RETRACTED. Another article on that bogus Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria nonsense has been pulled from the literature.
The usual suspects are all outraged at this rebuke. The odious Colin Wright wrote an article damning the journal — he claims the retraction was over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality
.
The technicality? Informed consent. Very minor. Totally unimportant. I don’t know why we even bother.
For those unfamiliar with this slop, the assessment of the psychological state of young trans people was obtained by soliciting self-reports from their parents, parents recruited from web sites where people obsessed with trans issues gather. All their data was gathered from an anti-trans website! It’s as if someone looked up the parents of scientists by finding their posted comments on Answers in Genesis, and then came to the conclusion that all evilutionists were formed by resentment of their pastors and association with god-hating school clubs, and determined that scientists were all pathological basket-cases.
I don’t know how it got published in the first place. The authors are openly biased, they pulled all their data from an openly biased website, and they even admit in the paper that there is a chance their results were biased, and somehow, it got accepted anyway. Surprise, if you poll posters to a site called “ParentsOfROGDKids,” you’ll get testimonials to the existence of ROGD.
Another surprise: they even say in the paper that The initial purpose of the survey was not for scientific publication, but information gathering for a community of parents with shared concerns.
Then, what the hell, they published it anyway.
Oh, and if you want to know where one of the authors, J. Michael Bailey (hey, I also mentioned him yesterday) is coming from, this might help:
🤮
Self-selected groups of people used in a published paper? I majored in history, and even I spot the problem there. It would be like an historian using nothing but sources approved by Liberty University for a dissertation. Wouldn’t fly. Well, it would at Liberty, but that’s not a real school.
And that last bit? In the black box? I’m gonna go take some Tum’s to settle my stomach.
Sandusky? WTF? He kept a hit list of 10 year old prospects. Bob Costas got him to confess on national TV. There was eyewitness testimony from victims, from a coaching assistant, and from his own son for Chrrisake.
Who’s Colin Wright? googles
Oh, he wrote for Quillette, mentally files his name under Wingnuts.
Cervantes:
Well, remember, Sandusky is an older white man, ran a charity for kids, used to coach college football, so he should have been immune. Even with witnesses. A travesty, I tells ya, a Travesty!
As bad as it sounds, it is even worse.
The anti-Trans parents are complaining that their Trans child suddenly became Trans.
Which is completely understandable.
If your parents are anti-Trans and you are Trans, your parents are the last people who are going to find out!!!
These children have a high probability of being abused until they can leave home, may be sent to Fake residential treatment centers for conversion therapy (which are known for cases of suicide among their victims), and may well be simply just pushed out of the home to live or die on the streets.
We all know about or see the homeless kids on the streets.
40% of them are gay or Trans kids.
And, a huge number of them aren’t runaways, they are pushouts.
No one is looking for them and no one cares where they are.
PZ outed J. Michael Baily.
I tried to find out who the first author was, Suzanna Diaz.
Apparently, Suzanna Diaz doesn’t even exist.
It is a fake name for someone who has no professional qualifications who runs an anti-Trans hate group.
All this paper shows is that anti-Trans people hate Trans people.
Which we already know anyway.
This is quite the snake pit of liars, haters, and twisted academics.
The editor of this journal was or is (I couldn’t tell from my first Google search) one Kenneth J. Zucker who invented gay conversion therapy and several diseases that cause people to be gay or Trans.
As someone on Pharyngula once pointed out, every minority gets their own diseases to explain why they are disadvantaged minorities and deserve all the hate and discrimination they get.
These are people out on the lunatic fringes but they are blatant haters and are not harmless crackpots.
I wrote a detailed comment on the IRB issue in this paper. Short version: yes I think the lack of informed consent from the parents was a problem. However, I think the more fundamental problem, one that affects all ROGD studies of this sort, is that they didn’t get the consent of the kids.
“The initial purpose of the survey was not for scientific publication, but information gathering for a community of parents with shared concerns.”
Imagine that! These parents have concerns. We always get things backwards. Would anybody imagine that perhaps the young people involved have concerns? Is there going to be any survey done on that question? Because I can promise you, if you listen to young people on transgender forums, oh, yeah, they’ve got plenty of concerns.
