An open debate on transgender issues seems to me vital if we are simply to get things right. The trouble is: Many trans activists don’t want a debate. They believe sincerely that such a discussion will inevitably tend toward the question of whether transgender people actually exist. (This is not debatable — they do.) The other trouble is: Many social conservatives don’t want to have a debate either, and they actually do assert that trans people do not exist. They claim that trans people are lying or are mentally ill, despite mounds of empirical evidence proving that transgender identity is real, and unchanging, if only for a small number of people (as of 2016, 1.4 million Americans — or 0.4 percent of the population — identified as transgender). In the middle of this gulf, the truth certainly lies. And it says something about this moment in our culture that the truth doesn’t seem to matter at all.
Hence the absurd “correction” of a study by Brown professor Lisa Littman published by the open-access science journal PLOS One. It was the result of a second peer review of the article that, in the end, changed not a jot of its data or conclusions. It merely “reframed” the article, and added some more context. Two cheers for academic freedom, I guess. Except that the ordeal sends a red flare up to other researchers: Don’t enter this field. It’s trouble.
The study itself examined how a sudden embrace of trans identity during adolescence (where none had been suggested in childhood) might be a function of peer pressure, Internet exposure to transgender materials, a majority-trans peer group, and withdrawal from parents. Littman proposed a description of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, or ROGD:
“[T]hat is distinct in etiology from the gender dysphoria observed in individuals who have previously been described as transgender … The worsening of mental well-being and parent-child relationships and behaviors that isolate teens from their parents, families, non-transgender friends and mainstream sources of information are particularly concerning. More research is needed to better understand this phenomenon, its implications, and scope.”
That’s all Littman was arguing for: more research, please. (And she’s right: her study was limited. Its respondents were all parents, not trans kids; and they were recruited from websites where many families were concerned about a sudden change in a daughter or son. Much more research is needed.)
And it is surely conceivable that trans identity can be, in some cases, mistaken, especially when it seems to come out of nowhere in the midst of puberty. People who detransition later on life absolutely do exist, and they are often unable to reverse permanent alteration of their bodies and endocrine systems. And if teenage trans identity suddenly surges in popularity, it’s surely possible that faddishness or other psychological issues could be at work. The language of “contagion” and “cluster” outbreaks used in the paper does rub the wrong way — because it would seem to imply that being transgender is some sort of disease. But when you think about it more deeply, you realize that the “contagion” is not being transgender but being deluded into thinking you are.
And that seems especially possible given a sharp increase in trans identity among young women, mainly lesbians:
“The adolescent and young adult (AYA) children described were predominantly natal female (82.8%) with a mean age of 16.4 years … Forty-one percent of the AYAs had expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation before identifying as transgender. Many (62.5%) of the AYAs had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neuro-developmental disability prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria.”
What you’re seeing in other words is a big chunk of these women who would previously have become adult lesbians, suddenly deciding in adolescence that they have been male all along. Immediately we are in a zero-sum game: Among these teenagers, transgender identity is replacing lesbian identity. It doesn’t surprise me that some lesbians see this as a form of lesbian and female erasure.
But what truly baffles me is why transgender activists would not want this relatively new phenomenon to be studied. Surely it’s in the interests of transgender people that the diagnosis, whether trans or cis, be accurate — especially when it can lead to permanent, irreversible changes in the physical body: removing genitalia, or flooding a teen girl’s endocrine system with testosterone. And the only way to discover who will or will not be rendered happier by transition is to observe unhappy transitions as well as the liberating kind, to be aware of the mistakes as well as the successes — rather than create an ideological chilling effect, in which we end up learning less. The last thing you want is for there to be a wave of de-transitioning in the future, because so many adolescent diagnoses were wrong. That would set back trans rights a very long way.
My fear is a very old one: that attempts to squelch free inquiry can only, in the end, discredit a good and humane cause, and that when orthodoxy trumps or chills empirical research, we have lost any reliable way to uncover the truth about the world. And, yes, I mean objective, empirical truth.
Hence the absurd “correction” of a study by Brown professor Lisa Littman published by the open-access science journal PLOS One. It was the result of a second peer review of the article that, in the end, changed not a jot of its data or conclusions. It merely “reframed” the article, and added some more context. Two cheers for academic freedom, I guess. Except that the ordeal sends a red flare up to other researchers: Don’t enter this field. It’s trouble.
The study itself examined how a sudden embrace of trans identity during adolescence (where none had been suggested in childhood) might be a function of peer pressure, Internet exposure to transgender materials, a majority-trans peer group, and withdrawal from parents. Littman proposed a description of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, or ROGD:
“[T]hat is distinct in etiology from the gender dysphoria observed in individuals who have previously been described as transgender … The worsening of mental well-being and parent-child relationships and behaviors that isolate teens from their parents, families, non-transgender friends and mainstream sources of information are particularly concerning. More research is needed to better understand this phenomenon, its implications, and scope.”
That’s all Littman was arguing for: more research, please. (And she’s right: her study was limited. Its respondents were all parents, not trans kids; and they were recruited from websites where many families were concerned about a sudden change in a daughter or son. Much more research is needed.)
And it is surely conceivable that trans identity can be, in some cases, mistaken, especially when it seems to come out of nowhere in the midst of puberty. People who detransition later on life absolutely do exist, and they are often unable to reverse permanent alteration of their bodies and endocrine systems. And if teenage trans identity suddenly surges in popularity, it’s surely possible that faddishness or other psychological issues could be at work. The language of “contagion” and “cluster” outbreaks used in the paper does rub the wrong way — because it would seem to imply that being transgender is some sort of disease. But when you think about it more deeply, you realize that the “contagion” is not being transgender but being deluded into thinking you are.
And that seems especially possible given a sharp increase in trans identity among young women, mainly lesbians:
“The adolescent and young adult (AYA) children described were predominantly natal female (82.8%) with a mean age of 16.4 years … Forty-one percent of the AYAs had expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation before identifying as transgender. Many (62.5%) of the AYAs had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neuro-developmental disability prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria.”
What you’re seeing in other words is a big chunk of these women who would previously have become adult lesbians, suddenly deciding in adolescence that they have been male all along. Immediately we are in a zero-sum game: Among these teenagers, transgender identity is replacing lesbian identity. It doesn’t surprise me that some lesbians see this as a form of lesbian and female erasure.
But what truly baffles me is why transgender activists would not want this relatively new phenomenon to be studied. Surely it’s in the interests of transgender people that the diagnosis, whether trans or cis, be accurate — especially when it can lead to permanent, irreversible changes in the physical body: removing genitalia, or flooding a teen girl’s endocrine system with testosterone. And the only way to discover who will or will not be rendered happier by transition is to observe unhappy transitions as well as the liberating kind, to be aware of the mistakes as well as the successes — rather than create an ideological chilling effect, in which we end up learning less. The last thing you want is for there to be a wave of de-transitioning in the future, because so many adolescent diagnoses were wrong. That would set back trans rights a very long way.
My fear is a very old one: that attempts to squelch free inquiry can only, in the end, discredit a good and humane cause, and that when orthodoxy trumps or chills empirical research, we have lost any reliable way to uncover the truth about the world. And, yes, I mean objective, empirical truth.
by Andrew Sullivan, NY Magazine | Read more:
