I used to be an ROGD believer myself, and the idea of “clusters” was a big part of the reason why. It seemed awfully suspicious that for such a rare condition, so often when one person came out as trans, it happened within a few years of someone else they knew also coming out. Social contagion! A-ha!
Then I got to experience it first hand.
Basically everyone who I’ve come out to has been surprised. But the first time I came out to a close friend—someone I’d known for about 25 years by then, although we’d only kept in touch sporadically for the last decade—his response wasn’t “I can’t believe you want to go through all that”. It was “I can’t believe you’re being so honest about that”. Because, as it turns out, he had a lot of the same feelings that led me to transition, and he’d had them for a long time; he had enough details at the ready, and they lined up well enough with some things I’d observed about him, that I’m sure he didn’t make it up on the spot.
“What an odd coincidence,” I thought.
Then I learned that another friend I’d known for nearly as long, but had had even less contact with recently, also started transitioning around the same time I did.
“Must be something in the water,” I thought.
Then I learned that one of my cousins, estranged from my side of the family, who lived across the country and who I hadn’t seen or heard from in 20 years, had also started transitioning a little bit after I did.
“Wait a minute,” I thought. “All those those annoying gender people online who say clustering happens because proto-trans people somehow manage to group up before any of them transitions… maybe they’re right.”
I’ve had things in common with those friends all along; that’s why we were friends. And besides sharing some fraction of DNA, that cousin also reportedly had a bunch of things in common with me. If she’d been in contact with my side of the family, we probably would’ve gotten along well before either of us transitioned.
It turns out those things are also correlated with being trans.
That’s another part of the reason I believed in it, actually. “Don’t trans people know all along? Wouldn’t someone else have noticed by now if they really were?”
Now, looking at how people responded to me when I came out, I can see that my own gender business must’ve seemed just as “rapid onset” to them as so many teenagers’ gender business does to their parents. To them, one day I was a regular guy, confident in my masculinity, and the next I day I wanted to be a woman.
In my mind, though, it wasn’t rapid at all—it was the culmination of thoughts I’d been having for 30 years. I’d just been missing a tiny piece of the puzzle. Once I found it, everything else snapped into focus. Every single time I’d blown out a birthday candle, I’d wished to be a girl. Silly, right? Of course it was, and I knew that… but still, it couldn’t hurt, you know? Just in case.
And then there were all the times I “pretended” to be a girl in chat rooms, including the time I got so invested in it that I made two good friends who I eventually had to come clean with. I had mentally filed it away as trolling, but there was never a punchline, no cackling victory. Just a role I was playing, one that for some reason was always female. And so on.
In retrospect, those were very trans things to do.
But I wasn’t telling people about all that at the time, certainly not my family. It was a weird topic to bring up out of the blue, and I never heard anyone else talking about it. It sounded pretty silly when I laid it all out like that. And what could anyone have done about it anyway, I thought? I wasn’t going to suddenly turn into a girl; that’s not how reality works. I’d heard of “sex change procedures”, but those weren’t for me, I thought. Those were for boys who thought they were girls and couldn’t stand being in a boy’s body. I, on the other hand, was a boy who knew I was a boy but wanted to be a girl, and I could tolerate being in my body, as disappointing as it was. Completely different. And besides, it wouldn’t really be the same as if I’d been born female, so what would be the point? Best to just keep all that to myself.
In retrospect, those were also very trans thoughts to have.
So, that’s why it came as a shock to everyone else: they weren’t privy to my thoughts all those years. If they were, I think most of them would have realized a lot sooner than I did that this was in the cards.
And I can also see why it often seems like “social contagion”, because social interactions were in fact part of how I figured this out. If I hadn’t been on that forum at the right time, heard this person describe what it was like for them, or learned that about transitioning, maybe I’d be in a very different place right now… still having all those same thoughts, telling myself year after year that this is just how my life is going to be and I have to accept that, not knowing that I could do something about it.