The Science Of Gender

I look far and wide for articles to write about and sometimes I find them in strange places, like today the article is from MIT Technology Review.

How the idea of a “transgender contagion” went viral—and caused untold harm
A single paper on the notion that gender dysphoria can spread among young people helped galvanize an anti-trans movement.
By Ben Kesslen
August 18, 2022


When Jay told his mom he was bisexual at 14, she was supportive. But when he came out as transgender a few years later, she pushed back. She felt blindsided by the news. YouTube videos and online forums soon convinced her that she was right to feel that way. To her, it was clear that Jay was simply mistaken. A trans “contagion” called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” spread through social media, had caught hold of him and convinced him he was not female, she said. The Internet had “turned” him trans.

There is that word! 

ROGD!

Littman [The professor who did the research, who is no longer on the faculty of Brown University] polled parents and reported that they “describe a process of immersion in social media … immediately preceding their child becoming gender dysphoric.” Once a teen identifies as trans, Littman argued, they can unduly—and perhaps unwittingly—influence peers to do the same. This can partially explain the rising numbers of trans youth, she said, adding that the dynamic particularly affects those assigned female at birth.

The paper, which was based on parent surveys recruited from explicitly anti-trans or trans-skeptical websites and forums, almost immediately drew criticism. Shortly after its publication in August 2018, PLOS One, a peer-reviewed open-­access journal covering science and medicine, issued a comment that questioned Littman’s methodology. Brown University, her then-employer, retracted its press release about the study. In early September, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health put out a statement saying ROGD “constitutes nothing more than an acronym” and urged restraint in using the term. Six months after that, PLOS One reissued the study with a large correction emphasizing that Littman’s paper was simply a “descriptive, exploratory” one and had not been clinically validated. In 2021, the Journal of Pediatrics published a comprehensive study that found no evidence for ROGD’s existence. More than 60 psychology organizations, including the American Psychological Association, called for elimination of the term. 

Her bogus study keeps coming back and haunts us, even through her study has been discredited it is still widely used by the right-wing conservatives, it has been used to justify the draconian laws passed in Republican dominated states.

Of the parents that she surveyed;

When Littman took up the question, she decided to survey parents, who she felt would be easier to reach than trans youths themselves. In her Methods section, she writes that “to maximize the chances of finding cases meeting eligibility criteria”—meaning youths who suddenly became gender dysphoric, according to their parents—she turned to three websites: 4thwavenow.com, a “community of people who question the medicalization of gender-­atypical youth”; transgendertrend.com, which says it’s concerned about “the unprecedented number of teenage girls suddenly self-identifying as ‘trans’”; and youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org, a now-private website that was “concerned about the current trend to quickly diagnose and affirm young people as transgender.”

The results were in line with what one might expect given those sources: 76.5% of parents surveyed “believed their child was incorrect in their belief of being transgender.” More than 85% said their child had increased their internet use and/or had trans friends before identifying as trans. The youths themselves had no say in the study, and there’s no telling if they had simply kept their parents in the dark for months or years before coming out. (Littman acknowledges that “parent-child conflict may also explain some of the findings.”) 

The Republicans took it as manna from heaven! This is what they wanted to discredit the liberals! Finally a paper that debunked the research on us and pushed their beleifs.

One reason for the success of Littman’s paper is that it validates the idea that trans kids are new. But Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins and author of Histories of the Transgender Child, says that is “empirically untrue.” Trans children have only recently started to be discussed in mainstream media, so people assume they weren’t around before, she says, but “there have been children transitioning for as long as there has been transition-related medical technology,” and children were socially transitioning—living as a different gender without any medical or legal interventions—long before that.

The conservatives were dancing the street, the paper was pulled by an angry liberal conspiracy not because shoddy research but by liberal pressure!

When Littman’s paper appeared in 2018, there was science that supported youth transition, but little longitudinal research and few studies with large cohorts. Researchers are still filling in the gaps. There are researchers and clinicians treating patients who agree with Littman and say ROGD is a real and growing phenomenon that they’ve witnessed firsthand.

But a July 2022 study found that five years after socially transitioning, 94% of youth surveyed still identified as transgender and 3.5% identified as nonbinary. 

And research has shown that family acceptance and appropriate medical intervention can have lasting benefits. In February 2022, for example, researchers reported that trans and nonbinary youths who went on puberty blockers or hormones had 60% lower odds of depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality, compared with those who did not.

But all that research doesn’t matter because it is all liberal conspiracy to hide the truth as they see it.

Let’s face it this research is not going away, the Republicans are going to keep dragging it out when every they try to pass anti-trans legislation.