#trans identification

The Tale of Two Contagions

In 2019, German psychiatrists observed a sudden surge in adolescent girls presenting to clinics with abrupt-onset Tourette-like tics. This immediately raised alarm bells because Tourette’s typically affects boys and begins in early childhood.

This was an entirely new patient population.

So, researchers scrambled to find the trigger and quickly identified the index case. Adolescent girls with sudden-onset Tourette-like symptomps began appearing in German clinics just three months after Jan Zimmermann, a young Tourette sufferer, launched a YouTube channel that exploded in popularity. The girls displayed the exact same symptoms as Jan: the same outbursts and the same catchphrases.

The phenomenon soon migrated to TikTok, where it spread like wildfire.

Researchers coined a new term for what they were observing: mass social media–induced illness — a modern iteration of the long-recognized phenomenon of mass sociogenic illness.

So now let's go to 2014, when paediatric gender clinics across the Western world witnessed and eerily similar event. All of a sudden, those waiting rooms also began to fill with and entirely new patient cohort — adolescent girls — when historically the patient population, just like Tourette's, would have consisted predominantly of young boys.

The surge was so sudden and the inflection point so obvious that in a sane era, clinicians would have scrambled to identify the trigger of what was clearly a social contagion.

Instead, in the era of "trans rights," no one even bothered to look.

And, just like TikTok tics, it wouldn’t have taken much effort to find the answer. All it required was a glance at the cultural messaging of the time.

Because 2014 was the year Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline: The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.

And with that, the modern trans rights movement launched.

Trans-identified celebrities were everywhere, trans characters appeared in children’s books and television shows, trans influencers proliferated with astonishing speed online, and schools began teaching gender identity ideology as if it were scientific fact.

And in a perfect-storm scenario, smartphones and social media exploded in popularity at exactly the right moment, creating the ideal super-spreading environment for this seductive idea to go viral.

The message adolescents received was simple: If you hate your body, that could mean you’re trans.

And right on cue, legions of confused adolescents who hate their developing bodies began showing up at gender clinics believing themselves to be trans.

Just like the TikTok tics. A mass social media–induced illness.

Except on this occasion, instead of scrambling to contain the epidemic, doctors picked up their syringes and scalpels and set about permanently medicalising the innocent youth caught up in this powerful cultural storm.

And activists marched in the streets demanding that these young people be allowed to sacrifice their health, fertility, and body parts — while swiftly demonising anyone who dared point out the obvious parallels to social contagions of the past.

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Full talk:

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A lot of people don't know fandom history even if they are involved in fandom currently and many don't read any research on fandom and fandom participation but I have specifically from a cultural studies perspective

For a basic run down just so everyone else can have an understanding of where I am coming from, modern transformative fan culture mostly comes out of the female fans of Star Trek the original series, they watched this show, got very invested in it, wrote their own stories or drew their own art about it and started creating their own communities and sharing this work with each other

a significant split in this fandom that has been carried forward is the way people have seen the nature of Kirk and Spock's relationship, if you think they're friends and portray them as such in your work you mark it Kirk & Spock with an ampersand and if you think they have a romantic/sexual relationship you mark them Kirk/Spock with a backslash and this is where the term slash comes from for referring to a male/male pairing

I specify male/male and not gay because in this time period, Kirk and Spock and other slash ships were not portrayed as being gay or bisexual men, whether Kirk and Spock had only one sexual experience together or were partners for an extended period of time, this relationship was always treated as an exception, they were not gay or bi, they were straight with an exception and that exception typically had an expiration date

That's because this was not about creating accurate or meaningful gay male representation, this fanwork was being created and shared secretively (even more secretly than the general fandom because many groups did not accept slash in any capacity) in likely female only or vastly female groups and more than likely straight, Kirk and Spock were straight with an exception so they could continue to be sexually available to women who were attracted to the characters and actors

So why turn to slash and put these two male characters you are attracted to together instead of het ships or female self inserts even when it's less popular and might get you shunned in this time period? Well there's a few reasons

By: Jean M. Twenge

Published: Oct 20, 2025

A firestorm erupted last week when Prof. Eric Kaufmann made a bold claim: Identifying as transgender is “in free fall among the young.”

But as journalist Benjamin Ryan rightly pointed out, these surveys didn’t measure identifying as transgender. Instead, they measured identifying as nonbinary (note the chart says “not identifying as male or female,” which is not the same as identifying as transgender). Another journalist, Erin Reed, criticized Kaufmann’s analysis for not using survey weights. Kaufmann has since responded to both critiques.

