On Flat Earth Studies, "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria," and Bad Science

[Illustration by MidJourney]

In the past couple of years, almost half of the states in the US have banned the provision of gender-affirming care for minors. This explosion of transphobic legislation keeping trans youth from working with care providers who support them has been based on two central myths. 

One of these myths is about what sorts of care trans youths access. This panicky myth is that little kids are walking into clinics and being hustled into "mutilating surgeries" and dosed with "experimental and dangerous drugs." (The reality is that most of the care received by gender-dysphoric young people is supportive talk therapy, with a modest subset of patients accessing puberty-suppressing drugs that have been prescribed without controversy for many years to cisgender youths. Surgeries on trans youths are very rare, and most of these are chest reconstructions on 17-year-old trans boys. A vastly larger number of cisgender 17-year-olds get plastic surgeries on their chests every year to support their gender identities, as they are cis boys unhappy with the breast tissue they have grown, or cis girls unhappy with small or uneven breasts.)

But I want to talk to you about the second myth, which is that children are being rushed into medicalized gender transitions when in fact they have "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" caused by "social contagion." The claim is that teens go online and read that it is cool to be transgender, and decide to go along with the fad. Or a cool kid at their school transitions and gets social attention, so they say they're trans too. Then they are hurried into the "medical transition complex" with tragic results because this was just a passing immature delusion of theirs. The proof is that their parents report that their child was "normal" and gender-conforming, until one day they suddenly declared they were transgender and wanted to use a new name and pronoun and transition.

If you have ever tried to support a young trans person, it will be patently obvious to you that this is false. Coming out as trans is really scary for young people. Trans youths face a whole lot of stigma and harassment at school, and at home they may (rightly) fear that their parents will reject them. Only a third of trans minors report having parents who accept them in their identified genders. For this reason, trans youths often try to hide their identities from their families, and conform to their parents' desires for how they present themselves. So when they finally decide they can't hide anymore and must come out, or someone outs them, their unsupportive parents are shocked. As the senior mental health practitioner quoted in this Scientific American article states, “It is not [an issue of] rapid-onset gender dysphoria. It’s rapid-onset parental discovery.”

"Rapid-onset gender dysphoria" is not a real diagnosis. It has been rejected as such by the American Psychological Association. But again and again, when bills banning access to gender-affirming care have been debated and passed by state legislatures, "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" has been cited as proving the ban was necessary. This remains the case as we speak.

This brings us to the central point I want to make as a social scientist, and that is the problem of terribly bad "scientific reports" being generated and occasionally even published in academic journals, specifically in order to promote bigotry and conspiracy theories. The claim made by those who deploy these studies is, "You say science supports providing gender-affirming care to minors? Well, your science is wrong, and we have good science on our side! Your science is produced by corrupt gender ideologues and big pharma! Ours is produced by brave independent researchers!" And transphobic politicians are happy to dismiss the position of 98% of experts in the field, so long as they are handed some published study they can enter into the record.

And that is why it is important to note that one of the two "scientific studies" cited all the time now when transphobic bills are passed (because these two managed to get published) has now been retracted by the journal that published it, The Archives of Sexual Behavior. The reason the journal retracted the article is because the "researcher" who collected the data did not go through the required step of protecting the study subjects and getting their informed consent. But really, that is the tip of the iceberg.

Neither the retracted study nor the earlier study published in 2018, which coined the term "rapid-onset gender dysphoria," actually studied trans young people. Instead, they looked at posts in online groups made up of parents who opposed their children gender transitioning, and surveyed parents in these groups. This means the data they gathered was biased and invalid. 

The retracted study had two authors--one being a controversial psychologist who has been publishing long-critiqued homophobic and transphobic claims for years, Michael Bailey. (Bailey, for example, has framed being gay as a disorder that should be cured, prevented, or selectively aborted.) The second author was not actually a psychologist or academic at all. She used the pseudonym Suzanne Diaz, and is the mother of a gender dysphoric child who was a member of the group for parents who opposed allowing minors to gender transition from which she gathered surveys.

