The Sweetest Poisons: Chapter 10A

"Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria"

This post is my second contribution to Billie Hoard’s series of articles on Dr. Preston Sprinkle’s book Embodied, titled, “The Sweetest Poisons”. Last post, I covered the transitional chapter “Interlude”, and here I start Chapter 10: “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria”. There is so much to this chapter, so this is the first of what will likely be four posts to get through it.

To those of you who follow Billie and are already familiar with her work, Hi! I’m Celeste Irwin. I’m a trans woman and a Christian. I’ve loved Billie’s series and can only hope that I can do justice to these portions. Welcome to my blog, and if you want to get future updates to this series as well as my other writings, you can subscribe (free) here:

Introduction

Have you ever said or thought any of these things?

• “Wow, there are a lot of trans kids now, and there didn’t used to be - what’s making all of these kids trans?”

• “I think [person] transitioned because their friend or family member did,”

• “That person transitioned because of social media or because it’s cool to be transgender.”

• “What if these people transitioning regret it someday?”

• “Why should teenagers be getting medical treatments for gender dysphoria?”

• “Couldn’t therapy be a better option?”

• “What if they have mental health issues or are autistic? Doesn’t that cast doubt on a gender dysphoria diagnosis?”

If so, then this post (and the subsequent posts about this chapter) are for you. I’ve also linked dozens of sources for you to read more about. I want to say at the outset: I do not judge anyone for having those questions. But I do expect someone with those questions to do the work to learn whether there is merit to them, and I hope this post and the ones following it help those who are in that spot. And, as always - feel free to ask questions below!

A difficult topic

I’ve wanted to write about the concept of “social contagion” or “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD) for a couple years now. It’s a difficult topic to write about, because it requires one to try to prove a negative. It’s hard to do, just like “Prove that cell phones don’t cause cancer,”¹ “Prove that vaccines don’t cause autism,”² “Prove that Sasquatch (Bigfoot) doesn’t exist,”³ or others.

But it’s an important topic, because of just how easy it is for this concept to take hold, and how destructive it can be once it does. The idea that “transness is a social contagion” categorizes gender dysphoria as a kind of virus. A disease that can be caught and transmitted. Julia Serano captures the impact of that quite well⁴:

…if trans people are imagined to be “contaminating” and capable of “infecting” or “converting” others (whether via “social contagion” or “grooming”), then that provides a convenient excuse for those who wish to “quarantine” us (e.g., by preventing us from participating in society, censoring our life experiences and perspectives, or perhaps even eliminating us all together).

Julia Serano - “All the Evidence Against Transgender Social Contagion”

This thinking leads to things like “Don’t Say Gay/Trans” bills⁵, libraries refusing to stock books containing LGBTQIA+ content⁶, and the wholesale erasure of anything to do with transgender people from federal government websites in the first weeks and months of President Trump’s second term. According to NPR:⁷

It's not the first time transgender people became a target of governments, historians say. They were one of the groups that were persecuted early alongside suspected communists and Jews by Nazi⁸ Germany, said Laurie Marhoefer, a specialist on the history of Weimar and Nazi Germany at the University of Washington who also studies transgender and queer history.

"Transgender people are the canary in the coal mine of democracy,"⁹ said Marhoefer.

The erasure includes the truly depraved act of removing mentions of trans people from the National Park Service website for the Stonewall Inn National Monument, site of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, widely considered a pivotal moment in the fight for queer rights in the United States.¹⁰

“Social Contagion” thinking relies on two fundamental premises. First, that some trans youth are not “actually trans.” And second, that trans identities are somehow “worse” than non-trans identities. That they are an unfavorable outcome; that it is, in a word, better to be cisgender. There is a word for a view that one class of people is better than another: bigotry. In this case, the specific form of it is called “cis supremacy.”¹¹ Like white supremacy, it defines those on the margins as “other”, and treats them as lesser. Sometimes it even treats them as not human, as evidenced every time I’ve been called a “monster”, or “virus”, or seen trans people referred to as a “plague.”