@ #5 raven
“If your parents are anti-Trans and you are Trans, your parents are the last people who are going to find out!!!”
ROGD rests on a number of false assumptions, one of them being that parents would know if their child was previously gender non-conforming. It would be obvious to them, wouldn’t it? No, because transgender people, before they come out, aren’t necessarily noticeably transgender. I.e., they’re not necessarily effeminate or butch, as the case may be.
There’s a class of transgender people I call “Surprisers”, surprisers because when they come out, everybody’s surprised. Nobody would ever have guessed that they were trans. I have no idea what percentage of trans people are surprisers. I’ve never looked into the question. It doesn’t really matter. I just know there are quite a few of them, and that’s good enough.
I was a surpriser myself. I remember my sister telling me that when she told her son I’d come out, he said, “I didn’t see that coming.” Nobody did–except me of course.
I really hope this Michael Bailey asshole is on a watch list. He seems like someone that shouldn’t be allowed around children.
“The exaggerated harmfulness of
[ REDACTED ] ”
Anton Cigurh, if we can agree on a price I got a job for you.
.
I did a brief physics course in Umeå University together with a bona fide bush pilot who later changed gender. He did not follow stereotypes.
I’m just going to put this here.
Above I claimed that Trans children were at high risk of parental rejection, parental abuse, and being pushed out of their home.
Which is why they don’t exactly rush to tell their parents that they are Trans.
This is true and there is data on this subject.
“Seventy-three percent of TGAs (Transgender Adolescents) reported psychological abuse, 39% reported physical abuse, and 19% reported sexual abuse.”
This is the population that the fake paper used for their survey, anti-Trans parents who almost certainly ended up rejecting and abusing their Trans children.
I suffer from Rapid-Onset Disgust — ROD — when I read stuff like this.
The hyphenation of the @13 adjective will escape even the ‘murrican spelling nazis.
To moonslicer @9:
Yes they do. And raven pointed out the reason many have concerns with their parents. OTOH, when trans youth are supported by their parents they flourish, just like any other kid that is supported by their parents.
See for instance Kristina Olson’s keen scholarship is informing the conversation on gender identity
So, parents, how about you support your kids’ exploration of their gender wherever it may lead them? (Said as a parent of a trans kid, now adult.)
And I hate the stoopid smart comma. An elision indicating apostrophe should be hanging, not having an erecton.
@ 15 anat
It’s when I look at stuff like this that I feel that today’s kids (some of them) are living in a totally different world from the one I grew up in. Having supportive parents? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Actually being able to get out and live as yourself? That’s something I never would have dreamed possible when I was young.
I’ve often said (generally to myself), “What is adulthood for a transgender person? That’s the time you get to try to recover from your childhood and youth.” So many young people these days are under the cosh because they’re going to insist on their right to live as themselves. They’re not going to languish in the closet like we did. At my age, I can only look and wish them the best. The positive reports we get make the heart rejoice.
Oooooh, looks like this Michael Bailey guy is trying to be all “edgy” and shit, coming out to support child-rapists without, you know, actually supporting child-rape, or something.
Also, “multiple personality disorder” (now called “dissociative identity disorder” BTW) is long known to be the result of SEVERE abuse of children by parents or other caregivers; NOT of “exaggerated harmfulness of child-adult sex.” Does this assclown actually think a severely abused kid won’t start showing “multiple personalities” until after everyone “overreacted” to news of the abuse? Fun fact, dimwit — a lot of parental abuse doesn’t come to light for a very long time, if ever, so blaming “overreaction” for the consequences of such abuse is just beyond ridiculous.
More like a few of today’s kids.
That article I just posted has, ““Seventy-three percent of TGAs (Transgender Adolescents) reported psychological abuse, 39% reported physical abuse, and 19% reported sexual abuse.”
This leaves 27% of Trans kids free of psychological abuse.
Of note, cis gender kids also report significant levels of abuse. No surprise.
The US has high rates of parent-child estrangement.
It’s 27%.
We’ve all seen this and often. It might even be one of us.
One of my relatives was raised by an abusive mother.
It works like you would expect. In the last 4 decades, he has had very little contact with her and avoids her as much as possible.
