We have a lot of voices on the gender critical side who have done extraordinarily well with bringing attention to how young people with autism and same sex attraction are disproportionately at risk of falling victim to trans medicalization. Yet we rarely hear about how foster kids are disproportionately more likely to identify as trans.
According to the Cass Report, foster kids made up 25 % of gender clinic referrals yet foster kids only make up 0.67% of the general population.
This means foster kids are 37 times more likely to identify as trans than other children.
Foster kids often experience severe trauma, including neglect, abuse, and instability. Trauma can lead to dissociation, identity confusion, and a desire to escape oneâs past, which might make some more vulnerable to seeing gender transition as a way to start over.
theres a reason lots of kids develop gender dysphoria around 10-14 and its not because its a social contagion but its because puberty is really fucking distressing when youâre trans, and thats when it becomes too much to handle.
New science: Transgender youth are as stable in their gender identity as their cisgender peers
A new study published by the Society for Research in Child Development reveals that transgender youth are just as consistent in their gender identity as their cisgender peers, Pink News reports.
The research, spanning from 2013 to 2024 and involving over 900 young people across North America, found that more than 80% of participantsâboth cis and transâremained comfortable with their expressed gender identity throughout the study.
Notably, trans youth who transitioned in childhood showed no higher likelihood of regret than cisgender youth.
When changes in identity did occur, they were more often shifts toward non-binary identification rather than a return to birth-assigned gender.
Researchers emphasized that these findings challenge outdated assumptions in developmental psychology and debunk the discredited theory of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), which falsely claims youth transition due to social contagion.
More here.
See also: Stability and Change in Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Across Childhood and Adolescence in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Full report here.
Academic conclusion from the report
By Benjamin E. deMayo, Natalie M. Gallagher, Rachel A. Leshin, and Kristina R. Olson
"We have presented a detailed quantitative portrait of gender identity and sexual orientation over time in a sample of over 900 North American youths studied between 2013 and early 2024.
Gender identity tended to be a stable trait across development for the vast majority of youths (>80.0%), including those who were supported in a social gender transition during childhood.
These earlyâidentifying transgender youths were no more or less likely to show gender change than their siblings or an unrelated comparison group of youths who were recruited into the study as cisgender children.
The gender change we did observe among both earlyâidentifying transgender and initially cisgender participants is suggestive of a potentially major shift among North American youth in thinking about gender as a concept that is less anchored on binary options and flexible across time.
We also observed high rates (30.0%â60.0%) of queer romantic interest among adolescents who selfâreport their sexual orientations.
Change in romantic interest over time was present in approximately 35% of youths who have reported on sexual orientation longitudinally, and many youths of all genders expressed interest in both boys and girls; these results again point to a substantial shift toward flexibility in thinking about gender and sexuality among today's youth.
We conclude that two things are likely true about gender and sexual orientation in youth today: stability across development is the current modal pathway, regardless of whether one's gender aligns with one's assigned sex or not, and youth can and do change how they think about their identities, contrary to a major assumption present in decades of classic research in developmental psychology.
We hope these results will not only refine our field's theories about how youth conceptualize the social identities of gender and sexual orientation but also inform broader societal understanding toward, and support of, gender diverse and sexual minority children and adolescents. "
A family in a right wing state openly plot and ask for advice in how to force their adult child into conversion therapy because she found her "son" taking estrogen.
As part of trying to detransition someone, this can include threatening to take away resources if they don't live with the transphobic parents
Trans medicine has no evidence, so instead we opt for evidence based interventions like prayer:
Religious fundamentalist mom who is anti trans shocked MtF daughter cut off contact after repeated bigotry and attempts at conversion. Really great parenting guys.
The share of young people claiming another âgender identityâ explodedâand now has suddenly receded.
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: âSwedenâs 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.â My commentary was brief: âTwo words: social contagion.â
Within hours, colleagues denounced me as a âtransphobicâ 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 wasnât 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 ârapid-onset gender dysphoriaâ in a 2018 peer-reviewed paper to describe a newly emerging cohort of adolescentsâoverwhelmingly girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria or even sex nonconformityâwho 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 isnât an insult; itâs 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 âgender identityâ 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 strategyâfrom puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for minors to arguments that âgender identityâ deserves civil-rights protections akin to race or sex. Progressives treat those who question these ideas as heretics and bigots.
The dominant counterargument to the social-contagion theory, repeated endlessly by the media and activists, is that the sharp rise in transgender identification over the past decade simply reflects liberation: People today are more comfortable expressing their authentic selves. The favored analogy compares this rise to the historic increase in left-handedness once schools stopped discouraging it. As transgender activist and biologist Julia Serano put it in a 2017 article, âthere wasnât really a rise in left-handedness so much as there was a rise in left-handed acceptanceâ that allowed its true natural prevalence to emerge. John Oliver popularized this analogy on âLast Week Tonightâ in 2022, insisting that the surge in trans identification was simply a sign that âpeople were free to be who they fâ were.â
If transgender identity were an innate trait, like left-handedness, we would expect identification rates to rise at first when it became socially acceptable, then plateau and remain stable at a fixed level. If the phenomenon were instead driven by social contagion, we might expect a boom-and-bust pattern: a spike followed by a rapid decline once the social forces driving it weaken.
Recent data offer a mixed picture. An analysis of campus surveys by Eric Kaufmann of the University of Buckingham and the Center for Heterodox Social Science found that the share of college students identifying as transgender fell 50% between 2023 and 2025. Psychologist Jean Twengeâs analysis of the annual Cooperative Election Study, administered by YouGov, found that transgender identification among 18- to 22-year-olds declined by nearly 50% between 2022 and 2024. She concluded that âit looks like the peak of trans identification is in the past.â
A new report from the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine seems to tell a different story. Drawing on data from the larger National College Health Assessment, the report found that transgender and ânonbinaryâ identification among U.S. college students is at a record highâbetween 4.7% and 6.7%âthough it may be reaching a plateau.
Some activists may wish to interpret this reportâs findings as evidence that transgender identity is innate and immutable, but the data bolster the social-contagion hypothesis. The overwhelming majority of those driving the trans craze fall into the ânonbinaryâ categoryâadopting identities which are said to be neither, both, or somewhere between male and female. These include labels such as âdemiboy,â âgenderfluidâ or âtwo-spirit.â These are social identities, not biological ones. Unlike left- or right-handedness, which describe objectively measurable traits, ânonbinaryâ identities have no anatomical or physiological referent. They are conceptual, political and responsive to cultural trendsâhallmarks of social contagion.
That doesnât mean the transgender phenomenon will necessarily collapse. Itâs 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 âtrans.â
Activists continue to argue in court that transgender identities are immutable. In Talbott v. Trump (2025), plaintiffs challenging President Trumpâs executive order barring people who adopt âa gender identity inconsistent with an individualâs sexâ from serving in the military argued that âgender identityâ is âinnate,â âdeep-seatedâ and âimpervious to change through external influences.â They argued that transgender-identifying people constitute a discernible class with distinguishing characteristics and a biological basis. This language mirrors civil-rights arguments for immutable characteristics such as race or sex.
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 canât 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 wasnât the revelation of a hidden biological truth. It was a social phenomenon shaped by imitation, ideology and institutional reinforcement.
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Anyone who's spent any time around teenage girls knows that it's a social contagion. Like Tourette's, TikTok tics, and anorexia.
"rapid onset gender dysphoria" could've been used literally to describe a phenomenon that I do think occurs, but instead it's become this pseudoscientific theory that oversimplifies the issue and touches on everything but the root problem. parents are blaming tumblr and their kid's friend group and the lgbt-friendly teacher at school and of course end up thinking the solution is to isolate their kid and control their life. they blame gender therapists and simultaneously think the panacea is ~good~ therapists, who can occasionally help but are not a substitute for oh, say, the eradication of sexism and homophobia on a systemic level.
rogd implies there's non-rogd trans people aka "real" trans people who can't be harmed by transition if they stick to guidelines set forth by "good" doctors. and on top of that, I think it minimizes the very real problems that rogd teens face that make them vulnerable to "social contagion" in the first place. it's easier to say, "my child was such a normal little girl, nothing was wrong until the internet made her trans!" than to say, "my child grew up in a a patriarchal and homophobic environment" (especially when you contributed to that misogyny and homophobia whoops).
I also hate this assumption that this is just gen zâs ~emo phase~ and that in 10 years everyone will look back and cringe at the phenomenon. things are not going to just magically get better, and they will in fact get worse if we donât do something about it.
