Queering Science
by Mark Regnerus, First Things:
This past August, Brown University public health professor Lisa Littman had her woke moment. Littman studies sexual health concerns, from reproduction to substance use in pregnancy to gender dysphoria—today’s topic of intense scrutiny and politicization. Understanding how children and adolescents come to believe that they were born into the wrong bodies is a complicated process. But the right approach for a social scientist is to listen to accounts, watch actions, ask questions, and write down what you see and hear. And that is how Littman, presumably as liberal as the next professor, found herself on the wrong end of a scholarly mob.
While it barely registered on scholarly radars a mere ten years ago, after Obergefell the transgender phenomenon became the next frontier in the dissolution of “heteronormativity” and the queering of science, that is, tearing down the assumption that sex—whether you’re talking about physiology (male and female) or what you do with it—is any kind of standard. Resisting heteronormativity is the new norm, and it now extends to the scientific method, once thought immune to social trends. Max Weber, peddler of the strong fact-value distinction, turns out to have been rather naive.
In her study published online at the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, Littman documents the reality of a type of experience: the rapid onset of gender dysphoria (ROGD) in adolescents. By “rapid” she means that it happens suddenly either during or after puberty among teenagers who displayed no indications of such a tendency in their childhood. The point of the study was to note that this scenario exists and to describe the phenomena that co-occur with it by surveying parents of these adolescents. The teens’ parents, who in this case were overwhelmingly supportive of same-sex marriage and transgender rights, tended to note that ROGD occurred in groups of friends as well as alongside a surge in the kids’ Internet or social media use. In fact, only 13 percent of parents noted no evidence of a “social influence.” Moreover, 62 percent of parents reported their child had been previously diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, and 48 percent reported a traumatic or stressful event prior to the ROGD.
You get the point—and the obvious problem. The evidence doesn’t fit an immutability narrative, or even the “I felt it as a child” explanation. On the contrary, ROGD appears to be “infectious” in some post-pubertal social groups. Just how common is this? We don’t know, since studies like this one are not designed to tell us. It was exploratory. Littman didn’t draw any hard conclusions in her study, only documented the strong correlations of certain social and psychiatric conditions with ROGD. It was clear that more science was called for. But that isn’t what came next.
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