Thank you for this review. I graduated HS in 1997, and I was the only person I knew to be out. It was deeply uncomfortable: everyone disapproved, my parents were tight-lipped unhappy, etc, etc.
It’s so clear me that if the adults at the time could have blamed peer pressure and the internet for the existence of their gay, lesbian, and bisexual kids, they would have jumped on that.
I feel so terrible for the maybe-trans kids of these parents. They deserve so much better than parents who assume they know their kids better than the kids know themselves.
This strikes me as basically phrenology for pride. It's the same old shit about "the gays" with the serial numbers filed off.
The ROGD thing is pretty clearly just social acceptance. It's a "contagion" the same way that gay people living public, natural lives is a contagion. It's the trans equivalent of gay pride. It's the trans equivalent of the civil rights movement. Both things that not-so-coincidentally are back under attack again after what felt like years of real progress.
As there are more trans and non-binary folks out there and as kids see them go through their lives and be accepted and be happy, they are more likely to question the dysmorphia in them head on and bring that exploration out into daylight. It's a pretty simple concept. Sexuality and gender identity aren't things that you consciously choose. But they *are* things you can consiously express.
And I think that in the end this is about two things. Men terrified of the idea that they'll date a girl and find out there's an extra penis involved and that they'll *love* it, and the aesthetics of what they consider to be socially masculine or feminine. Which is horseshit, because if you look back at typical gendered, especially male (because this whole thing is super-obsessed with MtF to a degree that in and of itself should probably be studied) aesthetic going back through the centuries, you find a *lot* of things that we'd normally associate with femininity today being considered manly and masculine. Makeup, nail tint/polish, long hair, wigs, fucking showing off shapely calves, tights/leggings, the list goes on. Aesthetics associated with gender are an intrinsicly fluid thing.
Even Coco Chanel, not exactly associated with masculinity, was obsessed with androgeny. Her entire appraoch to fashion (before becoming a Nazi) was about adapting more and more male elements of fashion into the late 19th and early 20th century feminine fashion, ultimately leaning into androgeny. I don't study it a lot and someone who has may correct me, but from what I can tell, androgeny and gender fluid aesthetics seem like the traditional start of new fashion cycles in society. It's society saying "fuck it" and shuffling the deck of cards a few times to start a new game. The rules break down and new social rules get built up out of the comingled concepts going on.
On another note, there's a behavoral psychologist PhD named Lindsey Osterman who used to co-host Serious Inquiries Only and did several deep dives into trans fearmongering and even into Littman's study that you tear apart here. She does an excellent job of critiquing the methodology and the study itself and the two parter is worth a listen.
Dr Osterman doesn't have a big online presence, and she may be burned out from her experience in doing podcasting, but she is one of the best communicators in science literacy that I've encountered and has done quite a bit of dissection of the anti-trans movement and might be able to provide some additional insight if you could contact her.
Great article as always. Looking for the next drop.
Androgynous aesthetics do not merit cosmetic endocrinology or amputations.
Female teens are famously prone to social contagions, particularly related to body dysmorphia, which have historically included cutting, bulimia and anorexia. They are also prone to social contagions which mimic psychiatric conditions such as Tourette's Syndrome or multiple identity disorder.
Why is it not reasonable to question claims about a psychiatric disorder (whose treatment parallels past waves of self-harming behavior) might be prone to social contagion?
Amputating one's breasts or taking drugs which atrophy organs to the point of removal seems a bit different than a short haircut and some masculine formal wear.
See you're missing my point. My overarching point about androgeny is that if there's social contagion going on, it's potentially impacting *you* because trans people and androgenistic fashion is more visible today than 10 years ago.
As far as questions about gender dymorphia, this study ain't it (and I went back and reviewed it and it's even shittier than Laura got into). It's cherry-picked from populations of parents that are experiencing difficulty in their childrens' dysmorphia. But it goes so, so, SO far beyond that. It expresses the direct goal of the researcher *in the introduction to the survey*, contaminating the responses with an expectation that expressly lined up with the preconceived notions of the survey takers, the questions themselves were written in a loaded, suggestive way that reinforced these preconceived notions, many of her statistics are just... floating in the ether and have no control or baseline to compare it to, and so her conclusions of a social contagion literally have no basis because there literally is nothing to compare to, and perhaps most hilariously, it assumed parents had complete, accurate information on their childrens' lives before and after their communication of dysmorphia.
The idea that parents know all of a teenager's personal life is fucking *hilarious*. So hilarious that among the corrections that Littman had to do, and there are many many many corrections, includes admitting that instead of this ROGD thing that she *made up out of whole cloth before even starting the study* that it could just be that parents weren't seeing the warning signs. Because, you know, there was no interviews or surveys of actual trans kids to find out their side of things. I mean, a can of cling peaches who has been around for a minute can look at the experiences of gay kids coming out to their folks and find a plethora of "it came out of nowhere!" stories from the parents.
