Youth transitions weren't really a problem until they discovered they could present trans boys as mentally ill girls who needed protection from thinking themselves to be trans.

I'm 45 now. But when I was a teenager that's how I was percieved. That's how MOST adult trans men were once percieved. You cannot draw a line between "real" trans men and mentally ill girls. Those are trans boys, and they're seeking to deny them the best treatments we know of that could allow them to thrive.

No one thinks you should give a child blockers or hormones a week after saying they're trans or might be trans.

But it's harmless to call them what they want to be called and let them wear their hair and clothes however they want. And if you do that and they say it helps them, and persist, then there's no justification for calling it "rapid onset" or denying them access to the next steps.

I started my transition 8 years ago, now. At the time, ROGD was a new theory, and it was predicted that a huge wave of detransition was going to result from all these misdiagnosed trans boys.

At the time I was very agnostic. I thought it was possible that some sort of social contagion was happening in that population. But there's been no explosion of detransiton. It remains rare. Detransition with regret remains much rarer still.

Still people keep saying- the trans boys NOW? They're the real victims of the social contagion. Forget about the trans boys from 5 yrs ago or 7 yrs ago. This cohort who are transitioning RIGHT NOW are the victims of a social contagion and THEY are going to detransition in huge numbers and experience massive regret.

Why should we believe it? There's been no evidence. There's just this theory that keeps predicting a huge wave of detransitions, always just another year or two out.

I have been watching the ROGD discussion closely since before I transitioned, and as someone who believes in following the evidence whether it's convenient or not I have only grown more skeptical. Because the predictions never materialized.

Lisa Littman's ROGD paper came out in 2018. Surely by now we'd have more evidence supporting it, if it was real.

But the evidence is always just another year or two out. And no one stops and says, hey, you were also saying that 5 yrs ago too.