que respecta a la autodeterminación de género, ya que, por un lado, la hormonación en menores se encuentra en entredicho (SWEDISH AGEN-CY FOR HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT AND ASSESSMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES, 2022) y, por otro lado, en el caso concreto de Reino Unido, existe un problema de seguridad en las prisiones y módulos femeninos por la presencia de hombres autoidentificados mujeres (BIGGS, 2022). No obstante, el caso de Reino Unido es especial y problemático, ya que, el escándalo de la clínica Tavistock por la denuncia de Keira Bell al servicio nacional de salud británico supuso un antes y un después para la autodeterminación de género en Reino Unido y la Gender Act de 2003 1 . ...

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La Implementación de la Libre Autodeterminación de Género en España.
Queer Theory and the Transition from Sex to Gender in English Prisons

Journal of Controversial Ideas

Michael Biggs

... Further, statistics on suicidal behavior in transgender and genderdiverse adolescents are even more alarming; in a study of over 120,000 11-19-year-olds, Toomey et al. (2018) reported that the rate of suicidal behavior in transgender and genderdiverse adolescents is up to five times higher than that of cisgender adolescents (i.e., those whose gender aligns with the sex assigned at birth). Yet another study in the UK confirmed this finding, reporting it as 5.5 times higher (Biggs, 2022). The most recent statistics report that for transgender and gender-diverse adolescents, 23% of transmen, 16% of transwomen, and 17% of nonbinary youth report attempting suicide over the past year, and 56% of transmen and 48% of transwomen and 48% of nonbinary adolescents report seriously considering suicide over the past year (The Trevor Project, 2023). ...

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Reducing Suicide Ideation in Transgender Adolescents with Mindful Self-Compassion: An Open Trial
Suicide by Clinic-Referred Transgender Adolescents in the United Kingdom
Michael Biggs

... However, potential effects of suppressive treatment with GnRH analogs (GnRHa) on various aspects such as growth, skeletal development, neurodevelopment, fertility, and future surgical outcomes must be considered [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], as with any medical intervention. The National Board of Health and Welfare in Sweden recently introduced updated guidelines for health services catering to children and adolescents with GD. ...

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Adolescent gender dysphoria management: position paper from the Italian Academy of Pediatrics, the Italian Society of Pediatrics, the Italian Society for Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes, the Italian Society of Adolescent Medicine and the Italian Society of Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry
Revisiting the effect of GnRH analogue treatment on bone mineral density in young adolescents with gender dysphoria
Michael Biggs

... Other literature similarly explores how historical institutions shape contemporary political attitudes (e.g. Acharya et al. 2016;Lupu and Peisakhin 2017;Mazumder 2018;Payne et al. 2019), with others arguing that sustained effects may not be present (Biggs et al. 2020). For example, Payne et al. (2019) find that areas formerly home to larger slave populations now house White residents that exhibit higher levels of anti-Black implicit bias. ...

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Institutional legacies and temporary assistance for needy families spending decisions: the case of the Freedmen’s Bureau
Did local civil rights protest liberalize whites’ racial attitudes?

Research & Politics

Michael Biggs

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Christopher Barrie

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... Uneinigkeit besteht indes über die mutmaßlichen Gründe für diese erklärungsbedürftige, in weniger als einer Dekade eingetretenen Entwicklung, inklusive der beobachteten epidemiologischen Verschiebungen. Wie bereits in früheren Arbeiten dargelegt (Biggs, 2020;Korte & Wüsthof, 2015;Korte et al., 2017Korte et al., , 2021 (Coleman et al., 2022, 45). Inzwischen gibt es weitere Forschungsberichte, die für einen Zusammenhang des Prävalenz-Anstiegs in der Adoleszenz mit ROGD auf der Grundlage einer vorbestehenden psychischen Erkrankung sprechen und der sozialen Ansteckung als Co-Faktor eine wichtige Rolle beimessen (Zucker, 2019;Hutchinson et al., 2020;Schwartz, 2021;Diaz und Bailey, 2023). ...

