Does 'Social Contagion' Explain the Rise in Youth Identification with Gender Dysphoria

Yes. No. Maybe. It's complicated.

Recently a post went around X/Twitter showing a graph of the massive explosion of youth identifying as trans or having other gender related issues. The post claimed that “There has never been a more obvious social contagion in all of history”. I had a subsequent (and mostly quite positive and constructive…Imagine that on X!) debate with Michael Bailey¹ and others regarding whether the social contagion hypothesis was well-supported or not. My general feeling is that people on both sides have rushed to foregone conclusions…either that destigmatization has led to people living their “real” lives with no issues whatsoever to worry about…or this is mainly a massive hysteria/social contagion, etc…even though evidence for either position is pretty slim.

I think this is worth exploring more, so here goes.

My general sense is that, yes, there’s something interesting and important happening here and it’s worth understanding. Is it destigmatization, social contagion, some of both, neither, or even some incredibly complicated mixture of multiple things that defies easily pleasing newspaper headlines?

Trying to steelman, the destigmatization theory suggests, throughout history, trans people tended to live in shame, hiding their identities. Now they are freer to live openly than ever before and shouldn’t be questioned in regard to their identity.

At its extremes, this viewpoint has closed off the possibility that anyone could be wrong about this, even kids, leading to considerable medicalization of youth, the evidence for which is controversial to say the least.

By contrast, the social contagion hypothesis (which I’ll spend a bit more time on), suggests that gender dysphoria is kind of like the Tarantella, a dance which at times was thought to be a hysterical phenomenon brought on by spider bites². That is to say that a false belief that one is trans is spreading through youth populations in a way similar to a biological contagion. Obviously, no one is proposing an actual biological vector; rather the argument is that social learning is so strong that youth mimic and influence each other in powerful and reliable ways. Much of this narrative seems to think that the mechanism of social contagion is through kids themselves not other agents in society such as parents, teachers, physicians, etc. (I understand individual opinions may vary of course), so I’ll focus on that³.

Not surprisingly, we can guess which side of the political aisle prefers each explanation. The destigmatization hypothesis is most popular on the political left, whereas social contagion is more popular on the political right. Not that everyone falls so neatly thus, of course.

I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that destigmatization probably can’t explain all the rise in youth trans identification. It probably does explain some of it. Taking the figures in the original post at face value, an increase from 200 in 2011 to 10000 or so in recent years, that’s a meteoric rise. I suppose one might argue that the general improvement in LGBT rights in the 2010s was influential and fair enough, but…I dunno…I think there’s more there.

At the same time, if the 10000 figure at the end of this timeline seems like an alarming rise...200 in 2011 seems artificially small as well. In all of the UK, only 200 people had some degree of gender dysphoria in 2011? I doubt that very much. I think part of the problem is that the social contagion folks take that low number as kind of axiomatic, with any rise entirely due to “error”, in this case social contagion.

So, I have some sympathies toward the argument that there’s probably some other social processes going on. But is social contagion the correct frame?

Trying to review the entire literature on social contagion theory (I’ve never liked the name as I think it’s misleading…it sounds too much like biological diseases) would take forever. I’ve generally found the theory, like so many social science theories, kind of murky, ill-defined, with few clear thresholds for falsification, etc. Even if we ignore it’s murkiness, it’s also just super big…if we’re talking about social contagion, social contagion of whom, by whom, of what, when, where and how? It’s…complicated…but people tend to interpret it in simplistic ways, particularly if that helps along their particular moral view. Given that social science generally has a very low threshold of evidence (that’s not a complement), it can also be hard to really assess the quality of evidence for social contagion. Is it based on robust effect sizes like we see in some Big-5 personality research, or is this just a muck of tiny effect sizes that are “statistically significant” but still more often noise than not, foisted up via publication bias? It’s hard to be sure, other than to say I find the theory interesting, but am cautious about getting too excited by it.

I think too…most people find it intuitive…but only when applying it to other people who are doing something they don’t like. So, people think obviously teens are spreading trans ideology via social contagion but simultaneously couldn’t imagine their own bigotry toward trans individuals might pass along the same way. Or, honestly, vice versa. This is generally a problem with people’s intuition of socials science…what is “so obvious” is applied selectively.

The reality is most things don’t really seem to spread about via social contagion in any reliable way. But maybe some things do? I’m open to that. But I find the whole idea…again, kind of murky. Even that Tarantella hysteria…the historical data don’t seem to be clear how prevalent it was or what actually happened. It was probably something but pointing to it raises more questions than it answers.

So, with that in mind...here’s what I hypothesize probably happened over the past 15 years. And, yeah, it’s complicated.