Buckle up, kids. We’re going to be here for a while.

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is a term given to the notion that someone (usually an adolescent) becomes dysphoric about their gender all at once instead of gradually over time. Since the world is full of stories about kids wanting to be the opposite sex from a very young age and then never grew out of it, kids who are considered to have Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (RODG from here on out) are thought to have manifested said dysphoria all at once, and thus may be being pressured to be trans by outside forces.

Yes, there are actually people dumb enough to believe that’s a thing. I can promise you that no one ever pressured me to BE transgender, but I got plenty of pressure not to be.

In August of this year (2018) Lisa Littman, a behavioral scientist at Brown University published a study called Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports, wherein she states that ” The purpose of this study was to document and explore these observations and describe the resulting presentation of gender dysphoria, which is inconsistent with existing research literature.” It’s a mission statement she completely disregards in her methodology since she didn’t do any actual observing, but more on that later. In a nutshell, this whole paper is utter nonsense, but the way she chose to structure her study alone should get her laughed out of academia. Never have I seen a more blatant example of structuring a research method to fit the desired result outside of a church.

Part I: Just What the Hell Are You Trying to Prove?!

Littman’s method for studying ROGD in adolescence was to send out an online survey on websites, “where parents had reported rapid onsets of gender dysphoria”. By the way, if you’re already foaming at the mouth because the flaws associated with this are flashing like signs on the Las Vegas strip, please sit patiently because I’m getting to all of that. I’m the one doing the work so let me have my fun.

Littman had 256 parents participate in the survey. Each survey consisted of 90 questions ranging from everything to their child’s age, sex, home life, school performance, mental or physical impairments, social circles, etc. It also asked how long ago the child came out as transgender, whether they’d shown any signs of being transgender before, how their peers reacted to them coming out, how they behaved online, etc. It’s extremely important to note that the input of the adolescence themselves was never included in Littman’s research. No questions were asked of them and I’m not certain they even knew they were part of the study unless their parents told them. I for one would consider their input to be pertinent data for the study, but more on that later.

Littman concluded her findings by saying, “ROGD appears to represent an entity that is distinct from the gender dysphoria observed in individuals who have previously been described as transgender.” Please keep in mind that this finding is, like all of her other findings, 100% based on the input of parents and not the subjects themselves, so anything about the adolescence that was never directly observed by the parents is not considered. She also concluded that “The worsening of mental well-being and parent-child relationships and behaviors that isolate [adolescence] from their parents, families, non-transgender friends and mainstream sources of information are particularly concerning.” And this is not surprising given her astoundingly flawed method of sampling, but we’ll get to that too.

There’s a lot to keep unpacking in this study, so let’s dig into the fundamental errors (or science fails) that it contains.

Part II: Madame, Please Control Yourself!

Another widely believed but easily debunked notion about transgender people (though in this case specifically transgender women) is autogynephilia. Autogynephilia is basically the idea that a transgender woman doesn’t transition due to her innate sense of self clashing with her body and assigned gender role but rather because of a sexual fetish whereby she gets off on the notion of having a female body. It was a theory brought forth by Sexologist Ray Blanchard in 1989. I could never hope to do a better deconstruction of Blanchard than the great Natalie Wynn already has, so you should absolutely check out her Youtube Video on it. (Seriously, Natalie, you’re a goddess).

I only bring up Blanchard and his theory here because the most often pointed-out flaw in his study also applies to Littman: there was no control group. For those who don’t know, a control group is a set of subjects outside your focus group that you administer the same tests on to determine if the focus group is indeed different in regards to whatever you were testing for. Blanchard “proved” that trans women were autogynephilic basically by demonstrating that we like to dress up in lingerie and look at ourselves in the mirror, but he completely ignored that cisgender women do that as well. Cis women like to dress up and feel sexy too, but sexologists like to refer to that as body positivity and self-empowerment instead of some fetish with the suffix -philia slapped on the end.

The lack of a control group robs context from any data you extrapolate from your subjects. If you don’t know how those same findings apply to subjects outside of your focus group then you can’t arrive at any conclusions based on them. Trans women enjoying sexy outfits make us seem like fetishists until you notice that cis women are no different. Basically, you can’t call something abnormal if other people do it too.

To understand how a control group would have figured into this study, it’s important to look at how the subjects themselves were considered (although even that wording doesn’t seem fair because the subjects themselves never were observed or questioned, only their already biased parents). The adolescent subjects were questioned against their existing peers (that’s important for later) so that the dynamics of the group could be calculated. Littman’s goal was to demonstrate that peer pressure can result in the adolescence believing they are trans instead of it coming from their own independent thoughts. She did this by gauging how many of the group of friends were trans, what order they came out in, and how they were received by said friends after coming out, with some other data points thrown in there too. There’s also an attempt to tie ROGD with previously diagnosed neurological disorders, as well as home life disturbances and past traumas like rape (yes, we’re bringing back out the ‘you’re only trans because you got molested’ argument; fuck me).