Digging into this, there is a Publisher’s Note at the bottom that says “Suzanna Diaz is a pseudonym.”
I know that it’s not impossible to publish under a pseudonym, but it is still very unusual, especially since that author has a listed affiliation with the very same website they pulled their “data” from.
There’s a lot about this that seems to me to be a series of institutional failures on the part of nearly everyone involved.
The retraction notice:
” The Publisher and the Editor-in-Chief have retracted this article due to noncompliance with our editorial policies around consent. 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 publish to have their data included in this article. Table 1 and the Supplementary material have therefore been removed to protect the participants’ privacy.
The authors disagree with this retraction."
So, the authors basically disagree that consent is required. Matches that whole support of pedophilia bit nicely.
My only question is, if consent wasn’t given and that’s plain enough that the paper had to be retracted, whyinhell was it even published in the first place?
My trans grandson has only known he was male since age 7 when he informed his parents that he was uncomfortable dressing as a girl. He’s 17 now and has had to put up with the storm of popularity dumped on him by his classmates and acquaintances, which is undoubtedly the only reason he insists on his gender. If this isn’t a case of rapid onset, what else could you call it? It seems to meet all the criteria.
Our legislators have been remiss in not preventing him from participating in sports. He obviously has an unfair advantage.
@22 simplicio
The narrative you’re giving here is rather confused. Just because at age 7 he tells his parents he’s uncomfortable dressing as a girl doesn’t at all mean that that’s when his discomfort started. He could have been feeling an attraction to “boy stuff” for quite some time before that, say 2-3 years. Neither does it imply that that’s when he became fully aware of his gender identity. That sort of full awareness can come on gradually.
Then you say that the only reason he now insists on his gender is because of his current popularity. How do you know? How do you know what’s been going on in his head for the last 10 years? This comes across as cheap dig that you’re taking at him, a way of trivializing him and his experience.
And why in the world would he have an unfair advantage in sports? Is he on testosterone and participating in girls sports? If that’s the case it’s not his fault. It would be the fault of the legislators who are insisting he must participate in accordance with his birth certificate.
At any rate, this is certainly not a case of ROGD, not when he’s been at least partially aware of his inclinations for at least 10 years. That’s not sudden. ROGD would apply to someone who’s never shown any signs of gender dysphoria, then suddenly displays all sorts of signs. That’s not at all the case with your grandson, at least not the way you’re telling the story.
moonslicer, it’s sarcasm.
There is more to ROGD than just Rapid Onset or perceived Rapid Onset.
They’ve also made up a “Why”and “How”.
ROGD happens, they claim, because of social media influence and social contagion. In other words, Trans kids are catching Trans from their peers by an invisible (and imaginary) social contagion.
They don’t have an explanation for why Trans kids aren’t catching cis gender, despite that being by far the majority gender bias in our society and the default assumption.
People have looked for the “social contagion” vector and it apparently…doesn’t exist.
I propose a different syndrome that deserves serious study: ROFD.
Rapid-Onset Fundagelical Dysfunction
(and there are “fundagelicals” in all of the major organized religions, so it’s not even discriminatory!). It’s not related to ROFL because nobody is laughing.
All seriousness aside, one can literally time-warp a few decades into the past and substitute “faith” for “gender” and the rhetoric sounds identical.† One need not even be in the “study group” to see that! What’s that bit Santayana threw off about being doomed to repeat history?
† Consider school board elections in the 70s and 80s. From the perspective of a student who, thanks to AP courses, before he could vote already had more college-level science credits than any of the candidates for the school board in a certain Seattle suburb, just north of PZ’s escape, in 197x.
Raven@25–
Entirely true. Given what we know about transgender identity, the ROGD hypothesis is completely at odds with the evidence, which means the only reason anyoone adopts it is for extraneous reasons, those being (1) so anti-trans parents can find someone to blame and (2) so anti-trans activists can maintain their violence-provoking ‘grooming’ lie.
