I’ve previously criticized Lisa Littman’s study of the alleged condition of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” – since corrected as “perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria” – on the grounds that its methodology, solely relying on the reports of parents about their children’s history of gender identity expression, will by design entirely fail to capture the developmental processes that trans people experience prior to expressing their gender externally in a way that would be perceived by others. The suggestion that their transgender identity should be regarded with suspicion as a mere passing phase or transient interest rather than a genuine expression of gender dysphoria, and that any kind of affirmation of their “newly” expressed gender is therefore likely to be premature or inappropriate, may thus be unwarranted. The study’s corrected title much more accurately describes the limits of this methodology: parents may indeed perceive that their child’s transness has simply appeared rapidly. But this is just an incomplete picture – it does not account for trans people’s experiences of gender dysphoria before coming out, and this limitation does not therefore mean that these experiences never took place. It is a study of parents’ secondhand perceptions, not trans people’s firsthand realities, and asserting that there must have been an actual “rapid onset” of gender dysphoria based solely on the former is a mistake.
A recent study in Transgender Health provides further information on those unseen developmental processes of gender identity in trans people, and it does so via the appropriate method: by asking trans people themselves. Continue reading
