Call it a match made in heaven. The Journal of the American Medical Association has a penchant for publishing non-rigorous research, and CNN has an insatiable appetite for promoting it. Their latest rendezvous comes by way of a study that sets out to assess regret and overall levels of satisfaction among people who elected to undergo mastectomies as part of a gender transition. The study appeared on August 9, and CNN ran an article on it within hours of its publication.

The results of the study sound remarkable. “The median satisfaction score was 5 on a 5-point scale, with higher scores indicating higher satisfaction. The median decisional regret score was 0 on a 100-point scale, with lower scores indicating lower levels of regret.” Put differently, most respondents gave the best possible ratings when it comes to their feelings of satisfaction or regret.

As is often the case with research guided by political agendas, however, the devil is in the details, or lack thereof. When it comes to so-called gender-affirming care, the salient policy questions concern the ethics and efficacy of performing irreversible medical treatments on adolescents. The study does not specifically address pediatric gender medicine, but it concludes that the results “affirm the overwhelmingly low levels of regret following gender-affirming surgery.” It was CNN that used the study to criticize state age restrictions, without ever mentioning that the study provides no information about pediatric outcomes.