Florencia (she/her)

  • 289 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 23rd, 2024

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  • “News article titled A New Democratic Think Tank Wants to Curb the Influence of Liberal Groups, published September 17, 2025, in The New York Times by Reid J. Epstein. The article explains that the Searchlight Institute, led by Adam Jentleson, aims to persuade Democrats to play down issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights to appeal to more voters. A color photo beneath shows five people standing outdoors: Cam Thompson, Charlotte Swasey, Adam Jentleson (center), Tré Easton, and Danielle Deiseroth.”




  • Comment repost by /u/Impossible_PhD

    Hi folks! Since this is a preprint, and we don’t have their full ms results available to look at, I dug up the study recruitment info. This is an interesting result, but I’ve got a few cautions. Here’s what you need to know:

    • This is a complex RCT, meaning there wasn’t just one test and one control group, there were three of each. Complex RCTs can be fine, but they’re inherently more vulnerable to independent variables, which means they’re more likely to return false positives or false negatives.
    • Complex RCTs are at their best as building blocks, IMO: by testing more stuff, you find the most promising things to test for later, larger simple RCTs.
    • The study has an already-small participant pool (90 people), but it being a complex RCT means that there were only fifteen participants per test/control group.This is an EXTREMELY small sample group, and highly vulnerable to false positives or negatives.
    • They measured differences in both estrogen dose and progesterone dose in this study, and the lower-estrogen “control” (there isn’t a traditional control group) was defined as having mid-cycle levels at 100pg/nl, or 400pmol/l. That means that half the time, that group was below target ranges for estrogen, so it’s absolutely no surprise that the study found that higher estrogen levels meant more breast development.
    • The lowest dose of progesterone they measured was 100mg. Progesterone has a 90-minute elimination half-life. That means that, by the time a person at 100mg takes a new dose, they have–wait for it–only 0.00152mg of progesterone remaining in their bloodstream. With any drug that gets used up so quickly, it’s always hard to track cumulative long-term effects, such as breast development, which is a really big reason that studies on prog and breast development have been so all over the place (what few there have been, anyway). Until we have a longer-lasting, safe ester, so a dose isn’t eliminated so quickly, we’re gonna have problems being sure about these sorts of effects.

    Anyway, bottom line: this is an interesting piece of research, and using 3D imaging here is probably the best way for them to monitor breast development. Unfortunately, this is really a prospective study, not anything even REMOTELY definitive, and it’s results shouldn’t be taken as such.

    They’re not really trying to really determine whether prog makes your boobs grow here. They’re trying to find the doses most promising for a larger study, later, where they might be able to actually say whether prog makes your boobs grow. Honestly, the part I’m more excited by is that this shows evidence that underdosing estrogen at the Endocrine Society-recommended levels, is slowing feminization, and we desperately need results that say that stuff so we can do away with those guidelines.

    Still, it’s exciting and promising! ⏤ by Impossible_PhD