Lies, Damned Lies, and Transgender Statistics

plus over a dozen studies contradicting the “social contagion/rapid onset gender dysphoria” hypothesis

Photo by Lukas from Pexels

A couple weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an op-ed entitled Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis. The author, Colin Wright, has been affiliated with not one, but two Southern Poverty Law Center designated anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups: SEGM and Genspect. He is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. If you search for Wright online, you’ll find scores of his videos (some on far-right outlets like PragerU) and writings (some published on his bombastically titled blog “Reality’s Last Stand” which, I kid you not, to opt out of subscribing, you have to click a button that says “I don’t care about the truth”), the majority of which claim that trans people do not exist biologically speaking. (For evidence to the contrary, please consult my Biology, Sex, and Transgender People resource page.)

There are numerous problems with Wright’s op-ed, which I will address momentarily. But one major flaw is that it largely rests on a recent report published by another anti-“woke” researcher, Eric Kaufmann. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), Kaufmann summarized his report by proclaiming that “trans identification is in free fall among the young.” Unsurprisingly, anti-trans activists (most prominently Matt Walsh and Elon Musk) celebrated this pronouncement. However, Kaufmann’s methodology quickly came under scrutiny. Even Wright’s own SEGM disputed Kaufmann’s findings.

For those interested, I have chronicled debates about the Kaufmann report in the October 10, 2025 entry of my recently updated Origins of “Social Contagion” & “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” timeline, but I will not be discussing them further here. From my perspective, the most pertinent issue is not whether the number of young people who identify as trans or LGBTQ+ happens to be rising (as the Williams Institute and Gallup, respectively, recently reported) or falling (as Kaufmann claims), but rather that anti-trans activists will inevitably shoehorn any statistics (both increases or decreases!) into their “social contagion” narrative.

The rest of this essay will be organized into three sections. First, I will discuss the history of the “transgender social contagion” narrative: who invented it, what purpose it serves, and why it’s nothing more than wild speculation. Second, with that necessary context in tow, I will highlight the numerous flaws in Colin Wright’s WSJ op-ed and revisit the popular “left-handedness” analogy, which he misrepresents in his piece. Third, I will end with a list of over a dozen studies that contradict the “social contagion”/“rapid onset gender dysphoria” hypothesis.

This is admittedly a longer-than-usual essay, in part, because of all the studies tacked onto the end (which you can delve into, skim over, or skip entirely, depending upon your preference). But the main reason is that I wanted to thoroughly address the many claims associated with “transgender social contagion” and highlight the many ways in which statistics regarding transgender prevalence (whether sound or specious) are often twisted by bad actors in order to promote anti-trans talking points. Hence the title of this essay, referencing the adage that Mark Twain popularized: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

The invention and intention of “transgender social contagion”

It is impossible to truly discuss this matter without first coming to terms with the previous century of trans-related research and healthcare. I provide an overview in my essay Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth Is Neither New nor Experimental: A Timeline and Compilation of Studies, but here is a super-brief summary: 1) Trans people have always existed—we are a pancultural and transhistorical phenomenon. 2) For most of the twentieth century, Western medical providers tried to “fix” trans people (read: turn us cisgender) via conversion therapy and/or endless psychotherapy, but those efforts failed miserably. The only thing that has ever worked is allowing trans people to live as the gender/sex we understand ourselves to be. 3) Initially, the means to physically transition were subjected to rigorous gatekeeping, but it became apparent over time that doctors are not capable of determining who is “really trans,” plus individuals who were denied treatment typically ended up seeking it out by other means (whether through “black market” hormones and medical procedures, or by telling doctors exactly what they wanted to hear in order to garner their approval).

Given all this, there has been growing recognition among trans healthcare providers over the last few decades that they should take trans people’s self-accounts seriously rather than trying to coerce us into being cisgender. This led to an informed consent approach for trans adults who wanted to transition, and the gender affirmative model for trans youth (which is most certainly *not* “rushing kids into hormones and surgery”—if you are confused about this point, please read the aforementioned essay and the 100+ references listed in it).

In addition to these medical advances, two other things were happening around the turn of the century. First, transgender activists during the ’90s and ’00s worked to facilitate social and legal recognition of trans people (by doing outreach, working to change policies and laws, etc.). Second, the rise of the internet made it possible for trans people (who had previously been isolated and unable to access any information and resources regarding our predicament) to find one another and learn more about what possibilities were available to us.

Together, these changes have led to what might be called a “stigma reduction” or “increased awareness and access” explanation for why more people identify as trans now than in the past. To be clear, stigma and awareness are not mutually exclusive factors here, but rather self-reinforcing: The more that trans people have access to social and physical transition, the more likely it is that they will come out and live as their authentic selves, which can lead to greater public awareness about the existence of trans people, which may help to reduce societal stigma, thus making trans people more willing to come out and transition, and so on.

This is the case that I made in a 2017 essay that Wright cites (and misrepresents) in his WSJ op-ed—I will return to that essay in the next section. But to be clear, this is not an idea that I invented out of whole cloth. That same year, in an article for the American Journal of Public Health entitled LGBT Data Collection Amid Social and Demographic Shifts of the US LGBT Community, Gary Gates of the Williams Institute summarized it this way:

Reduced social stigma and accompanying advancements in legal equality are contributing to marked changes in the demographic composition of the visible LGBT community. Most notably, it is growing, and the growth is most pronounced among young people, women, and racial and ethnic minorities.

