The bad science of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”

Quinnehtukqut McLamore,  postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri, explains why  ‘Rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ (ROGD) is nothing but unscientific bunk over at Aeon.

The ROGD “theory”, which is very popular among “gender critical” TERFS and other transphobes,  argues that transgender kids become trans because of transgender propaganda and cultural trends. There is no real trans identity there, as they see it.

Gender dysphoric trans kids can tell you otherwise.

The Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria theory is based on responses from transphobic parents, not from transgender kids and teenagers.

McLamore writes:

Bluntly, there is no solid evidence that ROGD exists. The study that birthed the term – circulated on, and designed for, these anti-trans websites – was first published in 2016 as a poster by the physician Lisa Littman, then at the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health in Rhode Island. 

A self-described gender dysphoria expert, Littman later published her findings in a (now heavily revised) paper in PLOS One in 2018. At no point was a single trans person studied for these findings. 

Instead, Littman recruited an anonymous sample of people who claimed to be parents of trans ‘youth’ (ranging in age from 11 to 27) from websites including 4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, and Youth Trans Critical Professionals. All three sources are infamous for transphobia, with 4thWaveNow in particular spreading unsubstantiated conspiracy theories…

Littman’s study is fatally flawed because it relies exclusively on parental hearsay – if indeed the respondents are actually parents. Her study cannot assess how accurately these parents assessed the timeline of their children’s gender incongruence. It shows only what unsupportive parents recruited from anti-trans web sources think happened.

Why are there more transgender people now?

McLamore argues that the reason  current samples of trans youth don’t resemble past samples is that the samples from the past were not well-characterised. They were small and inadequate, collected when parents were unsupportive, and the goal was to prevent adult transition if at all possible.

Given that being trans is no longer seen as a mental illness,  legal reforms have made it easier to be accepted, and researchers have gotten a more nuanced view of what it means to be trans, more trans people seek help:

In sum, claims that there can’t be this many trans youth rest upon misunderstandings of gender diversity and care models that alienated both patients and their parents – or that didn’t exist at all. 

The social, legal and clinical environments in which today’s trans youth find themselves are radically different from the first-line conversion therapy previously employed. Nowadays, care is available for them, and although they are often on waitlists years long, there is enough media representation for them to see themselves. The skyrocketing rate of trans youth should be entirely expected given these shifts. This is obvious – which is precisely why the expert consensus has arrived here.

 Read the article here. 

See also:
Everything You Need to Know About Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
“Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” is not real science

Illustration photo: FluxFactory

Not all women menstruate. This is a fact. So why do women have to be defined by it?

Sara Rose Gibbs has published a very interesting thread over at Twitter on how she, as a non-menstruating cis woman was attacked by transphobes for daring to say the obvious: Not all women menstruate.

She writes:

I’ll never forget the first time I accidentally waded into a discussion on trans issues. It was a few years ago, I hadn’t really encountered the transphobic crowd before. Someone posted complaining about the term “people who menstruate” to describe, well, people who menstruate. 

The poster wanted to call them WOMEN. Embarrassingly, I knew very little about trans identities. So I wasn’t thinking about trans men or non-binary folks who might still have periods when I said I didn’t understand the problem with the term.

Not all women menstruate

I was thinking of myself - a cis woman who’s infertile. I thought it was both logical & inclusive to say “people who menstruate” because not all women do - & it can be very painful when people assume things about your reproductive system when it simply doesn’t work.

What followed completely shocked me. Suddenly my mentions were full of people screaming at me - awful things designed to cause maximum hurt. They called me a handmaiden, told me I was erasing women. One woman told me I was “divorced from my womanhood”.

Learning about transgender exclusion

So I looked into why they were saying these things. And that’s when I started to follow trans folks on here, watch trans YouTubers, start reading articles etc. I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t known what the discussion was about but also the bullying had been so intense, full on, cruel & personal that it left me in tears for days. And I’m a Jewish person on the internet. I thought I’d heard it all. I felt instinctively that it was important to defend whoever those nasty bullies were targeting. 