But concern over the spread of a way of life only happens when it’s seen as a bad thing. No one loses sleep over something like an “electric vehicle social contagion.” When a thing is seen as good, we generally are happy if more people do it. When a thing is seen as neutral, at worst it’s seen as a trend or fad, mostly harmless (for those of you old enough, remember furbies, Tickle-Me-Elmo or the Macarena). But when a thing is seen as bad? That’s the makings of a moral panic.

Now, it is likely that I’ve offended some readers - that some of you are saying “hey now, I’m not prejudiced against trans people - I just am worried that maybe there’s a lot of kids getting caught up in this.” And I’d like you to ask a few questions of yourself:

1. Why would that bad?

2. Have you looked for evidence of the “why” actually happening. If you said, “too many people transitioning could lead to a lot of them regretting it,” have you looked into the data to see if that’s happening?

3. Have you actually looked for evidence that the contagion effect is happening? What form would that evidence take?

We’ll look into all of those questions as we go through the next few posts. Just keep this all in mind. This is a difficult conversation precisely because of how weak the concept is, how the conversation itself invokes a skepticism regarding whether it is acceptable to be transgender, and how it literally pathologizes transness into some kind of virus.

Ok, let’s get to it.

Summary: ROGD is not a thing

Chapter 10 of Embodied is titled “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria.” It was tempting for me to keep this post to a single sentence:

“Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is junk science¹² that has not been validated by any reputable study and should therefore be completely disregarded in any discussion of trans people, and anyone pushing this theory is revealing either their agenda, their unfamiliarity on the topics, or both.”

If you want a summary of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria, that’s it. That really is the summary. ROGD is not a thing.

Dr. Preston Sprinkle spends this chapter discussing something that simply does not exist. A 2021 statement by Coalition for the Advancement & Application of Psychological Science reads, in part:

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.¹³

The statement is co-signed by, among others, the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association. It further opposes any use of the concept in clinical settings.

At this point, I would encourage you to ask yourself who is more credible on topics related to child psychology. Would you be inclined to trust the American Psychological Association or would you rather trust Dr. Preston Sprinkle (PhD, New Testament)?

But I’m going to continue with this analysis of Dr. Sprinkle’s writing for two reasons:

1. There’s a lot of other claims mixed into the chapter that are worth examining.

2. Some of you may have heard of ROGD (or, as it is sometimes discussed: the “social contagion” theory of transness) and it’s helpful to walk through how it became an anti-trans talking point, despite having no reputable evidence for it.

However, I must note up-front: this chapter is a Gish Gallop¹⁴ within a Gish Gallop. The length of Billie’s critique of Embodied is in part due to the huge number of claims Dr. Sprinkle makes which require rebuttal, despite him having failed to support them to begin with. Here, Dr. Sprinkle builds an entire chapter on a concept with no scientific backing. But, I suspect that, for some of you, you will be unsatisfied with my simple statement of: “No. That’s not a thing.”¹⁵ Hopefully this post and linked resources will help you.

Preface

Dr. Sprinkle writes this as the first of three chapters talking about “the practical aspects of our topic.” Such a framing implies that he does not mean this as a philosophical exploration but rather a “rubber-meets-the-road”, practical discussion which informs action. This is made clear by how he describes the other two practical chapters, found at the end of the interlude preceding this chapter¹⁶:

1. Chapter 11, “whether a disciple of Jesus should transition”

2. Chapter 12: “various questions related to pronouns, bathrooms, and sleeping spaces.”

That practical framing makes it notable that Dr. Sprinkle first introduces Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) as “a social phenomenon that has become a highly publicized part of this conversation… which has to do with the massive increase in teenagers identifying as trans*¹⁷."¹⁸

One might hear Dr. Sprinkle as making several assertions in that statement:

• Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria exists

• It’s a social phenomenon

• It’s driving a massive increase in teenagers identifying as transgender

Throughout this analysis, I will be evaluating his support for those claims.

