I’m glad you asked. First of all, let’s outline the hallmarks of a social contagion event: - A rapid exponential explosion in numbers. - The sudden appearance of an entirely new patient group - Adolescent girls mostly affected. - Clusters of friends presenting with the same symptom/behaviour All of these are present in the epidemic of young people identifying as trans in the 2010s. Now, the way society normally responds to such events is with an immediate search for the trigger event and the vectors for the contagion. For example, with the bulimia contagion of the 80s, the trigger was found to be media coverage of the disorder. With the outbreak of anorexia in Hong Kong in the 90s, it was the sensational media coverage of a school girl who had collapsed and died on a busy street. With TikTok tics in the 2010s, a young Tourettes sufferer’s YouTube channel was swiftly identified. There are endless examples. In those instances, clinicians didn’t wait around for decades for someone to conduct a reliable study showing that the event was a social contagion. They recognised all the hallmarks and acted. In the case of bulimia though, not nearly fast enough. In the case of the trans contagion, all researchers had to do was take a glance at the cultural messaging of the era. The inflection point coincides precisely with the dawn of the trans rights movement, with media celebration of trans-identified public figures, and trans influencers proliferating rapidly on social media. And those early YouTube influencers actually documented the social contagion on camera for all to see with the How I Knew I Was Trans genre of video — with each young person describing encountering a trans-identified person online and immediately recognising themselves in it and adopting the identity. That’s the social contagion in action. We don’t need studies to show it’s a social contagion. We just need to open our eyes and look at the evidence that is, and always has been, all around us.