Additionally, this idea of ROGD is actually undermined by the next study Littman put out on detransitioners. The percentage of detransitioners who were exposed to the "social contagions" that Littman is postulating are driving this are reported *significantly* lower, sometimes more than half, depending on the demograpic. The amount of social pressure on people who stopped or reversed their transition is *drastically* lower than what is reported in this first dumpster fire of a "study".
And that study is a trash fire too in it's conclusions. It's marginally better constructed but it's really, *really* weird how Littman loves to combine response categories into what feels significant and then refuse to share the raw data, so we only get vague amalgamations of answers and no actual information, but we get hyper-specific and assertive conclusions and political policy from that work. For example, there are questions about satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the transitioning process that are gradiated, which is fine, but she doesn't share with us those gradiations, so we don't see how dissatisfied those people were, or even if it's a mixed bag where they were satisfied *and* dissatisfied with the experience. Other studies *have* broken that down and show that even detransitioners can still be satisfied with their experience and not regret it. Like, maybe they weren't happy with the outcome of a surgery but not the concept of a surgery itself. It's a super complex topic and Littman intentionally obscures that.
Or here's another one, there's no information on a detransitioner's overall feelings on their experiences correlated to what level of detransitioning they went through- did they stop presenting socially? Did they reverse surgery? Those numbers are there, the data and comparisons are in Littman's survey responses, she doesn't share that information with us. If we're "just asking questions" we have to ask why.
It's trash science.
And as far as "mutilation" and your shock language, humans have been mutilating themselves for a loooooong time now to bring themselves closer in line with how they want to look and society is totally cool with it. FFS in the 19th century men put *goat testicles* into their scrotums for virility and to have a bigger set of nads.
And let's go down the list of socially accepted "mutilalations" here as a refresher, and note that *many* of these are available for children, and in recent years politically have been defended to be explicitly available for children:
Tattoos, piercings, brandings, tongue splits, eye tinting, liposuction, tummy tuck, plastic surgery, otoplasty, rhinoplasty, breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, facelifts, breast reductions, buttock augmentations, brow lifts, breast lifts, labiaplasty, arm lift, lip augmentation, platysmaplasty, body lift, chemical peels, dermabrasion, botox, hair transplants, permanent hair removal, injectable filler, chin aumentations, penile implants, and that's just what I could come up with in short order. We change our bodies, including our genitals, *constantly*, and it's not just women/girls. If you want to scream, and I'm not being hyperbolic here, everyone I know that has read it has cried out in terror, read this propublica article on penile surgery:
Top and bottom surgeries and hormone therapy or puberty blockers is gentle compared to that article. It's also incredibly effective. Even by Littman's own studies it's failure rate, rejection rate, and regret rate is *far* lower than other optional surgical and medical procedures. That's not to say we should ignore that population, or the parents of kids who transition or decide they are non-binary. We should have compassion for them and learn from their stories. But this whole debate isn't about compassion, it's about control. Littman's studies have no suggestions on behavioral or psychological approaches to mitigate the situation. This study in particular goes directly to large scale political policies in it's conclusions based on a study that by the author's own eventual admission doesn't lend support for her hypothesis.
The "just asking questions" bad faith argument misses or ignores that the kinds of "questions" you're asking *are* being studied, intensely, and that there is debate going on. But it's not sexy, it's not dramatic, it doesn't assure *you* that you're normal and they're not. It doesn't give a political wedge issue to fight over.
I find it fascinating that for all your concern with social contagion you haven't looked at or thought about the timing of this entire controversy socially, and who brought it up, and what was going on politically and socially. That you assume you couldn't possibly be victim of a satanic panic style "social contagion" yourself.
Littman's study was transparently about a self-selected group, as is common among published authors on this subject, such as Jack Turban's use of various "convenience sample" US Trans Surveys.
Methodologically, Littman was well within normal bounds.
So it's not *just* a self-selected group. She intentionally started out by selecting groups that would align with her hypothesis strongest, then pre-disposed them with a statement that defined ROGD and what she expected to find. And then *hid* that in her reporting. This is not good methodology. This is like trying to do a study on racial equality by starting out on The Daily Stormer and telling the test takers that this study will measure just how impossible racial relations really are and then pretending like this group self-selected.
And her second study on detransitioning suffers from similar issues. The people who were trying to recruit for the study started out in very trans-negative social media groups, and according to people familiar with the process gave up trying to find more representitive social media groups because, and I can't stress this enough, they were getting blocked for not asking for permission before posting. So they just didn't try. Not that you'd know that from the study, because that second study simply says "social media like facebook groups, tumblr, and reddit" without defining *what* groups were reached out to.
Again and again and again Littman is hiding parts of her studies. Maybe there's nothing there. Maybe there is. Maybe it'll show the study is even more crap than is apparent. We don't know.
There is some salvagable data in those studies despite her best efforts but she made constant foundational errors in how she built her studies and then hid those errors in order to create a false synthesis of the data and make completely unsupported conclusions and policy reccomendations. We should not be okay with this work if we're operating in good faith.
Seriously you need to do an A/B comparison of her paper before and after her edits. It's almost to the point of me saying "So it seems like there's a water deity that can make every upturned surfice with sky exposure wet" and then going and having to add in a section where I say "Of course, that could also be rain."
