The Social Contagion of Trans Activism

The trans cult and social pressure:

That there has been a massive uptake in those – especially young people – thinking they are the wrong sex and are in need of transitioning is clear for the whole world to see. The stats are readily available telling us of this rapid and remarkable rise in those seeking to transition. The numbers are quite shocking.

But one bit of anecdotal evidence can also be appealed to here. I have over 300 articles on the trans cult now on my website, but the earliest pieces did not appear until around 14 years ago. Before this time, the topic was simply not really an issue – not just for me but pretty much the whole world.

So why did the trans phenomenon all of a sudden spring up in the West? If this is some genuine medical issue that has always been with us and must be acted upon, then why was no one even talking about it until just a few short decades ago?

And the opposite side of this is true as well. If all this is fixed and absolute, then why has the big surge in trans cases now suddenly been followed by a steep decline? As I wrote in a recent piece, figures from the US make this clear:

A report from the Centre for Heterodox Social Science in the US has found that there are far fewer young people now identifying as trans or homosexual over the past few years. As one media discussion states:

 

“The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which conducts a large annual survey of US undergraduates, polled over 60,000 students in 2025. My analysis of the raw data shows that in that year, just 3.6% of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female. By comparison, the figure was 5.2% in 2024 and 6.8% in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.” https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/10/24/on-the-trans-frontlines/  

Indeed, as can be rightly asked: If genitals don’t define gender, how does removing them affirm it? Either this is some innate condition, or it is not. If people are born homosexual, as the activists claim, and cannot change, then how can people change from one sex to the other? The trans agenda is all bogus. It is all radical ideology, not biological reality.

Social conditioning

And that explains this rapid rise and then decline in those seeking to “change” their sex. Many of us have argued that there is much blame to be laid at the feet of the media, of leftist politicians, of radical activist groups, and even popular culture. That is, so much of this is due to social contagion, peer pressure and the like.

It is just another trendy social pattern we are seeing. Nobody was complaining about being born into the wrong body until the past five minutes of human history. Now all of a sudden kazillions of folks want to hop on the trans bandwagon.

It has become a hip thing to do, and there is plenty of social pressure to join in on these things. But this is not just mere speculation on my part. There is a growing body of solid evidence to suggest that this is exactly the case. Let me point you to one key article on this.

Just a few days ago an important piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal by Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The title and subtitle say it all:

“Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis
The share of young people claiming another ‘gender identity’ exploded. Now surveys show it is receding.”

The piece is worth quoting from. He begins this way:

I was an academic scientist at Penn State in February 2020, when I became the target of an online mob for tweeting about transgender identity. I shared a link to an article from the Guardian with the accompanying quote: “Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls.” My commentary was brief: “Two words: social contagion.”

 

Within hours, colleagues denounced me as a “transphobic” bigot. Anonymous activists emailed universities to poison my job prospects. A professional job board even published mock job listings warning others not to hire me. My academic career never recovered.

 

But I wasn’t making an offhand remark or comparing a group of people to a disease vector, as some accused me of doing. I was referring to research published by Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher formerly with Brown university, who had coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in a 2018 peer-reviewed paper to describe a newly emerging cohort of adolescents—overwhelmingly girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria or even sex nonconformity—who suddenly began describing themselves as transgender, often after friends in their peer groups did the same. Dr. Littman proposed that this pattern was best explained by social contagion, meaning the spread of ideas or behaviors through peer influence. The term isn’t an insult; it’s a well-established sociological concept used to describe how trends such as eating disorders and even suicide clusters can spread.

 

Suggesting that social factors might cause or contribute to transgender identification violated fashionable left-wing dogma: that “gender identity” is an innate and immutable trait, and that some people are born with one that conflicts with their sex. This claim underpins both medical practice and legal strategy—from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for minors to arguments that “gender identity” deserves civil-rights protections akin to race or sex. Progressives treat those who question these ideas as heretics and bigots.

He looks at how the activists seek to respond to this, and then offers more of the research. He then concludes his piece with these words:

The purported evidence for innate, immutable transgender identity is deeply flawed, however, as is clear upon closer examination. Studies of neuroanatomy, heritability and prenatal hormone exposure that claim a biological basis for gender identity are replete with small and selective samples, poor replication and uncontrolled confounding factors such as sexual orientation and cross-sex hormone treatment. Properly interpreted, they describe correlates of sex nonconformity and same-sex attraction, not proof of an innate transgender identity.

 

The notion that transgender identity is biologically hard-wired can’t explain why there has been a more than 20-fold surge in those identifying as transgender in the U.S. since 2010. The social-contagion hypothesis was never hateful. It was purely descriptive: a recognition that social and cultural factors shape human behavior. For years, even hinting that such factors influenced transgender identities could end a career. Now, as data accumulate, this is becoming harder for anyone to deny.

 

The surge in transgender identification in recent years wasn’t the revelation of a hidden biological truth. It was a social phenomenon shaped by imitation, ideology and institutional reinforcement. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/evidence-backs-the-transgender-social-contagion-hypothesis-40937876?st=pXpdaU&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

This is not the end of the debate of course. The activists will not give up, and they will simply dismiss any research to the contrary as another example of transphobia. As Wright puts it:

That doesn’t mean the transgender phenomenon will necessarily collapse. It’s possible that these identities will persist, not because they reflect a long-suppressed biological condition, but because activist, scientific and medical institutions have redefined transgender to encompass virtually any degree of nonconformity to traditional sex stereotypes. A masculine girl or feminine boy may now be labeled as “trans.”

It is good to see some fightback against the trans mafia. For the sake of our women and children, we need much more of it.

[1266 words]