Wondering which side was right, last week I analyzed data from the nationally representative Household Pulse survey, which asked directly about identifying as transgender and which is a better population-wide indicator than the elite schools in Kaufmann’s graph. The Household Pulse data showed a decline in trans ID among 18- to 22-year-olds in 2024, but I was cautious about drawing conclusions from it as the decline appeared only in a limited time period (July to September 2024) and two of the three survey administrations added an option for nonbinary identification that wasn’t there before. Maybe that was why identifying as trans declined.

Then, over the weekend, I found it – a nationally representative survey that asked about transgender identification in the same way from 2021 to 2024. It also asked separately about identifying as nonbinary.

It turns out identifying as transgender really is in free fall among the young in the U.S. So is identifying as nonbinary. In other words, Kaufmann was right (with what some consider the wrong data, but still right).

Among 18- to 22-year-olds, trans identification was cut nearly in half from 2022 to 2024. Nonbinary identification dropped by more than half between 2023 and 2024 (see Figure 1; the data are from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), fielded each year in the fall by YouGov and administered by Tufts University).

[ Figure 1: Percent of U.S. 18- to 22-year-olds who identify as transgender or nonbinary, 2021-2024. Source: Cooperative Election Study (CES). Note: Transgender identity was not assessed in 2023. Data are weighted. Analyzed by Jean M. Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. ]

Year of birth plays a key role here. Americans born in the early 2000s were more likely to identify as transgender than those born before or after them (see Figure 2). That was also true for identifying as nonbinary, though with a less pronounced up and down pattern.

[ Figure 2: Percent of U.S. adults who identify as transgender or nonbinary, by birth year, 1990-2006. Source: Cooperative Election Study. Note: Transgender identity was not assessed in 2023. Data are weighted. Analyzed by Jean M. Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. ]

Including all birth years with 100 or more respondents (1933-2006) shows the pattern even more starkly (see Figure 3). Among Silents, Boomers, and Gen X’ers (those born before 1979), less than .5% identified as transgender or nonbinary, with the number at a flat zero in some earlier birth years. Those numbers begin to rise with Millennials (born 1980-1994) and continue upward with Gen Z (born after 1995) until they abruptly plummet with those born in the mid-2000s.

[ Figure 3: Percent of U.S. adults who identify as transgender or nonbinary, by birth year, 1933-2006. Source: Cooperative Election Study. Note: Transgender identity was not assessed in 2023. Data are weighted. Analyzed by Jean M. Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. ]

One caveat: We don’t have 2025 data from the CES yet, so we can’t tell if this trend will continue. CES is partially funded by the National Science Foundation, so it’s possible the survey will not ask about or report data on transgender or nonbinary identification this year due to the Trump administration’s mandate on not acknowledging gender identity. I hope they do, though, as that will be the only way to know that the 2024 data aren’t a blip.

For now, however, it looks like the peak of trans identification is in the past.

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Nobody is an "emo" anymore.

By: Colin Wright

Published: Oct 29, 2025

The share of young people claiming another ‘gender identity’ exploded—and now has suddenly receded.

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.

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The really crucial point that we're not grappling with at all is, even the diagnosis of gender dysphoria itself, whatever you want to call it - we've got the World Health Organization calling it "gender incongruence," we've got the DSM calling it "gender dysphoria," in the past it was gender identity disorder - you've really got to look at, is this even real?

Is this-- as far as I'm concerned it is a culture-bound syndrome that appeared at this time and in this place, and because it's in the symptom pool-- I love Edward Shorter's concept of the "symptom pool," which is the pool of legitimate mental health diagnoses that exist in any culture, in any time.

And so, what you have is a bunch of unhappy people, people who are in a state of distress and mental fragility, and what they do, they select a diagnosis from the symptom pool of their time. Right now, they can select gender dysphoria and then they apply that to their lives, and it feels very real, and it feels very-- it feels totally legitimate to them.

But then they go, and they show up at gender clinics and they've given themselves this diagnosis. And the madness is the fact that in gender clinics, nobody questions the diagnosis. Even though it is as culture-bound in my opinion as like if we had the epidemic of multiple personality disorder in the 1980s and 1990s. That was, it spread like wildfire. It just, it was an epidemic. And then it disappeared, because it was based entirely on something completely nonsensical that had no science and no evidence to it.