Her data is contradictory and isn't nearly as supportive of ROGD existing as she claims. In fact she had to reclassify her study as exploratory because it did not actually contribute to her presupposition that ROGD exists. That study presupposes an entire psychological diagnosis along with a pathology and then does *nothing* to establish it, instead expressing the experiences of 3rd parties and using that as empirical evidence. When other meta studies have been undertaken *specifically* to determine if ROGD exists, there's statistically negligible proof of ROGD and social contagion.
Like, the experiences of parents that struggle with their children transitioning is a legitimate thing to study and has value. And they should have our compassion and we should look at how to help them. But to do things like literally assume that parents had a comprehensive understanding of their teen child's social life pre and post coming out is fucking laughable. And to use that complete idiotic assertation as the "proof" that something you created out of whole cloth exists, and that there couldn't possibly be another explanation (going by her original paper) is so piss poor she should be shunned for it. And taking those anecdotes and making literally perscriptive national or even global policy reccomendations is the height of huberis.
Cutting and other forms of self-harm are far more complex than “contagion.” (What a word to use against kids who are suffering, by the way. I wouldn’t let you near my kids with that mouth.) You have no clue, Rory. Your questioning vocabulary belies your lack of true curiosity.
Having worked as an intermediate-grade and middle-school teacher, I think I've been pretty curious about adolescent development, and you are correct: Cutting and bulimia and anorexia and similar (counterproductive) adolescent behaviors are not exactly, etiologically identical to head lice.
Hate to say it but you’re a better science writer than the editors at Medscape. Great work. If Covid (and grad school for a mental health degree) has taught me anything it’s that we must be shrewd consumers of research. Even a greatest studies have biases. The quality authors will clearly describe the study’s limitations toward the end of the paper. If you don’t see any that directly impact the results, be suspicious. And don’t stop there - who’s funding it? And as so well described in this article, where did the participants come from and how were the questions structured? Thanks Laura, and I hope it was a nourishing trip.
Like I said, this isn't a serious question. You have some polemic you want to go off on and I've given you a launchpad for it (sigh). But maybe this will help address some of your questions:
I think the opening paragraph probably addresses most of what you'll need:
"A transgender person (often abbreviated to trans person) is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.[1] Many experience gender dysphoria, which they may seek to alleviate through transitioning,[2] often adopting a different name and set of pronouns in the process."
But...maybe you're more in earnest than you seem. Candidly, you don't really seem to actually want to understand, but maybe you're not being willfully blind. If so, I think what you might be thinking/claiming is that there's no difference between saying "I'm trans" and saying "I'm a fucking purple butterfly". However, I think what you might be missing is that the person identifying as trans is really saying that they have understood something fundamental about themselves in a way that is not some flippant joke and that (and this is important) has very little to do with strangers on the internet. As an example of that kind of fundamental understanding of oneself, you must know, deep down, that you are Rory Bowman and what that means. Does that mean anything more than you just saying "I'm Rory Bowman"? If I say, instead, "I'm Rory Bowman", does that make me you? No. Of course not. You know something fundamental about yourself and (I hope) could give less than a shit about what I think about that.
So "trans" is basically (a) to believe in "gender identity" and (b) declare oneself "trans," which is pretty much what I had surmised. No further action is ever necessary.
Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark are in solidarity with analyses such as those of NICE and The Cass Report in the United Kingdom, which led to the dismantling of that nation's main, NHS "gender clinic."
Denmark seems to be joining Sweden, Finland, the UK and others in rejecting pediatric "transition," https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/doubt-in-denmark, with a special nod to concerns about late (or rapid) onset claims of dysphoria.
"Under the new arrangements, children will only be sent for gender treatment by specialist NHS mental health or paediatric services. Those under seven years of age will not be considered for referral. In a separate rule change, puberty blockers will also no longer be prescribed outside of clinical trials for those aged 10-17, and only then for children who experienced early-onset gender dysphoria."
I'm not even sure if I can engage on this post given Brandolini's law on bullshit asymmetry, that "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
To begin with, this article assume that there is a substantive and real category of "truly trans" youth that can someone be discerned and should be "treated" with hormones and surgery, rather than a currently faddish, quasi-religious belief in "gender identity" or essence that is sold a bill of goods. I disagree with this, and suspect that a number of secular and materialist feminists (sometimes categorized as "second wave") would as well.
Continuing, a childless thirty-something commenting on this issue is much closer developmentally to the adolescents in question here than their parents, and I suspect that (1) a lack of parenting experience and (2) unawareness of adolescent development cycles is at play, (3) perhaps accompanying some "mommy issues" around authority and concomittant motivations got "own the TERFs."
Thirdly, this argument seems to ignore the very real phenomenon of social contagion, which has been fairly well accepted since at least Goethe's time, with The Sorrows of Young Werther and "Werther effect" of copy-cat suicides, which are part of modern public-health guidelines to this day.
