J. Michael Bailey asks why his gender research is being cancelled.

Updating to add: H/t Mostly Cloudy

Since my academic paper on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria was published last month, it has been downloaded more than 38,000 times and is ranked in the top percentile of similar articles in terms of online attention. One might think that the academic society associated with the journal — the International Academy of Sex Research — would be delighted. Instead, its officers are trying to cancel the article.

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Across the industrialised West, there has been an explosion of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls in recent years. In England, for example, annual referrals for child and adolescent gender dysphoria treatment grew in the 10 years between 2011-12 to 2021-22 from 250 (mostly boys) to 5,000 (mostly girls). In the United States, no one is keeping track, but the signs are the same. Two explanations have been given for this trend, and they have provoked a bitter controversy. The first holds that increased tolerance of transgender people has allowed transgender youth to come out earlier and in greater numbers. People who believe this also tend to assume we should not question children and adolescents who declare that they are transgender but should help them if they want to start their transition.

The second explanation, called “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), suggests that, for poorly understood reasons, adolescent and young adult females are susceptible to a socially contagious false belief that they are transgender. Especially susceptible are girls with pre-existing emotional problems who have been exposed to the ideas that transgender people are common, and that an underlying and unrecognised transgender identity can cause emotional problems only curable by gender transition.

How many girls don’t have emotional problems in adolescence? Adolescence is problemogenic, if you ask me.

The idea of ROGD, like the phenomenon that inspired the hypothesis, is quite recent. The first peer-reviewed empirical article was published in 2018 and attempted to determine whether gender dysphoric youth with an ROGD profile existed, according to parent informants. They certainly did. The article provoked a firestorm of criticism and an unprecedented (and shameful) demand by the journal, Plos One, that the author, Lisa Littman, revise the paper to mollify its critics.

Why? Because the dogma is that being trans isn’t something with a profile or a rapid onset, it’s a sacred holy inspiring beautiful meaningful spiritual awesome Essence. It’s profanity to talk about it as a medical issue or a psychological issue or both; it must be talked about as a combination of religion and stardom.

In 2018, I attended a small invitation-only conference about ROGD. The conference co-organiser, Suzanna Diaz, presented results of an online survey conducted by the organisation Parents of ROGD Kids. I was impressed by the findings and, given that ROGD was little-known in 2018, I told her she should publish her study. Eventually, we explored co-authoring an article, and the result is the one now threatened with cancellation.

We focused on parents’ reports on gender-dysphoric adolescents and young adults whom the parents believed had ROGD. You can read the full article here, but the key observations that motivated the cancellation attempt are as follows. First, we identified 1,655 cases of ROGD — a significant number for activists to ignore. Second, parents said that these youth had a high proportion of pre-existing mental health problems, predating gender dysphoria by four years on average. Third, youth with higher preponderance of emotional problems were especially likely to have socially or medically transitioned. Fourth, the best predictor of transition was consulting a gender specialist, and parents who did so tended to feel they were pressured to transition their children. Finally, parents said their children’s general functioning deteriorated after they socially transitioned.

Yeah well. We can’t be having any of that. Obviously. All of that makes it sound as if Genner Idenniny is socially influenced, and particularly attractive to unhappy kids, and bad for the kids who adopt it. ABORT ABORT ABORT. Genner Idenniny is in the soul, and the kids who have it are the lucky ones, and they are walking talking high-functioning miracles.