Experts blast so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria” as junk science

A recent study supporting the widely discredited concept of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD) has been retracted by its publisher over ethical concerns about its methodology.

Published in March in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the study’s authors — Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, and Suzanna Diaz — claimed to have identified over 1,600 potential cases of ROGD.

Related:

Study argues that “social contagion” isn’t making the kids today transgender

The “social contagion” claim has long been repeated by right-wing politicians and activists who support laws criminalizing gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth.

According to Scientific American, Diaz is a pseudonym used by the mother of a child with gender dysphoria. She is not affiliated with any research institution. Diaz reportedly collected survey data from parents of transgender children who contacted ParentsofROGDKids.com, a website that Scientific American describes as explicitly critical of gender-affirming care for transgender kids.

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The study purported to present evidence supporting the theory that “social contagion”— peer pressure, exposure to trans-affirming content on social media, etc. — is responsible for more adolescents and young adults spontaneously identifying as transgender or nonbinary. Research published last year debunked this narrative, but it has continued to proliferate among anti-trans conservatives and Republican politicians who have cited it to justify state-level legislation restricting or outright banning young people’s access to gender-affirming healthcare.

As Retraction Watch — a blog produced by the Center for Scientific Integrity that tracks retractions of scientific papers — reported in May, the study drew immediate criticism from the scientific community.

“The researchers know their framing and sampling introduce bias (they say as much!). They simply chose to collect the biased data all the same,” Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, an associate Professor at Indiana University who researches depression, psychotherapy, and social media use and mental health, wrote in a long tweet thread in March.

6/ The researchers know their framing and sampling introduce bias (they say as much!). They simply chose to collect the biased data all the same. The data btw took them *4 years* to collect. That seems insane to me given the traffic described in the websites. pic.twitter.com/XyyHxaLPYm

— Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, PhD (he/him) (@lluaces) March 30, 2023

On June 14, Springer Nature, which publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior, retracted the study.

“The Publisher and the Editor-in-Chief have retracted this article due to noncompliance with our editorial policies around consent,” a retraction note reads. “The participants of the survey have not provided written informed consent to participate in scholarly research or to have their responses published in a peer-reviewed article. Additionally, they have not provided consent … to have their data included in this article.”

Bailey and Diaz’s study is just the most recent pro-ROGD study to be discredited. A 2018 paper by Dr. Lisa Littman, who was a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University at the time, that first proposed the concept of ROGD has been similarly criticized for only recruiting survey participants from online communities that are critical of gender-affirming care.  

The scientific community has blasted the concept of ROGD as junk science. As Scientific American noted, the American Psychological Association and 61 other healthcare providers’ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of ROGD as a clinical diagnosis.

“This is just a fear-based concept that is not supported by studies,” Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, told the journal. Bowers said that ROGD is being used to “scare people or to scare legislators into voting for some of these restrictive policies that take away options for young people. It’s cruel, cruel legislation.”

“To even say it’s a hypothesis at this point, based on the paucity of research on this, I think is a real stretch,” said Eli Coleman, former president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the University of California, San Francisco, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, criticized studies like the newly discredited one and Littman’s for surveying parents rather than trans kids themselves.

“To talk about what children are thinking, feeling, and doing, particularly as they get old enough to have their own minds and narratives, you need to interview them,” she said.

Greta Bauer, director of the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said that if ROGD were a real thing, researchers and healthcare providers would be seeing two distinct groups of young people seeking gender-affirming care: kids who have understood their gender identity for years and kids who only recently realized they may be trans. “But we didn’t see that,” Bauer said.

Instead, recent research shows that for the vast majority trans kids, there is a significant time between when they realize they may be trans and when they seek gender-affirming care.

Ehrensaft noted that, similarly, there is frequently a gap between when kids understand their gender identity and when they tell their parents about it, potentially accounting for some parents’ belief that their children have “suddenly” become trans.

“It is not rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” Ehrensaft said. “It’s rapid-onset parental discovery.”