Yes, adolescents are prone to peer pressure and social contagion in rates higher than the general population and yes, that effect seems more pronounced in adolescent females. Why is it forbidden to ask how this particular version of body dysmorphia and "nonbinary" or "trans" or gender-aware fashion might be tied to that?
I'm seeing a lot of young ignorance of how peer pressure works over the long haul, and a lot of young arrogance about how stupid and blithely oppressive older adults are, along with a huge acceptance of philosophical essentialism and quasi-religious beliefs about "gender" essence or identity.
One cannot intelligently analyze Littman's research area and choices if one begins and never strays from these assumptions, which are also difficult to distinguish from smug self-righteousness and a blithe belief in "youth" and "progress."
That young people will be physically damaged by endocrine disruption and amputations is only part of the damage here, especially when other more substantive and treatable (comorbid) issues are ignored.
As with the fentanyl issue, eventually all of this will self-correct, but at great pain cost.
Other than the verbal declaration of such, whether followed by action of any sort or not, what does it mean to "be trans?" In what way is the assertion of trans identity a cogent category except in that narrowest sense?
It's deadly serious, because it goes to the question of ROGD and whether it exists, since I don't believe that Laura is (a) denying the existence of social contagion among teenage girls, (b) denying the data on social contagion and suicide generally, (c) denying that social contagion is present among adolescent females for cutting, bulimia, anorexia or other "disorders." Perhaps she is, but she ALSO seems to be assuming that there is a cogent category called "trans," and I'm not sure there is.
I know what means for someone to say "I am trans," and I know what it means to begin "social transition" with pronoun requests or name changes. I know what it means to seek out puberty retardants, to be given those or cross-sex hormones, and what it is to receive one of several elective and cosmetic surgeries. But which of those things qualifies one as "trans" and how is identity distinct from the treatment?
Diabetes is defined objectively using measure such as blood sugar levels. One becomes a tattooed person by getting a tattoo or an amputee by having a body part surgically removed. What makes someone "trans" and at what point do they qualify?
What are teenage girls doing that "makes them trans," exactly? If one cannot define that, how can one even begin to address the presence or absence of social contagion?
What does it mean to "be trans" other than to claim that one is?
Claims of trans identity CLEARLY cluster in friend groups, and largely by demographics such as sex and race and income.
Perhaps my reasoning would make more sense if we substituted "demonic possession" for "gender dysphoria" or "trans identity."
I do not believe in demonic possession, and understand gender dysphoria as a fairly rare psychiatric condition. Where on that spectrum does "trans identity" fall, and what makes it more or less prone to social contagion than other well-documented behaviors in female adolescents such as bulimia, anorexia or "cutting?"
You seem to see a brave new world of understanding about the essence of human souls, while many of those older with more experience see a fad.
Teenage ideas about "gender" are neither interesting nor well-founded, beyond any adolescent's obvious issues with arbitrary standards and sexism.
What makes you think it needs to interest you to be valid? I’m 50, by the way, and I don’t think that qualifies me more or less. The nonbinary gender model is hardly a new concept. Your pathologizing language likening trans people to plague carriers suggests you deserve no more of anyone’s time on this thread. We’ve tried to lay it out for you. Finally, your understanding of the etiology of eating disorders is incomplete and flawed, and sets up all kinds of fallacious arguments. You see a fad - you’d do better to leave it at that.
Gender variance is not new, but the industrial promise that it can be "cured" with endocrine disruption and amputation is.
My radical argument is that normal rules around evidence-based medicine and age-of-consent laws should apply, in keeping with medical principles of parsimony and "first do no harm."
There is no evidence that radical "gender affirmation" is a more effective treatment than traditional "watchful waiting," under which most gender-anxious youth resolve as LGB.
There isn't even evidence that it is better than placebo, or is not a distracting placebo itself with eternal promises that the next treatment will deliver one to some "promised land" of self-acceptance in a stable and adult body.
In the “narrowest sense,” for those who who see “trans” as stepping out of one gender into THE other. In a more open sense, which I see manifest in people in in my life every day and thus reality, it’s a stepping away from THE binary.
If identification as "trans" did not involve endocrine disruption and amputation, there would be much less of an issue.
Very few people have major issues with androgyny, and we can talk about sexism without cutting off body parts and promoting a lot of garbage "true essence" pseudo-physics.
This is a public health issue because insurance and public funds are being used to cause permanent iatrogenic harm (and possible lifelong dependencies).
At core I don't care if yuppies sterilize their kids, their children hate them, or if same said children commit suicide.
My ethical obligation is fair warning, and I have fulfilled that.
Thank you for this review. I graduated HS in 1997, and I was the only person I knew to be out. It was deeply uncomfortable: everyone disapproved, my parents were tight-lipped unhappy, etc, etc.
It’s so clear me that if the adults at the time could have blamed peer pressure and the internet for the existence of their gay, lesbian, and bisexual kids, they would have jumped on that.
I feel so terrible for the maybe-trans kids of these parents. They deserve so much better than parents who assume they know their kids better than the kids know themselves.
This strikes me as basically phrenology for pride. It's the same old shit about "the gays" with the serial numbers filed off.
