The anti-trans pseudoscience machine has been busy in 2026. Early this year, the AYAGDOS study, led by researchers affiliated with hate groups, began recruiting trans youth and their parents. In April a Finnish study led by Riittakerttu Kaltiala, with ties to the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM, an SPLC-designated hate group), published bogus claims questioning the benefits of youth transition. A few weeks later, the Pediatric Academic Societies hosted a panel featuring anti-trans pseudoscientists — met with a picket led by Protect Trans Futures.
Just last week, SEGM allies published another study that tried to root out evidence in favor of their pet theory: rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). But, the study’s results, in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, spectacularly failed to find the evidence they wanted.
The researchers, clinicians at the Hamburg Gender Identity Service, examined the case data for over 750 trans adolescents who attended their clinic from 2013-2023. Citing debunked ROGD and “social contagion” theory, the Hamburg doctors hypothesized that they would identify a steady increase over time in the relative numbers of transmasc youth seeking care. To do this, they grouped patients by the year of their first visit to the clinic.
Contrary to the authors’ hypothesis, the data showed seemingly random year-to-year variation in ratios of assigned sex in new patients (see graph). In fact, the most recent (2023) cohort showed the second highest proportion of transfemme youth. No trend can be detected.
Herrman et al. 2026. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. doi: 10.1007/s00787-026-03080-w | CC BY 4.0 | No changes were made to this figure.
After presenting the data, the authors fail a basic tenet of the scientific method: accepting when your data refutes your hypothesis. Instead, they try to salvage ROGD by regrouping their patient cohorts (using a latent class analysis) to fit the contours of their hypothesis. This analysis creates artificial distinctions in the noisy data, a statistical contortion that the study was not designed to accommodate. Even the authors admit that these new divisions “are statistical constructs rather than diagnostically defined groups or naturally occurring groups.” In other words, this analysis is the scholarly equivalent of throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks.
Why might the Hamburg research team be so committed to ROGD? One of the authors, Sarah Hohmann, serves on the Policy Division for the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) with Kaltiala. In 2024, ESCAP released a policy statement casting aspersions on health care for trans youth. A year later, the Policy Division collaborated with SEGM to host five symposia at the annual ESCAP conference. Hohmann co-chaired one of the symposia where she invited talks from Kaltiala (known for her abusive clinical practices) and SEGM co-founder Evgenia Abbruzzesse.
In Hohmann’s new study, SEGM got what they wanted. The hate group now includes the paper on “a compendium of literature to highlight our position of concern over the proliferation” over childhood transition. To get there, the Hamburg research team followed a well-trod path: Make trans youth the subjects of your research and over-interpret their data to fit your general opinion of trans people.
ROGD is just a half-baked theory that uses the weight of academic speculation to push out the voices of young trans people who are overwhelming satisfied with the outcomes of their care.
Near the Hamburg Gender Identity Service (on the right side of the street), an old brutalist post office stood for years, according to Kim Petras. Petras was born in Germany and transitioned there as a teen, traveling from city to city in search of the care she needed. The Hamburg post office caught her eye, and she was disappointed when it was demolished and replaced with modern apartments. Petras’ song “Brutalist” (on her new album “Detour,” an electropop romp through Los Angeles without problematic producers) juxtaposes her feelings about the building with her transition:
There was a building there, and it was brutalist
And it was beautiful, it was my favorite
But it's not there no more because they tore it down
They really ruined it (Yeah)
My dad's an architect, he used to show me it
When he would drive me to the psychiatry
Again and again, didn't come back a man
I guess I ruined it
Despite her happy and Grammy-winning adulthood, Petras told Fader that people still tell her that she ruined her body by transitioning: “I thought it was interesting to compare the two. What does it mean if something’s ruined but other people love it and it’s subjective.” Just as the construction of apartments made Hamburg more habitable for tenants, transition made Petras’ body more livable for her. The music video makes clear just how much joy can emerge from controlled acts of destruction.
As a passer-by in Hamburg, Petras ultimately accepted that her aesthetic opinions about the city are unimportant. In contrast, the Hamburg doctors are still pining for a post office and ruminating on their aesthetic opinions of trans bodies.
The doctors tried to conjure data to reinforce their preconceived notions of ROGD (and, by extension, whether trans youth are worthy of transition) after an honest analysis supported a different conclusion. They tried to manipulate data from their own patients in service of an anti-trans talking point, revealing their base contempt for the people they are supposed to serve.
These are telltale signs of bad-faith research, and the authors put it all in writing for us to see. Journals should stop publishing analyses of their trans patients, and the Hamburg research team should face professional censure. If you cannot abide by basic ethical principles, then you shouldn’t be conducting health research.
from the archive
1 Where age of presentation at the gender clinic equates to age of onset of dysphoria. Many people experience dysphoria for years before transitioning…