Magazine Loses It

Earlier this month Psychology Today had an article (which I wrote about here) about a bogus medical condition, “Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD); well in another psychology magazine they have a rebuttal.

There Is No Evidence That Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria Exists
Psych Central
By Florence Ashley, B.C.L., LL.B.
December 3, 2018

Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is the name given to a hypothesized new clinical subgroup of transgender youth, which would be characterized by coming out as transgender out of the blue in adolescence or early adulthood. Under this hypothesis, which is unsupported by evidence, children with ROGD falsely believe they are transgender due to social influence, trauma, and experiences of sexual objectification.

ROGD is mostly strongly associated with the work of Dr. Lisa Littman, who published a study purporting to substantiate the hypothesis of ROGD. The study was based on the reports of parents recruited from well-known, anti-trans websites.

As the World Professional Association for Transgender Health wrote, “it is both premature and inappropriate to employ official-sounding labels that lead clinicians, community members, and scientists to form absolute conclusions about adolescent gender identity development,” pointing out that ROGD “is not a medical entity recognized by any major professional association.”

She goes on to list the problems with the study by Dr. Littman.

The first and most commonly noted problem with the study is its choice of sample. It relies on parental report without independent confirmation and posted recruitment advertising exclusively on anti-trans websites. The websites where participants were recruited discourage parents and the public alike from accepting or affirming the gender identities of trans people and routinely depict all transgender people as deluded and subject to false belief. This introduces a significant bias, as parents are already encouraged to view their children’s identities as false beliefs, and may intentionally or unintentionally misreport certain facts, notably due to recall bias. As I previously noted, it is legitimate for studies to include parental reports. However, sole reliance on parental report majorly undermines scientific validity. In the study, parental reports of ROGD were uncritically accepted even when contradicted by the child’s counsellor, therapist, or doctor.

The second and, in my opinion, biggest problem with the study is that Littman fails to consider alternative, more plausible explanations for her observations. One of the main findings of the study is that children’s mental health and parent-child relationships deteriorate after coming out. Littman interprets this as evidence of a new subgroup of trans adolescents for whom social and medical transition may not be indicated. However, parental acceptance of gender identity is a well-known predictor of mental wellbeing for transgender people and children who are not supported in their identities are unlikely to want to maintain a good relationship with their parents.

One of the claims of the ROGDers is that they spent a lot of time on the internet where they found peer pressure to be trans.

There’s nothing noteworthy about questioning young people consuming social media content representative of their contemporaneous concerns. When academics on BBC Radio claim that “[t]here really isn’t a trans person I’ve met under the age of 30 who hasn’t been on Tumblr,” we should remind ourselves that there aren’t really many people under that age who haven’t been on Tumblr, trans or not.10 We live in a world where social media is omnipresent and is frequently people’s main source of non-academic information.

To support the hypothesis of ROGD, studies would have to reject the null hypothesis [What Is a Null Hypothesis?]. This null hypothesis — that so-called ROGD is a typical presentation of late-onset gender dysphoria among youth with unsupportive parents — is much more plausible given the currently available data. Littman’s study fails altogether to demonstrate the existence of a new clinical population. For the most part, the hypothesis of ROGD has been predicated on the belief that late-onset gender dysphoria was inapplicable, a belief that is grounded in the mistaken assumption that late-onset gender dysphoria is nearly exclusive to children assigned male at birth.

Dr. Winter wrote this about Dr. Veissière,

The Psychology Today magazine took a backhanded swing at transmasculine youth this week, with an article by Dr. Samuel Veissière, an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and expounder of the “men’s rights” movement. Veissière, who has previously dismissed discussion about toxic masculinity as “a fairy tale,” attacked the legitimacy of non-birth-assigned gender identities by doubling down on widely discredited stereotypes of “social contagion” and “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). He primarily targeted transmasculine youth, whom he denigrated as “natal females,” urging “caution” and “clinical and ethical questions” for families, schools, and clinicians in lieu of acceptance and support.

I was really surprised that such a prestigious magazine like Psychology Today would print an article that was so biased as the one by Dr. Samuel Veissière but then again he has authored many articles in Psychology Today including this one supporting “Toxic Masculinity.”