How can it be a descriptive study when not a single purported ROGD case was evaluated? You make it sound as if this paper were a long series of cases studies on patients with the alleged conditions. Instead, our only evidence is straw polls gathered from three avowedly partisan websites. I would like it if you could find me another study where this was considered an adequate method for proving a new hypothetical disease exists.

And yes, this paper claims to have discovered a new disease, in the now retracted Brown press release, Littman claimed to have discovered a disease distinct from the recognized gender dysphoria. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Perhaps you don't think anything is wrong with those websites habitually using slurs for most of their posts, or plugging in religious right political campaigns. Your post has not been a defense of the study methods itself, instead you're trying to convince me that trans is morally wrong in your eyes and using insulting terms such as, "transgenderism" and "transmachine" (akin to the "trans cult" Littman's surveyed websites threw around with everything), words I've only seen on the likes of Alex Jones pages. Wouldn't you say your political lobbying is outside the scope of this paper is flawed? If this paper should be retracted has nothing to do on if trans as you claim is morally wrong, it has everything to do with methods being wrong, if there is adequate evidence to support the claims made.

Please put aside your animosity to lgbt groups and lets simply look at the methods. Please tell me what other studies eschewed all assessment of all people with the new disease they claim to have discovered and instead tried to substitute with anecdotes from politically crusading relatives gathered from polling partisan websites. I've read the paper, I'm troubled of how the paper, especially in the discussion speaks of ROGD as if it were a certainty and Littman gathered overwhelming proof, despite the methods ensuring there isn't so much as a single confirmed case. There are good studies with overwhelming evidence that carry their discussion with less certainty. I suggest you read any of the seminal papers to have discovered diseases and compare their methods and the reach of their claims to this.

Marshall et al. 1985, might be a good benchmark, they went, methodically gathered overwhelming evidence of a "contagion" induced ulcer disease as you might call it, which was very controversial at the time. First by assessing cases, then by proving causality. No stone went unturned and still, his discussion spoke with less certainty than here. Imagine, what if all Marshall had done was poll new age clubs and speak to relatives of people allegedly struck by the contagion? Littman begs the question, this paper treats the hypothetical disease ROGD and discusses it as if we already had proof it exists. We don't, the long evidence gathering step was skipped.

We do already have a substantial amount of evidence pointing towards innate gender identities. [1-9] We've observed that transgender individuals tend to have certain brain regions which match those of what they identify with (much in the same way as we've found for homosexual individuals - which is linked by a common phenomology of prenatal hormonal exposure).

We have interesting intersex cases which show some remarkable things:
1) Complete androgen insensitvity syndrome (CAIS) XY women, who are born with female anatomy, raised as female and develop female identities
2) Individuals with 5-alpha-reductase defficiency, those who were born with female anatomy, raised as female, but go through male puberty and grow a penis during puberty due to the lack of DHT within the womb. Such individuals, despite being socialised as female will develop dysphoria. "Why?"

The genitals have receptors for both sex hormones, in the womb this allows for them to diverge into either genital class or be intersex. All nerve cells in the brain also have such receptors and allows them to diverge in a separate stage of pregnancy. We've even done some research onto the limits that biology and socialisation can have producing some very valuable insights [10] that shows that strong prenatal hormonal exposure will triumph over socialisation (and even cause it to be exaggerated - perhaps in rebellion over repression).

On a cross-cultural side, for millennia we've had transgender people, whether they be kathoey, two-spirit, Hijra, Muxe, Māhū, Fakaleiti, Fa'afafine, Uranian, Calabai, Bissu, Calalai, Khanith. This is all around the world, in isolated cultures. Can you not clearly see that something that transcends all world cultures indicates a biological phenomenon, not a mental illness.

All of this points to a deeper, innate phenomenon, with strong links to biology.

[1]Zhou JN Hofman MA Gooren LJ Swaab DF. 1995. A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality. Nature . 378:68–70.
[2]Garcia-Falgueras A Swaab DF. 2008. A sex difference in the hypothalamic uncinate nucleus: relationship to gender identity. Brain . 131:3132–3146.
[3]Nawata H Ogomori K Tanaka M Nishimura R Urashima H Yano R Takano K Kuwabara Y. 2010. Regional cerebral blood flow changes in female to male gender identity disorder. Psychiatry Clin Neurosci . 64:157–161.
[4]Schoning S Engelien A Bauer C Kugel H Kersting A Roestel C Zwitserlood P Pyka M Dannlowski U Lehmann Wet al. 2010. Neuroimaging differences in spatial cognition between men and male-to-female transsexuals before and during hormone therapy. J Sex Med . 7:1858–1867.
[5]Simon L Kozak LR Simon V Czobor P Unoka Z Szabo A Csukly G. 2013. Regional grey matter structure differences between transsexuals and healthy controls – a voxel based morphometry study. PloS One . 8:e83947.
[6]Rametti G Carrillo B Gomez-Gil E Junque C Segovia S Gomez A Guillamon A. 2011. White matter microstructure in female to male transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A diffusion tensor imaging study. J Psychiatr Res . 45:199–204.
[7]Rametti G Carrillo B Gomez-Gil E Junque C Zubiarre-Elorza L Segovia S Gomez A Guillamon A. 2011. The microstructure of white matter in male to female transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A DTI study. J Psychiatr Res . 45:949–954.
[8]Swaab DF Garcia-Falgueras A. 2009. Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation. Funct Neurol . 24:17–28.
[9]Bao AM Swaab DF. 2011. Sexual differentiation of the human brain: relation to gender identity, sexual orientation and neuropsychiatric disorders. Front Neuroendocrinol . 32:214–226.
[10]Udry, J. Biological Limits of Gender Construction, American Sociological Review, 2000; 65, 443-457.