A few hundred parents reported to a scholar that their child had “abruptly” come out as transgender.
These parents—many of whom were now hanging out on anti-trans forums—thought their child was wrong about being trans, and had only come out because of their trans-affirming friend group (especially their website friends).
The main themes of that study, “social contagion theory” and “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” vanished and also appear in publications and media reports as well as in legislative bodies.
However, when much more experts revisited these questions and really interrogated trans individuals about their own experiences, the results were completely unique.
For the overwhelmingly vast majority of trans people, coming out isn’t because of their friends, and it isn’t at all sudden.
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So why do these concepts keep coming up thus frequently? What caused this principle to come? And what does the research basically say about whether young people’s social organizations are influencing their gender identities?
Kids and teens, without a doubt, know a lot from their friends, including recommendations for their favorite bands, advice on whether to enroll in a play or shop class, and suggestions for clothing and accessories.
However, in the year of 2018, a new perception of how children and youth friend groups are influenced by one another emerged: that young people who came out as transgender were suddenly starting to identify and come out as transgender as well.
The social contagion theory, as it came to be known, spread quickly—first online, and quickly into legislative sessions.
Where did the theory of social contagion come from?
To know, we must turn to a 2018 report by physician-researcher Lisa Littman, in which she claimed that many young people who were coming out as transgender were really cis, were just being misled, misinformed, or wanted to fit in with their buddies.
This wasn’t the first time that someone had floated the idea that young people coming out and/or coming to understand themselves as trans was directly influenced by their friends coming out. Prior to the release of Littman’s paper, the idea of social contagion was undoubtedly being discussed in online communities for parents of transgender children. It was especially accessible on some of the most vehemently transgender communities. But the plan hadn’t yet made it into scientific books, let alone more conventional reporting and public meetings.
After she noticed a dozen young persons in her home who were in the same friend party and who had just come out as transgender, Littman began working on her report. It appeared that more and more children were coming out.
So she decided to see if she could find out more about children like these, who seemed to be coming out “all of a sudden”. However, Littman instead chose to only review parents to understand the youth’s motivations for transitioning. Not just any parents, but mostly those who logged into online anti-trans forums.
Looking to “maximize the chances of finding situations meeting registration criteria”, as she wrote in her Methods section, she focused her picking on three websites that she knew held communities of parents who often complained that their children had immediately started identifying as trans.
The websites 4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, and Youth Trans Critical Professionals, respectively, described themselves as “a community of people who question the medicalization of gender-atypical youth,” concerned about the “unprecedented number of teenage girls suddenly identifying as trans,” and concerned about the “current trend of quickly diagnosing and affirming young people as transgender” (this latter website has since been made private).
Littman outlined her hypothesis that young people were coming out as trans due to “social and peer contagion” in the information that was sent to parents before they completed the survey. In this type of study, researchers have to be careful about sharing specific details about their hypothesis and expected results in advance, because of the risk of biasing the data (both in terms of who participates in the survey, and how they answer the questions).
No transgender parents or guardians were surveyed, and no survey was purposefully distributed to organizations or forums for gender-affirming parents or guardians.
More than two-thirds of respondents said they thought their child was “incorrect in their belief of being transgender,” and the majority of respondents claimed their child had used more of the internet or had trans friends before identifying as a trans person themselves.
Of course—especially without the youth perspective—it’s impossible to compare the timeline of a person’s “sudden” coming out to when they actually started to question their gender or understand themselves as trans.
A parent may have been trying to figure out information that may not seem so sudden to the parent whose child just came out for the first time.
Still, Littman and her husband decided they had enough data to compile a brand-new term: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).
The term—which Littman suggested was a “potential new category” of gender dysphoria—referred to young people who come out as trans because of their peers’ influence, particularly online.
A young transgender person who comes out as trans and claims they are distressed because their gender and assigned sex don’t match (a classic example of gender dysphoria) shouldn’t be receiving gender-affirming care, according to Littman, isn’t actually trans at all and shouldn’t be.
Most scientific papers receive little media or public attention outside of their chosen academic field. But Littman’s 2018 paper landed in the middle of a series of mainstream news cycles related to the lives of trans people—in particular, escalating controversies over trans youth in sports, and over the perception that the general social and political climates had somehow become “‘too accepting’ of trans people”.
Ripple effects from the article
The paper “laundered what had previously been the rantings of online conspiracy theorists and gave it the resemblance of serious scientific study,” according to American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) communications strategist Gillian Branstetter to the MIT Technology Review in 2020. Nearly instantly, Littman’s theories became a cudgel to wield against trans people, particularly trans youth.
Ideas that were first introduced or gained popularity in Littman’s study have since continued to appear in anti-trans laws. The Coalition for the Advancement & Application of Psychological Science discovered “over 100 bills in consideration in federal legislatures across the country, predicated on the unsupported claims made by ROGD.”
And in 2022, Florida specifically referred to the ROGD hypothesis as a justification for prohibiting Medicaid funds for gender-affirming healthcare.
It is a matter of scientific ethics whether researchers and institutions should be looking into questions like why some people are trans and others are not. There are strong arguments to support the notion that science’s goal is to simply understand. But there’s also an awareness of the danger of looking for the “root cause(s)” of specific identities, particularly those that remain marginalized in many societal contexts, throughout history, that type of science (or pseudoscience) has been at the root of eugenics projects.
Other researchers were separating the 2018 paper from the competition as the concepts of “social contagion” and “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” were filtering into the broader conversation, noting that the survey, sampling, and data had serious issues from the beginning.
PLOS One eventually made a significant correction to the paper. After a review, the journal decided that the article’s title, abstract, introduction, discussion, and conclusion all needed to be revised, because the original version didn’t meet PLOS One’s publication criteria. The correction made it clear that no transgender or gender-discordant youth were actually included in the study, and that the phrase “rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is not a formal mental health diagnosis,” which is still the case today.
What is revealed by current social contagion research?
Since 2018, quite a lot of new research exploring the social contagion theory—with bigger samples, including youth themselves—has failed to produce the same results.
The main concept of the so-called “rapid onset” gender dysphoria is that it describes a distinct type of gender dysphoria that teenagers allegedly experience out of the blue, according to their parents.
But does coming out actually occur out of the blue? A 2023 paper in the Journal of Adolescent Health did the math, using the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, which included over 25,000 trans and gender-diverse adults in the United States.
Most people waited a very long time before realizing that they were trans when they first became aware of it: the median time between their first awareness and their first coming out was over ten years.
In other words, it’s not “rapid.”
Another study, published in The Journal of Pediatrics in 2022, looked at Canadian youth seeking gender-affirming care for the first time to see if there was a difference between the teens who had recently come out as trans and the teens who had known they were trans for a long time.
However, when researchers compared the recently released trans children to their peers who had come out years earlier, they didn’t notice a difference. The responses to questions like how many trans friends they had, how big their online friend group was, whether they had supportive parents, or whether they had mental health diagnoses were statistically the same.
Another study found that 97.5% of youth still identified as trans or non-binary five years after social transition, which suggests that this is not a transient fad.
In 2022, researchers used data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey—which surveys tens of thousands of children in the U.S. every two years—to show that the number of youth identifying as trans or gender-diverse was not rising, and had actually fallen slightly (from 2.4 percent in 2017 to 1.6 percent in 2019).
In the United States, about 0.001 percent of baby boomers in the year 2019 said they were trans, which is true of more trans youth than trans seniors (at least, more trans youth who have had the opportunity to embrace this aspect of their identity). However, there isn’t a pattern that, as you might expect, shows that more and more young people identify as trans each year (if being trans is actually “contagious”). In practice, this is a slowly changing, fluctuating percentage of people.
The trans and gender-diverse youth in this survey reported that they were much more likely to be bullied than their cis peers at school, as opposed to receiving any sort of social benefit from coming out as trans, contrary to what the social contagion hypothesis suggests.
The harmful effects of these unfounded hypotheses in further stigmatizing transgender and gender-diverse youth cannot be understated, according to lead study author Dr. Jack Turban in a statement at the time.
As the old saying goes, the nature of science is to be self-correcting—but when bad science like social contagion and rapid-onset gender dysphoria gets picked up and shared far outside their original field, it’s irresponsible (at best) not to amplify the follow-up research just as loudly too. Being trans doesn’t seem to be contagious, and young people aren’t coming out as trans, and those who, in good conscience, want to understand why they’re meeting more out trans people in their lives, or how to support a young person who has come out as trans, deserve to know that being trans doesn’t seem to be contagious.
The best explanation for why a person is coming out as trans is simply because they’re trans, as trans people themselves know and as more and more research confirms with every passing year.
