Apparently, J. Michael Bailey is “back”, and he wants to make himself out as another Jordan Peterson - beset by the onslaught of “woke” attacking his work. Bailey’s the same researcher who tried to define transgender people based mostly on his interviews of drag queens in a book titled “The Man Who Would Be Queen”.
Now he’s gotten all hot and bothered about “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD). A “diagnosis” proposed by Lisa Littman, and has about the same amount of intellectual validity as “Autogynephilia” (AGP) - a diagnosis proposed by Ray Blanchard years ago. (If you’re interested in the background here, I’ve written a few pieces on Bailey’s work here)
His latest piece (it’s an editorial article, not actual academic research) is titled “My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored, But I Won’t Be”. Apparently, he’s upset that a paper he co-authored was retracted.
What was that paper about, again, Michael? ROGD you say? So that would be the bizarre concept that Lisa Littman dreamed up after talking to a bunch of Gender Critical parents, and not a single transgender youth? That concept?
Yup, sure sounds like it. Littman’s 2018 paper was trash too - for the fundamental reason that it failed to actually explore what was happening with transgender youth, and for massive sampling bias. What answers did you think you were going to get when the primary avenues of soliciting responses was through web forums full of Gender Critical parents?
The Littman paper also made the assumption that “social contagion” was a valid construct when talking about gender identity, but never even made so much as an effort to look at it and validate the construct either through other literature, or as part of the research. No, Littman just assumed it was valid the same way that Blanchard decided that transgender women “get aroused by the idea of having a vagina”, and that’s why they transition.
Uh - no, Michael - that wasn’t “activist outrage”. That was plain bad science, and anyone with a reasonable amount of understanding of the fundamentals of study design would pick up on. It was striking that Littman’s paper was based on information from the parents, and not once did Littman talk to the teens being described. Further, did Littman go to websites where people were trying to figure out how to support their children? No - she went to some of the most rancid websites on the internet and posted it there. I can’t imagine how that would turn out (snark).
I don’t know the full story behind the parting of ways between Littman and Brown University. I can only presume that when actual experts weighed in on the 2018 paper, and Littman’s refusal to do more than publish a minor revision to the title that perhaps things didn’t exactly go in Littman’s favour. Universities are more than a little sensitive to having their names associated with Junk Science.
Here we also get a hint as to where Bailey is going. Note the use of the word “progressive community”. Now, I don’t know exactly what he means here, but it sounds a lot like he’s basically saying “OMG, look what’s happening over there!”, while he tries to claim some moral higher ground. The problem is that he’s trying to imply some kind of “social contagion” is going on with groups of adolescent girls.
Now we start getting into the particulars of this latest paper. We have an “anonymous” author who just happens to have a transgender child that they think is experiencing ROGD. At that point, didn’t it occur to you Michael that you have all sorts of problems with bias in the fundamental design of the study? Did it not come to mind that perhaps this was repeating the mistakes that Littman has made in her study? You, of all people, with decades of academic experience should know how to identify flaws in the study design and approach that this person was taking.
Oh wait - so not only did you repeat the fundamental error of the original Littman study (only talking to parents of transgender youth), you repeated the second error of recruiting only from sources where parents already believed the idea of ROGD? That doesn’t “limit the research”, it all but invalidates it. Those are such fundamental flaws that any objective review of the study design should have resulted in it being thrown in the wastebin.
Which is exactly what other researchers demanded be done a range of concerns:
Here’s a link to the open letter. Yes, it’s as bad as you might expect at this point, and the authors of the letter point out additional aspects of the “research” that are enormously problematic, not only for the paper itself, but for the general issue of ethics in research.
Bailey goes on in his tirade to extoll the great wisdom of Ken Zucker, but let’s also remember that he has long acted as a skeptic of transgender youth in particular. Ultimately, he was pushed out of Toronto’s CAMH gender clinic for using therapeutic strategies that were looking increasingly like conversion therapy techniques. Zucker unquestionably made significant contributions to research on transgender people - in the 80s and 90s. That’s a long time ago now. For the last number of years, he has been part of an increasingly isolated group that continue to promote constructs like AGP and now ROGD, while being considerably out of step with where the bulk of the literature has been pointing.
Wrapping up his tirade, Bailey swears that he’s going to launch this huge, long term study. Until such times as he publishes the study’s design, I’m going to assume he’s going to repeat the same errors. His past track record doesn’t give me much reason to believe otherwise, and frankly collaborating with both Littman and Zucker on this study is hardly making me optimistic.
Just to put my $0.02 in on study design, I don’t see one study here, I see a need for several studies that need to be done, and a lot of deep, detailed research in order to make it all fit together.
First, a study needs to be undertaken to explore the notion of “social contagion” and to validate whether or not it is even applicable to gender identity. I’ll be quite blunt, as it has been used to this point, the construct comes across as very similar to “tabula rasa” (blank slate) theory which led John Money to advocate that David Reimer be raised as a girl. The outcome of that experiment was tragic indeed, but it’s also indicative that gender identity is not some easily mutable trait that is going to be influenced by peer pressure in school. Just about every transgender adult’s story seems to back that up - the peer pressure to conform with social expectations was crushing, and still they ended up transitioning.
Second, once you have some sense that “social contagion” has a reasonable degree of validity, then you can set about designing a study that examines the distinction between “onset” of gender dysphoria (e.g. when a person starts talking about it) and the actual experience of gender in the individual. This applies just as much to adults as it does to youth. Developmental psychology research shows quite clearly that children have a working understanding of gender somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5. Such a study will help you design tools to assess the experience of the person.
Third, once you have designed your tools for assessing traits, you will need to execute studies to demonstrate that they have appropriate levels of construct validity (that is to say that they assess what they’re supposed to), and that they are reasonably reliable.
Then, and only then, do you have the fundamental materials you need to execute your longer term study. Any reasonable version of such a study will need to:
Recruit participants broadly. Recruiting participants solely from websites with specific biases isn’t anywhere near acceptable.
Researchers will need to do more than just talk to the parents of transgender youth. You MUST talk to the youth directly
Researchers will also need to assess the dynamics within the families, as well as those within the social circles of the youth. In other words, are the youth reporting what they think they want their parents to hear; are they being given certain messages at home; etc.
The concept of “desistance” is going to come up here. It will need to be carefully defined for the purposes of the study, because it has been grossly misused in the past, and if not carefully considered will become a serious problem in the analysis of any data gathered.
If, after all of that analysis, you can find a considerable pattern of “peer influence” resulting in gender dysphoria being expressed, then you might have a credible basis for proposing an explanation like ROGD.
I do not expect Bailey’s proposed study to be anywhere near this level of complexity and clarity. He, along with Littman, have already demonstrated that they have an axe to grind. I fully expect to see a repetition of the same errors that launched so much criticism of Littman’s original paper.
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