In WPATH’s most recent Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8 (published in 2022), they state (on page S26):

The trend towards a greater proportion of [trans and gender-diverse] people in younger age groups and the age-related differences in the AMAB to AFAB ratio likely represent the “cohort effect,” which reflects sociopolitical advances, changes in referral patterns, increased access to health care and to medical information, less pronounced cultural stigma, and other changes that have a differential impact across generations.

In other words, the stigma reduction/increased awareness and access explanation (which I will refer to here as “SRIAA” for lack of a better acronym) is the current scientific consensus. And if you want to overturn a scientific consensus, then you need to provide compelling scientific evidence showing otherwise.

Any serious consideration of “transgender social contagion” must begin by recognizing that it serves as a counternarrative to SRIAA. Rather than trans people arising as part of natural variation but having different trajectories (e.g., remaining closeted vs. coming out, being subjected to conversion therapy vs. transitioning) depending upon how accepting, disaffirming, or demonizing society is toward them, the “social contagion” hypothesis conceptualizes transness as an artificial phenomenon that results in vulnerable cisgender children being “infected” (via interactions with, or information about, transgender people) and “turned transgender” as a result.

If you doubt my characterization, I encourage you to read Tumblr snags another girl, but her therapist-mom knows a thing or two about social contagion—this is the 2016 post from the anti-trans parent website 4thWaveNow that first introduced the “transgender social contagion” narrative to the world. Evidence confirming this, plus a timeline demonstrating how fast this narrative subsequently spread throughout conservative and mainstream media (almost as if it were a “social contagion” itself, as many people have joked) can be found in my 2019 investigation Origins of “Social Contagion” & “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.” As I alluded to earlier, I’ve recently updated the timeline in that piece, so it now includes the Kaufmann report, the rise of SEGM & Genspect, the Diaz & Bailey retraction, and other significant developments in this story.

In a separate investigation, I make a convincing case that the author of that “Tumblr snags another girl...” post (aka, the inventor of the “transgender social contagion” narrative) is Jungian psychotherapist Lisa Marchiano, who has since gone on to found numerous professional-sounding pseudoscientific organizations, including “Youth Trans Critical Professionals” and the “Gender Dysphoria Workinggroup” (both described in the timeline), as well as co-founding the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association and serving as an advisor to both SEGM and Genspect. All of these groups have advocated for restricting or ending gender-affirming care for trans youth and, in some cases, for adults up to the age of 25 (which is another idea that Marchiano appears to have invented).

If you happen to be a dyed-in-the-wool anti-trans activist, then the “transgender social contagion” narrative is a godsend, as it allows you to discount trans people’s gender identities as “fake” and a “fad.” Better yet, it provides justification for censoring trans people and removing them from the public sphere lest they “infect” vulnerable cisgender children. Another benefit of the “social contagion” narrative is that it tends to resonate with trans-unaware general audiences who have never considered SRIAA and thus are susceptible to believing that trans identities (which have long existed) have somehow suddenly become “contagious.”

While “transgender social contagion” is admittedly a potent anti-trans talking point, it makes for a pretty shitty scientific theory. For one thing, the more general concept of “social contagion” has been extensively critiqued for being poorly defined and conflating several potentially distinct social phenomena (such as homophily and a reduction of restraints—see my 2023 essay All the Evidence Against Transgender Social Contagion for more on this).

On top of that, there is no way to tell whether any given individual is a “bona fide” trans person (who is a product of natural variation and has chosen to live as their authentic self) or the “victim” of “social contagion” (presumably because they read one too many trans-themed Tumblr posts). In other words, for “transgender social contagion” to be taken seriously as a scientific theory, there has to be some way to distinguish it from SRIAA, otherwise it is merely hand-waving or speculation.

Over the course of my years writing about this narrative, I have found three claims made by proponents of “transgender social contagion” that could potentially distinguish it from SRIAA.

The first distinguishing claim is that, because these newly “infected” young people are not “bona fide” trans people, they will eventually reject their trans identities and detransition. These arguments were first forwarded circa 2016–17 (i.e., 8–9 years ago), yet we still have not experienced the predicted mass wave of detransitioners—see that link for statistics confirming this. While anti-trans activists continue to act as though this mass wave of detransition must be just around the corner, but the more parsimonious explanation is that trans youth—whether they came out in 2010, 2015, 2020, or 2025—are overwhelmingly genuinely trans and should have their personal accounts taken seriously rather than presumed to be “fake.”

The second distinguishing claim is that “transgender social contagion” is gender-specific, in that it primarily or exclusively affects “young girls” (by which they mean trans people who are assigned female at birth/AFAB). In my 2023 essay, Explaining Assigned Sex Ratio Shifts in Trans Children, I delve into the relevant statistics and show that there isn’t actually a significant disparity in the numbers of AFAB versus AMAB trans youth today—I will provide additional evidence for this in the final section of this essay.

