For completeness, archived Substack article:
No Evidence Being Transgender Is A "Social Contagion" (
archive)
Twitter thread (link goes to a tweet part-way through to capture the whole thing):
@ErinInTheMorn, tweet 1686067475299909646 (
archive)
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · Jul 31, 2023 · 5:27 PM UTC
Recently in a national congressional hearing, Republicans asserted being trans is a "social contagion."
The claim was made in legislatures across the United States.
Research, history, and science show that's not the case.
Subscribe to support my work.
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · Jul 31, 2023 · 5:28 PM UTC
The idea of trans “social contagion” was proposed in a 2018 paper by Dr. Lisa Littman, a researcher who has pushed the theory heavily.
When it came out that she recruited her surveys froma nti-trans sites like 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend, the journal issued an apology.
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · Jul 31, 2023 · 5:29 PM UTC
A pivotal study published in The Journal of Pediatrics in 2021 entirely debunked the concept.
They found that trans youth knew about their identities an average of 4 years before coming out.
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · Jul 31, 2023 · 5:31 PM UTC
They didn't stop there though. They then looked at the few people who did say their self-awareness was recent, and found it was not correlated with having trans friends, having online trans acceptance, or mental disorders.
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · Jul 31, 2023 · 5:33 PM UTC
One of the claims is often that transgender men, for instance, are actually "lesbians" being "influenced" to transition (as if being gay is more acceptable than being trans)
This is not the case either though... LGBTQ+ identification is up across the board.
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · Jul 31, 2023 · 5:34 PM UTC
So what is going on? We have a good analogue in history.
In 1900, left handedness was only reported to be 3%. That shot up to 12% in 1950 where it has maintained ever since.
This came after parent campaigns to "allow kids to use whatever hand feels comfortable"
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · Jul 31, 2023 · 5:35 PM UTC
Thanks for reading, and remember to go read the artcle, where I cover so much of this in greater detail.
And please, subscribe to support my work. I depend on readers like you to be able to do this.
In a sense I quite like this article by Tony, in that it is perhaps the most obviously false thing he’s written. Whether he’s just straightforwardly lying to people, or is so mentally ill as to have truly deluded himself, is a question for others to mull over.
Others above have hit some of the important points, but I thought it was worth going through the whole thing to address each of Tony’s claims.
I’ll start here:
Tony said:
The idea of transgender "social contagion" was first proposed in a
2018 paper by Dr. Lisa Littman
False: Lisa Marchiano wrote about it in 2017, even using (in quotes) the phrase "Rapid-onset gender dysphoria". Littman’s research was conducted in mid-2016, but her paper was published after Marchiano’s.
Lisa Marchiano said:
Currently, we appear to be experiencing a significant psychic epidemic that is manifesting as children and young people coming to believe that they are the opposite sex, and in some cases taking drastic measures to change their bodies. Of particular concern to the author is the number of teens and tweens suddenly coming out as transgender without a prior history of discomfort with their sex.
"Rapid-onset gender dysphoria" is a new presentation of a condition that has not been well studied. Reports online indicate that a young person’s coming out as transgender is often preceded by increased social media use and/or having one or more peers also come out as transgender. These factors suggest that social contagion may be contributing to the significant rise in the number of young people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria.
Lisa Marchiano (2017) Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics, Psychological Perspectives, 60:3, 345-366, DOI:
10.1080/00332925.2017.1350804 (
archive)
Tony doesn’t actually link to the text of the Littman paper, only the APA Psychnet record. It’s here: Littman L (2018) Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLoS ONE 13(8): e0202330.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330 (
archive)
Tony said:
[Littman], a researcher who has pushed the theory heavily.
False: Littman has written only one paper on ROGD. "Heavily" is subjective, but at this point
Tony has written more blog posts about ROGD than Littman has papers.
Tony said:
The article … proposed that social contagion was leading to an increase in trans identification. To support her claim, Littman solicited interviews from anti-trans websites such as Transgender Trend and 4thWaveNow. She used data from those interviews to claim that transgender youth "suddenly" develop gender dysphoria through a process known as "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria."
False: Tony is wildly misrepresenting the paper, and attributing a motive to Littman (setting out to prove social influence) for which he gives no evidence.
It will become very clear very quickly to anyone who reads the paper that it is not overwhelmingly about social influence, but rather about understanding a group of people with a new presentation of gender dysphoria. There is material in there about friend groups, and Internet and social media use, but this is just part of the picture (though obviously a major one).
There is also material discussing rates of same-sex attraction, existing mental health problems, trauma, and familial relations. There is material describing the adolescents’ "coming-out" announcements, and interactions with doctors.
The key to understanding the paper is that adolescents and young adults ("AYA" in the paper) without a childhood history of symptoms gender dysphoria are a
new patient group who don’t appear in the literature before about 2012. Before then it was people who showed symptoms as children (early-onset GD), and adults who develop symptoms after puberty (late-onset GD).
If there quickly emerges a group of people afflicted with a condition, who previously never had been, it makes sense to ask: "What is driving this, why now, and what does this mean for treatment?"
I could (actually did) write much more about the paper itself to show that it clearly couldn’t have been primarily motivated by an attempt to "prove" anything about social and peer influence, but it would obvious to anyone who has read it.
Tony said:
Her paper was
immediately withdrawn with an apology by the journal for correction after the data collection methods were revealed, with the republication stating that the research "does not validate the phenomenon" of transgender social contagion.
This sentence is doing a lot of work for Tony, let’s unpick it.
Tony said:
Her paper was immediately withdrawn with an apology by the journal
False: PLOS One did not withdraw the paper. The paper was published on August 16 2018, and
on August 27 2018 PLOS One said it would conduct a post-publication review. But in the interim, it wasn’t withdrawn; here it is on
September 21 2018,
October 27 2018,
November 30 2018,
January 10 2019, and
February 11 2019. On none of those archive pages will you find any mention of it being "withdrawn".
The
apology Tony links to was published on March 19 2019 — when the article was republished,
not when it was supposedly "withdrawn". Why editor-in-chief Joerg Heber felt the need to apologise for publishing a paper that he then republished substantially unaltered is a question for him, perhaps along with a question about where he keeps his spine.
Next from Tony:
Tony said:
withdrawn … for correction after the data collection methods were revealed
This implies that the paper’s data collection itself was flawed, but the same data is used in the "corrected" paper. Obviously the point Tony is trying to make here is that Littman was biased in her recruitment, by posting the link to "anti-trans" websites. (Littman’s correction notice does note that the survey link did make its way to a pro-transition Facebook group.)
But Littman’s recruitment methods are common and seemingly unproblematic when used by pro-transition researchers. As
Littman wrote in 2020:
Lisa Littman said:
The methodologies singled out for criticism in Littman (2018) — parent-report, targeted recruitment, convenience samples, online and anonymous surveys — are used in research that supports or is otherwise in line with the GAMC [gender-affirmative model of care] and appear to be considered perfectly acceptable in that context (e.g., Dickey, Reisner, & Juntunen, 2015; Olson, Durwood, Demeules, & Mclaughlin, 2016; Riggs & Bartholomaeus, 2018; Riley, Clemson, Sitharthan, & Diamond, 2013; Riley, Sitharthan, Clemson, & Diamond, 2011; Russell, Pollitt, Li, & Grossman, 2018; Tebbe & Moradi, 2016; Timmins, Rimes, & Rahman, 2017). Table 2 lists eight articles that have been published in reputable journals, have been subsequently cited in the literature, and share methodologies with those criticized in Littman. Some have been used explicitly as reasons that the medical community should adopt the GAMC (Olson et al., 2016; Russell et al., 2018). I have selected these articles not to suggest that they should be dismissed, but rather to make the point that these articles contribute to our understanding and that none of the limitations noted are grounds to disqualify the research articles out of hand.
And lastly in Tony’s sentence:
Tony said:
with the republication stating that the research "does not validate the phenomenon" of transgender social contagion.
This is not something the paper could do, and not something the paper set out to do. And Littman is very clear about this — Littman wrote the correction notice, so Tony is quoting Littman herself here. She writes a little later in the notice:
Lisa Littman said:
As mentioned in the article, the study design of this research falls under descriptive research: as such, it did not assign an exposure, there were no comparison groups, and the study’s output was hypothesis-generating rather than hypothesis-testing. Descriptive studies often represent a first inquiry into an area of research and the findings of descriptive studies are used to generate new hypotheses that can be tested in subsequent research. Because of the known limitations of descriptive studies, claims about causal associations cannot be made, and there were none made in the article. The conclusions of the current study are that the findings raise certain hypotheses and that more research is needed. Simple descriptive metrics to describe the quantitative characteristics of a sample in a descriptive study are the appropriate measures to use in this study. Additionally, because the data were collected at one point in time, no claims of cause and effect can be made.
Tony writes next:
Tony said:
"Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" is derived from interviews with parents who report their children "abruptly came out as trans" without any forewarning.
