Opinion | Coming Out as Trans Isn’t a Teenage Fad
Jennifer Finney Boylan looks at “rapid onset gender dysphoria” over at the New York Times:
An abundance of scientific research makes clear that gender variance is a fundamental truth of human biology, not some wacky dance craze.
Transgender people have not come up with the entirety of our existence solely to hurt Tucker Carlson’s feelings. We do not embark upon transition because it’s groovy. We are here because our hearts demand it.
R.O.G.D. is not a clinical term. It’s a political one, designed to undermine the validity of these young people’s transitions.
The term originated a few years ago on three blogs with a history of promoting anti-trans propaganda. There has been only one study on it, in the journal PLOS One. But the study isn’t about the children in question; it’s about their parents, who were recruited for the study by ads placed in the conservative blogs that had invented the concept of R.O.G.D. in the first place.
If you want your children’s life to be hard, Boylan adds, “the quickest way to that end is to tell them that their deepest sense of self is nothing but a fad, and that you know them better than they know themselves.”
Illustration: Jun Chen/The New York Times