"Not backed up by scientific research" is fascinating. I have read the study by Littman and followed the backpedalling by Brown at the time. This was before my brother (now my trans sister) suddenly declared that he was actually a woman and had already began undertaking hormones. He was 19 and therefore free to make his own health choices.
I'm his older sister five years his senior, and lived with him until my mid-twenties in the family home. He had a serious gaming addiction and had very little social interaction, career ambitions or hobbies by his late teens.
He moved out with his girlfriend (very opinionated, belligerent, left-wing, anti-work, anti-capitalist) and two years plus covid later was telling me now realised he was trans after his girlfriend's suggestion. In my head I tried to rationalise how I could have missed this. It was just the same bias as those parents in the ROGD study I thought. He was a shy boy, maybe he just never felt safe. Dad never would have let him explore his gender! He just hid it be default. I helped him find a LGBTQIA+ counsellor that he would feel comfortable with to help explore all underlying problems.
Immediately following her transition, she experienced a rush of support and attention from her limited network of friends. She reported to me that she was being invited to more things than before. My friends who had never even MET my sister, were congratulating ME on her bravery. Within a few months she was convinced she was passing as a female despite clearly very little change in her actual physiology.
Disturbingly, she confided to me that by the time she when for her first psychiatry appointment, she'd already spent weeks researching exactly what to say to get a GD diagnosis, which has cast doubt on whether any due diligence was done into her reasons for transitioning at all. Her off-hand claim she had a twinge of subconscious GD in school is just retconning to avoid scrutiny.
Two years on, witnessing where his life as a now mid-twenty something is going, I've reassessed that view and become slowly less affirming and more watchful waiting. I bite my tongue to stay present in her life but goodness me a lot of other underlying beliefs around how she perceives gendered roles in society have become clear. It's clear she sees passing as a woman as a kind of golden ticket to an easier life, one without the expectation to be the primary breadwinner, one where she is a more sympathetic victim during personal conflicts with her friends, where overall less is expected of her by virtue of being a woman. One where, if she finds someone to look after her, she might get to sit at home all day and work on "personal projects". Its clear to me that it was once she had conviction that becoming a woman would be a silver bullet in her life that the GD set in. Like a kind of project she needs to finish. She boasted to me about her first sexual experiences with men, which were under very risky and objectifying circumstances which lead me to wonder if this wasn't all brought about by her simply, reluctantly, realising her attraction for men but feeling "icky" about the idea of being gay. I think that this is an unrealistic expectation of life as a trans woman and she is setting herself for a rude awakening in future years.
Overall, I believe I made a massive mistake in celebrating her GD revelation. I pushed along with the claim because I thought it would make me cool, and supportive and on the "right side of history".
Is ROGD a scientifically-observable phenomenon? The study has been discredited by claims of parent bias... I say, we need to just as readily discredit the bias of the trans person. Justifying the means to their own ends, they have an incentive to rewrite history and make an unfalsifiable claim of having "always known" they were trans in order to access the gender-affirming treatment they crave in that moment. Until we can trust observational studies on either side, I suppose we can only use cautionary tales like mine.