Related/tangential to this, it reminds me of the complete shitshow surrounding the
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) Controversy.
I'm sure you already know about it, but I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts or the thoughts of any other medical Kiwis. Topical especially since Detrans Awareness Day was yesterday, but the hashtag was apparently suppressed on Twitter and other social media platforms.
Anyway, the linked wiki article is a good overview, but basically a researcher and professor at Brown University - Dr. Lisa Littman - published a 2018 paper about how "gender dysphoria" is spreading via social contagion, especially among peer groups of school-age girls. Littman coined the "ROGD" term to describe this.
Anyone who knows anything about FTMs can probably recognize this as an obvious truth, but oh no... the backlash against this paper was
HUGE. And not just from crazy troons on social media, but also from shit tons of academics, activists, medical professionals, and all kinds of trans/health/civil rights organizations.
The criticism was all very disingenuous, too. Dr. Littman was accused of being an evil TERF using flawed methodologies to get the transphobic findings she desired.
Brown University quickly backtracked on promoting the paper. PLOS One (the scientific journal that published it) bowed to pressure and did a post-publication review to nitpick these so-called flawed methodologies. Littman was harassed like crazy and has been blacklisted by many of her peers and the associations/organizations in her field.
The funny thing is that review of her paper, despite being meritless and extremely nitpicky, ended up finding no significant problems. Nevertheless, PLOS One still had Littman "correct" the paper, and all the critics and TRAs ran with that headline. They ignored that nothing had really changed... only that the evil TERF's original paper was Flawed™, and therefore worthless.
Original Paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330
"Corrected" Paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214157
Here's an interview Dr. Littman did about the controversy (long but very interesting):
https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an...coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/
Arjee Restar, an MTF academic also at Brown University, published a hitpiece on Littman's "flawed" methodologies:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1453-2
Littman fired back with a response showing that her methodologies are perfectly fine and - in fact - very standard:
https://t.co/A2pZo8nYMB?amp=1
Perhaps because of this backstabbing and other drama within Brown University, Littman
left or was forced out of the university in 2020. She and a few of her colleagues now study gender dysphoria independently and seem very interested in desisters/detransitioners. See: her
website and her
twitter.