The third distinguishing claim is that “social contagion” results in a brand new (and heretofore unexamined) form of gender dysphoria: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). That link will take you to my 2018 essay critiquing this concept shortly after the publication of the Littman paper. It should be noted that that the first academic article promoting ROGD was actually Lisa Marchiano’s Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics in Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought in 2017. Both Marchiano’s and Littman’s articles proposed that “ROGD” is caused by “social contagion”—in other words, they are different facets of the same theory. While merely a theory, the name “ROGD” seemed purposely designed to sound like a specific diagnosis or clinical condition, thus opening the door to reintroducing previously discredited treatments under the following rationale: While conversion therapy and endless psychotherapy may have failed in treating regular ol’ gender dysphoria, they may be effective in treating this new “rapid-onset” form of gender dysphoria.

While there were numerous flaws with ROGD theory, at least it did provide a readily testable hypothesis: Researchers could ask whether trans youth today are succumbing to gender dysphoria rapidly, as one might expect if they were suddenly “infected” by trans peers and trans-themed Tumblr posts. It turns out that the answer to that question is no. By my count, at least 8 studies to date have shown that contemporary trans youth typically become aware of their transness many months or even years before they eventually come out to others—those studies are compiled in the final section of this essay.

In the wake of those studies, Littman and other proponents of ROGD have since backed away from the idea that it is “rapid” (interestingly, she published one of those posts in Colin Wright’s “Reality’s Last Stand”). The previous link will take you to journalist Evan Urquhart’s reporting on this story, in which he makes a crucial point: By admitting that ROGD is indistinguishable from the standard long-established “late-onset” gender dysphoria, Littman et al. have essentially rendered ROGD unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

Similarly, if anti-trans activists cannot distinguish “transgender social contagion” from the more well-established stigma reduction/increase in acceptance and access (SRIAA) consensus, then it too is unfalsifiable and unscientific.

Colin Wright’s disingenuous op-ed and reconsidering the “left-handedness” analogy

Early proponents of “ROGD” and “social contagion” seemed to acknowledge that trans people exist and that gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon, they simply doubted that most contemporary trans youth fall into those categories. But Colin Wright’s position is something else entirely. According to this testimony (and other things he’s written), Wright appears to be a “gamete truther” who believes that sex can *only* be defined based upon whether the person in question possesses large or small gametes (read: eggs or sperm), and that all other sex characteristics (chromosomes, genitals, secondary sex characteristics, etc.) do not count whatsoever, and that anyone who disagrees with this worldview (he singles out trans people) are “delusional” (rather than being “reality-based” like he and his bombastically titled blog are).

This is an extreme view! And I say that not just as a trans person, but as a biologist. As I detail in my talk-length video, Trans People and Biological Sex: What the Science Says, sex is multifaceted (comprised of numerous separable sex characteristics), variable (as a result of these characteristics being complex traits), and sometimes malleable (as many people on HRT can attest to). Furthermore, gender identity is not merely an “ideology” (as Wright claims) but is demonstrably influenced by biology (once again, see video). And while certain subfields of biology do define sex based on gamete size (largely because all other sex characteristics vary significantly between species), the only people who insist that this definition must be rigidly applied to human beings across all social and legal settings (to the exclusion of all other sex characteristics) are anti-trans activists—see my essay Why Are “Gender Critical” Activists So Fond of Gametes? for a deep-dive into both the actual biology and this bizarre gamete-truther philosophy).

Hopefully that background information will help make sense of some of the more confusing aspects of Wright’s Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis op-ed.

Wright begins his op-ed by making a straightforward (if incorrect) argument: He always thought that the rise in the number of trans youth was due to “social contagion” because he read the Littman paper. And now, seven years later, Kaufmann’s report of a decline in those numbers confirms that Littman’s social-contagion hypothesis was correct all along!

But of course, even if such a decline has occurred (which is debatable, as discussed in the opening paragraphs of this essay), it could still be readily explained by SRIAA. After all, we are currently living through an unprecedented anti-trans moral panic and legislative onslaught, which includes laws in twenty-seven U.S. states banning or restricting gender-affirming care, efforts in those same states to censor trans and LGBTQ-themed books, ban discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation in K–12 school settings, exclude trans people from sports and public restrooms, and so on.

If the 2010s represented a period of decreased stigma and increased trans acceptance, then the 2020s have pretty much been the exact opposite! Astoundingly, Wright doesn’t even mention this ongoing anti-trans backlash in his op-ed, perhaps because he is one of the activists fomenting it.

Now, you could argue that perhaps Wright has never heard of the SRIAA explanation before. Except for the fact that he has. And I know this because he makes a point of citing my previously mentioned 2017 essay Transgender Agendas, Social Contagion, Peer Pressure, and Prevalence, in which I carefully lay out that case. But rather than take that case seriously—which would involve him recognizing that increases in anti-trans stigma, and decreases in acceptance and access to gender-affirming care, could very well reduce the numbers of trans youth who are out and willing to publicly identify as such—he instead makes two different straw-man arguments, both of which rely on the “left-handedness” analogy that I made in that piece (via this graph):

graph from BBC News: “Do left-handed people really die young?”

