I hadn’t heard of ROGD syndrome before, but a recent Barbara Kay column explains the concerns about it:
I have met and spoken with such parents (of daughters with ROGD). They love them deeply. They are not transphobic in the least. But since none of these girls ever expressed any sign of discomfort with their natal sex before adolescence, the parents were resistant to uncritical affirmation. Gender crossover is a momentous life change, minimally involving permanent, sterilizing, off-label hormonal treatment. These parents quite properly expected a thorough exploration of possible underlying root causes that, attended to, might well mitigate against such life-altering treatment. They felt in their bones that the “wrong body” was no more their daughters’ primary problem than too much weight is the primary problem for anorexics.
A newly published study validates these parents’ concerns. “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,” by Lisa Littman, a researcher in the department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown University’s School of Public Health, is the first empirical academic descriptive exploration of “the psychosocial context of youth who have recently identified as transgender with a focus on vulnerabilities, co-morbidities, peer group interactions, and social media use.”
Littman notes that adolescent-onset of gender dysphoria is relatively new for natal females. Prior to 2012, little to no research had been done on it. Most available research on adolescents with gender dysphoria includes only those with onset during childhood and is not generalizable to the adolescent-onset genre. Before 2012, there were only two clinics (one in Canada and one in The Netherlands) with enough data amassed to provide empirical information on gender-dysphoric adolescents. Both institutions concluded that management is more complicated in these cases than with early-onset dysphoria, and that individuals with adolescent-onset were “more likely to have significant psychopathology.”
[…]
Almost invariably, these teenagers spend an inordinate amount of time on certain websites, notably Tumblr and Reddit. Here they can find advice on how to lie to clinicians: “Get a story ready in your head … keep the lie to a minimum” and “look up the DSM for the diagnostic criteria for transgender and make sure your story fits it.” Almost a third of the AYAs brought up the threat of suicide as a reason for transitioning; this is also something they are coached in. Some made up stories of childhood trans yearnings, presumably to impress gender therapists. One child actually edited her perfectly ordinary childhood diary to include material suggesting she had always been gender dysphoric.
Parents often felt betrayed by the unprofessional attitudes of clinicians they consulted: psychologists, pediatricians, gender therapists and endocrinologists. Many were resistant to exploring other sources of distress, or hostile to parental testimony regarding their children’s fabrications. One parent reported, “When we tried to give our son’s trans doctor a medical history of our son, she refused to accept it. She said the half-hour diagnosis in her office was sufficient … ” Another reported on her child’s therapist’s credulity: “I overheard my son boasting on the phone to his older brother that ‘the doc swallowed everything I said hook, line and sinker. Easiest thing I ever did.’ ”