The ROGD thing is pretty clearly just social acceptance. It's a "contagion" the same way that gay people living public, natural lives is a contagion. It's the trans equivalent of gay pride. It's the trans equivalent of the civil rights movement. Both things that not-so-coincidentally are back under attack again after what felt like years of real progress.
As there are more trans and non-binary folks out there and as kids see them go through their lives and be accepted and be happy, they are more likely to question the dysmorphia in them head on and bring that exploration out into daylight. It's a pretty simple concept. Sexuality and gender identity aren't things that you consciously choose. But they *are* things you can consiously express.
And I think that in the end this is about two things. Men terrified of the idea that they'll date a girl and find out there's an extra penis involved and that they'll *love* it, and the aesthetics of what they consider to be socially masculine or feminine. Which is horseshit, because if you look back at typical gendered, especially male (because this whole thing is super-obsessed with MtF to a degree that in and of itself should probably be studied) aesthetic going back through the centuries, you find a *lot* of things that we'd normally associate with femininity today being considered manly and masculine. Makeup, nail tint/polish, long hair, wigs, fucking showing off shapely calves, tights/leggings, the list goes on. Aesthetics associated with gender are an intrinsicly fluid thing.
Even Coco Chanel, not exactly associated with masculinity, was obsessed with androgeny. Her entire appraoch to fashion (before becoming a Nazi) was about adapting more and more male elements of fashion into the late 19th and early 20th century feminine fashion, ultimately leaning into androgeny. I don't study it a lot and someone who has may correct me, but from what I can tell, androgeny and gender fluid aesthetics seem like the traditional start of new fashion cycles in society. It's society saying "fuck it" and shuffling the deck of cards a few times to start a new game. The rules break down and new social rules get built up out of the comingled concepts going on.
On another note, there's a behavoral psychologist PhD named Lindsey Osterman who used to co-host Serious Inquiries Only and did several deep dives into trans fearmongering and even into Littman's study that you tear apart here. She does an excellent job of critiquing the methodology and the study itself and the two parter is worth a listen.
https://seriouspod.com/sio314-lisa-littmans-bogus-trans-studies-part-1/
https://seriouspod.com/sio315-lisa-littmans-latest-trans-study-is-garbage/
Dr Osterman doesn't have a big online presence, and she may be burned out from her experience in doing podcasting, but she is one of the best communicators in science literacy that I've encountered and has done quite a bit of dissection of the anti-trans movement and might be able to provide some additional insight if you could contact her.
Great article as always. Looking for the next drop.
Androgynous aesthetics do not merit cosmetic endocrinology or amputations.
Female teens are famously prone to social contagions, particularly related to body dysmorphia, which have historically included cutting, bulimia and anorexia. They are also prone to social contagions which mimic psychiatric conditions such as Tourette's Syndrome or multiple identity disorder.
Why is it not reasonable to question claims about a psychiatric disorder (whose treatment parallels past waves of self-harming behavior) might be prone to social contagion?
Amputating one's breasts or taking drugs which atrophy organs to the point of removal seems a bit different than a short haircut and some masculine formal wear.
See you're missing my point. My overarching point about androgeny is that if there's social contagion going on, it's potentially impacting *you* because trans people and androgenistic fashion is more visible today than 10 years ago.
As far as questions about gender dymorphia, this study ain't it (and I went back and reviewed it and it's even shittier than Laura got into). It's cherry-picked from populations of parents that are experiencing difficulty in their childrens' dysmorphia. But it goes so, so, SO far beyond that. It expresses the direct goal of the researcher *in the introduction to the survey*, contaminating the responses with an expectation that expressly lined up with the preconceived notions of the survey takers, the questions themselves were written in a loaded, suggestive way that reinforced these preconceived notions, many of her statistics are just... floating in the ether and have no control or baseline to compare it to, and so her conclusions of a social contagion literally have no basis because there literally is nothing to compare to, and perhaps most hilariously, it assumed parents had complete, accurate information on their childrens' lives before and after their communication of dysmorphia.
The idea that parents know all of a teenager's personal life is fucking *hilarious*. So hilarious that among the corrections that Littman had to do, and there are many many many corrections, includes admitting that instead of this ROGD thing that she *made up out of whole cloth before even starting the study* that it could just be that parents weren't seeing the warning signs. Because, you know, there was no interviews or surveys of actual trans kids to find out their side of things. I mean, a can of cling peaches who has been around for a minute can look at the experiences of gay kids coming out to their folks and find a plethora of "it came out of nowhere!" stories from the parents.
Additionally, this idea of ROGD is actually undermined by the next study Littman put out on detransitioners. The percentage of detransitioners who were exposed to the "social contagions" that Littman is postulating are driving this are reported *significantly* lower, sometimes more than half, depending on the demograpic. The amount of social pressure on people who stopped or reversed their transition is *drastically* lower than what is reported in this first dumpster fire of a "study".
