Opponents of surgically mutilating healthy adolescents are currently relishing a moment of vindication. This month, the Supreme Court delivered a blow to California laws that obligate schools to aid and abet minors’ “gender transitions,” keeping them secret from parents. Back east, a New York court awarded two million dollars in damages to a woman on whom doctors performed a double mastectomy at age 16. Given this turn in the cultural tide, it’s understandable why conservatives would be fighting the urge to spike the football and offer much-deserved “I told you sos.”
And there’s more good news. A few months ago, researcher Erik Kaufmann noted a precipitous decline in the number of young people who identify as “non-binary” after 2023. More recently, Jean Twenge, a scholar who charts generational divides and characteristics, confirmed that Kaufmann’s findings are likely true and can be extended to include transgender identity specifically and LGBTQ identity in general.
These results bolster the claim that the explosion of youth who belong to a sexual minority at the peak of the “Great Awokening” was the effect of a social contagion. Simply put, the social contagion argument holds that it was peer pressure, combined with cheerleading from mainstream media, that caused so many young people to announce that they were gay, transgender, or non-binary starting around 2020.
It may be true that there was a cultural moment in which it was broadly perceived as cool and edgy for youth to belong to a sexual minority. But the social contagion thesis ultimately fails to give a satisfying account of the phenomenon in question. Before offering an alternative explanation for the decline in youth LGBTQ identification, we must document the inherent weaknesses of the contagion theory.
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