You may have seen variations of this graph before depicting the rise in left-handedness in Western countries over the twentieth century (from roughly 2 percent to 13 percent of the population). Now, if you viewed left-handedness as unnatural and sinister (as people often did in the past), then you might be inclined to interpret this increase as being due to a “social contagion” that swept through the population “turning” vulnerable children left-handed. But most of us understand that that’s not what happened. The consensus interpretation of this shift is akin to SRIAA: There was a sharp reduction in stigma against left-handedness over this time period, which allowed left-handed children to openly express their natural tendency, rather than being forced into being right-handed (which was still a common practice even during my parents’ generation).

So what are Wright’s straw men then? Well, the more ridiculous of the two is that he creates a false dichotomy between trans people who supposedly insist that trans identities are “innate” and “immutable,” and reality-based people like himself who rightly recognize that such identities are entirely social (as he puts it, “a social phenomenon shaped by imitation, ideology and institutional reinforcement”). For one thing, the lion’s share of “ideology” and “institutional reinforcement” are clearly on the side of cisnormativity—after all, we’re not debating the legitimacy of cisgender identities, nor are there any laws banning cis people’s access to gender-affirming care. But more to the point, I don’t know any serious contemporary researchers who study gender and sexual diversity that adhere to either side of this old-timey “Nature versus Nurture” dichotomy that Wright pushes in his op-ed.

While individual researchers may differ in their definitions and emphases, the current standard view (which I explain throughout my Trans People and Biological Sex video) is that sex, gender, and sexuality are complex traits that are influenced by countless factors: some biological (genetic, epigenetic, hormonal, neurological, physiological, etc.), others environmental (including experiential and social), plus a certain amount of randomness or noise that one finds in any biological system. SRIAA is a perfect example of this: While transness is a pan-cultural and trans-historical phenomenon (and thus part of natural variation, rather than being a mere social artifact or product of modernity), the percentage of people who express their transness in any given population, as well as any given individual’s life trajectory (remaining closeted, subjected to conversion therapy, allowed to transition, etc.), may vary significantly depending upon social factors (such as the amount of stigma they face, or the language and possibilities available to them).

Wright describes himself as an evolutionary biologist, so I find it difficult to believe that he doesn’t understand how complex traits and natural variation work. Furthermore, in his op-ed, Wright seems to acknowledge that variation in handedness and sexual orientation have a natural or biological basis despite the fact that there were way less left-handed and LGB people in past generations. Seriously, in the early 1980s, there were no out gay kids in my high school nor gay adults in my life. And we all know why: It wasn’t safe to be out as queer back then in most settings, and this left young people with LGB feelings (or tendencies, or inclinations, or predispositions, or whatever you want to call it) isolated and scared and forced into the closet.

At one point in his op-ed, Wright makes a big deal out of seemingly new labels like “genderfluid” and “two-spirit” (he should seriously look into the history of the latter) and argues that “these are social identities, not biological ones.” But of course, I had never heard the term “lesbian” until I was in about ninth grade. And I don’t think that I heard the term “bisexual” until I was in college. Back then, it would have been easy to dismiss those seemingly newfangled labels as mere “social identities” with no biological basis, especially if you were hell-bent on depicting non-heterosexual orientations as mere “alternative lifestyles” (as homophobes of that time often did).

There is no way to make sense of the discrepancy between how Wright treats left-handedness and same-sex attraction (as natural/biological despite being repressed during periods of high social stigma) versus trans people (who he insists are a purely social phenomenon) other than motivated reasoning: He wants to define trans people out of existence. That’s why he promotes “gamete trutherism” even though that worldview strains credulity. And it’s why he spends much of his op-ed dwelling on the word “immutable,” which is not a word that comes up a lot in trans discourses (although it’s arguably applicable given that conversion therapy is ineffective on us). But the word “immutable” does show up in legal settings with regards to whether minority groups should be protected from discrimination or not. Which is precisely why Wright brings it up.

Wright spends the last five to seven paragraphs of his op-ed arguing that because “social contagion” proves that transness is not “immutable,” it should therefore be legal to ban trans people from the military and discriminate against us in other ways. That is literally the take-home point of his essay!

And what about all the earlier paragraphs where he pores over transgender prevalence statistics? He wasn’t sharing those out of intellectual curiosity or a genuine scientific interest in testing the “social contagion” hypothesis. Those statistics were merely a ruse to lull readers toward his desired conclusion: that it is a-okay to discriminate against trans people.

Wright’s second straw man is less egregious, but I wanted to highlight it here because it’s a mistake that I’ve seen some trans people make as well. It happens in this paragraph:

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.

I’ve already explained why it’s quite possible for innate traits to seemingly decline. After all, if twenty-seven U.S. states suddenly started passing laws banning left-handedness, and if many parents started joining online groups dedicated to debunking “left-hand ideology” and sharing techniques for ensuring that their children turn out “naturally right-handed,” then I wouldn’t be surprised if those numbers reversed as well.

But the straw man Wright employs in that paragraph is the “plateau” myth. While it is true that left-handedness seems to have reached a plateau at around 13% of the population, I never suggested in my 2017 essay (or in anything else I’ve written, as far as I recall) that the same would hold true for trans people. The “plateau” idea seems to have been tacked onto the left-handedness analogy at a later point, although I’m not sure precisely where or when. I’d assume that some trans people and advocates may have emphasized the plateau in the left-handedness graph to assure cisgender audiences that increases in trans identities would not keep going up forever. And for the record, I don’t think they will either (and there is evidence to support this).