Now, let's be clear: it is ok for people to study subject pools with whom they sympathize! Doctors who are cis white men are "allowed" to study cis white men patients; jazz-aficionado sociologists are "allowed" to study jazz musicians. But researchers need to disclose their social position and potential conflicts of interest. They are supposed to lay out what potential biases they may have. And if 98% of researchers say XYZ, while the author's conclusion is that XYZ is wrong and in fact the opposite is true, they absolutely must acknowledge this and make a convincing argument for why the scientific consensus is incorrect. 

Most of all, surveying people from a group for flat-earth believers cannot tell you if the Earth is truly flat and not a globe. You have to study the actual Earth for the research to come to a valid conclusion. And academic journals should not be publishing invalid articles. This is especially true when those articles are being published in order to support a political campaign, and will impact the lives of thousands, unlike most scientific journal articles, which will only be read by a small pool of academics.

I am glad the Bailey and Diaz article was retracted. But it did great damage in the few years in which it was in print. We have to do a much better job of reviewing submissions that contradict scientific consensus. Sometimes a consensus can be wrong, and careful studies should prove that! But the burden of proof should be a high one, and publishing an article concluding that people may fall off the edge of the Earth based on interviewing people in Facebook groups for flat-earthers does not meet that burden.

 

The Extent of the Assault on Trans Rights in Florida

This is a status report for you on just how bad things are now for trans people in Florida. It is so much worse than most Americans are aware.

The school year is about to start up. Schools must implement HB 1069, which requires public K-12 schools to adopt the policy that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” They must also enforce HB 1521, which requires people in public buildings, including schools, to only use bathrooms and locker rooms designated for the binary sex they were assigned at birth, and a ban on trans girls and women playing sports in their lived genders.

For K-12 teachers, using a pronoun or title (like Mr. or Ms.) that doesn't match the binary sex assigned at birth is an offense punishable by suspension of their teacher's license. Using a bathroom that does not align with their sex assigned at birth is banned. What the punishment will be is determined by the school district. But the Florida State Board of Education has instituted a policy that state university professors who use a bathroom not matching their birth-assigned sex twice must be fired.

K-12 teachers are not allowed to mention LGBTQ+ issues. If a student talks to them about being trans, they have to report it to the student's parents. Students cannot use any name other than their full legal name on their birth certificate without signed parental permission. And parents are only allowed to give permission for students to use nicknames that are gendered to match the child's sex assigned at birth. Students cannot join a school gay-straight alliance without signed parental permission.

Passed but currently under litigation is a bill that goes beyond "merely" banning providing gender-affirming care to people under 18. It makes the provision of such care a felony and requires the revocation of the medical license of any doctor who provides it. As a result, many Florida clinics have ceased providing any trans care, including to adults. This bill declares a parent's bringing a child to a doctor for trans-affirming care to be child abuse, with the threat of taking children from their supportive parents. And it allows divorced parents in other states who do not have child custody, but who claim that the parent with custody is allowing or intends to allow the child to access gender-affirming care (i.e. that parent accepts the child's trans identity) to kidnap the child, take them to Florida, and have the Florida court issue a new child custody order taking precedence over the prior order in another state.

It is truly horrendous. This is segregating trans people out of public life, legally detransitioning educators, equating acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist with pedophilia, censoring knowledge, tormenting children, denying people healthcare, and fostering kidnapping. And a batch of states are right behind Florida in this evil.

People need to know how bad things are, because people they love are going to be burned by it.

 

Why the Deluge of Transphobic State Laws?

OK, what is this thing?

I need to do more thinking about this, but it's been hard, because the stunning flood of transphobic state laws (over 500 introduced this year and it is only April) has been kind of like standing under a waterfall. It's hard to think and write when you can't grab a full breath.

But I do have an idea that I need to flesh out. And, speaking of fleshing out, this is a slime mold, drawn to order by the AI MidJourney. Maybe it reminds you of something?

Slime molds are creepy entities that are actually a mass of single-celled organisms joined together temporarily to make up a more complex, large body that can move, seek out food, and reproduce. And oddly, I think they can help answer a key question. 

How can you possibly get that many transphobic bills and laws in four months?

So here is my thought: Donald Trump gave us a human embodiment of an alternative type of politician: one not interested in governing (much too boring! geeky! compromising! a beta male thing! contemptible!). Trump instead wanted the presidency as a platform for celebrity that could generate the two things he desires--adulation and monetary profit. And he would get those not by "being presidential," but by being outrageous, a WWE character delivering constant drama. He would provide aggrieved conservative fans of patriarchy and whiteness with the thrill of a ringside seat as he smacked down their perceived enemies and kicked them in the face. "The libs" would howl and cry, and Trump fans would drink their delicious tears and get a sadistic thrill.

His fans roared and applauded. But for the rest of us, it was ghastly. Not just painful, as we got kicked at, but tacky and gross. Trump was the embodiment of that "Calvin peeing" car window decal, taking a whizz on the dignity and ideals of American democracy as he bullied the vulnerable.

Around a third of Americans could not get enough of the Trump Show. Not all Republicans--there was a sector who found him exhausting and distasteful. They just hated Team Blue and stayed loyal to Team Red, in some weird sports metaphor of how democracy operates, even when the quarterback was a schmuck.

In the end, Trump lost his bid for re-election--let us thank the stars.

But thousands of little politicians out there are fans who aspire to be the next Trump. There are some big names, like the governors DeSantis of Florida or Abbott of Texas, or the federal Representative and professional troll Marjorie Taylor Greene. But most are pipsqueaks unknown on the national stage. Representatives in state legislatures whose names are barely recognized in their home districts, let alone intoned on the national news. They aspire to Trumpish fame, but come across as impotent caricatures, posing on tacky Christmas cards with the whole family wearing matching outfits and matching semiautomatic rifles. They are mere amoebae.

And that's where the slime mold metaphor comes in. These tiny state representatives aspire to stomp like a giant, smashing norms of civility and hearing shrieks. So they have given up their vaunted individuality to do it. The ameoba-politicians have merged into legislative slime molds. Slime molds do not have brains, but these legislative conglomerates do not need a brain to act: there are PACs and "think tanks" out there that have come up with a plan and drawn up model legislation. They provide the ostensible brain.

The reason this is so destructive for trans people is that those entities acting as brains have fixated on us as the safest target to throw to the lions. Sure, there is action on other culture-war targets, like demonizing immigration and terminating education about racism as supposedly harming white children and violating “parental rights.” But abortion has proven an electoral losing topic, and of the various marginalized groups to kick at, trans people are deemed the smallest, least-supported group, so the safest one to stomp. 

So these national culture-war organizing brains have sent the same message to all the Trumpy slime molds in state legislatures at once: here are the bills to pass. Ban support of trans kids as child abuse.  Ban trans youth from playing sports as an attack on cis girls. Ban use of Medicare by adult trans people. Ban discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools as "sexualizing children." Force schoolteachers and counselors to out trans kids to their parents. Shift the Overton window, and in time you can ban all gender transition and roll back protections for LGBQA people, but don't worry about that yet. Just merge and Hulk up and smash trans people, and you can be that big orange kaiju you so long to be!

And now all these red state legislatures are passing a flood of nearly-identical transphobic bills.

That's my basic read of the situation. A slime mold metaphor.

Drag Bans 40 Years Ago and Today: The Case of Annie Lennox

 

This is the video for the 1982 Eurythmics song Love is a Stranger. It became a hit on MTV in the US in 1983--and then got pulled by the station.

The video starts out with Lennox in this classic femme "blond bombshell" look, but a minute into the video, she pulls off the blond wig, revealing slicked-back short red hair. By the end of the video, she is also sans lipstick and wearing butch mirrored sunglasses and a suit and tie.

It's a gender-queering video. That was true of a lot of the other British synthpop videos that were in heavy rotation in the early 80s on MTV, from bands like Culture Club and Adam and the Ants. But the wig-removing reveal had been a classic of "female impersonator" drag shows intended for mainstream audience consumption since the 1920s. And leaders of American conservative evangelical Christian congregations gave sermons about the evil of MTV destroying teens' morals that used the Eurythmics' video as key evidence of depravity. They presumed Annie Lennox was a man in drag, called this degeneracy, and generated outraged letter-writing campaigns from congregants to MTV.