So trans people didn’t galvanise me into action, not initially. It was the transphobes. I may not have known anything about gender identity or transitioning - but I sure as fuck knew bullying when I saw it. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way. 

Follow up to thread

Just a follow up as this gained a lot more traction than I thought! The purpose wasn’t to centre myself (and I’m so so sorry if I came off that way) just to illustrate how the bullying mentality of that horrible movement is creating more trans allies than enemies.

Bit more context because it’s relevant - I think this was specifically in regards to some sort of workplace initiative for accommodations for people who menstruate. My point was if that survey had just gone out to women, that could have been distressing to people like me  as opposed to telling people that if you menstruate and want to feed back via this survey thing (if I’m remembering right) you can opt in, rather than have salt rubbed in the wound if it doesn’t apply to you or being left out if it does but you’re not a woman. Seems thoughtful.

Full thread here.

On how transphobes invalidate cis women

Note the way nearly all transphobes, to the right or to the left, insists on reducing a woman’s identity to bodily functions. This was the way traditionalists kept women under control in the 19th and 20th century. Women were nurturing life-givers, for sure, but they were also emotionally unstable, intellectually weak and unfit for positions of power, all because of their bodies. 

For some 200 years feminists have tried to get out of this body trap and show how women are the equals of men in any part of life.  But now, because of irrational transphobia, there are even women who try to reduce the worth of women to a fully functioning uterus, all in attempt to keep trans women out.  We see that this narrative also invalidates many cis women. This is truly sad.

Illustration by marzacz.

Trans Women on a Desert Island

Over at twitter a transphobe wrote the following parable:

Put 100 women and 10 men on a deserted island. In 100 years you will have a community of men, women, boys and girls. Put 100 trans women and 10 men on a deserted island. In 100 years you will find the skeletons of 110 men. It. Is. Science. You can’t change sex.

A transgender woman’s reply:

Put 100 trans women and 10 guys like this on a deserted island and in 100 years you have 10 male skeletons and signs of someone having engineered boats

So true.

Just to make sure: People are not defined by their skeletons. As long as you are alive, we cannot even see them. Being alive is what counts.

Photo: pixdeluxe

The real reasons for the anti-LGBTQA bills in the US

The transphobic laws of American states reflects a fear of the future and a longing for an idealized past that never existed.

Alejandra Caraballo has  compiled a legislative tracker for anti-LGBTQ bills, which can be found here.  It is a depressing spreadsheet, for sure, but it is necessary to make the sheer aggressiveness of the Republican attacks against trans and queer people visible.

Right now there are 27 bills banning gender affirming care,  15 bills banning trans people from sports, and 6 bills banning drag.

So why are the Republicans doing this? Here are some tentative answers:

1. The Party has been taken over by nationalist extremists who have no vision of a better future. They have no real policies. Instead they try to mobilize supporters by presenting some idealized past (MAGA!) that never existed and which was not that great in the first place. The idea is that this longing for simpler times will appeal to those who live in fear of the future. 

Putin’s aggressive anti-LGBTQA policies reveals a similar need for a cultural distraction.

2. The Republicans have, for all practical purposes, lost the Millennials and Gen Z. Since they have no policies that can appeal to them, they will have to mobilize the older generations, which  tend to be more conservative. When people get older, they become more invested in the status quo. They think they have more to lose, and they find the younger generations harder to understand. 

3. Like the anti-gay activism of 20th century, the anti-transgender activism of the 21st is based on a made up threat scenario. LGBTQA-people threaten “American values”, exemplified by the nuclear family understood as a married cis/straight couple with a couple of kids. 

This ideal family represents traditional gender values, which are seen as the basis for American white culture. As the acceptance of gay nuclear families shows, queer people are not really a threat to the nuclear family. People are free to make one, and the majority do. The number of queer and trans people is so low that it is hard to see them as a threat in the real world. But this is not about the real world.