The same thing is happening now. Gender identity ideology, this whole trans rights movement, has created a culture-bound syndrome of gender dysphoria and people, unhappy people are just applying that label to their lives. But it's not necessarily-- it's not real in the sense that, you know, cancer is real, or diabetes is real. And yet, we're treating it with this harsh, brutal medical pathway that is as extreme as cancer treatment, and that-- Really, I think a focus on what exactly the diagnosis is, is absolutely essential to avoid misdiagnosis. To avoid all of these kids, maybe they're autistic and they're interpreting the difficulties with autism as a sign that they're transgender.

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Full video:

By: Genspect

Published: Sep 28, 2025

On day one of the Genspect conference in Albuquerque, Mia Hughes announced the official launch of Genspect’s Re-psychopathologization campaign in her talk defining transgender identities as extreme overvalued beliefs.

Genspect strongly urges the recognition of transgender identification and the drive for medical transition as a pathological condition characterized by an Extreme Overvalued Belief.

An extreme overvalued belief is a rigid, non-delusional conviction, shared and reinforced within a culture or subculture, defended with passion, and experienced by the individual as entirely rational. Over time it strengthens, resists challenge, and can drive powerful — even harmful — actions in its service.

The 2010 declaration by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to “de-psychopathologize” gender variance was not based on scientific discovery but on political advocacy. This campaign has caused catastrophic harm by removing essential psychiatric guardrails, fueling a social contagion, and exposing vulnerable people to experimental medicalization.

Re-psychopathologization is not a call to re-stigmatize or marginalize individuals who identify as transgender. It is a call to restore compassion and clarity: to understand that this condition is pathological, not innate; to treat it as an all-consuming fixation requiring careful, appropriate, ethical psychological intervention, and to prevent the unchecked spread of this harmful belief.

Genspect’s re-psychopathologization campaign is not motivated by politics, but by truth, and it is grounded in a long-established psychiatric concept—the overvalued belief. Only by returning to this clinical understanding of transgender identities can we protect children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults and offer genuine help to all those consumed by this belief.

We call upon governments, medical associations, and mental health bodies to review their policies and practices and update them accordingly. To quench the flames of this contagion and safeguard the next generation, we must cease colluding with this dangerous, overvalued belief and view transgender identification through the appropriate lens of the extreme overvalued belief.

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By: Genspect

Published: Oct 2, 2025

To support the launch of our re-psychopathologization campaign, we have prepared these FAQs to explain the core concepts, address common questions, and clarify why Genspect is calling for a return to psychiatric clarity, compassion, and safeguarding in the care of trans-identified individuals.

1. What does “re-psychopathologization” mean?

Re-psychopathologization means restoring transgender identities to their proper place in psychiatry—as conditions of the mind requiring careful therapeutic attention, rather than celebrating them as healthy identities.

It is not a call to stigmatize or marginalize individuals who identify as transgender. It is a call to restore clarity, compassion, and safeguarding by recognizing that transgender identification is not innate or biologically determined, but an all-consuming pathological belief heavily influenced by culture.

2. What is an “Extreme Overvalued Belief” (EOB)?

An Extreme Overvalued Belief is a psychiatric concept first described by Carl Wernicke in 1892. Wernicke used the term “overvalued idea.” In 2019, Rahman and Abugel further elaborated on the idea, coining the term “extreme overvalued belief.”

EOBs are rigidly held, false convictions.

They are shared by others in a subculture or culture.

They are relished by the individual and defended with passion.

They appear rational to the person who holds them because they are reinforced socially.

Over time, they become resistant to challenge and can drive destructive action—either outwards in the form of violence, or inwards in the form of medical interventions that severely impact health.

3. How do EOBs apply to transgender identities?

Transgender identification does not fit the definition of a delusion (idiosyncratic false belief) or an obsession (unwanted intrusive thought).

But it maps perfectly onto an EOB:

It is shared and celebrated not just within trans subcultures but by the whole of western society.

It appears rational because schools, media, and governments reinforce it.

It hardens into certainty. To the individual, the trans identity feels very real.

It drives action—not violence against others, but harm against one’s own body through hormones and surgeries.

4. Is there a difference between trying on a trans identity as part of youth culture and pursuing medical body modification?

Yes. It is normal for adolescents to experiment with identity through changes in clothing, hairstyles, pronouns, or by affiliating with subcultures. This is part of ordinary identity development and is not in any way pathological.

Pathology begins when a young person, caught up in the extreme overvalued belief that their body must be radically altered to match this identity, turns to medical interventions. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries represent a drastic and irreversible response to what is usually a transient stage of identity exploration.