So the station pulled the video, bowing to this pressure and announcing the decision that "crossdressing men" were not suitable material for their programming, which children could view.

Residents of Britain thought this was hilarious: proof both of Americans' backward religious prudery, and ignorance, since Annie Lennox was assigned female at birth.

The Eurythmics' response was initial disbelief, followed by Lennox publicly stating that she was not in fact a man, though it shouldn't matter. But MTV agents said she needed to prove it. Lennox was rightly affronted (were they implying she should undress for them?). Eventually she had a certified copy of her birth certificate mailed to MTV, and after more internal debates among corporate staff, the Love is a Stranger video was put back into the broadcasting rotation.

The thing is, while the outraged evangelicals of 1983 were incorrect about Annie Lennox's birth-assigned sex, they were not wrong about her being in drag. The entire video is an exploration of femme drag and masculine drag.

And here we are, 40 years later, with US state legislatures in red states enacting laws against drag, because minors might see it, and that would supposedly be intolerable "grooming" activity, "sexualizing innocent children."

What I'd point out is that the whole MTV fracas just made the video more popular. The irony is that people shouting "don't say gay!" all the time are saying "gay" all the time, leading kids to have schoolyard conversations about what it is that these adults say they shouldn't hear about. All the public discussion about not letting minors gender transition means that more young people than ever are aware that this is a possibility, giving them tools to articulate their own gender identities. 

Let's be clear: it also terrifies kids to see the rage and hate on adult faces aimed at people like them. It is very scary to come out as a youth, with adults screaming that they will not allow you rights.

And it's pretty depressing that gender-policing bigots on the political right are not only engaging in the same activities they were 40 years ago, but now they are spewing hundreds of state bills and laws banning books, forcing teachers to misgender their students, banning trans kids from participating in healthy athletics, etc. etc. etc.

This is driving a whole lot of people, whether young or adults, into the closet. But that closet is now huge! A third of the students at my midwestern university identify as something other than a cis straight person, even if many of them are only out about that in private spaces and trusted social circles.

And in those secure spaces they are doing what Lennox did in this video of 40 years ago: defying the gender police.

Considering an Ancient Transgender Saint

This is Euphrosyne of Alexandria, a saint in the Catholic and Greek Orthodox faiths. St. Euphrosyne was assigned female at birth, in the year 410, and was raised as a girl. But at age 18, Euphrosyne, with the assistance of two monks, entered a monastery, with shaved head and wearing men's garb, and became known as Brother Smaragdus. Smaragdus was highly respected for achieving a "perfect ascetic life." He was understood by the monastic community in which he lived for 38 years to be a eunuch. Those to whom he provided spiritual counsel included his own father, who did not recognize him. But on his deathbed, Smaragdus confessed his identity to his father, and asked his father to bury him so his secret would be preserved. His father was so moved by this revelation that he gave away all his possessions and became a monk himself, living in the cell that his child had occupied before him.

Miracles were reported to take place at the tomb. Then people learned that Smaragdus was also Euphrosyne. Did the church then revile this miracle-worker? No. They canonized this gender-transitioning person as St. Euphrosyne, framing them as a woman who had lived as a man in order to preserve "her" celibacy and in service to God.

The Greek Orthodox prayer to St. Euphrosyne is, "The image of God was faithfully preserved in you, O Mother. For you took up the Cross and followed Christ. By Your actions you taught us to look beyond the flesh for it passes, rather to be concerned about the soul which is immortal. Wherefore, O Holy Euphrosyne, your soul rejoices with the angels."

This is not a modern story of medicalized gender transition. And how Smaragdus/Euphrosyne understood themself, we cannot know. But what we can say is that the contemporary claim that Christianity requires people to live in the sex they were assigned at birth contradicts Christian history. And not just church history, but the contemporary practice under which people pray to St. Euphrosyne today. It is the interior soul that matters, not the flesh, says the prayer--and changing lived genders is one way to reveal that.