But as we can see in that Wright quote, some anti-trans activists are now weaponizing this idea to insist that transness can only ever be deemed “natural” if it reaches a plateau and remains “stable at a fixed level.” This maneuver allows Wright to cite any evidence of either increases or decreases in the trans population as “unnatural” and therefore a product of “social contagion.” I’d call this tactic ingenious if it wasn’t so logically incompetent.

I don’t believe that we should expect the levels of people who identify as trans (or LGBTQ+ more generally) to remain perfectly stable for at least two reasons.

First, transphobia and homophobia are more generally tied to societal sexism. I discuss this at length in my first book Whipping Girl, but for a shorter online explanation, just search for “oppositional” & “traditional” sexism in this essay or this one. In short, all people’s genders are policed to some degree in our society, with people who (for whatever reason) fail to live up to the canonical “masculine man” and “feminine woman” ideals facing varying levels of discouragement, delegitimization, or derision. In such an environment, being trans (or gender-nonconforming, or LGBTQ+) will always lead to some stigma. This stigma may vary somewhat from year to year, or from decade to decade, depending upon whether society is trending toward more gender equity or less. As long as these fluctuations persists, we shouldn’t expect trans identities to reach a perfectly stable plateau any time soon.

Second, “transgender” has long been (since the 1990s) an umbrella term for people who defy societal gender norms. This includes people who socially and/or physically transition (who used to be called “transsexuals”), as well as people who are gender-diverse in other ways but do not take steps to transition. Some trans people are “binary” (in that they identify as women or men), while others are “nonbinary” (in that they don’t and sometimes go by “they/them” pronouns). And yes, new trans identity labels do spring up from time to time, sometimes in an attempt to escape the stigma of older terms, other times to express variations or nuances that may not be readily apparent to people who adhere to a strict “masculine man” and “feminine woman” binary. These ever-shifting identity labels can also lead to fluctuations in the precise number of people who explicitly identify as transgender at any given moment.

By the way, that last link will take you to a Riki Wilchins article from earlier this year that further explores how new labels and language often help us to express aspects of our person that remained previously unarticulated. In it, Wilchins’ cites a 2023 Washington Post/KKF poll that reports that 62 percent of transgender Americans are nonbinary, and only 31 percent have taken steps to physically transition (such as hormones and surgery). And the latter number is even lower for trans youth: While about 3% of U.S. adolescents (aged 13 to 17) identify as transgender, a recent study of U.S. insurance claims from 2018-2022 found that less than 0.1% of adolescents received puberty blockers or hormones.

In his op-ed, Wright exploits this diversity within the transgender umbrella to create another fail-safe that ensures he’s perpetually correct about “social contagion.” To paraphrase his argument: The number of people who identify as transgender was rising but is now in free fall because it was merely “social contagion.” And yet nevertheless, “that doesn’t mean the transgender phenomenon will necessarily collapse” because now the term transgender includes gender-nonconforming people who don’t transition. (Sorry Colin, it always has.)

I wanted to highlight this, as it’s a textbook example of what is arguably the most frequent misuse of transgender statistics. Namely, whenever anti-trans activists want to raise alarms about kids supposedly being “rushed into hormones and surgery” (which, once again, isn’t happening), they will cite the overall numbers of youth who identify as transgender, omitting the fact that most of these individuals will never physically transition. But then, when it suits their purposes, they will claim that transgender isn’t a real thing because it’s almost entirely made up of non-transitioners who superficially embrace labels like “‘demiboy,’ ‘genderfluid’ or ‘two-spirit’” (to quote Wright).

Sorry, you can’t have it both ways!

There is no credible evidence demonstrating that the subset of trans youth who do take steps toward physically transitioning are doing so capriciously, recklessly, or frivolously—if you doubt this, please consult the studies that I share in the final section (we’re almost there, I promise!).

As for all the other kids who are exploring their genders and/or gravitating toward nonbinary identities, there is no credible evidence that doing so is in any way harmful. This is why anti-trans activists have to manufacture fears about how young people changing their names or embracing they/them pronouns is the inevitable “first step” down a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to them “mutilating their bodies” (to use their pathologizing parlance). But there is simply no evidence that gender experimentation or nonbinary identities automatically leads one to physically transition—in fact, the statistics I just shared shows that it doesn’t! And the fraction of those individuals who do eventually take steps to transition overwhelmingly don’t come to regret that decision (once again, see studies in the next section).

While the left-handedness analogy can be useful for understanding recent increases in young people identifying as trans, one of the main reasons why I forwarded it was to help cisgender readers understand that gender identity, like handedness, is not infinitely malleable (which is, once again, why conversion therapy doesn’t work). And if your child is genuinely cisgender, no amount of trans peers or trans-themed Tumblr posts will “turn them transgender.” Here’s the analogy I made in my 2017 essay:

Can I share a secret with you? When I was a young child, I experimented with left-handedness. Seriously. In elementary school, I had a few friends who were left-handed, and in art class they got to use these special scissors. I was intrigued, so I tried them out, using my left hand, but they didn’t really work for me. A few years later, inspired by my favorite baseball player, I tried batting left-handed. It didn’t go particularly well. It felt awkward, uncomfortable, so I eventually gave it up.