I should add that ROGD is no different to arguments I heard about gay orientation when I was a young adult in the 1980s. A close friend of mine came out to his parents, and about a year later at a Christmas party those parents cornered me and demanded to know ‘if it was [name redacted] to did this to him’. As if he wouldn’t be gay if he hadn’t met that person. It’s the same argument, just shifted to an even more vulnerable population.
moonslicer @ #17:
I’m so sorry you had to go through that.
@ john morales #24
Are you sure? I hope so. But this is no more far-fetched than a lot of stuff you see on the net posted by haters who are perfectly serious.
@ raven # 25
“ROGD happens, they claim, because of social media influence and social contagion. In other words, Trans kids are catching Trans from their peers by an invisible (and imaginary) social contagion.
They don’t have an explanation for why Trans kids aren’t catching cis gender, despite that being by far the majority gender bias in our society and the default assumption.”
Yes. The reason transgenderism isn’t a contagion is that it is my gender identity that makes me transgender. My gender identity is a fundamental part of my psychology and it isn’t something I could pass on to somebody else. I can’t lend them my brain.
And you’re rightly pointing out something that I’ve remarked on: I’ve lived my entire life heavily outnumbered. Every least little move I make I’m outnumbered by 99-1, if not 199-1. I’ve lived my entire life amidst a sea of cisgender people and influence, yet it’s never changed me in any way. How then is a bit of contact with me going to change somebody else?
moonslicer @30, no. I should have said that’s how it seems to me.
Just going by the vibe. I could be wrong.
PS Seconding SC, and may I add your sentiment is admirable — “They’re not going to languish in the closet like we did.”
—
[OT]
The nym is suggestive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Chief_World_Systems#Structure
Back in the day, we had a commenter here yclept “Smoggy Batzrubble”.
[nostalgia]
<clickety-click>
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/03/21/why-i-am-a-christian-a-conversation-with-jesus-smoggy-batzrubble/
Utterly OT, but germane to reality:
Our wonderful press noticed Putin threatening nukes again.
Unnoticed this far is, he referred to Belarus as a territory, rather than a nation, implying possession of that nation.
Of course, the current misleader of Belarus didn’t object, essentially granting Russia ownership of the nation and its populace.
Nukes, not all that alarming, as there are a hell of a lot of nations that own such products of the insanity factory. That a nation quietly gives up sovereignty, that’s a big deal.
If only we had a strong leader, but alas, we have Biden, one slightly left of Trump.
@ moonslicer : Respect. You have my respect and admiration and sympathies for whatever those might be worth. Also virtual ((hug)) from me if you want it.
@ #30 John Morales
“I should have said that’s how it seems to me.
Just going by the vibe. I could be wrong.”
If it’s sarcasm, it obviously took me in completely. I just don’t know. I have gone back and looked at it again, and for the life of me I just can’t tell.
@ #34 StevoR
“Respect.”
Thanks very much, StevoR. And yes, hugs are always welcome. When do you ever get enough of them?
moonslicer @35: FWIW, simplicio’s post seemed obviously sarcastic to me. “the storm of popularity”? And ten years hardly qualifies as “rapid onset”.
@ # 36 Rob Grigjanis
OK, I can go with the consensus. I’m just thinking of stuff that I’ve seen on the net before, like the story some guy was giving me about his niece, who’d regetted her transition. It was all rather convoluted, and there were holes in his story so that it didn’t actually make any sense. But it made me quite angry, since it was an obvious fabrication, and this was the kind of thing this guy would post by way of trying to hurt trans people, because he was bitterly anti-trans himself.
In a way it’s hard to parody such people because what they have to say is already ridiculous enough.
That is one of the many nonsense arguments the Trans haters bring up.
Very few Trans people regret their transition.
The number who regret transistioning is 1%.
That is very low.
For comparison, half of all people who get married regret it since the divorce rate is 50%.
“Aug 31, 2021 — In a survey published in June, 8 percent of British parents said that they regret having kids.”
And, who hasn’t made choices they later regret?
Everyone has a long list and it gets steadily longer with time.
That is just part of life.
@ #38 Raven
“The number who regret transistioning is 1%.
That is very low.
For comparison, half of all people who get married regret it since the divorce rate is 50%.”
This is an argument I use myself from time to time. I ran into one guy who didn’t like it for some reason. He didn’t really say why, said it amounted to deflection, or something like that. I think what he really meant was, “That’s not fair!” I.e., it’s a pretty good argument.