Littman’s “research” arrives at a bunch of statistics and percentages that all make for interesting tidbits of knowledge but the lack of a control group renders them meaningless. Take a look at this section from her publication:

“The majority (62.5%) of [adolescents] had one or more diagnoses of a psychiatric disorder or neurodevelopmental disability preceding the onset of gender dysphoria (range of the number of pre-existing diagnoses 0–7). Many (48.4%) had experienced a traumatic or stressful event prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria. Open text descriptions of trauma were categorized as “family” (including parental divorce, death of a parent, mental disorder in a sibling or parent), “sex or gender related[sic]” (such as rape, attempted rape, sexual harassment, abusive dating relationship, break-up), “social” (such as bullying, social isolation), “moving” (family relocation or change of schools); “psychiatric” (such as psychiatric hospitalization), and medical (such as serious illness or medical hospitalization). Almost half (45.0%) of [adolescents] were engaging in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) behavior before the onset of GD. Coping styles for these [adolescents] included having a poor or extremely poor ability to handle negative emotions productively (58.0%) and being overwhelmed by strong emotions and trying to avoid (or go to great lengths to avoid) experiencing them (61.4%) (Table 4). The majority of respondents (69.4%) answered that their child had social anxiety during adolescence; 44.3% that their child had difficulty interacting with their peers, and 43.1% that their child had a history of being isolated (not associating with their peers outside of school activities).”

This is all kind of interesting, Littman, but what does it tell us? You didn’t survey any of this stuff for any adolescents outside of your focus group. Are these rates of trauma, neurological impairments, emotional instability, etc. any different from adolescents who aren’t saying they’re transgender? If you’re trying to prove that any of this can be an indicator of or lead to ROGD then we have to know if your test subjects experience these afflictions at a greater amount than their cisgender peers. I’m sure these weren’t the only kids in school whose parents split up or were treated for anxiety.

The lack of a control group makes every single data point in this study absolutely meaningless. What we’re left with is a bunch of factoids about these specific groups of adolescents, which do not demonstrate evidence of anything whatsoever.

Part III: Carts Don’t Pull Horses

In Littman’s study, she asked parents to tell her about their kids, specifically how they interacted with their friends. The goal, again, was to prove peer pressure was linked to ROGD by demonstrating how several members in a social group all either were transgender or came out as a result of being around other transgender people. She also discussed online influences such as social media, suggesting essentially that the internet tricked them into thinking they’re transgender. Her finding report that “In the time period just before announcing that they were transgender, 63.5% of [adolescents] exhibited an increase in their internet/social media.”

The rebuttal to this feels so obvious that it’s groan-worthy that I even need to point it out. Littman had the parents talk about their kids and the kids they were already friends with. Friendships and social circles form based on shared interests, experiences, or a combination thereof. It is entirely plausible, and I dare say probable, that these kids got together in the first place because they were already experiencing some degree of gender dysphoria unbeknownst to their parents (and trust me, we’re going to get to the parents in a bit).

How could this have possibly been missed by Littman? It’s not like transgender individuals were introduced to other groups of adolescents to see if any of them later became dysphoric. That would have been a more conclusive way to test her theory. I couldn’t find anything in the study about why the adolescents became friends in the first place, and that being a mystery casts doubt over all of her data like an eclipse.

And let’s talk about internet influences. There’s a saying (kinda) in trans circles that if you Google “am I transgender” then answer is yes because you wouldn’t be Googling that if you weren’t. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet, but your experience within it is easily curated to fit your tastes. This is the reason Alex Jones doesn’t get to claim he doesn’t know why trans porn was on his phone. The vast majority of the time, the internet either shows you what you want it to or what it’s showing you can very easily be shaped however you want it.

Given these facts, is it more likely that the adolescent subjects decided they were trans because they were seeing trans stuff online or that they were already questioning their gender and thus sought out answers and support? I can tell you that my browser history didn’t have any transgender stuff in it until dysphoria hit me like a truck at 22 and then it was all over my screen as I tried to make sense of it.

Littman’s methodology puts the cart before the horse; it flips the cause and effect. The likelihood that these kids pressured each other into being trans instead of seeking each other out because they were already questioning is marginal at best, and Occam’s Razor makes quick work of it.

Of course, all of this probably would have come to light had the adolescents themselves been questioned instead of their parents, which brings me to…

Part IV: Parents Just Don’t Understand

A few weeks ago my mother and I actually sat down and had a real talk about my transition where we just laid everything on the table. One thing she mentioned was how she’d read stuff on trans people after I came out and saw multiple instances of kids showing “signs” from a young age. “You never showed us anything like that,” she said to me. What I had to explain to her was that I did all of my gender explorative stuff in my room with the door locked. She never saw it because I was careful as hell to make sure she never did. From her perspective, I never showed signs of questioning my gender, but her perspective wasn’t wholly representative of the facts.

