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After last week’s landmark ruling in the UK’s High Court that children under 16 with gender dysphoria are unlikely to be able to give informed consent to undergo treatment with puberty-blocking drugs, I want to provide you with some of the disturbing, but necessary peer-reviewed facts we need to protect children.
To be clear at the outset, this article does not refer to childhood-onset gender dysphoria, other than to note that the majority (60–90 per cent) of children with this condition become comfortable with their sex by adulthood and do not opt for a sex change. Instead, I want to look at what is known as rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). For those seeking a primer on transgenderism, I strongly recommend appendix two of Charles Murray’s Human Diversity (2020) from which I have sourced much of the following.
ROGD was a term coined by the physician and researcher Dr Lisa Littman (Brown University). It was the result of her systematic study — still the only one of its kind — of 256 surveys from parents who reported that their children had experienced rapid onsets of gender dysphoria. Dr Littman said she had noticed, ‘an unusual pattern whereby teens from the same friend group began announcing transgender identities on social media, one after the other, on a scale that greatly exceeded expected numbers.’