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/rightwing-group-anti-trans-messaging-swing-states-womens-bill-of-rights
Opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IztFQtTd1A0
@ # 40 John Morales
Great! Just what we need. Another anti-trans organization with millions to spend.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the video of Trump’s speech at Bedminster right after his arraignment in Miami. There was one little bit there where he acknowledged what everybody with any brains knows: that the right has deliberately whipped up this war against transgender people as a way of rallying the troops. “Who’d have thought it? Five years ago you didn’t even know what the hell it was.”
That’s something that my brain is simply not equipped to understand: how people can be so cynical, so heartless and so wicked. And then they’re so proud of themselves for that.
moonslicer, I gave up trying to figure out such creatures long ago. Dealt with such when I actually personally had to deal with actual terrorists. I don’t need to figure them out to out think them and outmaneuver them or in a worst case scenario, out-monster them.
I only needed to neutralize them and survive. And neutralize means stop them, not always kill them, just stop their behavior.
And when I got things wrong, I did manage to at least blunt their recruiting by making them plainly visible as the monsters.
For today, all I can offer is this: Today, it’s trans being evil, six months from now, it’ll be a new target as attentions drift and need refuckusing. Yes, that was intentional.
Some new torture chamber in the school basement full of dead children’s bodies.
Hopefully, this time, they won’t have to demolish a school to find no basement. Given the pizza shop with no basement not getting razed to find no basement, I do have some hope.
And heaven help their next victims.
@ # 43 wzrd1
Yes, I’ve come to much the same conclusions. I’m not going to understand them, and we’re not going to be able to convert them. But there is the possibility of defeating them. One thing that we’ve learned is that the majority isn’t against us. They pretty much don’t care one way or the other. So we get out and live our lives, and bit by bit they’ll see that we’re not a threat to them in any way (although that little stunt at the White House didn’t help matters).
That’s basically what happened in Ireland, and it’s happened in various other locales where trans people have legal rights in some form. People get used to us, and when they see we’re not harming them in any way, they come round to accepting what really doesn’t affect them in any way.
That might happen.
The anti-Trans hate is something we’ve seen many times.
A witch hunt.
It’s been witches, Pagans, commies, gays, Muslims, atheists, public health and medical workers, climate change scientists, etc., and now it is Trans people.
That is what happened to the gays and gay marriage.
Are there gay people living on my road?
Sure, it is a long road.
Who are they and are they married?
Who knows or cares?
They don’t affect my life in any way and aren’t bothering me so it is none of my business and nothing that concerns me.
This should happen to Trans people eventually and it might happen.
I won’t call this a prediction but it’s a possibility.
Next stop: blaming the Canadian world conspiracy.
…it is actually possible to “recruit” Americans to become Canadians. Unlike becoming gay. Or trans.
The Federal court in Indiana just blocked a lot of their anti-Trans newly enacted laws.
These laws have now been blocked in many states, including Alabama, Florida, and now Indiana.
They are likely unconstitutional as violating the 14th amendment for lack of equality under the law and due process.
More on the Indiana laws.
Some of them are absurd.
.1. “The order from U.S. District Court Judge James Patrick Hanlon will allow the law’s prohibition on gender-affirming surgeries to take effect.”
Which is no big deal.
“They…Indiana University Health Riley Children’s Hospital…that for patients who are minors, doctors do not perform genital surgeries or provide those surgery referrals.”
.2. “Hanlon’s order also blocks provisions that would prohibit Indiana doctors from communicating with out-of-state doctors about gender-affirming care for their patients younger than 18.”
This is a strange one.
Likely seriously illegal.
Violation of freedom of speech, freedom of movement,
Indiana here is trying to make their laws apply outside of Indiana which is illegal.
Indiana only has jurisdiction within Indiana.
@ raven # 48 & 49
Yes, I’m glad to see the courts at last knocking some of these laws down, or at least knocking them back. For one thing, they’re an invasion of privacy. A lot of nit-wit legislators who know nothing about transgender issues are putting themselves between a patient and doctor, in effect telling a doctor what sort of health care he can provide to a patient.