As background, in case it needs stated, Dr. Sprinkle does not believe that transitioning is correct for anyone. So even if he believes there is a “true gender dysphoria” to contrast with ROGD, he still doesn’t think transition is ever a correct choice. In the previous chapter, he bluntly stated, “I don’t think gender should override sex when there is an incongruence”¹⁹.

What is Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria?

The easy answer? As I said before, it’s nothing. It doesn’t exist. It’s difficult to prove a negative, but we can minimally say that there is no evidence that it exists in any kind of widespread clinically useful way.

I can’t really overstate the importance of that. This chapter is literally named after an idea that has no merit and has indeed been debunked numerous times. A good place to start is transgender writer and activist Julia Serano’s article, “All the evidence Against Transgender Social Contagion.”²⁰

Dr. Sprinkle never gives a succinct definition of ROGD, but the claim is typically phrased something like this: there is some subset of teenagers who do not experience some innate form of gender dysphoria, but that their experience of gender dysphoria is:

• Sudden (Rapid-Onset)

• Caused by exposure to transgender people, either in person or online (i.e. it is a social contagion)

Where did the idea come from?

The concept of gender dysphoria as a “social contagion” was being discussed in 2016 and 2017, notably by Lisa Marchiano²¹, but truly entered public discussion²² with the publication of Lisa Littman’s August 2018 paper, “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.”²³ The circumstances of Littman’s paper are very worth discussing, a topic I will revisit as I continue in the next post. For now, several facts are exceedingly important:

1. A substantial correction was made and the entire corrected paper republished in March 2019.²⁴

2. The study only interviewed parents, not the children themselves.

3. The parents were recruited from three online spaces critical of the entire concept of transgender people, creating obvious sampling bias.

4. The recruitment for the study was clear in its goal of demonstrating that ROGD existed (researcher bias).

5. The recruitment for the study specifically recruited parents who already believed that their children had experienced ROGD: “If your child has had sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria beginning between the ages of 10 and 21, please consider completing the following online survey.”²⁵ I trust I don’t need to elaborate on how problematic this is.

6. The corrected paper only claims to generate a hypothesis that ROGD exists, it does not claim that ROGD has been shown to exist.

From there, despite the correction and severe limitations, ROGD has continued to garner widespread discussion by those opposed to gender transition. For example, you can find it referenced as fact by other evangelical publications such as The Gospel Coalition²⁶, Desiring God²⁷, or Christianity Today²⁸.

And with all that background (sorry), we are finally ready to dive into Chapter 10 of Embodied, which begins with an anecdote about a detransitioner named Helena. Dr. Sprinkle introduces her to ground the conversation of ROGD in a real person’s story.

Helena’s Story

Timeline

Dr. Preston Sprinkle opens the chapter with a story about Helena Kerschner²⁹, a woman who transitioned and then eventually detransitioned. Before we proceed, I need to note that, since February 2022, Helena Kerschner works for Genspect³⁰, an organization designated as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.³¹

The chapter begins:

Helena was fourteen when she realized she was attracted to both boys and girls and began to explore what this meant for her through online communities on Tumblr. It was there that she learned about various gender identities. She read story after story of people identifying as trans*. “I eventually started relating to [these stories],” she later explains, “and identifying as trans*.”[1]³²

Helena learned on Tumblr that taking testosterone was the next step she must take as a trans* person. So she began cross-hormone therapy (CHT): “On Tumblr specifically, there’s this attitude that if you have the slightest inclination that you might have gender identity confusion, the healthiest thing you can do is explore that and experiment with that.”

Getting testosterone was easy.[2]³³ All it took was a one-hour consultation with a counselor who asked about her dysphoria.

After reading that, how old do you think Helena was when she began taking testosterone? If you’re like me, you might have guessed she was fourteen, maybe fifteen, especially in a chapter titled, “Rapid-onset Gender Dysphoria.”