There is no credible evidence that kids experimenting with or exploring their genders is harmful in and of itself (although they may experience stigma from their parents or peers, which is why we should all work to reduce anti-trans stigma!). And this lack of credible evidence is why anti-trans activists rely almost entirely on anecdotes, speculation, and the age-old practice of manipulating statistics.

All the studies to date that refute the “social contagion”/“ROGD” hypothesis

I have organized these studies into four subsections: 1) studies showing that rates of detransition have not gone up among contemporary trans youth, 2) studies showing that trans youths’ gender identities are not any less stable over time than those of their cisgender counterparts, 3) studies showing that there hasn’t been a significant shift in the ratio of AFAB versus AMAB trans youth, and 4) studies that contradict the concept of ROGD. My rationale for highlighting these particular studies should be apparent to those who’ve read the first section of this essay (see the three types of claims that distinguish “transgender social contagion” from SRIAA).

1) In my 2023 essay Spotting Anti-Trans Media Bias on Detransition, I cite a slew of studies examining the rates of discontinuing transition, detransition, and/or regret, and across the board they are remarkably low, typically in the 1–3% range. Here are a handful of studies that I highlighted in that essay because they specifically followed trans youth in the last decade (that is, during the period of time when “transgender social contagion” was supposedly occurring): Olson et al., 2022; De Castro et al., 2022; Tang et al., 2022; van der Loos et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2023; Jedrzejewski et al., 2023.

A common complaint from anti-trans activists is that most of these studies follow individuals for relatively shorter periods of time while they are receiving treatment from the clinic in question. So I will add this more recent longitudinal study to the mix:

Kristina R. Olson, G. F. Raber, and Natalie M. Gallagher, “Levels of satisfaction and regret with gender-affirming medical care in adolescence,” JAMA Pediatrics 178, no. 12 (2024): 1354–1361. Published online October 21, 2024. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.4527 [a non-paywalled version can be found here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11581734/]
From their Findings section: “In this survey study, the experiences of 220 youths who had accessed puberty blockers or hormones were detailed by the youth and/or their parents as part of an ongoing decade-long study of transgender youth. At a mean of 4.86 years after beginning blockers and 3.40 years after beginning hormones, they reported very high levels of satisfaction and low levels of regret; the overwhelming majority (97%) continued to access gender-affirming medical care.” They also mention that of the 9 individuals who reported regret, 4 have continued gender-affirming care, “suggesting that regret is not synonymous with stopping care.”

2) While the aforementioned studies specifically followed trans kids who took steps to transition, there have been two newer studies that followed cohorts of both transgender and cisgender youth over several-year periods of time:

Benjamin E. deMayo, Natalie M. Gallagher, Rachel A. Leshin, and Kristina R. Olson. “Stability and change in gender identity and sexual orientation across childhood and adolescence.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 90, no. 1-3 (2025): 7-172. First published: July 15, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1111/mono.12479
It is a very long article, but you can read synopses of it here and here. In brief, they followed over 900 adolescents from 2013 to 2024, splitting them into three groups: 1) “early identifying transgender youths, who were supported by their parents in a social gender transition (changing their name, pronouns, hairstyle, and clothing) by age 12,” 2) “a group of their siblings, who were cisgender at the beginning of their participation in the study,” and 3) “a group of cisgender youths who were age- and gender-matched to, but not family members.” Individuals and their parents were interviewed on a yearly basis. The authors found that all three groups displayed roughly equally stable gender identities, “with over 80% of youths showing stability throughout their participation in the study.” Almost all of the shifts (in both the transgender and cisgender groups) were toward gender-diverse (e.g., nonbinary) identities. The percentage of individuals whose identities switched completely from transgender to cisgender, or from cisgender to transgender, was in the 2–4% range.

André Gonzales Real, Maria Inês Rodrigues Lobato, and Stephen T. Russell. “Trajectories of gender identity and depressive symptoms in youths.” JAMA Network Open 7, no. 5 (2024): e2411322. Published online: May 22, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.11322
This study was specific for gender and sexual minority (read: LGBTQ+) youth aged 15-21 years. 366 individuals were interviewed 4 times over the course of approximately 3.5 years. Similar to the deMayo et al. study above, greater than 80% of participants had a consistent gender identity throughout the study, with some individuals shifting between cisgender and TGD (“transgender or gender diverse”) or vice versa. It should be noted that shifts to TGD identities were not necessarily associated with steps to physical transition: “While 20 of 32 participants (62.5%) in the TGD group reported hormone use, only 6 of 28 participants (21.4%) in the cisgender to TGD group, and 1 of 32 participants (3.1%) in the TGD to cisgender group had used hormones. Use of puberty blockers was reported by 12 of the 92 participants who identified as noncisgender (ie, binary transgender or genderqueer and nonbinary) during the study; the majority were from the TGD group.” They also found that youth who shifted from cisgender to TGD identities “experienced stable levels of depressive symptoms over time,” contradicting ROGD proponents’ claims that underlying mental health issues contribute to youth identifying as trans.