Drag queens are seen as a threat to the traditional nuclear family, because they play with gender roles the traditionalists see as God given or defined by nature. Photo: Alessandro Biascioli.

4. Racism, homophobia and transphobia are deeply embedded in culture, in language, in media, in religious tropes, which means that a lot of people have adopted these prejudices without thinking much about them. 

If your parents and your friends have show disgust when queer and transgender people are mentioned, you are easily conditioned into feeling the same fear and disgust. 

The most effective medicine against this is exposure, i.e. for the fearful to meet marginalized people and see them for what they truly are: Real People. This is why the Republicans want to force all LGBTQA people back into the closet. As long as they are not revealed to be real and complex people, the anti-LGBTQA propaganda will have an effect.

Some have asked me why the gender critical TERFs, which are supposed to left wing feminists, go along with this. The answer is simple: The TERFs are either part of this reactionary movement themselves, or they have invested so much in finding an identity in a sexist world like this present, that a new world is seen as a threat to that identity.

So for the good news: The reason the Republicans in the US and  similar extremists in other parts of the world, are playing this card, is because they know they are losing. The Republicans do not have the majority of Americans behind them. The extremism makes them lose national elections. Putin is losing his war.  They need to do this now, before the new, more tolerant, generations take over. This is the tipping point, and they know it.

This is why queer and trans people and all good people, from the left to the right, need top keep on fighting the good fight.

Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts

How right wing media is trying to turn  Tonje Gjevjon, a TERF,  into a hero,  all based on lies.

The Norwegian transphobieTonje Gjevjon has been on her anti-trans crusade for a long time now, aggressively harassing trans women and spreading lies. Now it seems that right wing American media has become interested in her story, repeating all the lies in the process.

Here are the facts, as presented by Alexander.

(Note that the post contains references to transphobic statements.)

Alexander writes  over at twitter:

//How embarrassing for @nypost to write an article where every fact given in the title is a lie. Tonje Gjevjon is not an actress, is not being investigated for saying men can’t be lesbians and is not facing up to 3 years in prison. This is fake news. An entirely fabricated story.

Deception tactics

In fact, she has admitted to knowingly repeating verbatim from an earlier case on hate speech where someone was given probation for publicly harassing a trans woman by calling her things like a perverted male pig and fetishist, just for being transgender (from Norwegian news):

[Original version in tweet]

Here is the court case she is referring to. As you can see, it was not about saying men cannot be lesbians, but for saying a trans woman is a perverted male pig who should have her kids taken away by the state. He was given 15 days probation and a fine.

[Norwegian court document] [Google translation]

Trying to get arrested to make her case

Tonje Gjevjon has been trying to get arrested for over a year, and calls this her new art project. As a part of this project she has been viciously harassing trans people and tagging the police, trans activists and politicians and asking us to take her to court.

Gjevjon is now being investigated after the police decided to finally give her what she wanted and opened an investigation. The police did this against the wishes of the trans woman she harassed. In fact, said trans woman has said explicitly that she wants the case dropped.

Extremely bad “art”

Gjevjon is infamous in Norway for making “art” that is literally just sexualized homophobic, transphobic and racist caricatures. Here is an example of her drawing of a Norwegian organisation for queer migrants + queer people at Pride (censored by me - they all have penises out).

[Link to tweet with sensitive imagery]

And here is her depiction of the trans woman that she is currently under investigation for harassing, also censored by me, but she is drawn with breasts and penis hanging out. This was drawn years ago, as Gjevjons harassment has lasted for many years.

[Link to tweet with sensitive imagery]

She knows full well that she is not being investigated for saying men cannot be lesbians. This is a fully and unambiguously legal statement to make in Norway. But she also knows that lying about it is likely to get her money and attention as an artist that lives on controversy.

A lesbian that hates gay men

Tonje Gjevjon also hates gay men with a passion, and argued in 2012 that unprotected sex between two men should be de facto criminalized. Use google translate on this thread if you want to see more. She responds to the thread and does not denounce her views.

