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Notes -
https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/
I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before. I can see the social contagion factor in both especially for women who are much more conforming than men tend to, and because women have higher neuroticism than men. What I’m not sure about is some of the other ideas, that being trans is about self-negation and a sort of renouncing of their body.
On the one hand, the rapid increase in the number of people identifying as trans and undergoing transition in the past few years is a phenomenon that requires an explanation.
On the other hand, trans ideation is something that arises quite naturally and spontaneously in certain individuals. It seems difficult to explain in terms of anything like “social contagion” or “renunciation of the body” because some people demonstrate a strong pre-reflective affinity for it. Phenomenologically speaking, it’s continuous with other types of familiar desires, and does not represent a radical break in kind: some people really want to be rich, some people really want to be astronauts, and some people really want to be the opposite sex. That last one is a very perplexing sort of desire to someone who has never experienced it before, which leads them to assume that there must be more going on than meets the eye, there has to be some sort of theory that explains it because who could want something like that.
In fact I assume (but cannot prove) that at a basic level, most (MTF) transsexuals are motivated by this basic I-just-want-it sort of desire, rather than any sort of complex story about how they have a deep internal proprioception that they really are the opposite sex; but the former just sounds like idle fancy to other people, while the latter sounds like a serious medical disorder that requires treatment and social accommodation, so that’s the public-facing story they go with.
Any complete theory of transsexuality has to accommodate both facets of the phenomenon: on the one hand, the rapid increase in cases which is obviously socially conditioned, and on the other hand, the fact that it arises spontaneously and seemingly without cause in at least some individuals. (I don’t think it’s completely without significance that one can find a certain fascination with the idea of men becoming women that dates back to ancient mythology, and continues to reappear in various guises - see for example Freud and Lacan’s analysis of the case of Dr. Schreber).
Doesn’t anorexia also arise spontaneously in some people? All social contagions have to start somewhere.
I'm sure they all start somewhere, but some of the more classic examples of social contagion aren't ubiquitous in the modern era. Various dancing manias and speaking in tongues come to mind as two likely-social phenomena that you don't see as often as a few hundred years ago.
I would be interested if anyone has any numbers on this, though. If nothing else, the rate of spontaneous genesis seems akin to the frequency of appearance of physical pathogens: frequent zoonotic crossover makes substantial differences in how we treat influenza versus smallpox, for example.
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