When I learned of the controversy over Lisa Littman’s seminal paper from 2018, which introduced the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), I did not understand the nature of the backlash. Littman’s paper appeared in a respected journal, Plos One, and had passed through the peer-review process. Shortly after its publication, however, the dean of public health at Brown University, where Littman, a physician, worked, published a letter noting that the Brown community was concerned that “conclusions of the study could be used to discredit the efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate perspectives of members of the transgender community.”
The letter also claimed that Littman’s research design and methods were problematic, despite her paper’s surviving an unusual post-publication assessment by senior journal editors, academic editors, a stats reviewer, and an expert reviewer. Littman claims that, after the post-publication review, her methods and findings were left virtually intact in a republished version of the paper. Most of the changes involved highlighting how her data were collected from parent reports and the limitations of those reports.
But the dean’s letter and the backlash to Littman’s paper suggest that critics’ real concern was Littman’s tentative conclusion suggesting the emergence of a novel developmental pathway to gender dysphoria. In her study, Littman hypothesized that a new form of gender dysphoria, and trans-identification, was presenting among peer groups of adolescent girls typically immersed in online trans subcultures and who often had preexisting mental-health and developmental issues. Strikingly, most of these girls had no childhood history of gender dysphoria, or even gender nonconformity, and their newly announced identities seemed unexpected and caught their parents by surprise.
Littman speculated that gender dysphoria was becoming a catch-all interpretive framework for a range of phenomena, from normal pubertal angst to specific mental-health issues. She also speculated that, among youth with existing mental-health issues or unprocessed sexual trauma, a trans identity could serve as a maladaptive coping mechanism to avoid dealing with intense negative emotions. This notion was tentatively supported by her finding that 61.4 percent of parents surveyed reported that their trans-identifying children were easily “overwhelmed by strong emotions and go to great lengths to avoid experiencing them.”
Approved ~ FS
