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In 1979, Playboy published a 15 page feature/interview with musician Wendy Carlos. Carlos had been a minor celebrity for a few years around 1970, known for being a pioneer of musical sound synthesis (she and collaborator Rachel Elkind recorded the "Switched-On Bach" series of albums and much of the soundtrack for Kubrick's film adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange" and Carlos had performed with the St. Louis Symphony, as well as doing a handful of televised demonstrations of sound synthesis), before becoming a recluse. The motivation for Carlos to sacrifice her privacy and Playboy to devote 15 pages to a relatively obscure musician was sharing Carlos's experience of gender dysphoria sexual transition, something few had previously done. (A transwoman named Christine Jorgensen had shared her experience with a magazine in 1953 and published an autobiography in 1967, but she did so after being involuntarily outed by the New York Daily News and having difficulty supporting herself. Playboy assumed their readers to be so unfamiliar with the topic that two of the introductory questions are "Let's start with a basic question: What is a transsexual?" and its followup question, "So transsexuals aren't necessarily former homosexuals?") I recommend reading it as a now-historical primary source.
Carlos is an interesting case, because she has traits that would trigger incredulity among critics of transgender medicine, if she were transitioning today (exemplifying many elements of the male nerd archetype), but she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child (page 4, though I strongly recommend reading the full interview). Historical cases aren't dispositive of present-day sociogenic gender dysphoria, but how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases? A "critical mass" of cases sufficient for self-sustaining sociogenesis may be possible, but how could it come to exist, absent any "genuine" cases?
(Here's a pdf of the book Carlos mentions on page 5, in case anyone is curious about it.)
1979 is pretty late in the game. If you want a historical case, I'd go with Christine Jorgensen, which was nearly 30 years prior. The thing is even that story contains a significant element of social contafion, as Jorgensen was widely profiled in the media, putting the idea in the American public's awareness, and leading Harry Benjamin (the prior namesake of WPATH) to say "Indeed, Christine, without you, probably none of this would have happened; the grant, my publications, lectures, etc."
I'm not sure there's anything to explain. There must have been "genuine" cases of Morgellons disease, in that the affected person formed the idea relatively independently, rather than copy-pasting a ready made one from the media, but I don't think it implies they had actual skin parasites.
Indeed, I included Jorgensen and a link to a free pdf of Benjamin's book. I chose Carlos, because I thought the interview was a good primary source and that her transition (long before the interview) was in something of a goldilocks date-range, preceding modern controversies by a healthy margin but sharing modern vocabulary and "conceptual framework." (You could equally choose someone from a generation before Jorgensen or a generation before that or...)
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