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I think the most important parts of a social contagion are that it's self-replicating, and that it contains some form of error correction to prevent its core payload from mutating beyond all recognition. In my opinion there is one obvious existing social contagion, Christianity. The primary function of Christianity is to perpetuate itself through evangelism. It also has error-checking capability to prevent its core payload (the holy trinity, etc) from mutating too much, but beyond that it adapts to fit in every culture and every corner of the world. Note that this isn't true of most other religions - many don't even want to perpetuate themselves beyond their own original culture. I think it's also reasonable to argue that wokeness a social contagion, since conversion through guilt-tripping seems to be a major component of the woke doctrine. However, the woke doctrine itself is not very well-preserved as wokeness reproduces itself, since wokeness is not a formal religion. Different woke people can have radically different beliefs, much more so than different sects of christianity, which still agree on 99% of their doctrine. I would argue that JK Rowling herself is part of woke culture - she is a radical feminist who believes in male privilege, and votes left on basically every issue other than transgenderism. Most of her criticisms of transgenderism are based on woke identity politics (women need safe spaces, men are evil raping oppressors, blah blah)
But I think transgenderism itself is fairly inert. People do decide to transition by witnessing other people transitioning, true. But there isn't always an ideological component. Some people just want to change their physiological sex characteristics to the extent possible. Imagine the counterfactual, that nobody wanted to change their biological sex. That would be pretty weird if everyone just happened to be totally satisfied with the results of a coinflip at their conception. People want to change all kinds of things about themselves, why not sex as well? I think a world where everyone was fine with their biological sex would actually require a mental gender identity. Somehow the brain would have to be adapted to prefer being in a body with the correct biological sex characteristics.
So the question is whether our observations of approximately 1% of people choosing to mess around with their physiological sex characteristics is more consistent with a social contagion containing that goal, or with some people just inherently wanting to do that, and social restrictions being lifted in the last few decades.
It’s not ideological for the kids involved. But it is a way for ostracized kids to find some measure of acceptance and even celebration as they decide to transition. Which would feel better to a boy who doesn’t fit in at all with the other boys? Grow up to be a lonely male incel hikkimori, doomed for life, or be trans female and find some measure of acceptance by wider society, a new, somewhat trendy identity. People choose all kinds of identities that don’t fit them perfectly for the purpose of fitting in. Goths, various fandoms, music scenes, sports, you name it. Humans are social animals that naturally want to be high in the social hierarchy. It’s not really that weird to think that if there’s social capital in being trans there would be kids willing to at least socially transition. The alternative is being an outcast.
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