Well, if you watch the video Dr. Sprinkle links to in the first footnote in that passage, you’ll hear Helena say, “I actually did end up being on testosterone for almost two years … from like the week after I turned 18 to just before I turned 20”.³⁴

Helena was eighteen when she started T, so not even a minor anymore. She says in the video³⁵ that, “I identified as trans for five years in total, so three years not transitioning and then two years I actually physically transitioned.” This was not a rushed decision being made by a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, but a decision over three years in the making by an adult. In Dr. Sprinkle’s discussion of Helena, he never mentions this. The closest he gets is saying that Helena was, “on CHT for two years,” and then later, “I lost five years of my life to gender ideology…”. If the reader does not do the math themselves and then go listen to the primary sources, they would have little reason to guess Helena was an adult when she started medical treatments.³⁶

Pressure

Next, I want to point out Dr. Sprinkle’s phrase, specifically because it is his, and not Helena’s. He writes, “Helena learned on Tumblr that taking testosterone was the next step she must take as a trans* person.” (emphasis mine). The follow-up quote from Helena does not support this claim in any way, and in fact it is contradicted by the three-year gap between her coming to see herself as transgender and her starting testosterone.

I cannot say that no one told Helena that she “must” take testosterone as a next step, but even Helena doesn’t make that claim, so I see no reason to believe it happened.

My own experience on forums like Reddit or Twitter trying to learn about my own transgender identity in 2022 was that absolutely people will suggest that you explore feelings about your gender. Get some clothes and try them on. Try creating an avatar online with a different name and pronouns and see how it feels when people call you that. This is all harmless stuff - I did a lot of it with no one even knowing.

But when it comes to decisions about legal or medical decision? There, the community had a very strong ethic of leaving those decisions to the individual. The most you might see would be a statement that, early on, hormones have minimal effects other than potential effects to one’s mental state, and that they are typically reversible if one stops taking Hormone Replacement Theraply (HRT)³⁷ early on.³⁸ I actually asked people on one of the trans Reddit forums, “Should I start HRT?”, and had people either say, “up to you” or “be careful.” And the medical community is even less prescriptive. I have had to ask for every medical treatment I have received as part of transition, and had to get my therapist to sign-off on many of them as well. At no point did anyone say, “you should do this,” much less, “you must do this.”

Lying to the doctors

Dr. Sprinkle continues:

All it took was a one-hour consultation with a counselor who asked about her dysphoria. “I had all these rehearsed answers that I didn’t genuinely believe, but it’s really popular for the trans* community to … help each other rehearse answers and tell each other what to say to doctors.”³⁹

Remember, this is an adult we’re talking about. And… I feel for Helena. But, this implies to me that Helena likely did not meet the standards for gender dysphoria at the time. And I hope everyone will agree: if you lie to your doctor, you’re putting yourself at risk of incorrect treatments. That said, it is somewhat understandable, given how difficult it can be to get gender affirming care under the best of circumstances.⁴⁰ But Helena cannot claim that doctors pushed her into transition, when she in fact had to deceive them to access testosterone.

A more recent development is the publication of a new paper titled, “Gatekeeping gender-affirming care is detrimental to detrans people,” which supports the idea that gatekeeping causes people to be untruthful with their doctors, possibly leading to situations like Helena’s.

Problems begin on HRT

Dr. Sprinkle then writes:

Helena was on CHT for two years. At first, she really enjoyed the experience. But after a while, several problems flared up.

“It is a common thing for women on testosterone to experience a lot of anger. Then there’s this weird phenomenon where you get upset and want to cry, but you can’t cry. Even though I was really elated at first, eventually these kinds of problems started getting more apparent and I started feeling really miserable.… I was angry, like, all the time. Everything made me angry. I felt like I had been put through the wringer with all these emotional changes.… It really messed with my mental health.”⁴¹

There are several issues with this passage, which implies that Helena was satisfied with HRT for some time and then discusses issues which “flared up.”

“At first, she really enjoyed the experience.” is Dr. Sprinkle’s summary phrase. Here’s what Helena says in the video⁴², leading into to his quote:

At first, I was definitely really excited, I was really elated, I was really optimistic. But it is a common thing for …

Dr. Sprinkle summarizes Helena’s terms “really excited”, “really elated”, and “really optimistic” with “really enjoyed.” That seems like a stretch to me - “excited” and “optimistic” are forward looking terms, while elated is typically a temporary euphoria associated with a specific event. “Enjoyed,” on the other hand, implies some level of satisfaction with something that is happening.

After that, Dr. Sprinkle simply inserts the phrase, “But after a while,” which is completely absent from Helena’s account.

Next up, are a couple of quotation errors. First, harmlessly, Dr. Sprinkle adds the word “but” to make it, “but you can’t cry.” More troubling, and contrary to any writing style guide I have seen, but without changing the meaning dramatically in this case, Dr. Sprinkle fully omits a phrase, with no ellipsis to mark the omission. (emphasis mine for the phrase he omits)

… you can’t cry. It's really strange but I've heard a lot of trans guys say that they've been through that and I went through that. So even though I was really elated at first …

Dr. Sprinkle’s first ellipsis is valid, omitting a question from the interviewer and a leading phrase by Helena.

But after that, he makes another omission, also not marked with an ellipsis. Just like the first couple issues, this could skew the reader’s perception of Helena’s timeline. (emphasis mine for the phrase he omits):

… Everything made me angry all the time. And it was the strongest for like the first three months or so and then it kind of evened out. But by that time I just felt like I had been put through the wringer …

Put simply, this is unacceptable writing practice by Dr. Sprinkle. I would have more grace for this if Dr. Sprinkle did not have a PhD and “New York Times bestselling author” in his biography⁴³, and if Embodied were not the fourteenth book he had authored or co-authored.⁴⁴

The effect of all of these is that it makes it sound like Helena was satisfied on HRT for some time, when she doesn’t indicate that in her telling of her story. To listen to Helena, it sounds like the problems started quite quickly, possibly immediately.

Helena, later in the video, does say, “eventually these kinds of problems kept getting more apparent.”⁴⁵ But this is not in conflict with her statements that the problems were, “strongest for like the first three months or so.”

I feel that Dr. Sprinkle damages his own credibility by summarizing and paraphrasing in ways that leave the reader with an impression that more neatly supports his conclusions, but which are not clearly supported by the sources he cites. His altering of quotations goes against every writing style guide I checked.

In summary, Helena was an adult who deceived her medical provider and experienced early effects she did not like. Such a person could easily stop the HRT at any time, potentially with no long-term effects from having taken it.

Anger Issues

Dr. Sprinkle rightly presents the anger issues Helena experienced as being distressing. But here is the part I wish he could have empathy for: I could have said everything Helena said, word for word, about my own experience pre-transition.

I was constantly angry. I was constantly on edge. I had to deaden all of my emotions just to avoid doing damage. I’m not proud of it in any way, but I used to lose my temper frequently at work or at home. The testosterone in my body made my life something of a living hell, constantly fighting myself.

Then, I began taking an anti-androgen (Testosterone blocker) and Estrogen. And life changed. I was able to regulate my emotions. I could feel them, listen to them, but not be controlled by them. Within weeks, my kids could see a difference. My partner began to be able to notice, with high accuracy, if I had forgotten to take my HRT for a couple of days.

Within a month, I knew this was maybe the best decision I had ever made in my life. Two years later, I continue to feel that way.

But here is my question: how can Dr. Sprinkle see detransition for Helena as a good thing, where for me, my transition is unacceptable, despite us both benefiting from those decisions, in largely the same way?

Wishful thinking

Dr. Sprinkle writes this about Helena’s expectations:

Helena also learned that high doses of testosterone in females often cause their ovaries and uterus to atrophy after about five years. “I was aware of this … but [I assumed that] probably by the time that becomes my problem, the doctors will figure something out.”⁴⁶

This is just wild. Once again, Helena herself is responsible for the error. She is a consenting adult, aware of this risk, simply dismissive of it. And what Dr. Sprinkle omits is Helena herself immediately taking accountability for this. Immediately following the quote above, she adds, “So, I didn't — I did not take it as seriously as I should have.”⁴⁷

Helena Now

Sprinkle summarizes Helena’s story:

Helena is now living as a bisexual female who still wrestles with dysphoria, and she has some strong words to describe her experience identifying as trans*:

“I lost 5 years of my life to gender ideology … 5 years. [O]f believing a lie. [O]f centering all of my identity, friendships, actions, and thoughts on a lie. [A] falsehood. 5 years of repressing my trauma and sexuality in favor of a lie.”[3]⁴⁸

I do find it quite interesting that Helena, like some other detransitioners I have heard speak, still speaks of “wrestling with dysphoria.” That is, she’s not saying the dysphoria was never there, she’s saying she’s found another path for dealing with it. That is hugely relevant to the inclusion of her story in a discussion aobut ROGD. The entire premise of ROGD is that it is a kind of “fake” dysphoria that is only created by peer pressure and social contagion. If her dysphoria is persistent even after detransitioning and becoming an activist against gender transition, that would imply that her dysphoria was and still is quite real, and that whatever we can learn from her story, it’s not some kind of proof case of ROGD.⁴⁹

How the trans community feels

But I want to note this: I have never met a trans person or advocate who wants people to transition if it is not right for them, and the reason is quite simple: we know what gender dysphoria feels like. We know how horrible it is. And we know that if someone transitions and it’s not right for them, that’s what they will experience. If people ask me, “do you think I am transgender,” or, “do you think I should transition,” I always lead with, “I cannot answer those questions.”

If a large percentage of people transitioning were finding it was wrong for them, the trans community would be among the first to stand up and say, “We have to figure out what’s wrong here, this is not ok.”

Finally, it should go without saying that many trans people feel exactly the same as Helena, but regarding the time they were told they could not transition. I know I feel exactly that way about how the evangelical church taught me to suppress my own gender and sexuality.

Why does Helena’s pain matter while my own does not?

Just one story

Dr. Sprinkle concludes his discussion of Helena with this:

Helena’s story is one story. And one story is just one story. We should never view an entire idea or concept through the lens of just one story.

I wholeheartedly agree, and Helena deserves to be able to share her story, just like any other trans person or detransitioner. When they do, their stories deserve to be respected, and not forced to fit a narrative in the way that Dr. Sprinkle has done above.

For what it’s worth, I am personally thankful to the detransitioners who have shared their stories on Reddit and elsewhere. Their stories, though a small percentage of those who transition, help us understand if there are commonalities that lead someone to transition when that ultimately won’t help them.

But Dr. Sprinkle regularly uses anecdotes throughout his book, using each of them to support his conclusions, never sharing stories like mine⁵⁰. He excludes stories like mine or Billie Hoard’s, or the more than 94% of US transgender individuals who say they are more satisfied with life after transition.⁵¹

Next up

Believe it or not, that only covers the first two pages of this chapter. But with that context, we are now ready to tackle the next section of this chapter, which directly engages with the false concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria. That’ll be the next blog post, so please make sure to subscribe (for free!) so you don’t miss it. Thank you for reading, and feel free to ask questions in the comments!

Apologies for the delay coming: much of the next post is already written, but I’m having surgery on Thursday, May 29th, so recovery will keep me from writing for a week or two. I’ll get it posted as soon as I can.

1. Short version: Seems very unlikely. See this from the National Cancer Institute.

2. They don’t, and there was never any good evidence they did, and the one person who has said that there was has been exposed as a complete and total fraud who was harming children (seriously) in order to build a case that people should buy *his* version of a vaccine. For a brilliant, nearly two hour explanation of just how awful the whole thing was, please watch YouTuber HBomberGuy’s incredible deep dive into the history.

For what it’s worth, the fraudster who pushed this theory has connections to Trump, claiming that Trump is “on our side” (“our” being anti-vaxxers). Trump, of course, pushed anti-vax views that caused many people to reject the COVID-19 vaccine and even now making it more difficult to access.