3) In 2023, I published Explaining Assigned Sex Ratio Shifts in Trans Children (which I’ll refer to as my “ratio-shift essay”) that investigated repeated claims that the proportion of AFAB trans people has significantly risen in the last decade. In it, I largely drew on the “Population Estimates” section of the WPATH Standards of Care, version 8 (pp. S23–S26), which reviews many recent studies. Providing numerous examples, I made the case that, while there has been a shift in clinic referrals (which I will return to in a moment), there has not been a discernible ratio shift toward AFAB youth identifying as trans. This conclusion is further supported by the following 2022 study:

Jack L. Turban, Brett Dolotina, Dana King, and Alex S. Keuroghlian, “Sex assigned at birth ratio among transgender and gender diverse adolescents in the United States,” Pediatrics 150, no. 3 (2022): e2022056567. Published Online: August 3, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2022-056567
The authors explicitly tested the “social contagion” hypothesis by examining survey data from across sixteen states (almost 200,000 adolescents in total). They found no indication of a sharp rise in AFAB adolescents—for example, the AMAB:AFAB ratio was 1.2 to 1 in 2019, the most recent year they examined. They conclude: “our findings are in direct contrast with central components of the ROGD hypothesis, as well as previous studies that used smaller samples from single clinics.”

With regards to those clinics, several have reported a significant increase in the number of AFAB adolescents seeking trans-related care over the last decade. Indeed, if you’ve seen statistics about “the rise of young girls identifying as trans,” they are invariably citing these clinic-specific reports. In my ratio-shift essay, I highlighted one these reports (de Graaf et al., 2018) that framed this increase as part of a greater overall dynamic, wherein children referred to their gender clinic during the ages of 3–9 were disproportionately AMAB, whereas during the ages of 10–12 they were disproportionately AFAB. Their hypothesis (which jibes with my own writings about traditional sexism and transmisogyny) is that younger kids are often brought into clinics because parents tend to be more concerned about “feminine boys” than “masculine girls.” In contrast, adolescents are often referred to clinics because they self-identify as trans, and transmisogyny may lead AMAB adolescents to be more reluctant to come out as such.

Since my ratio-shift essay was published, another has been published that further confirms these dynamics:

Freya K. Kahn, Chantal M. Wiepjes, David Colon-Cabrera, Michelle A. Tollit, Monsurul Hoq, Debi Feldman, Anja Ravine, Riki Lane, Thomas D. Steensma & Kenneth C. Pang, “Effect of assigned sex on the age at which individuals seek specialist gender affirming care,” International Journal of Transgender Health. Published online May 22, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2025.2503221
From their Abstract: “Citing fears of possible social contagion, opponents of medical care for transgender youth have raised concerns over recent observations that adolescents assigned female at birth are presenting to specialist gender clinics worldwide in higher proportions than adolescents assigned male at birth. As population surveys report roughly equal numbers of adults assigned male and female at birth among those confiding gender diversity, we hypothesized that gender diverse individuals assigned male at birth are less likely to be referred during their adolescent years and instead present later during adulthood. In this retrospective analysis, we collected data from the medical records of specialist pediatric and adult gender services in Australia and the Netherlands.” They found that: “the cumulative referral patterns in both Australia and the Netherlands follow similar trajectories, with a modest excess of children assigned male at birth in early childhood, a major excess of adolescents assigned female at birth, and a later persisting excess of individuals assigned male at birth throughout adult years.” And they propose: “these insights suggest that transgender adolescents assigned male at birth may be subjected to higher levels of societal intolerance – such as trans misogyny – which delays their presentation to clinical services but which they eventually overcome in an effort to affirm their authentic selves.”

Together, this evidence severely undermines the “young girls are especially vulnerable to social contagion/ROGD” narrative.

4) Finally, at least 8 recent studies have examined the time difference between when trans youth first realize they’re transgender and when they first come out to other people (such as their parents). All of these studies show that there is typically a significant delay between these two events, often of about two years on average. A few of these studies also surveyed parents and found that they tend to presume that their child’s coming out is contemporaneous with their realization that they’re trans, even though this is rarely the case. This supports a common critique of Littman’s paper (which only surveyed parents) that what’s seemingly “rapid” about ROGD is the parents’ sudden awareness of their child’s gender dysphoria (which, from the child’s standpoint, may be longstanding and thoughtfully considered). Taken together, these studies disprove the ROGD hypothesis. Here they are presented in reverse chronological order, along with short overviews and excerpts:

Jack L. Turban, Brett Dolotina, Thomas M. Freitag, Dana King, and Alex S. Keuroghlian, “Age of realization and disclosure of gender identity among transgender adults,” Journal of Adolescent Health 72, no. 6 (2023): 852–859. Published online March 17, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2023.01.023
This study examined the responses of over 27,000 transgender and/or gender diverse (TGD) adults with regards to when they first realized they were trans, and when they first shared that realization with someone else. They found: “A substantial proportion of TGD adults reported realizing their gender identity was different from societal expectations based on their sex assigned at birth during adolescence or later. Several years typically elapsed between participants’ TGD identity realization and sharing this with another person. The results of this study do not support the ROGD hypothesis.”