And that study is a trash fire too in it's conclusions. It's marginally better constructed but it's really, *really* weird how Littman loves to combine response categories into what feels significant and then refuse to share the raw data, so we only get vague amalgamations of answers and no actual information, but we get hyper-specific and assertive conclusions and political policy from that work. For example, there are questions about satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the transitioning process that are gradiated, which is fine, but she doesn't share with us those gradiations, so we don't see how dissatisfied those people were, or even if it's a mixed bag where they were satisfied *and* dissatisfied with the experience. Other studies *have* broken that down and show that even detransitioners can still be satisfied with their experience and not regret it. Like, maybe they weren't happy with the outcome of a surgery but not the concept of a surgery itself. It's a super complex topic and Littman intentionally obscures that.
Or here's another one, there's no information on a detransitioner's overall feelings on their experiences correlated to what level of detransitioning they went through- did they stop presenting socially? Did they reverse surgery? Those numbers are there, the data and comparisons are in Littman's survey responses, she doesn't share that information with us. If we're "just asking questions" we have to ask why.
It's trash science.
And as far as "mutilation" and your shock language, humans have been mutilating themselves for a loooooong time now to bring themselves closer in line with how they want to look and society is totally cool with it. FFS in the 19th century men put *goat testicles* into their scrotums for virility and to have a bigger set of nads.
And let's go down the list of socially accepted "mutilalations" here as a refresher, and note that *many* of these are available for children, and in recent years politically have been defended to be explicitly available for children:
Tattoos, piercings, brandings, tongue splits, eye tinting, liposuction, tummy tuck, plastic surgery, otoplasty, rhinoplasty, breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, facelifts, breast reductions, buttock augmentations, brow lifts, breast lifts, labiaplasty, arm lift, lip augmentation, platysmaplasty, body lift, chemical peels, dermabrasion, botox, hair transplants, permanent hair removal, injectable filler, chin aumentations, penile implants, and that's just what I could come up with in short order. We change our bodies, including our genitals, *constantly*, and it's not just women/girls. If you want to scream, and I'm not being hyperbolic here, everyone I know that has read it has cried out in terror, read this propublica article on penile surgery:
https://www.propublica.org/article/penis-enlargement-enhancement-procedures-implants
Top and bottom surgeries and hormone therapy or puberty blockers is gentle compared to that article. It's also incredibly effective. Even by Littman's own studies it's failure rate, rejection rate, and regret rate is *far* lower than other optional surgical and medical procedures. That's not to say we should ignore that population, or the parents of kids who transition or decide they are non-binary. We should have compassion for them and learn from their stories. But this whole debate isn't about compassion, it's about control. Littman's studies have no suggestions on behavioral or psychological approaches to mitigate the situation. This study in particular goes directly to large scale political policies in it's conclusions based on a study that by the author's own eventual admission doesn't lend support for her hypothesis.
The "just asking questions" bad faith argument misses or ignores that the kinds of "questions" you're asking *are* being studied, intensely, and that there is debate going on. But it's not sexy, it's not dramatic, it doesn't assure *you* that you're normal and they're not. It doesn't give a political wedge issue to fight over.
I find it fascinating that for all your concern with social contagion you haven't looked at or thought about the timing of this entire controversy socially, and who brought it up, and what was going on politically and socially. That you assume you couldn't possibly be victim of a satanic panic style "social contagion" yourself.
Littman's study was transparently about a self-selected group, as is common among published authors on this subject, such as Jack Turban's use of various "convenience sample" US Trans Surveys.
Methodologically, Littman was well within normal bounds.
So it's not *just* a self-selected group. She intentionally started out by selecting groups that would align with her hypothesis strongest, then pre-disposed them with a statement that defined ROGD and what she expected to find. And then *hid* that in her reporting. This is not good methodology. This is like trying to do a study on racial equality by starting out on The Daily Stormer and telling the test takers that this study will measure just how impossible racial relations really are and then pretending like this group self-selected.
And her second study on detransitioning suffers from similar issues. The people who were trying to recruit for the study started out in very trans-negative social media groups, and according to people familiar with the process gave up trying to find more representitive social media groups because, and I can't stress this enough, they were getting blocked for not asking for permission before posting. So they just didn't try. Not that you'd know that from the study, because that second study simply says "social media like facebook groups, tumblr, and reddit" without defining *what* groups were reached out to.
Again and again and again Littman is hiding parts of her studies. Maybe there's nothing there. Maybe there is. Maybe it'll show the study is even more crap than is apparent. We don't know.
There is some salvagable data in those studies despite her best efforts but she made constant foundational errors in how she built her studies and then hid those errors in order to create a false synthesis of the data and make completely unsupported conclusions and policy reccomendations. We should not be okay with this work if we're operating in good faith.
Seriously you need to do an A/B comparison of her paper before and after her edits. It's almost to the point of me saying "So it seems like there's a water deity that can make every upturned surfice with sky exposure wet" and then going and having to add in a section where I say "Of course, that could also be rain."