[Link to Norwegian language twitter thread]

I’m not kidding on her homophobia: here she is calling a Norwegian gay male author a “cock-fixated cock-fetishist”, stating that he “loves cock and the cock is central in his gay life” and writing that all gay men who accept trans people are “fixated on cock”.

[Links to snapshots of offensive Norwegian language tweets]

I could go on for years with the shit she’s said, cause that’s how long she has been doing this. Here she is literally calling the leaders of the biggest trans organisation in Norway “whores”, and stating that they are a pimp-lobby that grooms young children into prostitution.

Here is the post that she herself have been taking quotes from in order to claim that she is persecuted for saying men cant be lesbians: conveniently leaving out that she starts the post by calling trans women “permanently roleplaying perverted fetishists”

This is a great representative example of how she talks about trans women as a group, and has for years: here she is referring to them as “heterosexual men with a sexual fetish that get aroused by dressing in women’s panties and identifying as lesbian, woman and mother”.

//end of tweets

So to make this clear: Tonje Gjevjon si NOT facing up to 3 years in prison for saying men cannot be lesbians. She is not going to prison any time soon. She is simply a transphobic hater who wants to gain more attention to her toxic cause.

Note also how it is the extreme right that embraces people like her. It becomes harder and harder to see the difference between right wing extremists and transphobic “radical feminists”:

Republished with permission.

Read the whole thread here!

We are taking the liberty of reproducing Hampus Lundgren’s photo of Gjevjon above. The photographer has captures the privilege of wealthy, white, transphobic TERFs in all its splendor (via Dagbladet).

See also:
 Norwegian TERF tries to stop new law against conversion therapy
The TERFminator" – Lesbian feminist LGBTQA-activist puts “gender critical” transphobes in their place

TERFs do not actually believe in biological sex, not really!

Lily Alexandre is a transgender YouTube blogger that has come up with some really interesting analysis of trans, queer and gender issues. You don’t have to agree with everything she says to appreciate that she brings in new perspectives presented in a well informed and intelligent way.

In the video embedded below, TERFs Are Wrong About Biological Sex she makes the point that TERFs are not really arguing about biological sex, as those arguments do not hold water from any serious philosophical or scientific point of view. 

No, what they want is to make the assignment of gender at birth the basis of a new gender divide, one just as bad as the old one, and one based on cultural ideas about biological sex and not biology per se.

Lily Alexandre says:

TERFs don’t believe in biological sex. They  believe in the inescapable power of birth  assignment, powerful enough that its impact  endures even when no trace of it remains. They  believe that birth assignment dictates whether you are a pure person who’s destined to be victimized, or a threat who’s not to be trusted.

They  believe that your assigned sex at birth  should determine what you can do, what you can  call yourself, and who you can associate with.

This belief is a rigidly idealist one, and doesn’t hold up to real-world scrutiny,   but it’s the core of their whole movement. It  needs to be true, or everything else falls apart.

The thing about treating sex as the most important  thing, and imparting deep cultural meaning onto  people’s bodies, is: You’ve just invented gender  again! 

That is literally where gender came from  at the very beginning. That’ what gender was 2000  years ago, and it’s what gender was in the 1920s.  

I thought these people were supposed to be gender critical! It seems like they want us to step back several decades into the past, when gender did exist, but we had no language to talk about it.

We named gender in the first place to talk  about how gender roles are artificial.   How women’s place in society is not natural.  And I think this has worked! Nowadays,  calling gender a social construct  is so tame, it barely feels worth saying. But TERFs want us to stop using this language.

They identify themselves as the most principled,  strident radical feminists. But to borrow a page  from their playbook: I don’t give a shit how you identify, I care about what you are! 

And the vast  majority of TERFs are, at this point, fighting to  control the bodies of women, and people they think  are women. They’re fighting to reinstate the old  order, where men and women inhabit separate worlds that can never touch, where gender is ignored, and so-called natural sex differences justify all  kinds of discrimination.