Even by ROGD-skeptics’ own restrictive definitions, the U.S. Transgender Survey shows evidence of 2,127 people who reported a time course consistent with ROGD.
I am grateful for the efforts of all scientists and clinicians who are resisting the "gender affirmative care" movement and their unethical behaviors.
What is more telling than the number of kids who get official diagnoses, however, is the vast number of young Millennials and Gen Z'ers who are adopting "trans" and "non binary" identities, or who are supporting them in others, as a cool anti-Establishment lifestyle. The main difference between this latest generational fashion and the hippies, goths, etc., is that the "adults" and "The Establishment" mostly stayed out of youth lifestyles in the past. Or, at least the exploitation of the youth fads was more or less limited to making money off new clothing styles, makeup, and piercings.
Children are struggling, and they are having a particularly hard time with puberty. The reason so many girls want to change sex (and are being lied to that they can) is because they want to escape what is the most misogynist, sexist period of my life. There is no such thing as trans, yet the ideology has captured every democratic institution, and that was done in the most un-democratic way.
Having strangely acute episodic memory, I recall where and when as a 5-year-old I thought “Maybe I’m not a boy” when I grasped that I would not marry a woman and have kids. I called myself a “Janie-girl” to friends and parents. Unhappy about being bullied incessantly through childhood for feminine behavior - being a girl - by 9 I had self-diagnosed transsexualism with the help of the public library, I could probably walk to the stack with the books on psychiatry still. It reassured me that I would grow up and marry a man, and adopt kids. By 11 however as puberty began, after seeing and reading about gay men instead of listening to bullies, I began to realize I was plain old gay, and a year later at 12 was happily jacking off fantasizing about myself as male with men having sex.
That narrative is so common as to be unremarkable - and why I am fascinated by the current debate. Of course gay children are “confused” about sex and adult issues - they aren’t adults, no concept of sex other than what mommies and daddies do. Of course they’re unhappy about having the body of a boy and being g bullied about having behaviors “of a girl”.
Of course teens dislike their body changing. The time delay between when teens are unhappy about a body change, and being exposed to fictional trans explanations shortened drastically after 1998, then , due to zero buffering between teens and misinformation.
It used to take longer than a cycle of puberty for information to diffuse through a population (see slow rate of diffusion of teen pregnancy myths) then suddenly information flowed very rapidly (see the teen pregnancy rate that peaked and fell off a cliff just as Internet became worldwide - 1991 accelerated up to when “16 and Pregnant” began airing.) I suspect trans misinformation began to be seeded around a 1998 when Google came online, and an inflection began around 2004/5 with YouTube and Facebook becoming ubiquitous, then 2006 with Twitter.
The doubling rate of trans diagnoses - period in which the number doubles - slid feom around 9 years from 2000, to 2 years in 2019, a classic logistic growth curve (see bass diffusion models also). It’s not hard to reverse engineer the parameters at this point and see where the phenomenon is going ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function ), and where it ends.
I would posit that all trans identification before 20 is categorically “Rapid” since historic trans identification was decades later.
One significant problem in any research on cross-sex identifying patients of both sexes is that we do not actually know which sex each subject is. If there were controls, their male or female sex is recorded. But due to "self-ID" in countries where the use of wrong sex hormones and/or sex trait modification is called "gender affirming care" the natal sex of the subjects being studied is unclear. Doctors have gone along with medical "self-ID" even though this group must be researched and the natal sex of patients is crucial information. The results of the recent Finnish study in European Psychiatry (66) 1:1-20 from Nov. 2023 include this admission of the biological ID flaw for research.
Dec 24, 2023·edited Dec 24, 2023Liked by Colin Wright
Leor Sapir is a voice of clarity and reason on this topic, and I was pleased that he, and Lisa Littman, are featured here.
Sapir does a great presentation on gender medicalization that is IMO a must-view for anyone interested in this topic. I've had to listen several times to ensure I got it all!
Thanks for this. I suggest, in addition, that Q3.1 is flawed and presumptive in itself. A better query might be, "at what age did you perceive yourself to be different from others of your sex?"
In my experience, the initial awareness is not a rejection of one's own sex, but an internal questioning, a "who am I" (common to all) in which some children come to understand that expectations of their milieu differ from the sense of self. Until ROGD became a sanctioned thing, the answer for many may have been: be you, your own kind of expression of your self.
