Back in February 2019 on this blog, I published Origins of "Social Contagion" and "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" – an investigation into where these (at the time) novel concepts suddenly appeared from. What I found was they originated on anti-trans parent websites then quickly spread throughout conservative and mainstream media, almost as if they were a “social contagion” unto themselves (as many people have joked).

For that investigation, I created a timeline of all the relevant events, which I've just updated with a load of new entries – you can read it at the link above!

The most recent entries include last month's Kaufmann report & a Wall Street Journal op-ed, which revived discussions about supposed "transgender social contagion." As I started writing a response to these developments, I realized that I needed to write a more general primer explaining why that theory isn't scientific (as proponents have ensured that it's unfalsifiable) and how bad actors often shoehorn any statistics (whether sound or specious, increases or decreases) into that narrative. Hence the title of my latest essay:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Transgender Statistics (plus over a dozen studies contradicting the “social contagion/rapid onset gender dysphoria”). That's a no-paywall link to Substack, but you can also read it via this friend link to Medium.

In addition to countering the aforementioned report and op-ed, this essay also gave me the opportunity to collect all of the studies that refute “social contagion/ROGD” in one place, so others can conveniently cite it and share it with others. So please check it out & share widely!

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