Claim: Being transgender is a social contagion (ROGD)

“Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD) is the medical-sounding title for the “social contagion” theory of why kids are identifying as transgender in larger amounts (although the real reason is an increase in acceptance and visibility) based on one study in 2018 by Lisa Littman¹. It was then picked up by right-wing sites and concerned parents to fuel the moral panic around transgender people.

This paper did not interview or study the youth in question, but only their parents. Brown University retracted a press release for this paper “given the concerns raised about research design and methods”².

When research was done on the emergency of gender dysphoria based on the reports of the adolescents themselves, a different picture is painted³—one that shows kids often wait many years to tell clinicians about gender dysphoria. The “rapid” part of ROGD is only from the parent’s point of view.

Additionally, a study published in Pediadtrics in 2022⁴ provides evidence against the notion that adolescents in the U.S. come to identify as transgender due to “social contagion.” The analysis included 91,937 adolescents in 2017 and 105,437 adolescents in 2019. It refuted the ROGD hypothesis in 3 ways⁵:

1. The total percentage of transgender and gender diverse (TGD) adolescents decreased from 2017 to 2019.
2. The percentage of adolescents who were AFAB (assigned female at birth) decreased from 2017 to 2019.
3. Rates of bullying victimization and suicidality were higher among TGD youth compared with their cisgender peers, which is incongruent with the notion that some youth openly identify as TGD in an attempt to flee the stigma of being a sexual minority because being TGD will “make them more popular among their peers”.

Jangles ScienceLad has put out a great video on this paper and he talks at length about the scientific illiteracy involved. There is also a formal methodological critique published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior⁶.

Here are the high-level points:

• Non-heterogenous sample: recruited from forums of parents who don’t want their kid to transition to bias results in her favor
  • 4thWaveNow (“A community of parents & others questioning the medicalization of gender-atypical youth”)
  • Transgender Trend (“Parents questioning the trans narrative”)
  • Youth Trans Critical Professionals (“a group of professionals sceptical of the trend to diagnose children and adolescents as transgender”)
• Leading questions: prompted desired answers to get the results she wanted
• Lack of online security: Online surveys are known to include repeat testers, and no check for this was done (e.g. IP address checking)
• Selection bias: Littman specifically asked for parents to apply if they “suspect that their child has had sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria”.
  • Specifically, the respondents were 83% female sex at birth, 91% White, and 66% between the ages of 40-60⁶.
  • Littman also discarded 26 surveys where parents responded that they did not perceive their child to have ROGD.
• Talking primarily to parents, not the trans youth: Littman only interviewed the parents, not the youth themselves.
• Critically undermined findings due to bias: Some 24% of respondents reported that their child was offered puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones at the first visit, running contrary to the WPATH’s Standards of Care, and runs in contrast with the current literature⁶.

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