Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis
The share of young people claiming another ‘gender identity’ exploded. Now surveys show it is receding.
ET
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.
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, “there wasn’t really a rise in left-handedness so much as there was a rise in left-handed acceptance” that allowed its true natural prevalence to emerge. John Oliver popularized this analogy on “Last Week Tonight” in 2022, insisting that the surge in trans identification was simply a sign that “people were free to be who they f— were.”
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 Twenge’s 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 “it looks like the peak of trans identification is in the past.”
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 “nonbinary” identification among U.S. college students is at a record high—between 4.7% and 6.7%—though it may be reaching a plateau.
Some activists may wish to interpret this report’s 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 “nonbinary” category—adopting identities which are said to be neither, both, or somewhere between male and female. These include labels such as “demiboy,” “genderfluid” or “two-spirit.” These are social identities, not biological ones. Unlike left- or right-handedness, which describe objectively measurable traits, “nonbinary” identities have no anatomical or physiological referent. They are conceptual, political and responsive to cultural trends—hallmarks of social contagion.
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.”
Activists continue to argue in court that transgender identities are immutable. In Talbott v. Trump (2025), plaintiffs challenging President Trump’s executive order barring people who adopt “a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex” from serving in the military argued that “gender identity” is “innate,” “deep-seated” and “impervious to change through external influences.” 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 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.
Mr. Wright is an evolutionary biologist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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