In short: youthful experimentation is normal; pursuing radical body modification in its name is pathological.

5. Does calling transgender identification an Extreme Overvalued Belief mean transgender people are violent or dangerous?

Absolutely not.

The EOB framework is most often used in forensic psychiatry to explain extreme acts of violence, but the concept applies to any rigid, pathological belief reinforced by a culture or subculture. In the case of transgender identities, the harmful action is turned inward: medical interventions that drastically impact health, often involving sterilization and the amputation of healthy organs, making them a danger to themselves.

This statement does not suggest that transgender people are criminals or violent—it stresses that they are victims of a pathological cultural contagion, deserving of compassion and truth.

6. What harm came from “de-psychopathologization”?

When WPATH and the American Psychiatric Association declared that transgender identities were “healthy”:

Psychotherapy was reframed as “conversion therapy.”

A social contagion spread unchecked.

Medicalization was normalized—puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries became the default response.

The result has been widespread harm to children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults who needed psychiatric care, not experimental body modification.

7. Why is re-psychopathologization necessary now?

To restore safeguarding: recognizing that these are vulnerable individuals, who in response to various psychiatric comorbidities or life challenges are susceptible to being consumed by this extreme overvalued belief.

To restore clarity in medicine: psychiatry must address pathological beliefs rather than collude with them.

To restore compassion: the young people caught in this cultural wave are innocent victims who need help and support, not experimental body modification in the name of a political ideology

8. Isn’t it stigmatizing to call transgender identification a psychiatric condition?

No. In fact, the opposite is true. WPATH’s campaign of “de-psychopathologization” was meant to remove stigma, but it did so by redefining trans-identified people as mentally healthy, thus implying that being mentally ill is something shameful. That stigmatizes mental illness itself. There is nothing dishonourable in acknowledging that someone is struggling with a psychiatric condition.

The answer is not to deny that transgender identification falls into a psychiatric category—in the form of an extreme overvalued belief—but to build compassion and understanding for mental illness of all kinds. Re-psychopathologization is about clarity, safeguarding, and care: recognizing what this condition is so that individuals can receive appropriate psychological support, not experimental body modification.

In addition, framing transgender identities as extreme overvalued beliefs highlights that the real pathology lies in society itself—for celebrating a harmful idea and urging vulnerable people toward drastic, unproven medical interventions in its service.

9. Is the field of gender medicine also acting in the service of the EOB?

Yes. WPATH and gender-affirming clinicians have acted pathologically since depsychopathologization launched.

They charged forward with a mass medical experiment on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults in the absence of evidence, while disregarding long-established research on child and adolescent development. They continue to ignore the systematic reviews that consistently showed only low-quality evidence of benefit, and WPATH even buried its own reviews when the findings contradicted their agenda.

Instead of correcting course, WPATH allowed politics—not science—to guide the development of their Standards of Care. In this way, they demonstrate the very dynamic of an extreme overvalued belief: consumed by the conviction that “trans is healthy,” they collude with the belief and act pathologically just as their patients do.

10. Does this mean banning care for transgender people?

No.

Re-psychopathologization calls for better care: ethical psychiatric and psychotherapeutic support, not hormones and surgeries on demand. It seeks to protect individuals from irreversible harm and to provide genuine treatment that addresses the root causes of distress. It recognizes that far from being a diagnosis for life that requires drastic, permanent medical interventions, transgender identities are typically a transient response that occurs after colliding with the extreme overvalued belief currently pervasive in Western society.

11. Why now?

In the 15 years since WPATH launched its de-psychopathologization campaign, the field of gender medicine has gone completely off the rails. It is now clear that the experiment of “gender-affirming care” has failed. Countries such as Sweden, Finland, and England have already reviewed the evidence and moved away from the affirmation model for youth.

It is time to recognize transgender identification for what it is: a pathological belief requiring careful psychiatric attention, not celebration and widespread medicalization.

12. What’s the difference between a mass delusion and an extreme overvalued belief in the context of trans?

A mass delusion is when large swathes of the population believe something absurd—normally due to not thinking too deeply about it, out of concern that doubting will make them seem cruel, or because they fear they’ll be persecuted if they question it.

An extreme overvalued belief (EOB) describes the smaller patient, activist, and clinical core whose conviction is so rigid and emotionally charged that it drives zealous, harmful actions.

In short, the mass delusion is passive acceptance; the EOB is the pathological zeal that turns belief into harm.

In Summary: