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Well I certainly would never claim that "men can be women" or other such rhetorical nonsense. What I mean by "transgenderism" is the right of individuals to alter their sex characteristics with hormones, without government interference. Whether that makes someone a "real woman' is a meaningless question. Obviously it doesn't change one's chromosomal sex. But it does change things in superficial ways that do matter to some extent.
Okay, I'll stipulate to this meaningless tautology. I don't know what it means or why it's important to you, but sure.
This is the only statement you've made that is testable and has real-world implications. but you've also not made an argument for it. I don't have strong evidence that transgenderism isn't a social contagion, but the burden of proof would be on you. To me, it is obvious that some people would be unhappy with the biological sex they ended up with at birth. Gender is an intrinsically important part of the human experience, and our bodies all have the potential to express different secondary sex characteristics to the ones that are activated during our development.
I think transgenderism is certainly a social development that has resulted from the technological development of hormones and surgeries, as well as the relaxation of puritanical values. It certainly can spread from one person to another in that people can learn that hormones exist, or that other people are going by different pronouns, and decide they want that for themselves. But to me that doesn't seem like it meets the definition of a social contagion.
If 5% of the population likes the idea of changing genders, and then the knowledge that changing genders is possible gradually diffuses through society, I would expect the growth rate of transgenderism to follow a logistic curve. At the beginning it could look like exponential growth, but not everyone can be infected with transgenderism, only those 5%. To me that is not a social contagion, that is a pre-existing demand being satisfied by a new product.
I've previously argued here that Christianity is a social contagion, and in my opinion it is the most infectious social contagion of all time. In a matter of a few hundred years, it went from an obscure middle eastern religion to a global phenomenon that has reached even remote uncontacted tribes in the amazon. And it's no surprise, given that Christianity has built-in mechanisms for perpetuating itself. Once someone is converted to Christianity, they attempt to convert everyone they interact with. Does transgenderism have a mechanism like that? In my opinion, no.
Sure, in a sufficiently liberal and individualistic society that's a fair thing to permit. Let's just hope that the government also stays out of health care, and stays out of defining how transgender-people must be treated, and stays out of promoting specific views on the matter...
That matter, socially, to the extend that they correspond to chromosomal sex. If they don't - they're noise that interferes with the correct functioning of society. Obviously not to a massive extent, but within that it's clearly counterproductive.
Those people are wrong to be unhappy with that.
And artificially causing such delayed and partial expression results in completely meaningless signals.
Does it not? Christianity co-opted or synergized with the Roman empire (and future European government structures), and wielded that power to promote itself. Transgenderism is promoted by the broader left, and they absolutely also use institutional power to promote their favored social contagions and hinder hostile ones. In this ideological promotion, transgenderism is indeed pushed onto anyone who might be remotely receptive, and everyone else is conscripted into an "ally" role and expected to support the transgenderism of others. Neither leftism nor (historical) Christianity left much room for competing social contagions.
Certainly the internet had a lot of 'cracking eggs' and 'if you feel this way you're transgender' and 'if you like yuri anime (that is, if you find two girls hot) you're probably transgender', etc. Trans people can be very evangelical, especially in spaces they control.
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