Also, what does the 14th amendment say? You can’t deprive someone of life, liberty and property without due process of law? Again, these legislators who have no earthly idea why transgender people want and need to live “authentically” are trying to limit our freedom by fiat. When have I ever had my day in court? When has anybody ever laid any charges against me and produced any evidence against me? Yet they want to take my freedom away from me in various ways without showing that it’s right and just to do so.
If Donald Trump loses his freedom, he’ll have abundantly earned it. But most of us don’t commit 71 felonies.
Being gender-fluid is nothing new.
An iron age grave with a gender-fluid high-status person (possibly Klinefelter syndrome, an XXY chromosome)
BTW this was in Finland, before Sweden invaded and imposed Christianity.
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-weapon-grave-suontaka-hattula-finland.html
@50: Unfortunately, considered legislation IS due process of law. That’s why a legislative act can condemn private property for public use; the only remedy that’s left is setting the “compensation” value for the “taking” (Amd V).
It can be a bit dicier with pure-liberty interests, because the courts will be more interested in whether the legislative act relied upon a prohibited rationale. Unfortunately, “morality” is not a prohibited rationale, and courts have always gone out of their way to avoid finding a sectarian-religious baseline so infecting a “morality” provision that the provision is unconstitutional. (It really isn’t much more prevalent now than it’s ever been — just more explicit and easier to rationalize; it’s just about the difference between bottled salad dressing and making up pre-packaged salad dressing.)
And it’s always more complicated when the purported welfare of minors is involved. (It wasn’t when forcing 17-year-olds to register for the draft, but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and legislators definitely have small minds…) Just like any upstanding upper-class individual citizen is, though, legislatures are incapable of child abuse — just ask them.
@ # 52 Jaws
OK, point taken. But when a legislature is giving you due process merely by passing a law, it makes the notion of due process pretty meaningless. This would especially be the case with transgender issues, given that our opponents/legislators don’t have the slightest understanding of those issues. All they know is that they don’t like transgender people, so they proceed to ban something or other.
I’m glad to see that the courts are beginning to look at the legislation being passed in so many states and finding holes in it everywhere. It’s the biggest problem connected with being a minority: a certain faction of the majority will simply gang up on you and strip you of certain rights without the slightest justification.
The odious Colin Wright … claims the retraction was “over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality.”
If he’s really concerned about inconsistency, he should be glad whenever it’s applied at all. If the rule is there, it should be applied more, not less.
raven @ 49, “They…Indiana University Health Riley Children’s Hospital…that for patients who are minors, doctors do not perform genital surgeries or provide those surgery referrals.”, so that means that if a neonate is born with an imperforate anus, both imperforate, they just get s shovel to bury the kid when the intestines rupture?
The frequency for imperforate anus is approximately one in 4,000 to 5,000 births. In such patients, fusion is frequent with the urogenital tract as well.
Can’t beat when they legislate medical abandonment that will result in an agonizing death.
Slightly less seriously, would such legislation not result in the banning of breast enhancements for girls under 18, which I understand from other comments does happen at a higher rate than there are transgender children? I mean, what is breast enhancement except for “gender confirming surgery”?
<
blockquote>I mean, what is breast enhancement except for “gender confirming surgery”?<.blockquote>
“gender enhancing surgery”
Jazzlet #56
Sometimes women who have had a mastectomy want “breast enhancement”.
Sometimes women who are particularly over-endowed want a more reasonable life, too.
Basically, “gender confirming surgery” is an euphemism which is a bit outdated — currently, it’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-affirming_surgery these days.
Breast enhancement is kinda the opposite of that.
@ 58 weeaboo lad
That’s exactly the point. They want enhancement so their bodies are more typical of their gender. That’s what “gender confirming” means.
This is why I (sarcastically) use the phrase “Rapid-Onset Guardian Discernment” to refer to these transphobic parents. The parents suddenly start discerning that their kid is trans. And rather than accept their kid for who they are, they have to invent a nonsensical backstory.
@56
All of the Republican laws banning trans kids from getting health care are very explicit that they only apply to trans people: cis children can continue getting the same treatment. That’s why the courts have started striking them down.