For those in an unaccepting milieu, life could be hell and emergence into a self came later, with independence from parents, milieu.
For the lucky, it meant coming into one's own through life's lessons from the day one realizes that it is not the child, but the world, that needs to change toward accepting the many ways of being male or female.
For anybody, coming into oneself is not an easy progress. We just pretend that it is. My two cents.
Thank you for engaging with this material. ROGD is observable in my community. For me there is no doubt that it’s real. I have a list of families who are affected.
Pornography is more degrading and violent. And children as young as 8 years old are exposed to it. Boys are learning men like humiliating, degrading, choking women, and girls learn what boys and men want and her role is to give them what they want. I could go on.
You are exactly right about all of this. The point is that the “realization” or, more accurately, the conclusion drawn that one is somehow “in the wrong body” inevitably leads to a re-writing of one’s life to mesh with that conclusion. Any feelings of discomfort for whatever reason will be used to support the conclusion, because the conclusion becomes a fantasy about relief from discomfort. And nobody wants to admit that this is just a fantasy. So the inaccuracy of the responses is inevitable.
I have a non-scientific observation that a large percentage of kids within this cohort of gender confusion consider themselves below some line in attractiveness as possibly reinforced by their social interactions with peers and exacerbated with social media, and in a highly-material world that we live in made more so by social media, they crash into a position of such low self-esteem that they grow interested in silver-bullet solutions to "fix" it. There are a few problems with this. One - most kids as they are starting and going through the bulk of puberty are awkward and unattractive. They are no longer cute kids, and they are not yet adults. It is natural for many people in their teenage years to feel like they don't belong in their body. It is also common to be confused about sex at that age and time. Two - the peer pressure for material attractiveness is massive within K-12 but almost disappears for most people when they escape to their real life after K-12. Three - children don't have wisdom yet to make decisions that are so profoundly life-changing. For most people, any decision to alter gender should be restricted until at least 18 years old. Frankly, even though people are sexual active before then, I think it is good to consider they should not be until adults. And with respect to gender assignment, if we have a tolerant community that does not judge, for example, a biological female dressing as a male or visa versa, then there should be no urgency for altering gender before the age of 18. And frankly, if community harassment for gender dysphoria is the justification, it does not change, and in fact might get worse, for kids engaged in gender changing procedures.
I am grateful for the efforts of all scientists and clinicians who are resisting the "gender affirmative care" movement and their unethical behaviors.
What is more telling than the number of kids who get official diagnoses, however, is the vast number of young Millennials and Gen Z'ers who are adopting "trans" and "non binary" identities, or who are supporting them in others, as a cool anti-Establishment lifestyle. The main difference between this latest generational fashion and the hippies, goths, etc., is that the "adults" and "The Establishment" mostly stayed out of youth lifestyles in the past. Or, at least the exploitation of the youth fads was more or less limited to making money off new clothing styles, makeup, and piercings.
Children are struggling, and they are having a particularly hard time with puberty. The reason so many girls want to change sex (and are being lied to that they can) is because they want to escape what is the most misogynist, sexist period of my life. There is no such thing as trans, yet the ideology has captured every democratic institution, and that was done in the most un-democratic way.
Having strangely acute episodic memory, I recall where and when as a 5-year-old I thought “Maybe I’m not a boy” when I grasped that I would not marry a woman and have kids. I called myself a “Janie-girl” to friends and parents. Unhappy about being bullied incessantly through childhood for feminine behavior - being a girl - by 9 I had self-diagnosed transsexualism with the help of the public library, I could probably walk to the stack with the books on psychiatry still. It reassured me that I would grow up and marry a man, and adopt kids. By 11 however as puberty began, after seeing and reading about gay men instead of listening to bullies, I began to realize I was plain old gay, and a year later at 12 was happily jacking off fantasizing about myself as male with men having sex.
That narrative is so common as to be unremarkable - and why I am fascinated by the current debate. Of course gay children are “confused” about sex and adult issues - they aren’t adults, no concept of sex other than what mommies and daddies do. Of course they’re unhappy about having the body of a boy and being g bullied about having behaviors “of a girl”.
Of course teens dislike their body changing. The time delay between when teens are unhappy about a body change, and being exposed to fictional trans explanations shortened drastically after 1998, then , due to zero buffering between teens and misinformation.
