I recently came across a post on XTwitter, because it is wrong and a lot of people don’t seem to realize that it is wrong. At the risk of spreading wrongness, I will share the whole post below, and then respond to it:
There’s a saying in medicine that goes, “when you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.” Meaning always opt for the most plausible explanation first.
So let’s apply that to the enormous surge in adolescent girls identifying as transgender in the past decade.
Option 1: All throughout human history, there have been girls who showed no sign of gender distress during childhood who suddenly at puberty realised that they were actually boys, but modern medicine had yet to be invented so they had to suffer the lifelong agony of being trapped in the wrong-sexed body. Curiously, not one ever gave voice to this pain.
Then, only when the caring, benevolent medical industrial complex invented the concept of transsexualism and out of the goodness of their hearts made puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries available were these tortured souls able to embrace their true authentic selves.
As well, miraculously, the modern trans rights movement began in 2014 and achieved immediate and complete societal acceptance of transgender people, so all of these boys trapped in female bodies felt comfortable coming out en masse starting in 2015.
Or, option 2:
It’s an internet-fuelled social contagion on steroids.
Incredibly, in gender clinics all over North America, doctors are still opting for zebras.
https://twitter.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1720448308177490334
As of my writing this post, over four thousand people have “liked” the above message. This could be a lot worse (some anti-trans tweets get hundreds of thousands of likes) but still, four thousand people thought this was worth saying. Allow me to elaborate why I disagree.
Let’s start with the first sentence of option one – the “zebra option”, as it were. Mia claims that “there have been girls who showed no sign of gender distress during childhood who suddenly at puberty realised that they were actually boys”. This phenomenon is known as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), in which an adolescent who did not display signs of gender dysphoria suddenly begins to show these signs around puberty. There’s one problem with talking about this phenomenon, though: it might not actually exist. The Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science has this to say about ROGD:
As an organization committed to the generation and application of clinical science for the public good, the Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science (CAAPS) supports eliminating the use of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and similar concepts for clinical and diagnostic application given the lack of rigorous empirical support for its existence.
There are no sound empirical studies of ROGD and it has not been subjected to rigorous peer-review processes that are standard for clinical science. Further, there is no evidence that ROGD aligns with the lived experiences of transgender children and adolescents.
CAAPS Position Statement on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)
Right from the beginning, option 1 isn’t describing reality. It proceeds to get worse. Consider this next sentence: “Curiously, not one ever gave voice to this pain.” Just do a little reading on transgender history and you’ll find plenty of historical instances of people who weren’t happy with the gender they were assigned at birth. You’ll also find plenty of history of women being punished for being too masculine (such as laws forbidding anyone from dressing as the opposite sex) so it’s worth noting that if many people throughout history weren’t voicing their pain, it was because they had good reason to keep their mouths shut.
Even without strong social norms, there was still another good reason not to give voice to gender-related pain: there wasn’t much you could do about it. As Mia notes, modern medicine didn’t exist for a long time, so switching genders wasn’t really an option. Why express your longing to be a boy when you had no way of becoming one? You might as well publicly wish for a unicorn for all the good it would do you.
Happily, things did not stay this way, but Mia again gets things wrong. She dismisses modern medicine as just an industrial complex and scorns the idea that they could do things out of kindness. She forgets that the “medical industrial complex” is made up of people, and many of those people are doctors, and many of those doctors actually have good intentions. They’re not just in medicine for the money; they’re in it to heal. That’s part of why doctors and medical institutions have been studying and developing transgender health care for multiple decades. They saw that there was a need, and they tried to fill it.
While getting the history of transgender health care wrong, Mia also gets the history of transgender culture and acceptance wrong. She claims that the modern trans rights movement began in 2014 and achieved massive social acceptance at that time. She should know that trans rights activists have been pushing for more trans rights over the past several decades, and she is already fully aware that we have not achieved “immediate and complete societal acceptance of transgender people” since she herself is part of the crowd of people who are pushing against that acceptance.
So where are we so far? As I see it, we have ourselves a horse that Mia has painted stripes on and called a zebra. She has made claims that fail to line up with recorded history, sound science, or basic human nature. And now, after all that, Mia presents her own “horse”: the theory that it’s all social contagion, a kind of madness of crowds.
I’m not an expert on social contagion, but I believe that for this to be true, there would have be a lot of pressure on women to conform to maleness so that the idea of becoming male could actually take hold and become contagious. Consider the case of contagious eating disorders: they spread when there’s a lot of pressure to conform to a certain body type. Is there a comparable pressure on girls to be boys?
Again, I’m not an expert here, but it seems to me that there is not! In fact, some people complain that the opposite is going on: Christina Hoff Sommers says that there’s a war against boys. I’m not going to claim that being a woman is all peachy-keen, but I think we can all agree that the situation for women could be worse, because it was so obviously worse just a few decades ago. Society has made huge progress on accepting women as they are, giving them options, and not pressuring them to be more male. If you want to be a woman without conforming to stereotypical femininity, your options are probably better now than they have been for the past hundred years or so.
In other words, Mia’s “horse” option comes off looking rather like a zebra, and her “zebra” option is a repainted horse. She’s got it exactly backwards… and four thousand people agreed with her.
Lodo the Bear 