Annie Pullen Sansfaçon, Denise Medico, Morgane Gelly, Valeria Kirichenko, Frank Suerich-Gulick, and Stories of Gender Affirming Care project, “Blossoming child, mourning parent: A qualitative study of trans children and their parents navigating transition,” Journal of Child and Family Studies 31, no. 7 (2022): 1771–1784. Published online November 29, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-021-02178-w
The authors interviewed 72 trans and non-binary youth (TNBY) and their parents. Here’s their findings as described in the discussion: “Our data highlight that youth often begin their journey of gender questioning long before they first bring it to their parent’s attention, often because youth fear their parents’ reaction, or in some cases because they want to shield their parents from unnecessary concern. In some cases, parents misinterpreted or ignored signs that were more visible. This suggests that though parents may be surprised by their child’s identity when they first reveal it—especially if parents did not notice any prior signs—this does not mean that a youth’s gender identity has suddenly or ‘rapidly’ appeared, as has been previously suggested (Littman, 2018). Our data show that most youth actually questioned their gender for years, waiting to be certain about their gender identity or for the timing to be right before disclosing it to their parents.”

Greta R. Bauer, Margaret L. Lawson, Daniel L. Metzger, and Trans Youth CAN! Research Team, “Do clinical data from transgender adolescents support the phenomenon of ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’?” The Journal of Pediatrics 243 (2022): 224–227. Published online November 15, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2021.11.020
The authors surveyed 173 trans adolescents to see if individuals who displayed more “recent gender knowledge” (i.e., those who Littman would categorize as “rapid onset”) differed from those who had understood they were trans for a longer period of time. They report: “We did not find support within a clinical population for a new etiologic phenomenon of ‘ROGD’ during adolescence. Among adolescents under age 16 seen in specialized gender clinics, associations between more recent gender knowledge and factors hypothesized to be involved in ROGD were either not statistically significant, or were in the opposite direction to what would be hypothesized.”

Julia C. Sorbara, Hazel L. Ngo, and Mark R. Palmert, “Factors associated with age of presentation to gender-affirming medical care,” Pediatrics 147, no. 4 (2021): e2020026674. Published online April 1, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-026674
The authors analyzed questionnaires completed by 121 youths presenting at a clinic for gender-affirming care and 121 of their caregivers (typically parents). While youth waited a median time of 1.5 to 2 years before coming out to their caregivers, “caregivers reported recognizing their child’s gender incongruence and their child coming out as nearly contemporaneous events.” The authors go on to say: “These findings contrast descriptions of apparently rapid development of gender dysphoria among older adolescents. Instead, our data suggest that perceived rapidity may reflect caregiver unawareness of both the existence and duration of their child’s transgender identity before an explicit disclosure.” They also found that children who came to the clinic at older ages tended to have more religious and less supportive caregivers, leading the authors to suggest that “environment may be a determinant of transgender identity formation and recognition.”

Natacha Kennedy, “Deferral: The sociology of young trans people’s epiphanies and coming out,” Journal of LGBT Youth 19, no. 1 (2022): 53–75. Published online September 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2020.1816244
The author conducted interviews with trans youth and found they typically experienced periods of months or years between when they first understand themselves to be transgender and when they come out to other people (including parents) as such. From the abstract: “These data contest the validity of concept of ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ and the way young trans people are positioned by ‘passive victim’ narratives in many academic and media accounts.”

Jae A. Puckett, Samantha Tornello, Brian Mustanski, and Michael E. Newcomb, “Gender variations, generational effects, and mental health of transgender people in relation to timing and status of gender identity milestones,” Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity 9, no. 2 (2022): 165–178. Published online September 1, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpp0000290
This study does not explicitly mention “social contagion” or “ROGD” (as it was published online just a year after the Littman paper). The authors analyzed data from an online study of transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) individuals ages 16–73. The youngest cohort (Generation Z) included 194 individuals. The mean age at which they “felt different” was 11.47 years; the mean age at which they identified as TGD was 15.18 years; and the mean age at which they began medically transitioning was 17.62 years. So not especially rapid.

Laura E. Kuper, Louis Lindley, and Ximena Lopez, “Exploring the gender development histories of children and adolescents presenting for gender affirming medical care,” Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology 7, no. 3 (2019): 217. Published online September 1, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpp0000290
This study does not explicitly mention “social contagion” or “ROGD” (as it was published just a year after the Littman paper). Using gender clinic data of 224 children and adolescents (ages 6 to 17), they found that, for both AFAB and AMAB cohorts, the average age at which they first identified with their current gender preceded the average age at which they disclosed that identity to immediate family by over two years. So not very rapid.

Arjee Restar, Harry Jin, Aaron Samuel Breslow, Anthony Surace, Nadav Antebi-Gruszka, Lisa Kuhns, Sari L. Reisner, Robert Garofalo, and Matthew J. Mimiaga, “Developmental milestones in young transgender women in two American cities: Results from a racially and ethnically diverse sample,” Transgender Health 4, no. 1 (2019): 162–167. Published online August 7, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1089/trgh.2019.0008
This study does not explicitly mention “social contagion” or “ROGD” (as it was published the year after the Littman paper). But the authors examined survey data from 298 young transgender women and found that their mean “initial self-awareness of transfeminine identity” was at age 9.91, yet their disclosure to other people was at 15.82 years. Only 71.5% of them had taken hormones at the time of the study, at the mean age of 20.4 years. In other words, not rapid at all.

This essay was made possible by my Patreon supporters — if you appreciate it, please consider supporting me there! You can also sign up for a paid or free subscription here: