Transgender Children and Young People by Heather Brunskell-Evans

In her research, Littman found that among the young people reported on - 83% of whom were observed female at birth-more than one-third had friendship groups in which 50% or more of the youths began to identify as transgender during the same period of time. When Lisa Littman published her study of parents’ descriptions of what they experienced was going on with their children’s declarations of gender identity incongruence in 2018, she named the phenomenon that they had observed ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ or ROGD (Littman, 2018). They can remain anxious that doctors are missing the ‘real’ cause of their bodily distress and that medical tests or interventions are required. They can feel ‘dismissed’ or that their stories are not believed. Understandably, it can be very hard, if not impossible, for patients to accept a psychological explanation or ‘formulation’ for their difficulties. Sometimes the patient has clearly experienced trauma or an event that has led to the symptoms, but at other times it is not straightforward or even possible to ascertain an exact trigger or cause. Physical symptoms experienced in these conditions are not due to disease as such, but instead are often understood to have a social/psychological cause. The symptoms are real (in other words, the patient is not making up their ailments or putting them on) they can frequently be disabling and can significantly affect day-to-day functioning. This means that psychic distress is experienced in the body, as well as in the mind. Culture bound syndromes, such as ‘resignation syndrome’ in the children of asylum seekers in Sweden (O’Sullivan, 2021a), are frequently psychosomatic. The social environment plays a large role in how people interpret physical and mental experiences. It is important for clinicians to consider why an explanation of ‘transgender’ or other gender identity may feel easier for young people to turn to, rather than feeling overwhelmed by more amorphous, unexplained fears and anxieties that might feel boundary-less.

Transgender Children and Young People by Heather Brunskell-Evans