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Sturm und Drang im Würgegriff der Medien: Die Leiden der jungen Generation am eigenen Geschlecht*
Gender Dysphoria and Psychological Functioning in Adolescents Treated with GnRHa: Comparing Dutch and English Prospective Studies
  • Citing Article

  • June 2020

Michael Biggs

... Tras años de trabajo, la antigua presidenta del Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health confirma la presencia de serios problemas relacionados con este enfoque afirmativo. Varias son las principales objeciones: a) la transición social está lejos de ser un proceso inocuo y reversible, ya que actúa como un tratamiento psicosocial que eleva significativamente las probabilidades de que el joven continúe con las demás fases de la intervención (31) sin estar claro que contribuya al bienestar del menor (32,33) ; b) no sabemos hasta qué punto mejora la salud mental de los jóvenes (34)(35)(36) , en especial en relación con índices tan importantes como la conducta suicida (37)(38)(39) ; c) desconocemos cuántos desistidores y destransicionadores hay (40)(41)(42) , aunque algunos autores prevén que serán más de lo que parece (43,44) ; d) no están claros los efectos médicos del consumo crónico de bloqueadores de la pubertad y hormonas cruzadas en áreas como la salud cardiovascular (45,46) o la densidad ósea (47,48) ; y e) en contra de investigaciones que señalan que las disforias de género adolescentes se superan sin intervención en una amplia mayoría de los casos (49,50) , la terapia afirmativa cuenta con tasas bajas de abandono y una vez iniciada no parece fácil su interrupción (51) -recordemos que no existe una edad mínima para el inicio de la primera fase-. Quizá el mejor resumen de toda esta cuestión lo han ofrecido recientemente Levine et al (52) al señalar que la ratio beneficios/riesgos de la terapia afirmativa se mueve entre lo desconocido y lo desfavorable: 'las preguntas sobre el mejor tratamiento para el creciente número de jóvenes disfóricos con su género producen una división tan intensa dentro y fuera de la medicina que pocas veces hemos visto ante otras dudas clínicas […] Debemos dejar de usar argumentos que hablan de la justicia social y volver a los honorables principios de la medicina basada en la evidencia'. ...

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Aspectos psicológicos de la disforia de género y la transexualidad/transgenerismo [Revista Española Endocrinología Pediátrica, 15(2), 77-78]
Puberty Blockers and Suicidality in Adolescents Suffering from Gender Dysphoria
Michael Biggs

... However, this recent research is problematic. Biggs (2020) argues that Turban et al (2020), without any measures of psychological problems prior to the study, cannot establish any causal connection between puberty blockers and reduction in suicidal thoughts. Second, Costa et al (2015) finds no statistically significant evidence that prescribing this therapy actually does increase global functioning (Biggs 2019). ...

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Toward a Standard of Medical Care: Why Medical Professionals Can Refuse to Prescribe Puberty Blockers
A Letter to the Editor Regarding the Original Article by Costa et al: Psychological Support, Puberty Suppression, and Psychosocial Functioning in Adolescents with Gender Dysphoria
  • Citing Article

  • December 2019

Journal of Sexual Medicine

Michael Biggs

... Our evidence challenges this perception by showing that younger cohorts who received formal religious education lean toward Islamists, and certainly more than those receiving more secular forms of education. This study, thus, adds to a thin literature documenting this link among university students (Ketchley and Biggs, 2017) and religious leaders (Nielsen, 2017). Shared among these studies is the conclusion that state provision of religious education is no panacea to the Islamist challenge facing Middle Eastern autocrats. ...

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Relationship between state-provided Islamic education and Islamism
The educational contexts of islamist activism: Elite students and religious institutions in Egypt
  • Citing Article

  • March 2017

Mobilization An International Quarterly

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Michael Biggs