#ROGDAwarenessDay: What It Is and Why You Should Care
By Laura Becker
Amidst the ongoing onslaught of transgender media coverage and public discussion on gender and sexuality, a new push for understanding has emerged from inquisitive parents and therapists. Genspect is honoring this with ROGD Awareness Day on August 16, the anniversary of the publication of Lisa Littman’s 2018 study that coined the term.
“ROGD” describes a new category of transgender-identifying individuals, occurring in previously unseen numbers and for vastly different reasons than the adult transsexuals of past decades. Unlike other transgender-identifying people who felt confused about their sex from early childhood, ROGD individuals develop symptoms of distress about their sex and gender roles in adolescence. They are teens going through the turmoil of puberty who discover the concept of being trans and, encouraged by other teens, ruminate on that fantasy.
These children are recruited on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where internet algorithms bombard their impressionable minds. They are fed a stream of transgender advertisements. They get validation from strangers who tell them that being trans is cool and healthy. And they connect with adults who encourage them to seek surgery and hormones to improve their mental health.
As a 26-year-old detransitioner who medically transitioned in 2016, I am a few years older than this new cohort, and I have witnessed the escalation of internet and media advertisements to children about transgenderism in ways which were not present when I was an adolescent.
I was not an ROGD transitioner, as I was sex-role atypical since childhood. I was, however, an early adopter of the social media trends that began in the 2010s, and I’ve watched them increase dramatically in a decade.
When I was growing up in the late 90s and 2000s, transgenderism was never discussed, “being yourself” was promoted, and gay acceptance was becoming the norm. By the time I was in high school in the 2010s, however, teens were learning about “gender identity” and non-binary and transgender identities online and in school.
Today, children are taught from kindergarten that some boys and girls are born in the wrong body and that taking wrong sex hormones or having surgery is a natural part of growing up. “Queer pride” celebrations are commonplace in public schools, where teachers hand out pop art-style flags of various sexualities and gender identity labels as they choose their gender “club” and celebrate their identities like wearing their favorite band’s shirt.
Children do not possess the brain development or experience to fully understand what it means to be a boy or a girl, and even less so, a man or a woman. Teenagers who are confused about emerging adulthood cling to these identities to distract from adult responsibility, dreading becoming a man or a woman, scared about being trapped by cultural sex roles, sex, birth, parenthood, and independence.
This is why we need a movement of discerning parents and ethical therapists who are prepared to help teens through this phase, offering a healthy approach to issues of sex and gender as a counter to the strange, even extreme world they see online. It does not mean treating them the same way they would treat adult transsexuals. It does mean helping teens practice resilience in the face of their adolescent confusion. We’re promoting #ROGDAwarenessDay as a step in this process, encouraging conversations about how to do this.
Unfortunately, some stand against this effort. Political activist organizations like Planned Parenthood, GLAAD, WPATH, and other pharmaceutical clients suppress information about ROGD: as just one example, look at what Eliza Mondegreen reported about EPATH’s conference in April 2023. Evidently, groups like these see any argument that children do not need to be medicalized with puberty with drugs and surgical procedures as a threat. Despite growing numbers of medical malpractice victims like myself who detransition, these organizations are wilfully blind to harm being done to teens, as this loses them patients, money, and credibility.
As a detransitioner and child advocate, I support ROGD Awareness Day and its efforts to safeguard vulnerable families from the ideologically captured medical industry. Young adults and kids deserve comprehensive medical and mental health information, and to realize that thousands of other families are struggling with rapid onset gender dysphoria symptoms, all operating inside one large scale social contagion infecting the mind like a virus.
Header image by Filmbetrachter from Pixabay