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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32977 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I dislike the phrase "social contagion", which assumes that being trans is a negative and it's bad for it to spread.

I think the phrase came into being due to the recent increase in female-to-male identification, where up till then it had been majority male-to-female transition:

Earlier this year, a team of NHS researchers was asked to investigate why there has been such a huge rise in the number of adolescent biological girls seeking referrals to gender clinics.

The figures alone do seem remarkable.

According to a study commissioned by NHS England, 10 years ago there were just under 250 referrals, most of them boys, to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust in London.

Last year, there were more than 5,000, which was twice the number in the previous year. And the largest group, about two-thirds, now consisted of “birth-registered females first presenting in adolescence with gender-related distress”, the report said.

And increasingly younger women, and teenage girls being vulnerable to precisely this sort of social contagion (see conversion disorders and examples of mass hysteria spreading amongst teen girl populations in enclosed or tightly knit social circles). The Loudun possessions is perhaps the most well-known example of such an outbreak, in a convent in the 17th century.

An article about a movie from 2015 about a fictional incident quotes the film-maker as inspired thusly:

The idea for the film, documentary maker Morley explains, "came to me over a decade ago, when a friend and I ended up in bursts of hysterical laughter on the phone.

"I ended up making a short film, called The Madness of the Dance, about mass hysteria, or mass psychogenic illness, as it's now known.

"It's documented in medieval times and there was an outbreak in Salem, New England, which helped lead to the famous witch trials of the 17th Century.

"They are usually confined to same-sex institutions such as convents, schools or army barracks - and it is overwhelmingly a female phenomenon.

"Most recently they seem to break out in schools, and there have been cases all over the world - from Mexico to Sri Lanka to the West Bank.

"That idea of female collectivity, of what can happen amongst a close-knit group of girls or women, is fascinating to me.

"I found that while there are set patterns that are used to identify a mass psychogenic outbreak, medics can't yet entirely understand the physical symptoms. It's steeped in mystery.

"There's a theory that they are to do with unconsciously admiring another person with symptoms and this is how the disorder spreads, or that it's triggered by a stressful event.

"That gave me the whole idea for The Falling."

I think you misunderstood my post. I do not deny that there is a social spread of transgender. That's obvious. I object to the phrase "social contagion" because it implies that this spread is a bad thing we ought to stop, as opposed to a value-neutral - or even beneficial! - social trend like any other. I object to it for the same reason I might have objected, decades ago, to "there is a satanic plot to corrupt children into playing Dungeons & Dragons". Doubtless there were indeed marketing experts working very hard to convince more children to play Dungeons & Dragons! That is not in doubt! But playing Dungeons & Dragons isn't witchcraft and being transgender isn't a horrible disease, therefore the one is not satanic corruption and the other is not contagion. They're just neat activities propagating through populations that find them to be fun ways to spend their lives.

But it is a straightforward social contagion, in the same way female tourettes is. You can track the prevalence of specific, non standard clinical symptoms that gain popularity via one or a handful of "content creators" that explode out of no where, and trivially make the case that people, overwhelmingly teenage girls, are cargo culting various mental illnesses.

Are we really going to pretend that the lifetime outcome changes of taking drugs that massively and irreversibly alter your body and playing a tabletop RPG are anywhere near the same?

What's next, you're going to argue that methheads are just trying to have fun?

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