The World Professional Association for Transgender Health released a statement on the phenomenon, stating: “The term ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)’ is not a medical entity recognised by any major professional association ... therefore, it constitutes nothing more than an acronym created to describe a proposed clinical phenomenon that may or may not warrant further peer-reviewed scientific investigation.”
The author of the Guardian article and others who have seized on the statement might do well to consider what is actually being said here.
This statement doesn't mean that the patterns described in the term 'ROGD' don't exist with someyoung people, it means that it is not recognised yet as a medical entity and as the statement concludes more scientific study may be needed.
Every medical entity now recognised, went through this process of observation, hypothesis, research, testing, understanding and officially describing and naming.
The government have already announced an investigation into the treatment of rapidly increasing numbers of young people.
In my opinion, anyone; whether individual, charity or organisation intent on preventing thorough informed professional investigation into something which may affect vulnerable children and young people profoundly should be viewed with suspicion.
James Kirkup Spectator: 'Trans rights have gone wrong
The new gender orthodoxy allows no room for dissent'
(extract)
"It is unsurprising that schools want guidance on how to deal with children describing themselves as transgender, since more and more seem to be doing so.
Why? Is it about tolerance: as society becomes more understanding, more trans people feel able to ‘come out’? Could the internet be accelerating ‘social contagion’, where the idea of being transgender spreads rapidly?
What explains the disproportionate number of girls (child ‘assigned female at birth’, to use the approved term) who are starting a journey that can lead to hormone treatment, then binding and ultimately removing their breasts? Is it possible that this is simply part of a wider crisis of mental health among girls?
I don’t know, and neither do the doctors and scientists who study this issue. If you talk to the clinicians at the Tavistock Clinic in London, the NHS centre for the treatment of gender-variant children, they’ll tell you that all the factors I mentioned may be at work, but the evidence base is still incomplete, that they need more time and data before offering explanations. (They’ll also tell you that quite a lot of the children referred to them as transgender will in time desist – although this is not a term the clinic would use – and decide to live in their original gender.)
The government now intends to commission research into all this. You might think that sounds sensible and mundane. You would be wrong.
According to Tara Hewitt, founder of the Trans Equality Legal Initiative (TELI), prominent campaigner for transgender rights and an adviser to numerous public bodies including the NHS, the proposed research is ‘absurd and offensive’. The project should be ‘dropped in the bin — it’s simply not an inquiry that needs to happen,’ Hewitt reckons.
This is the quintessential trans-rights response to scrutiny: even looking for facts about children’s welfare is transphobic. Just accept that trans girls are girls and trans women are women. End of debate" (continues)
www.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/trans-rights-have-gone-wrong/