And yes - with ROGD, the situation is similar - it never was shown to be a thing, but that hasn’t stopped people from pushing it and harming many trans kids and adults in the process.

3. “the evidence is a combination of folklore, misidentification and hoax, and the creature is not a living animal.” (Wikipedia)

4. Source: Julia Serano, “All the Evidence Against Transgender Social Contagion”

5. Source: Wikipedia (“Florida Parental Rights in Education Act”)

6. Source: “Last Week Tonight” (John Oliver) - “Libraries”

7. Source: NPR (“Here are all the ways people are disappearing from government websites”)

8. Yes, I’m aware that I’m leading with a Nazi reference, and some might see this as extreme and might invoke Godwin’s Law to dismiss it. But the statement is true. The Nazi’s did attack the Institute for Sexual Science in 1933 (Source: Wikipedia), burning much of the research there (a catastrophic loss to the trans community which would take decades to recover from). The founder, Magnus Hirschfeld had been villified by the Nazi party for years.

The wikipedia article states, “A newspaper headline soon after the raids declared the "un-German Spirit" (or undeutschen Geist) of the institute.” And of course, that’s obvious propoganda meant to “other” those who the Nazi’s had just attacked, making the attacks permissible. This is why it’s chilling when President Trump signed an executive order on day one of his new term saying that accepting transgender people, “… has a corrosive impact … on the validity of the entire American system.” That is, we’re not just unamerican, we’re a threat to America.

9. Again - I know this comes across as extreme, but I don’t know how to beat around the bush and pretend that these aren’t fascist techniques. I wouldn’t have recognized them as such just a few years ago, but I do now. If you have a knee jerk reaction to the word “fascist”, as “wow, Celeste, you’re unhinged”, I’d invite you to read the excellent, “How Fascism Works,” by Jason Stanley, a professor who is the child of two Jewish parents who moved to the United States in 1939 to escape Germany (his father) and Poland (his mother). (Source: Wikipedia).

Also note that fascism isn’t the only governmental style that targets minorities like transgender people.

10. Gender expansive people, including some people who were very clearly transgender, were the target of the police raids that led to the Stonewall Riots. Trans women, including Marsha P. Johnson, were members of the uprising. And now, the National Park Service website says this:

Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal. The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.

Caelan Conrad and Sarah, from The Leftist Cooks, created an incredible video essay documenting the history and discussing the damage of attempts to erase trans people from queer history.

11. I highly recommend reading Julia Serano’s modern classic, “Whipping Girl”

12. Source: “All the evidence against transgender social contagion”, Julia Serano, February 21, 2023.

13. See definition at Wikipedia.

14. Source: “CAAPS Position Statement on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)”, CAAPS, July 26, 2021

15. A Gish Gallop (Wikipedia) is a rhetorical technique wherein the speaker will make numerous quick claims, each of which takes significantly more time to rebut than the original claim took to make. For example, if I said, “Space aliens are real because of abductions, crop circles, Roswell, UFO’s, and because humans couldn’t have built the pyramids,” I would be making a Gish Gallop. I’ve presented no evidence for my claims. Furthermore, each is complex, and some are subjective. Nevertheless, if someone wanted to rebut me, they would need to present significant evidence for each of their positions, despite me having offered none for my own. A literal novel could (and I’m sure has been) written about each of those claims.

16. See also: Brandolini’s Law (Wikipedia): “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

17. Embodied, Page 156

18. As Billie Hoard has discussed, Dr. Sprinkle writes trans as “trans*”, which is out of step with how most use it. Like her, I disagree with his usage of an asterisk after “trans”, but will faithfully quote him.

19. Embodied, Page 156

20. All the Evidence Against Transgender Social Contagion - Julia Serano, February 21, 2023

21. Lisa Marchiano, a licensed clinical social worker, published “Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics” on October 2, 2017. Julia Serano published a response to the growing discussion of the concept in an article on November 27, 2017, “Transgender Agendas, Social Contagion, Peer Pressure, and Prevalence”

22. See Google Trends, which shows that “ROGD” basically did not exist in the popular lexicon prior to Littman’s study being released.

