WSJ: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Is ‘Social Contagion’

The medical community is far too unconditionally affirmative in its treatment of rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a Wall Street Journal op-ed argued Sunday, making ROGD an anomaly among social contagions.

Unlike traditional gender dysphoria, a “psychological affliction that begins in early childhood and is characterized by a severe and persistent feeling that one was born the wrong sex,” writes Abigail Shrier, ROGD is “a social contagion that comes on suddenly in adolescence, afflicting teens who’d never exhibited any confusion about their sex.”

Unlike other social contagions, such as cutting and bulimia, ROGD gets “full support from the medical community” instead of the treatment such contagions deserve, she contends.

“The standard for dealing with teens who assert they are transgender is ‘affirmative care’—immediately granting the patient’s stated identity,” Ms. Shrier writes, when the role of therapists should be to assist their patients in overcoming their unhealthy urges rather than pandering to them.

Gender dysphoria has now become “a fashionable cause,” and clinics routinely give girls testosterone with few questions asked, and with little thought to the sometimes permanent damage that such treatment brings about.

Parents who question the wisdom of yielding to their children’s desire to change genders often run up against a wall of contrary public opinion with very little scientific evidence to back it up.

“Nearly every force in society is aligned against these parents,” Shrier says.

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