Psychologist Jonathan Haidt on why he says social contagion is behind the surge in the number of cases of people claiming to be transgender: "Because it happens in clusters of girls, it happens in clusters of girls who had no previous gender dysphoria when they were young."

HAIDT: So there’s very important, older research by Nicholas Christakis and, James Fowler where they looked at, they had gigantic health data sets, the Framingham Heart Study, and they were able to see that, you know, if one person takes up smoking, their friends are more likely to take up smoking, but actually, so are their friends friends and even friends, friends, friends. So the things we do spread out through social network. We affect each other. Now it turns out, when you’re looking at emotions, girls and women, when they study women, when a woman is depressed, that spreads out to her network. Whereas when a man is depressed, it doesn’t. Women talk about their feelings. They’re more connected in that way. Girls are connecting on social media, where it just turns out in many communities, the more anxious and depressed you are, the more you get support. The more extreme your symptoms, the more you get likes and followers. You know, of course it’s good to destigmatize social, mental illness. We don’t want people to be ashamed. But boy, is it a terrible idea to valorize it, to tell young people, ‘You know what? The more you have this, the more popular you’ll be, the more support you’ll get.’ And so you get this explosion, not just of anxiety – anxiety is in part, I think, spread sociogenically, it’s called, from social causes, not from internal causes – but we get it for dissociative identity disorder. And it seems to be the case for gender dysphoria as well.

HOOVER: And you think that the data demonstrates that it is above and beyond just the phenomenon of coming out and increased awareness?

HAIDT: Yes. Because it happens in clusters of girls. It happens in clusters of girls who had no previous gender dysphoria when they were young. So it’s very different from the kinds of gender dysphoria cases that we’ve known about for decades. I mean, it is a real thing. But what happened, especially when girls got, was YouTube and Instagram early, but then especially TikTok, girls just, you know, girls get sucked into these vortices and they take on each other’s purported mental illnesses.