23. Littman L (2018) Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLOS ONE 13(8): e0202330. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330

24. Littman L (2019) Correction: Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLOS ONE 14(3): e0214157. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214157

25. Via Web Archive, you can view the original recruitment page for 4thwavenow.com.

26. 8 Things Parents Should Do When Kids Want to Transition Their Gender - Sam Ferguson, October 23, 2023

27. Are We Living Out Romans 1? - Rosaria Butterfield, February 27, 2020 - Butterfield makes the egregious error of discussing children “diagnosed with ‘ROGD’”, which is simply impossible because there is no such diagnosis.

28. Is Sexuality a Matter of First Importance? - Sam Allberry, July, 2024

29. Dr. Sprinkle also interviewed Kerschner at the Q Ideas Culture Summit, in a video published April 23rd, 2021, two months after Embodied was published. The video is available on Youtube: “Identity, Teens, and Gender - Preston Sprinkle & Helena Kerschener”

30. Source: Genspect, Internet Archive shows her on the “Meet the Team” page from its earliest snapshot of the page, on August 18, 2023. On February 13, 2022, Genspect announced on Twitter (archived here) that Helena was joining the Genspect team, calling her a “key figure in the detransitioner community.”

31. Sources: SPLC, with more from LGBTQ+ Nation and Wikipedia.

32. Embodied Footnote #1, on page 271: “Helena retells her story in an interview on YouTube: “Teen Transition and Social Media | with Helena,” YouTube, posted by Benjamin A. Boyce, February 28, 2019,

All quotes from Helena are taken from this interview unless otherwise noted.”

33. Embodied Footnote #2, on page 271: “Helena documents this in two lengthy Twitter threads under her username @lacroicsz (https://twitter.com/lacroicsz) on May 9, 2019, and July 16, 2019.” - Sadly Helena’s Twitter account is protected now, so these threads are unavailable.

34. Quote begins at 9:16 mark in the video:

35. Quote begins at 10:56:

36. And footnotes are not apparent to anyone listening to the Audiobook, rather than reading a physical or digital copy.

37. Dr. Sprinkle uses “CHT”, for “Cross-sex Hormone Therapy.” This is not a term commonly used in the transgender community, due to the loaded meaning of “Cross-sex.” We most commonly use “Hormone Replacement Therapy” (HRT). I will keep Dr. Sprinkle’s quotes as is, but will use “HRT” myself.

38. The earliest hard-to-reverse change for trans-femme folx on HRT would be breast growth, the earliest signs of which take weeks to appear, sometimes longer. I am less familiar with the trans-masc experience, but long-enough use of testosterone will result in effects like a deepening of the voice or the growth of facial hair, both of which are reversible in the same way that trans-femme people reverse them to transition, which is to say with difficulty, but it is possible.

Also, of course: I am not a medical professional and anyone considering these treatments should do their research and consult with their own medical professionals.

39. Embodied, page 159

40. I do want to note that there is a long history of medical gatekeeping regarding transgender healthcare that was extreme and unnecessary. Abigail Thorn openly admits that some trans people will lie in order to get access to gender affirming care. She also advises reforms to the system such that those lies are not incentivized or necessary, and I agree with her. You can start the video here, but please watch all the way to ~1:11:42 (a little over 2 minutes). Honestly the whole video worth of context for this is very important, as well.

41. Embodied, page 159-160

42. At 12:09

43. Source: Preston Sprinkle - About

44. Source: Preston Sprinkle - Books

45. At 12:32:

46. Embodied, page 160

47. At 17:25:

48. Embodied Footnote #3, from page 271: “Twitter thread posted by @lacroicsz, February 17, 2019, at 1:09 p.m., https://twitter.com/lacroicsz/status/1097196342768816128.”

Helena’s account is protected, meaning it’s not publicly accessible, but the Twitter thread linked is available via Internet Archive here.

49. Embodied, page 161

50. Which you can read here:

51. Source: US Transgender Survery - Early Insights Report (Page 16)