In all honesty, I could have saved myself a whole day of typing by simply debunking this garbage study from the title alone. She states right there in bold letters that it’s “A Study of Parental Reports.” Every piece of data in this study is filtered through the completely subjective lens of the parent’s perspective. We never get to hear a single thing from the adolescents themselves. The notion that these kids didn’t think they were trans until they told their parents doesn’t even consider that maybe, just maybe the kids knew it long beforehand (or were at least questioning) and were too scared to tell them. And I’m not stating that as a fact either. I’m saying that we don’t know and will never know because this study is unrepresentative garbage.

I knew I identified as a girl when I was in Kindergarten. In my adolescence and teen years, I knew something felt off but I couldn’t put it into words. In my 20’s I got smacked with dysphoria and finally figured out I was trans. After that, I kept it a secret for another 7 years before I finally came out. At no point during any of that time did I talk to my parents about it. By their own admission, they had no clue, and that’s because I made sure they didn’t. This would have made them a terrible source of data for a study like this.

Kids fear rejection from their parents. They fear isolation from their peers. These fears are the main reason transgender people choose not to come out. The parents in Littman’s study were reporting based on an incomplete understanding of their child’s experience, and now Littman is presenting that report as evidence of ROGD. Personally, I find that disgusting. But there’s more to the parent problem than just ignorance.

Part V: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy

Are you wondering where Littman found these parents in the first place? Did she ask around at clinics? Did she sit in on a PFLAG meeting? How on Earth did she find 256 participants who all had kids with a supposed case of ROGD? Well, she explains it right near the beginning of the study and reading it did not do good things for my blood pressure.

“Recruitment information with a link to a 90-question survey, consisting of multiple-choice, Likert-type and open-ended questions, was placed on three websites where parents had reported rapid onsets of gender dysphoria.“

Feeling twitchy? Well, hold on, because it gets worse.

“Recruitment information with a link to the survey was placed on three websites where parents and professionals had been observed to describe rapid onset of gender dysphoria (4thwavenow, transgender trend, and youthtranscriticalprofessionals). Website moderators and potential participants were encouraged to share the recruitment information and link to the survey with any individuals or communities that they thought might include eligible participants to expand the reach of the project through snowball sampling techniques.”

And there you have it! Littman found her subjects on three of the most blatantly anti-transgender websites on the internet. Remember what I said earlier about internet experiences being easily curated to show you what you want to see? Well, if you’re an angry mom seeking out other angry moms to help convince you that your trans child really is just a victim of those goddamn liberal activists, then a quick Google search will probably land you somewhere in this unholy trinity.

Should we determine if Hispanic immigrants are a threat to America by polling people at a Trump rally? How about we find out how good Samsung phones are by asking the folks who work at Apple? If you go in search of transgender information on websites dedicated to anti-transgender rhetoric then you’re guaranteed to only get a certain kind of answer. And the moderators of these websites were the ones promoting the survey. How unbiased do you think they were in presenting it to potential participants? They moderate forums saturated in anti-transgender rhetoric. Again, I’m not stating for fact that they weren’t presented that way, but given the social atmosphere of the websites in question, does anyone really think the survey was distributed in a way that wouldn’t skew the results?

So now we have biases within biases. Not only are these parents going off of incomplete information, they’re doing so after spending time in anti-transgender echo-chambers where their worst assumptions about their kids are being amplified back at them. There are sources Littman could have used to even out the sample group, but she didn’t. This is nothing more than reckless, shameless, shoddy science.

Part VI: Conclusion

This study of ROGD is akin to a theologian going out in search of Noah’s Ark and considering any sunken ship they find a success. It is unscientific horseshit. ROGD isn’t a diagnosis, it isn’t a condition, it’s a belief. It’s a belief held by narrow-minded, hateful people who refuse to have their worldview challenged. In the case of parents, it’s a cop-out so you don’t have to admit that your kids don’t tell you absolutely everything and obviously for good reason: because you’re a shitty parent.

Studies like this are an answer in search of evidence. They’re an interpretation of a Rorschach Test presented as empirical data. And, what’s worse, those who’ve already made up their minds that transgender people are deranged perverts or misguided kids too stupid to know who they really are will latch onto this as “evidence” of what they already made their minds up on long ago.

Lisa Littman should be laughed out of academia for this mutilation of the scientific method. Brown University should be embarrassed to have her on their staff. Not only is this bad science, it’s bad science that perpetuates the problems facing transgender youth. This is agenda-driven drivel wearing academic merit like a Halloween costume. ROGD isn’t real, or at least it’s validity has yet to be proven by any method that actually stands up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny.