Discovering the Link Between Gender Identity and Peer Contagion – Quillette

In 2016, Lisa Littman, ob-gyn turned public health researcher, and mother of two, was scrolling through social media when she noticed a statistical peculiarity: Several adolescents, most of them girls, from her small town in Rhode Island had come out as transgender all from within the same friend group. With the first two announcements, I thought, Wow, that s great, Dr. Littman said, a light New Jersey accent tweaking her vowels. Then came announcements three, four, five, and six.

Dr. Littman knew almost nothing about gender dysphoria her research interests had been confined to reproductive health: abortion stigma and contraception. But she knew enough to recognize that the numbers were much higher than prevalence data would have predicted. I studied epidemiology& and when you see numbers that greatly exceed your expectations, it s worth it to look at what might be causing it. Maybe it s a difference of how you re counting. It could be a lot of things. But you know, those were high numbers.

In fact, they turned out to be unprecedented. In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria the medical condition associated with the social designation transgender. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the United States quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for as we have seen 70 percent of all gender surgeries. In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments. In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.

via quillette.com

Hmmph.