Gender Analysis

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Soh continues:

Why would this be the case? Along with the physical and emotional discomfort that is typical of undergoing puberty, it has become more socially acceptable to be a transgender man than a gay woman. The study’s findings also showed that transitioning increased students’ popularity among their peers and offered greater protection from harassment, because teachers were more concerned about anti-trans bullying than bullying that was anti-gay.

However, gender dysphoria is not at all equivalent to some broader “physical and emotional discomfort” that is supposedly “typical” of most or all adolescents. It represents a symptom profile that is specific to a given syndrome, and inventories of gender-dysphoric symptoms administered to the general population of adolescents have found that only 1.3% of that demographic report experiencing clinical levels of gender dysphoria. The experience of gender dysphoria is hardly “typical” among adolescents when 98.7% of adolescents do not experience it. Continue reading →

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Soh continues:

Another phenomenon that points to homophobia as a possible motivation for transitioning is that of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), wherein adolescent and college-aged girls suddenly declare to their parents that they want to transition, without any previous signs of being distressed about their birth sex. This desire to transition usually manifests during or after puberty, yet these girls don’t meet any of the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria.

This study of “ROGD” did not actually study a single person with this alleged new condition – instead, it relied on anonymous survey responses from parents claiming that their children have experienced this condition, drawn from users of three anti-trans websites that invented the supposed condition in the first place. The distinguishing features of this supposed condition are not really distinguishing at all, with little to separate this from gender dysphoria itself or delineate it as a separate syndrome. When Soh says “these girls” (of whom almost 1 in 5 were actually assigned male, and some were up to age 27), keep in mind that “these girls” were never evaluated in any capacity or even verified to exist at all before they were diagnosed with a condition that may not exist on the basis of anonymous secondhand reports from anti-trans advocates. Continue reading →

Her alarmist claims of transition as anti-gay “conversion therapy” are wildly at odds with current evidence.

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Debra Soh, a science writer for Playboy who’s offered uncritical coverage of the “rapid onset gender dysphoria” hoax condition and an equally uncritical profile of right-wing YouTube transphobe Blaire White, recently published an article in Quillette arguing that there is “unspoken homophobia propelling the transgender movement in children”. This article is tagged under “hypothesis”, which is one of the more friendly ways to describe the claims she makes. The main thrust of her argument proceeds as follows:

On some level, these parents likely know that there is a chance their feminine son will grow up to be sexually attracted to men. Instead of allowing this to happen, they may be more than happy to go along with facilitating their child’s requests to transition to the opposite sex, so that to the outside world, that child will appear heterosexual—an adolescent boy who is attracted to other boys will appear to be straight if he transitions to female. What’s most disturbing is that these parents will be lauded as open-minded and “on the right side of history,” when in actuality, they are homophobic.

Continue reading →