I wanna talk about something personal, related to this ROGD narrative.

So, for those who don’t know, ROGD is shorthand for Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. It’s not a medical diagnosis, and was invented on the internet (you can read Julia Serano’s documentation of it here: https://juliaserano.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-1940b8afdeba)

ROGD was basically invented on messageboards of parents of trans teens who were “blindsided” by their kid coming out. “They didn’t have any signs of it!” the parents would claim, and decided to diagnose their kids with “rapid-onset gender dysphoria."

In the early 2010s, Researcher Lisa Littman conducted a study via an online survey posted on forums for parents of trans kids, culling her study largely from parents who were not affirming of their kids’ identity. Basically: the study was designed to give support for ROGD.

A big part of the whole thing about ROGD is necessarily that it’s a narrative from the viewpoint of the parents. Teens who “never showed any signs” that *parents* noticed were being considered victims of contagion based on parental observation.

Shrier expands on this technique throughout her book, Irreversible Damage, speaking only to parents of AFAB trans teens, and never to the teens themselves. As a result, the parents’ emotional experienced is privileged.

The parents go on and on about how their child has now cut them off, how this “trans ideology” has destroyed their family, and how hurt they are that their kid is no longer who the parent thought they were. The actual trans experiences are filtered through the parents.

This last fall, I called my dad to talk about the 2020 election. He’s a lifelong Republican, and raised us Christian and conservative. At the time, I was barely out as non-binary, and still haven’t told him about that, but he’s known about the gay thing since 2015.

In the intervening years between when I came out to him, and that phone call in 2020, I dated a woman for 18mos and my dad met her several times and told me he liked her. He never explicitly said he approved, but “She’s really smart! I like talking to her!” was close enough.

Until I asked him to actually stand up on my behalf. I told him about how the Trump administration had made life harder for queer people, how they’d rescinded health care and job protections for people like me, how he was making the world harder for me to live in.

I ended up learning, in that moment, that Dad wasn’t actually okay with the whole gay thing. I asked him if he thought I was going to hell, and he said “I’m not sure.” And then immediately tried to lessen it by asserting that he’d been nothing but kind to my partners regardless.

I told him that kindness doesn’t cover up for the fact that, on a fundamental level, he doesn’t believe my sexuality is legitimate and that he “hates” a major part of who I am. It felt like his statements of loving me suddenly had an asterisk saying: “except the gay part."

I made the decision that day to limit contact. I didn’t talk to him for two months, and have talked to him only a handful of times since we re-established some form of contact. I sent him my friend Matthew’s book, God And the Gay Christian. He still hasn’t read it.

The past six months have been deeply, deeply painful for me. I have spent nights crying myself to sleep, knowing that I will never, ever be able to be my full self around my dad. Last week, my brother and I realized that Pride is the same wknd as Dad’s 70th. I’m going to Pride.

My dad, no doubt, views this as me cutting him off for a difference in views, that I’ve done this for no real reason because he was still a kind and loving parent. But the reality is that I feel like he’s been gaslighting me about how he really feels about me for years.

My dad is not a bad man. But he chose to prioritize his feelings about me being “in sin” over the fact that I’m his kid and a person in my own right. To tell his story without balancing it with mine is to cast me as the villain, rather than a heartbroken person w/a hard decision.

We need to pay attention to whose stories are being told, whose experiences are being filtered through a specific narrative. Trans kids who cut off their parents aren’t villainous. We are protecting ourselves from pain.

This is why I’m so insistent about what stories we tell and why. Whose narratives get prioritized. Who gets to have the final say. The stories we tell shape the future, and we need to pay attention when such stories cast marginalized people as villains.