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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. This negative connotation is, I think, what causes people to deny the obvious when they might not if the question were phrased differently. Is dyeing your hair a "social contagion"? Tattoos? The latest slang, the latest fashion? People will trivially be more likely adopt all these things if they know they're on the table, and even more so if they're popular. "People will be more likely to develop a desire to change genders if they know it's a commonly-done thing" is common sense, and I don't think "the pro-trans tribe" would deny it if the name people used for it wasn't something which implies it's a nefarious process that needs to be halted.
(Mind you, I do think we use puberty blockers on minors too cavalierly. But Rowling is not a good champion for that narrow, sensible point when she is clearly against social transition, and all forms of adult transition, as well.)
No matter which way you slice it, medical transition will have negative effects on your health. Few people would consider it a good idea to do it for cosmetic reasons, and even fewer parents would let their children do it for such a reason. This is why the possibility of the desire to transition being spread socially needs to be denied, and reasons for urgency (like suicide risk) need to be invented.
Well, see my parenthetical. I think we should tell 90% of trans minors "great, go ahead and transition socially, but you'll have to wait until you're of age for medical transition", and only medicalize the minority who have proper "will claw at their growing breasts with their bare nails if not allowed to get rid of them" dysmorphia.
One turn of the screw later, everyone who's been exposed to the trans meme will claw at their growing breasts with their bare nails if not allowed to get rid of them because they're told that that will get them what they want. The measure becomes the target. Then what?
I contend that what they want is to be taken seriously as their chosen gender, and a lot of trans teens who currently seek medicalization do so because they think it will improve their chances of that. If the two were successfully decoupled, far fewer would want it.
The problem is we've told these people it's possible to choose your gender or for your gender to be wrong wrt your sex. The whole idea is a memetic hazard. They aren't tomboys, twinks they are suddenly in the wrong body. That's the problem.
I'm sure a non negligible number would have been "fine" with being a slightly-gender nonconforming version of the same gender instead of being sold the bill of goods for "choosing your gender"
You are, again, assuming the conclusion. I happen to think the world is considerably better for having trans people in it, and that most people are happier transitioning than they would have been in a counterfactual world where they didn't. (Not because it was written on their soul in golden ink from birth that they were the opposite gender; just because gender transition is a fun thing to do with your life and imbues the transitioner with a welcome sense of purpose and fulfillment, like any other arbitrary self-improvement project.) It's a memetic something but I reject the term "hazard". I think it's a boon to human flourishing, and it needs to spread harder, so long as we can decouple it from dangerous medical procedures. We're halfway there. "Transmedicalists" are already viewed with suspicion by mainstream gender theory; "you can be trans even if you don't get surgery or hormones" is a very widespread meme which is looked on approvingly. Push it all the way to "at least if you're a minor, it's better to be the non-medicalized kind of trans" and you're golden.
I've been through this before with the self-affirming, ego-stroking, this is a reaction to being rejected but don't you dare point that out that we're feeling hurt and trying to soothe ourselves that "well of course being queer is so much better than being silly old boring cis het! we queers are so special and creative and brave and exciting! without us there would be no science and art or nice things! white bread!"
Gee who would have thought that raising a generation on this would result in every kid trying to indicate that "in fact I am a bisexual non-binary femme and not a cis straight girl, even though I've only dated guys and am married to one", because being cis het is not only boring and dull but also bad and wicked and systemically oppressive?
And we're getting it now with the trans thing. And I think it serves the genuine trans people poorly, because the fringe cases, the extremists, the batshit insane, and the 'hop on the trend bandwagon' types are getting all the publicity and making ordinary people think "well if this is what trans means, I want nothing to do with it".
Maybe you think "hurrah, a ten year old trans model!" (who is now thirteen) is an improvement for the world, I look at that and go "a manipulative crazy bitch conditioned her kid into this because she's the extreme form of a Stage Mother and is using the kid for attention and praise reflected back on her". Munchausen's By Proxy involves adults causing genuine harm to the child in order to make the adult feel better. I think that's what is going on here, and instead of heaping praise on the Brave and Stunning mothers like Dee McMaher and Jeannette Jennings we should be taking the kids away and giving them a chance to breathe and figure out if they're really trans, or gay, or just needing help navigating difficult circumstances.
… so? Trans minors I can see the issue on, because of the health hazards etc. But who the fuck cares if girls are identifying as bi on a kind of flimsy basis? How does it have any effect on the world besides making it a little bit more colorful, a bit more fun to live in, a little bit freer? Imagine a world with a restrictive binary of registered Vegetarians and Meat-eaters, with a small minority of Omnivores. I think encouraging people to view being an Omnivore as cool, and register themselves as such in greater numbers, would be a generally good thing even if some of the new Omnivores still eat many more greens than meat. On the margins, it's encouraging them to experiment more, to feel free to try more things. They can still eat a mostly-veggie diet (ie date mostly men) if that's what they actually want.
Not particularly, but frankly I'd hardly be less skeptical of any mother pushing a ten-year-old into a modeling career. The gender aspect seems very secondary to what's gone wrong here. And to the extent the mother might in this case have pushed the kid towards identifying a certain way, I'm not suddenly in favor of pushing people into a certain gender presentation just because you've flipped the polarity. I'm all about freedom. I'm against coercion whether it's enforcing birth sex or doing the exact opposite. The former is, I think you'll agree, a lot more common - there are many, many more mothers obsessively teaching their little girls to clean up nice and be pretty, than teaching the same thing to their hitherto-sons - but sure, to the extent the latter happens, I'm against it too.
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