It used to take longer than a cycle of puberty for information to diffuse through a population (see slow rate of diffusion of teen pregnancy myths) then suddenly information flowed very rapidly (see the teen pregnancy rate that peaked and fell off a cliff just as Internet became worldwide - 1991 accelerated up to when “16 and Pregnant” began airing.) I suspect trans misinformation began to be seeded around a 1998 when Google came online, and an inflection began around 2004/5 with YouTube and Facebook becoming ubiquitous, then 2006 with Twitter.
The doubling rate of trans diagnoses - period in which the number doubles - slid feom around 9 years from 2000, to 2 years in 2019, a classic logistic growth curve (see bass diffusion models also). It’s not hard to reverse engineer the parameters at this point and see where the phenomenon is going ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function ), and where it ends.
I would posit that all trans identification before 20 is categorically “Rapid” since historic trans identification was decades later.
One significant problem in any research on cross-sex identifying patients of both sexes is that we do not actually know which sex each subject is. If there were controls, their male or female sex is recorded. But due to "self-ID" in countries where the use of wrong sex hormones and/or sex trait modification is called "gender affirming care" the natal sex of the subjects being studied is unclear. Doctors have gone along with medical "self-ID" even though this group must be researched and the natal sex of patients is crucial information. The results of the recent Finnish study in European Psychiatry (66) 1:1-20 from Nov. 2023 include this admission of the biological ID flaw for research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJhFbqL_KU&t=10s
Thanks Dr. Littman.
Leor Sapir is a voice of clarity and reason on this topic, and I was pleased that he, and Lisa Littman, are featured here.
Sapir does a great presentation on gender medicalization that is IMO a must-view for anyone interested in this topic. I've had to listen several times to ensure I got it all!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpijyN8FLE
Thanks for this. I suggest, in addition, that Q3.1 is flawed and presumptive in itself. A better query might be, "at what age did you perceive yourself to be different from others of your sex?"
In my experience, the initial awareness is not a rejection of one's own sex, but an internal questioning, a "who am I" (common to all) in which some children come to understand that expectations of their milieu differ from the sense of self. Until ROGD became a sanctioned thing, the answer for many may have been: be you, your own kind of expression of your self.
For those in an unaccepting milieu, life could be hell and emergence into a self came later, with independence from parents, milieu.
For the lucky, it meant coming into one's own through life's lessons from the day one realizes that it is not the child, but the world, that needs to change toward accepting the many ways of being male or female.
For anybody, coming into oneself is not an easy progress. We just pretend that it is. My two cents.
Thank you for engaging with this material. ROGD is observable in my community. For me there is no doubt that it’s real. I have a list of families who are affected.
Pornography is more degrading and violent. And children as young as 8 years old are exposed to it. Boys are learning men like humiliating, degrading, choking women, and girls learn what boys and men want and her role is to give them what they want. I could go on.
You are exactly right about all of this. The point is that the “realization” or, more accurately, the conclusion drawn that one is somehow “in the wrong body” inevitably leads to a re-writing of one’s life to mesh with that conclusion. Any feelings of discomfort for whatever reason will be used to support the conclusion, because the conclusion becomes a fantasy about relief from discomfort. And nobody wants to admit that this is just a fantasy. So the inaccuracy of the responses is inevitable.
I have a non-scientific observation that a large percentage of kids within this cohort of gender confusion consider themselves below some line in attractiveness as possibly reinforced by their social interactions with peers and exacerbated with social media, and in a highly-material world that we live in made more so by social media, they crash into a position of such low self-esteem that they grow interested in silver-bullet solutions to "fix" it. There are a few problems with this. One - most kids as they are starting and going through the bulk of puberty are awkward and unattractive. They are no longer cute kids, and they are not yet adults. It is natural for many people in their teenage years to feel like they don't belong in their body. It is also common to be confused about sex at that age and time. Two - the peer pressure for material attractiveness is massive within K-12 but almost disappears for most people when they escape to their real life after K-12. Three - children don't have wisdom yet to make decisions that are so profoundly life-changing. For most people, any decision to alter gender should be restricted until at least 18 years old. Frankly, even though people are sexual active before then, I think it is good to consider they should not be until adults. And with respect to gender assignment, if we have a tolerant community that does not judge, for example, a biological female dressing as a male or visa versa, then there should be no urgency for altering gender before the age of 18. And frankly, if community harassment for gender dysphoria is the justification, it does not change, and in fact might get worse, for kids engaged in gender changing procedures.
Why is it that no one ever mentions this? https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/