Vindicated: Professor Attacked For Suggesting Teens Identified As Trans After Peer-Pressure

Mar 22, 2019 by Jill

by Hank Berrien, Daily Wire:

Remember the assistant professor at Brown University who was vilified for publishing a scientific paper arguing that peer influences could influence teens and young adults to identify as transgender?

Guess what? She’s been vindicated.

Speaking to Quillette’s Canadian editor Jonathan Kay, Lisa Littman, Assistant Professor of the Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, spoke of her article, titled, “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Study of Parental Reports,” which was originally published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE. After its publication, the harsh criticism from the transgender community prompted PLOS ONE to re-review the paper, which in turn triggered Brown University, which removed the press release from their website.

But as a result of the re-review, only a barely different, slightly modified version of the original paper was published by PLOS ONE this week. PLOS admitted, “Other than the addition of a few missing values in Table 13, the Results section is unchanged in the updated version of the article. The Competing Interests statement and the Data Availability statement have also been updated in the revised version.”

[…] Asked what prompted her to research the area of her paper, Littman answered, “I became interested in studying gender dysphoria when I observed, in my own community, an unusual pattern whereby teens from the same friend group began announcing transgender identities on social media, one after the other, on a scale that greatly exceeded expected numbers.” She noted, that parents of children who had announced their transgender identity said that the clinicians “were only interested in fast-tracking gender-affirmation and transition and were resistant to even evaluating the child’s pre-existing and current mental health issues.”

Littman stated that she noticed that she found “clusters of people” whose children had started to announce their transgender identity, adding, “Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.”

Read here