On Social Contagion

Probably one of the most offensive and yet underrated Gender Critical narratives, one which isn’t treated as if it’s offensive or controversial by most cisgender commentators discussing us like they’re watching a cock fight, is the claim that the increase in out trans people is a form of "social contagion". Started first by Lisa Marchiano in her Jungian Analytic Psychology paper “Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics (2017)" where she compares the sharp rise in the number of trans children following the expansion of gender affirming care for trans children to the folk tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin in a disturbing level of straight facedness as if she’s really on to something.

I’ll acknowledge that trans people transition more when they are supported. In fact the whole thing makes plenty of sense when you start to interpret it in terms of the numbers of trans adults we see in the world, as a left-shift of the age of transition earlier in an individual’s life getting support in place before irreversible physical changes have happened.

Without support we become miserable and some die. In fact the history of famous trans figures has very much been a matter of survivorship bias — those who come from a solid educational background in the middle or upper middle class do pretty well, those who transitioned after learning a trade similarly, whereas those who ran away from home young to the city as young or otherwise marginalised trans people lived hard lives or just didn’t survive in the early days of trans healthcare, and trans children while documented as existing throughout were simply not routinely provided for or in many cases able to access adequate parental support to reach a clinic. The expansion of trans healthcare has, inevitably, expanded the number of people accessing it.

But let’s not pretend that contagion is not a loaded way to describe the outburst of young trans people flourishing rather than wishing they were dead or waiting out their teen years watching their bodies transform hoping they will be able to eventually cope with doing whatever it takes to pay a private shrink once they reach the age of majority and can make their own health decisions.

The expansion of visible trans people after active suppression efforts were reduced by trans activism is a contagion in precisely the sense that finding ways to purge us and treating us like a virulent infection corrupting society is actually pretty effective at terrorising people out of transition. Sure, I guess it works as a belief but it tells us nothing about our condition and much more about the value judgements of our opposition.

With the fact that violence and coercion one way or another against trans people works to reduce us, and I hate that I have to say this in so many words, we are human beings expressing ourselves in the way that comes naturally to us.

We are not a virus.

If transition helps more people, good! The spread of access is only a contagion to those who want to exterminate us.