#educational resource

Here’s the specific propaganda in question, written out as verbosely as I can ever recall seeing it:

“’Being trans’ is a mental illness known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria which is spread to children in the form of a social contagion, contracted either by reading blog posts full of dangerous ideas by trans people, or occurring spontaneously as a child seeks to be popular at school, or is inflicted upon a child by homophobic parents who would rather their child be another gender than gay. This then leads to them being fast-tracked into irreversible hormones which render them infertile and mutilating surgeries that they all regret and therefore kill themselves!” - FALSE

There are, frankly, more lies in that rambling paragraph than I can count without just picking the whole whole thing apart piece by piece and addressing it one item at a time. So let’s do that.

“’Being trans’ is a mental illness..” - FALSE

Despite the confidence of bigots as they routinely confront trans people shout “you’re mentally ill!” being trans is absolutely not a mental illness. Being trans is just one of those things a person can be. Like being left-handed, or being gay, or having detached earlobes. It is impossible for a person who isn’t trans to become trans, and it is impossible for a trans person to stop being trans. Anyone who ever tries to tell you otherwise is directly contradicting literally everyone you might think to check that with, from the World Health Organization to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

“...known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria...” - FALSE

I believe I may have covered this in an earlier primer, but “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” or “ROGD” is a completely fake disease invented by a bigot in the hope of creating a scientific sounding term to scaremonger with. The notion has been actively debunked and discredited since the term was coined, and even when initially presented, the “evidence” offered that such a condition might exist was a collection of anecdotes from forums dedicated to transphobia, claiming to have all had “young children” who all “suddenly declared that they were trans with no prior signs of this” who, on later examination, proved to be referring to children from the ages of 17 to 30 who by and large did not inform their overtly transphobic parents that they were trans until some time after they were safely out of their homes.

“...which is spread to children in the form of a social contagion, contracted either by...” - FALSE

The actual concept of “social contagion” is that one can track a phenomenon like repeating a joke someone heard to someone else through a large population in a fashion similar to how one might track the spread of a disease. Proponents of the whole “ROGD” thing instead seem to hope to convince people that there exist actual maladies one can contract by learning about them. Like if I explained to you that blue-blistering brain pox existed, and caused you to break out vivid blue sores, such sores would suddenly appear all over your body. As if I were a witch or something. It’s a downright astounding example of magical thinking.

“...or occurring spontaneously as a child seeks to be popular at school...” - FALSE

The idea that coming out as trans is a way to become more popular at school is the sort of thing that frankly could only possibly make any sort of sense from the mindset of an abusive parent learning that their child has discovered some exterior social support network, and I’m frankly amazed it’s an idea anyone even try to float with the general public. The unfortunate reality is that being openly trans at school opens a child up to violence and discrimination, both from other students, and from school staff, a basic fact of life one would think everyone would be intimately aware of as the most common verbal elements of all bullying are suggestions that the person being bullied is a boy with feminine qualities or a girl with masculine qualities.

“...or is inflicted upon a child by homophobic parents who would rather their child be another gender than gay.” - FALSE

This feels a bit like belaboring the point, but this is, first off, not a type of parent that exists. Homophobia is always rooted in the idea that same-sex attraction makes someone inherently less feminine/less masculine, and bigots have always envisioned some sort of spectrum on which being trans is some sort of more extreme version of being gay. It is extremely unlikely that there has ever been anyone in history who has had a child come out to them as gay and been met with an exclamation of “why couldn’t you just be trans!?” but it is exceedingly common for trans children to be asked “why couldn’t you just be gay!?”

In addition to that, it is actually less common for trans people to be straight. So for instance, a trans girl, whose parents mistakenly perceive her to be a boy, is more likely than not going to be attracted to other girls instead of or in addition to boys. So bigots pointing at any given trans girl and insisting her parents “changed her from a boy to a girl” because she liked boys are, more likely than not, wrong on both those counts.

“This then leads to them being fast-tracked...” - FALSE

So, first off, the disingenuous framing here is suggesting not only that being trans is a choice, it’s a choice other people make for you, which is just stunningly divorced from reality. Parents simply do not spend several years raising a child as one gender and then decide they’d like to switch things up. That does not happen, full stop. If that ever were to happen, one would assume the child in question would not be at all on board with the idea, and there would be absolutely no reason for them to go along with the plan without any objection or mention of it to others. Even if firmly coached or questioned, children can’t keep up the sort of deception that would require. To say nothing of needing to get doctors on board with this plan, school administrators, and various other authorities, all of whom, here in reality, are notoriously stubborn about acknowledging and accepting trans people, even when explicitly required to do so.

And speaking of how things work in reality, even the most accepting parents will not assume their children are trans even when making it real obvious. Every story you ever hear of any parent accepting a child as trans starts with that child making a surprisingly bold and unambiguous declaration of what their gender is. People, by nature, will naturally attribute anything less than that to basically anything else, which is rather understandable as being trans is, contrary to what you might think from all the public attention, quite the rare thing for anyone to be.

And of course if we’re talking about “fast-tracking” medical transition... well let’s save that for the next point.

“...into irreversible hormones...” - FALSE

“Hormones,” or to use the proper medical terminology, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is never administered to children, full stop. The very suggestion that it ever should be administered to children is something I would never expect any medical professional to ever sign off on either, as the idea behind it is to correct hormonal imbalances in trans people such that their levels of various androgens and estrogens are in line with people of the same gender who are not trans, and the typical human body does not start to produce those in particularly high quantities until after puberty.

Even after the onset of puberty however, when administering HRT to trans teens would actually be tremendously beneficial, causing them to develop in the exact same way as their peers, at the same time, with tremendous benefits to their overall health, social development, and self-image, we don’t administer it to them.

Decades ago, fearmongering over the concept that some teens might be misdiagnosed as trans, and that such teens would be “irreversibly damaged” by spending a few years with the wrong mix of hormones, a compromise was reached to instead administer trans teens puberty blockers. Drugs first developed for the treatment of precocious puberty (the condition requiring us to say “the typical human body” earlier) to delay the large-scale production of androgens and estrogens until legal adulthood, at which point, if they haven’t changed their mind, switch to HRT for a normal puberty (if a few years late in getting started), and if they are in fact one of these theoretical misdiagnosed teens, they can simply stop taking puberty blockers at any time, and unpause their normal development.

Such teens incidentally remain theoretical, as much to the frustration of organized transphobes, there have been approximately zero teens in the multiple decades where this has been the policy who have not continued on through the full period and gone on to start HRT, because again, there simply aren’t any people out there declaring other people to be trans, and trans people have to really argue a strong case to be acknowledged and given proper treatment. At time of writing, they don’t seem to have found a compelling way to argue how this rationalizes their position and seem to be relying on a general medical conspiracy.

“...which render them infertile...” - FALSE

Some countries have had policies in the past (and others still to this day) which prevent people from being legally recognized as trans unless they submit to forced sterilization. There is no actual medical, psychological, or ethical basis for this, nor is it part of the international standards of medical care for trans people, nor does HRT remove the ability to produce children. In fact, many of the same people spreading misinformation to this effect spend an equal amount of time throwing absolute fits over seeing language printed that acknowledges the fact that trans people are able to have children. That said, anyone planning to both have children and start a regimen of HRT should discuss things with their prescribing doctor because there are a lot of corner cases to account for there.

“...and mutilating surgeries...” - FALSE

Trans-related surgical procedures are not performed on minors. It’s a blatant lie to suggest they are. There are also no grounds for referring to such surgeries as “mutilating,” and there is a truly deplorable amount of misinformation out there on what such surgeries actually entail. If anyone uses the phrase “cut off” in regard to anything a trans person may chose to have done, that person is outright lying.

It is of course very much worth mentioning the very notable exception of people with certain intersex conditions, on whom it is alarmingly common for doctors to, in fact, perform rather horrifying surgeries the very day they are born, making the on-the-spot decision, frequently without even their parents’ knowledge or consent, and declare them a boy or a girl depending on exactly what sort of surgical result they were going for. This is, of course, a horrific practice that should be ended immediately, but is only relevant to the subject of trans children if one considers a boy whose genitals were trimmed down to resemble those of a girl and then declared to be such on his birth certificate to be as trans as a boy who was visually read and marked as such without any surgery to force him into that box, and we typically leave that call to be made by the particular boy who was given unethical surgery without his consent.

“...that they all regret and therefore kill themselves!” - FALSE

Possibly the most malicious lie spread about trans people is that medically transitioning (that is to say, any combination of HRT and surgery) causes regret in trans people, and leads to a high rate of suicide. The actual numbers cited come from a variety of disingenuous sources- some made up completely, some pulled from a particular decades out of date study which has become something of a holy relic for anti-trans extremists but does not actually have any relevance to anything involving trans people, and frequently numbers are pulled from valid studies on trans people, but from the wrong line (i.e. citing the likelihood of suicide among trans people PREVENTED from being able to medically transition.

If one is to look at any of the many, many actual studies conducted on the outcome of treatment for trans people, medical transition yields uniformly positive results across the board, and trans-related surgical procedures have a lower rate of regret of any type of surgery that is ever performed. i.e. more people are happy with gender affirming surgeries than say, knee or hip replacements.

Not that that has any relevance on children of course, because nobody is performing any such surgeries on children. In fact, no one is doing anything at all to children in regards to them being trans other than, hopefully, acknowledging that they are speaking the truth when they explain that they are trans, and addressing them properly after that has been cleared up. Which is something that should not be in any way offensive to anyone, but unfortunately gets very much under the skin of hateful people who get actively angry any time they hear a trans child is not being actively abused.

This of course leads us to the big question...

So if nobody is “transing” children, nor “diagnosing them as trans,” how do children (or teens, or adults for the matter) come to the understanding that they are trans in order to ask for proper treatment?

The simplest answer I’ve seen anyone give to this question is, “you get misgendered a lot, and it really bothers you.” I can’t really think of a better way to put it than that.

It’s not like this is the be-all end-all answer on the subject, but generally speaking, we all have a great many moments in our lives when someone refers to us with a gendered term. You’re on the phone with someone, they keep calling you “ma’am” or “sir,” someone’s starting a dance lesson with “OK now ladies...” or you’re watching some streamer shout “OK boys!” or any of hundreds of other things. For the vast majority of people, half of those terms are going to feel like you fit them just fine, and the other half are going to feel like they are describing a category of people you do not belong to. And of course if you’re non-binary it’s possible they’re all going to feel wrong, or right, or maybe you’re genderfluid and which ones feel right or wrong at a given point depend on other factors.

In any case, what typically happens with trans people is that over some period of time it sinks in that which of those gendered terms feel right tend not to be the ones people most typically use for us, and while it can very much vary from person to person how long we can put up with it without objecting (and you know, adjusting for fear of reprisal, repression, etc.) at a certain point you feel pretty obligated to start issuing corrections.

And then maybe you look into the whole HRT thing, because hey, turns out that even among the vast majority of trans people, the way humans are wired, which hormones are typically associated with the gendered terms that feel right for you, which mix of hormones makes your brain properly function, and how you’d ideally want your body to distribute fat, hair, bone densty, skin oils, etc. all line up in a really nice way, so you flip that androgen/estrogen ratio and everything’s great after you give things a bit of time to get into proper gear. Or almost everything, and that’s when you also throw a couple surgeries in the mix if you can afford them.