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There's a quote in the Vice article that this seems to be based on discussing a recent guest Shrier who wrote a book against transgender youth. "She also descr

There's a quote in the Vice article that this seems to be based on discussing a recent guest Shrier who wrote a book against transgender youth. "She also described wanting to transition as a "contagion" with the potential to infect other children, an entirely scientifically baseless idea, Men's Health noted." The idea that transgender identification is, in part, a social contagion, is the subject of academic research. [1] It seems odd and inappropriate to me that Vice, and consequently Business Insider, cite "Men's Health" magazine as the definitive source on what is or isn't scientific and ignore actual academic research on the topic. It's also dishonest that they phrased it to elide the "social" part of the phrase, to make it seem as if the guest were claiming trans identification is communicated as a disease is. Articles like this are something of a depressing reminder that journalists are basically bloggers who quickly bang out a story about current events for their audience. I think, ideally, journalists would try a bit harder to be fair and impartial. 1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/

4ggr0 6y ago
This reminds me of people back in the day saying that homosexuality is a "disease" which is being spread by homosexuality. I'm not a scientist, but isn't it just the fact of being educated that such exist? If I don't know about transgenderism, or I know about it but people view it as a negative thing, I would never get the idea of being it myself, right? I just live my whole life with a strange feeling of not really knowing who I am. If, on the other hand, I know about it and the culture is accepting of it, I can finally know who I am because I feel like I found myself. I really doubt that people start hormone-therapy just because they heard about transgenderism and were somehow brainwashed into thinking that they are trans as well...It actually sounds like a disgusting theory to me, could come from a certain german group in the 1930's. If I was born 100 years prior, I probably never would've known that I have ADHD or am Bi-Sexual. Now with the internet all the information is available to me and I suddenly get to know myself. I doubt that the internet or the culture made me bi or ADHD. I just found out thanks to those things :) People back in the day were labeled as dumb people because they couldn't read, now we know that there's a thing called dyslexia. Anyways, sorry for going on a tangent, just what I thought when reading this discussion.
- auganov 6y ago
  > This reminds me of people back in the day saying that homosexuality is a "disease" which is being spread by homosexuality. You're just assuming that the hypothesis of contagion necessarily carries some negative connotation. I generally tend to believe there's a strong contagion element to all kinds of behaviors. But that doesn't inherently make them wrong. A lot of the born-this-way arguments for all kinds of phenomena arose simply in response to negativity. The point being "if I can't change it, you cannot judge me for it". Almost implying that it is indeed a bad thing.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  The basic idea of the paper is investigating teens who did not show symptoms of gender dysphoria in their youth, who had what the author calls "Sudden onset gender dysphoria" after being exposed to trans-friendly content (youtubers, tumblr blogs, etc), and who have one or more friends in their social group who become trans at the same time as they did. You can read more here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... I agree with you that I am not likely to transition if one my peers did. That's not really what the author is saying. The author is saying that some people (specifically teenage girls) seem to be transitioning together, without prior symptoms of gender dysphoria, after being exposed to content about trans people. This research may be right or wrong. Trans-identification may or may not be a social contagion. I lack the expertise and evidence to judge. However, I can tell that the idea that this is a "completely unscientific" question is wrong by evidence of their being scientific research about it. "Social contagion" doesn't mean the author thinks of trans-identification as "a disease". Social contagion means that it is spread through social interactions, which is why multiple individuals in friend-groups will sometimes develop sudden onset gender dysphoria together.
666lumberjack 6y ago
Anything can be 'the subject of academic research' if you just find one sufficiently biased individual willing to write an article. The paper that you link (which is the only one that ever gets trotted out when this subject comes up...) had to be corrected after publication and has been widely criticised for its poor methodology. The author sought to find evidence to support the idea of transgender identification as a social contagion by surveying only parents who reported 'rapid-onset gender dysphoria' in their kids recruited specifically from anti-trans / 'gender-critical' forums 'transgendertrend', '4thwavenow', and 'youthtranscriticalprofessionals'. The fact that their sample was obscenely biased is right there in the intro to the study. The fact that the study had to be corrected is right there at the top of the page.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  It seems like you are shifting the goalposts somewhat. In my comment, the claim I'm responding to is that the idea that trans-identification is a social contagion is "an entirely scientifically baseless idea". To rebut that claim I linked scientific research supporting that idea. You, in turn, replied that the research I linked was not very good. This is shifting the goalposts from "entirely scientifically baseless" to research that satisfies some unknown and nameless criteria of yours. You also mention that it "had to be corrected after publication and has been widely criticised for its poor methodology." That's an interesting point, but to my knowledge, the critics that drove that correction were trans activists rather than scientists. It "had to be corrected" (to the state it currently is in today where it makes the argument I reference) because of protests from these activists. The wikipedia summary of the controversy surrounding this paper says[1]: "Criticism was voiced by transgender activists, and two weeks after publication, PLOS One responded by announcing a post-publication review of the paper. In March 2019, the journal concluded its review and republished Littman's revised and corrected version." It's also not really a coherent criticism to say that, when I was faced with a claim that something is entirely non-scientific, I responded by citing the most frequently cited scientific paper to rebut that claim. Okay, it's a frequently cited scientific paper. That still rebuts the idea that the social contagion hypothesis is entirely non-scientific. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_c...

4ggr0 6y ago

This reminds me of people back in the day saying that homosexuality is a "disease" which is being spread by homosexuality. I'm not a scientist, but isn't it just the fact of being educated that such exist? If I don't know about transgenderism, or I know about it but people view it as a negative thing, I would never get the idea of being it myself, right? I just live my whole life with a strange feeling of not really knowing who I am. If, on the other hand, I know about it and the culture is accepting of it, I can finally know who I am because I feel like I found myself. I really doubt that people start hormone-therapy just because they heard about transgenderism and were somehow brainwashed into thinking that they are trans as well...It actually sounds like a disgusting theory to me, could come from a certain german group in the 1930's. If I was born 100 years prior, I probably never would've known that I have ADHD or am Bi-Sexual. Now with the internet all the information is available to me and I suddenly get to know myself. I doubt that the internet or the culture made me bi or ADHD. I just found out thanks to those things :) People back in the day were labeled as dumb people because they couldn't read, now we know that there's a thing called dyslexia. Anyways, sorry for going on a tangent, just what I thought when reading this discussion.

auganov 6y ago
> This reminds me of people back in the day saying that homosexuality is a "disease" which is being spread by homosexuality. You're just assuming that the hypothesis of contagion necessarily carries some negative connotation. I generally tend to believe there's a strong contagion element to all kinds of behaviors. But that doesn't inherently make them wrong. A lot of the born-this-way arguments for all kinds of phenomena arose simply in response to negativity. The point being "if I can't change it, you cannot judge me for it". Almost implying that it is indeed a bad thing.
ALittleLight 6y ago
The basic idea of the paper is investigating teens who did not show symptoms of gender dysphoria in their youth, who had what the author calls "Sudden onset gender dysphoria" after being exposed to trans-friendly content (youtubers, tumblr blogs, etc), and who have one or more friends in their social group who become trans at the same time as they did. You can read more here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... I agree with you that I am not likely to transition if one my peers did. That's not really what the author is saying. The author is saying that some people (specifically teenage girls) seem to be transitioning together, without prior symptoms of gender dysphoria, after being exposed to content about trans people. This research may be right or wrong. Trans-identification may or may not be a social contagion. I lack the expertise and evidence to judge. However, I can tell that the idea that this is a "completely unscientific" question is wrong by evidence of their being scientific research about it. "Social contagion" doesn't mean the author thinks of trans-identification as "a disease". Social contagion means that it is spread through social interactions, which is why multiple individuals in friend-groups will sometimes develop sudden onset gender dysphoria together.

666lumberjack 6y ago

Anything can be 'the subject of academic research' if you just find one sufficiently biased individual willing to write an article. The paper that you link (which is the only one that ever gets trotted out when this subject comes up...) had to be corrected after publication and has been widely criticised for its poor methodology. The author sought to find evidence to support the idea of transgender identification as a social contagion by surveying only parents who reported 'rapid-onset gender dysphoria' in their kids recruited specifically from anti-trans / 'gender-critical' forums 'transgendertrend', '4thwavenow', and 'youthtranscriticalprofessionals'. The fact that their sample was obscenely biased is right there in the intro to the study. The fact that the study had to be corrected is right there at the top of the page.

ALittleLight 6y ago
It seems like you are shifting the goalposts somewhat. In my comment, the claim I'm responding to is that the idea that trans-identification is a social contagion is "an entirely scientifically baseless idea". To rebut that claim I linked scientific research supporting that idea. You, in turn, replied that the research I linked was not very good. This is shifting the goalposts from "entirely scientifically baseless" to research that satisfies some unknown and nameless criteria of yours. You also mention that it "had to be corrected after publication and has been widely criticised for its poor methodology." That's an interesting point, but to my knowledge, the critics that drove that correction were trans activists rather than scientists. It "had to be corrected" (to the state it currently is in today where it makes the argument I reference) because of protests from these activists. The wikipedia summary of the controversy surrounding this paper says[1]: "Criticism was voiced by transgender activists, and two weeks after publication, PLOS One responded by announcing a post-publication review of the paper. In March 2019, the journal concluded its review and republished Littman's revised and corrected version." It's also not really a coherent criticism to say that, when I was faced with a claim that something is entirely non-scientific, I responded by citing the most frequently cited scientific paper to rebut that claim. Okay, it's a frequently cited scientific paper. That still rebuts the idea that the social contagion hypothesis is entirely non-scientific. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_c...