Her data is contradictory and isn't nearly as supportive of ROGD existing as she claims. In fact she had to reclassify her study as exploratory because it did not actually contribute to her presupposition that ROGD exists. That study presupposes an entire psychological diagnosis along with a pathology and then does *nothing* to establish it, instead expressing the experiences of 3rd parties and using that as empirical evidence. When other meta studies have been undertaken *specifically* to determine if ROGD exists, there's statistically negligible proof of ROGD and social contagion.
Like, the experiences of parents that struggle with their children transitioning is a legitimate thing to study and has value. And they should have our compassion and we should look at how to help them. But to do things like literally assume that parents had a comprehensive understanding of their teen child's social life pre and post coming out is fucking laughable. And to use that complete idiotic assertation as the "proof" that something you created out of whole cloth exists, and that there couldn't possibly be another explanation (going by her original paper) is so piss poor she should be shunned for it. And taking those anecdotes and making literally perscriptive national or even global policy reccomendations is the height of huberis.
Cutting and other forms of self-harm are far more complex than “contagion.” (What a word to use against kids who are suffering, by the way. I wouldn’t let you near my kids with that mouth.) You have no clue, Rory. Your questioning vocabulary belies your lack of true curiosity.
Having worked as an intermediate-grade and middle-school teacher, I think I've been pretty curious about adolescent development, and you are correct: Cutting and bulimia and anorexia and similar (counterproductive) adolescent behaviors are not exactly, etiologically identical to head lice.
Hate to say it but you’re a better science writer than the editors at Medscape. Great work. If Covid (and grad school for a mental health degree) has taught me anything it’s that we must be shrewd consumers of research. Even a greatest studies have biases. The quality authors will clearly describe the study’s limitations toward the end of the paper. If you don’t see any that directly impact the results, be suspicious. And don’t stop there - who’s funding it? And as so well described in this article, where did the participants come from and how were the questions structured? Thanks Laura, and I hope it was a nourishing trip.
Like I said, this isn't a serious question. You have some polemic you want to go off on and I've given you a launchpad for it (sigh). But maybe this will help address some of your questions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender
I think the opening paragraph probably addresses most of what you'll need:
"A transgender person (often abbreviated to trans person) is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.[1] Many experience gender dysphoria, which they may seek to alleviate through transitioning,[2] often adopting a different name and set of pronouns in the process."
But...maybe you're more in earnest than you seem. Candidly, you don't really seem to actually want to understand, but maybe you're not being willfully blind. If so, I think what you might be thinking/claiming is that there's no difference between saying "I'm trans" and saying "I'm a fucking purple butterfly". However, I think what you might be missing is that the person identifying as trans is really saying that they have understood something fundamental about themselves in a way that is not some flippant joke and that (and this is important) has very little to do with strangers on the internet. As an example of that kind of fundamental understanding of oneself, you must know, deep down, that you are Rory Bowman and what that means. Does that mean anything more than you just saying "I'm Rory Bowman"? If I say, instead, "I'm Rory Bowman", does that make me you? No. Of course not. You know something fundamental about yourself and (I hope) could give less than a shit about what I think about that.
So "trans" is basically (a) to believe in "gender identity" and (b) declare oneself "trans," which is pretty much what I had surmised. No further action is ever necessary.
These folks went out of their way to find biased data to perform their analysis.
With Denmark formally deprecating pediatric "transition" last month, Scandinavia now seems in agreement.
https://segm.org/Denmark-sharply-restricts-youth-gender-transitions
Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark are in solidarity with analyses such as those of NICE and The Cass Report in the United Kingdom, which led to the dismantling of that nation's main, NHS "gender clinic."
Denmark seems to be joining Sweden, Finland, the UK and others in rejecting pediatric "transition," https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/doubt-in-denmark, with a special nod to concerns about late (or rapid) onset claims of dysphoria.
The GOP's culture-war reach grows longer… 8^)
Britain's NHS seems to believe in ROGD enough to have made a clinical policy to deprecate it, as per https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2023/08/06/the-government-must-move-further-and-faster-to-keep-childre/
"Under the new arrangements, children will only be sent for gender treatment by specialist NHS mental health or paediatric services. Those under seven years of age will not be considered for referral. In a separate rule change, puberty blockers will also no longer be prescribed outside of clinical trials for those aged 10-17, and only then for children who experienced early-onset gender dysphoria."
I'm not even sure if I can engage on this post given Brandolini's law on bullshit asymmetry, that "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
To begin with, this article assume that there is a substantive and real category of "truly trans" youth that can someone be discerned and should be "treated" with hormones and surgery, rather than a currently faddish, quasi-religious belief in "gender identity" or essence that is sold a bill of goods. I disagree with this, and suspect that a number of secular and materialist feminists (sometimes categorized as "second wave") would as well.
Continuing, a childless thirty-something commenting on this issue is much closer developmentally to the adolescents in question here than their parents, and I suspect that (1) a lack of parenting experience and (2) unawareness of adolescent development cycles is at play, (3) perhaps accompanying some "mommy issues" around authority and concomittant motivations got "own the TERFs."
Thirdly, this argument seems to ignore the very real phenomenon of social contagion, which has been fairly well accepted since at least Goethe's time, with The Sorrows of Young Werther and "Werther effect" of copy-cat suicides, which are part of modern public-health guidelines to this day.