False: It is not that they simply "abruptly came out as trans", but that they came out as trans in adolescence with no prior childhood history of gender dysphoria — a new phenomenon. As well, they don’t meet the accepted GD criteria either:
Lisa Littman said:
It is important to note that none of the AYAs described in this study would have met diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood. In fact, the vast majority (80.4%) had zero indicators from the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for childhood gender dysphoria …
Tony continues:
Tony said:
For numerous parents on these websites opposed to transgender rights, they claimed their children’s coming out was too sudden to be genuine. Coupled with conservative media exposure asserting that being transgender results from factors ranging from TikTok to alleged "grooming" in schools, parents frequently sought alternative explanations for their children’s trans identification, instead of acknowledging the possibility that their children were authentically transgender.
Tony is speculating here. I would just emphasise that the survey responses were collected in mid-2016, when the cultural zeitgeist was very different, with the Obama administration’s "Dear Colleague" letter and the boycott of North Carolina over its "bathroom bill". (And, for reference, over 2.5 years before Tony himself started to identify as transgender.)
Next, Tony writes:
Tony said:
A
pivotal study published in The Journal of Pediatrics in 2021 entirely debunked this concept.
The "pivotal study" that Tony links is
Bauer et al 2021. It cannot "debunk" anything because it defines ROGD to mean something entirely different — those who attend a gender clinic within 1 year of "realizing" that their "gender was different from what other people" call them. For comparison the Littman definition is adolescents and young adults who develop a transgender identification without a history of childhood GD.
As Littman pointed out in a letter to the journal, it’s entirely possible that there are ROGD adolescents in both the study and the control groups of Bauer et al.
Saying that Bauer et al studied rapid onset gender dysphoria is inaccurate and misleading - The Journal of Pediatrics (
archive). A similar point was made separately in a letter from Joanne Sinai, a Canadian psychiatrist:
Rapid onset gender dysphoria as a distinct clinical phenomenon - The Journal of Pediatrics (
archive).
Tony praises this irrelevant study for a couple of paragraphs, then says:
Tony said:
Although there is no proposed explanation, those opposed to transgender rights continue to maintain that transgender people are increasing in population, and therefore, there is a "social contagion" factor that is explaining that increase.
It seems that Tony doubts that there is an increase in transgender identification, which is certainly an odd position to take. It’s not a matter of debate that referrals to pediatric gender clinics have increased worldwide, and the sex ratio has changed from mostly boys to mostly girls. Here’s what happened at GIDS in England, from
the Cass interim report:
The Cass Interim Report said:
3.10. In the last few years, there has been a significant change in the numbers and case-mix of children and young people being referred to GIDS. From a baseline of approximately 50 referrals per annum in 2009, there was a steep increase from 2014-15, and at the time of the CQC inspection of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in October 2020 there were 2,500 children and young people being referred per annum, 4,600 children and young people on the waiting list, and a waiting time of over two years to first appointment. This has severely impacted on the capacity of the existing service to manage referrals in the safe and responsive way that they aspire to and has led to considerable distress for those on the waiting list.
3.11. This increase in referrals has been accompanied by a change in the case-mix from predominantly birth-registered males presenting with gender incongruence from an early age, to predominantly birth-registered females presenting with later onset of reported gender incongruence in early teen years. In addition, approximately one third of children and young people referred to GIDS have autism or other types of neurodiversity. There is also an over-representation percentage wise (compared to the national percentage) of looked after children.
The Littman paper looked at parent reports in an attempt to get a feel for why this sudden change has happened. This is a new, large population suffering with a previously rare condition that presents in a new way, and we don’t understand why. Tony has not addressed any aspect of it!
Tony briefly mentions the idea of "transing away the gay" but dismisses it because a larger proportion of young people consider themselves LGBT, with no further comment. (As an aside: the biggest change in the chart he shows is in bisexuals, almost doubling between generations, which makes sense if Gen Z understands bisexual to mean "one sex, either gender". There’s also an almost doubling of "transgender", and "other LGBT" — furries and demisexuals and whatever else.)
Then Tony rehashes his tired left-handedness argument, which has been discussed to death, so I’ll just throw in this chart that begins earlier than his favourite:
More on this:
The Left Hand of Daftness - by Dave Hewitt (
archive).
Lastly:
Tony said:
It is clear that "social contagion" does not explain increase in transgender identification. Instead, increased acceptance has allowed more LGBTQ+ people to feel safe being public with their identities.
Why anyone would "feel safe" publicly identifying into a group that Tony says is the target of a worldwide genocide, I will never know.