Yes, adolescents are prone to peer pressure and social contagion in rates higher than the general population and yes, that effect seems more pronounced in adolescent females. Why is it forbidden to ask how this particular version of body dysmorphia and "nonbinary" or "trans" or gender-aware fashion might be tied to that?
I'm seeing a lot of young ignorance of how peer pressure works over the long haul, and a lot of young arrogance about how stupid and blithely oppressive older adults are, along with a huge acceptance of philosophical essentialism and quasi-religious beliefs about "gender" essence or identity.
One cannot intelligently analyze Littman's research area and choices if one begins and never strays from these assumptions, which are also difficult to distinguish from smug self-righteousness and a blithe belief in "youth" and "progress."
That young people will be physically damaged by endocrine disruption and amputations is only part of the damage here, especially when other more substantive and treatable (comorbid) issues are ignored.
As with the fentanyl issue, eventually all of this will self-correct, but at great pain cost.
Go team!
Great work. I look forward to the rest of the series. Till them, enjoy your time in the Maine woods.
I look forward to using “the fucksaw crowd” at every opportunity.
Other than the verbal declaration of such, whether followed by action of any sort or not, what does it mean to "be trans?" In what way is the assertion of trans identity a cogent category except in that narrowest sense?
I mean, there are many medical steps that can be taken. But, you know, I don’t really think your question was a serious one.
It's deadly serious, because it goes to the question of ROGD and whether it exists, since I don't believe that Laura is (a) denying the existence of social contagion among teenage girls, (b) denying the data on social contagion and suicide generally, (c) denying that social contagion is present among adolescent females for cutting, bulimia, anorexia or other "disorders." Perhaps she is, but she ALSO seems to be assuming that there is a cogent category called "trans," and I'm not sure there is.
I know what means for someone to say "I am trans," and I know what it means to begin "social transition" with pronoun requests or name changes. I know what it means to seek out puberty retardants, to be given those or cross-sex hormones, and what it is to receive one of several elective and cosmetic surgeries. But which of those things qualifies one as "trans" and how is identity distinct from the treatment?
Diabetes is defined objectively using measure such as blood sugar levels. One becomes a tattooed person by getting a tattoo or an amputee by having a body part surgically removed. What makes someone "trans" and at what point do they qualify?
What are teenage girls doing that "makes them trans," exactly? If one cannot define that, how can one even begin to address the presence or absence of social contagion?
What does it mean to "be trans" other than to claim that one is?
Claims of trans identity CLEARLY cluster in friend groups, and largely by demographics such as sex and race and income.
This comment suffers from some of the flaws Jedeed describes in the article. Makes me wonder if you read it because…wow. Really?
Perhaps my reasoning would make more sense if we substituted "demonic possession" for "gender dysphoria" or "trans identity."
I do not believe in demonic possession, and understand gender dysphoria as a fairly rare psychiatric condition. Where on that spectrum does "trans identity" fall, and what makes it more or less prone to social contagion than other well-documented behaviors in female adolescents such as bulimia, anorexia or "cutting?"
You seem to see a brave new world of understanding about the essence of human souls, while many of those older with more experience see a fad.
Teenage ideas about "gender" are neither interesting nor well-founded, beyond any adolescent's obvious issues with arbitrary standards and sexism.
What makes you think it needs to interest you to be valid? I’m 50, by the way, and I don’t think that qualifies me more or less. The nonbinary gender model is hardly a new concept. Your pathologizing language likening trans people to plague carriers suggests you deserve no more of anyone’s time on this thread. We’ve tried to lay it out for you. Finally, your understanding of the etiology of eating disorders is incomplete and flawed, and sets up all kinds of fallacious arguments. You see a fad - you’d do better to leave it at that.
Gender variance is not new, but the industrial promise that it can be "cured" with endocrine disruption and amputation is.
My radical argument is that normal rules around evidence-based medicine and age-of-consent laws should apply, in keeping with medical principles of parsimony and "first do no harm."
There is no evidence that radical "gender affirmation" is a more effective treatment than traditional "watchful waiting," under which most gender-anxious youth resolve as LGB.
There isn't even evidence that it is better than placebo, or is not a distracting placebo itself with eternal promises that the next treatment will deliver one to some "promised land" of self-acceptance in a stable and adult body.
In the “narrowest sense,” for those who who see “trans” as stepping out of one gender into THE other. In a more open sense, which I see manifest in people in in my life every day and thus reality, it’s a stepping away from THE binary.
If identification as "trans" did not involve endocrine disruption and amputation, there would be much less of an issue.
Very few people have major issues with androgyny, and we can talk about sexism without cutting off body parts and promoting a lot of garbage "true essence" pseudo-physics.
An issue for who? It’s literally none of your business.
This is a public health issue because insurance and public funds are being used to cause permanent iatrogenic harm (and possible lifelong dependencies).
At core I don't care if yuppies sterilize their kids, their children hate them, or if same said children commit suicide.
My ethical obligation is fair warning, and I have fulfilled that.