Fact Check: Being Trans Is Not A Social Contagion, Despite Latest Submission To UN

The outdated myth has been debunked time and time again—but it keeps coming back.

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

Anti-trans extremists are once again circulating viral claims that being transness is a “social contagion” after an independent human rights expert, appointed by but not representing the official stances of the United Nations, platformed a version of in an advance copy of a report she submitted to the international organization.

These sensationalized stories—which paint the rise in documented cases of trans youth as a sort of mass hysteria—use junk science and outdated myths about sex and gender as an excuse to hinder trans kids’ access to life-saving care. In reality, multiple studies have undercut the “social contagion” claim.

But the “social contagion” scare is one we’ve seen before with LGBT communities. Conservative groups and politicians have spent a lifetime pushing the homophobic myth that being gay is merely the product of social conditioning; that it is a deviant behavior that can and should be snuffed out. As the famously homophobic televangelist Pat Robertson stated over a decade ago, “a person who has acquired this can un-acquire it”—”it” being same-sex attraction.

Going back even further, one can point to “The Well of Loneliness," a 1928 novel about lesbians. The ensuing backlash was a “water shed” moment, writes Nancy J. Knauer in the Hofstra Law Review, marking “one of the earliest examples” of the American legal system using the “social contagion” myth to suppress LGBT rights and expression.

“THE WELL encountered a hostile counter-narrative of homosexuality as contagion, resulting in sensational obscenity trials on both sides of the Atlantic,” Knauer continues. “Courts in New York and London adjudged THE WELL obscene [...] finding that it had the tendency to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and who might come in contact with it.”

Today, similar book-banning campaigns have been waged by conservatives who purport to believe that books and content about gay or trans people will turn more people gay or trans, which it does not.

Nonetheless, some have tried, and failed, to meaningfully reaffirm this belief. Enter Dr. Lisa Littman: A disgraced researcher who coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria” during a 2016 study (published in full in 2018) as a way to formalize and pathologize the idea that transness is a “social contagion.”

To test her hypothesis, she surveyed hundreds of parents of transgender adolescents. What she failed to disclose in her paper was that participants were largely recruited from anti-trans online forums, creating a significant participant bias.

As a result of this flaw and other egregious methodological failures, the journal issued a correction. Other scientists that tried to verify ROGD stumbled upon similar academic impropriety, and at least one other article was retracted.

Littman defended her work in the aftermath. “I reject the premise that parents who believe transition will harm their children are more likely to discredit their kids’ experiences than parents who believe that transition will help their children,” she told reporter O. Rose Broderick at Scientific American.

Broderick pointed out that “most experts cite the survey of parents rather than transgender children themselves” as the study’s biggest flaw.

But the damage had already been done. Anti-trans politicians, activists and media outlets had picked up this rhetoric, which granted their age-old bigotry the veneer of scientific rigor. Even more, it pathologized and stigmatized transness in ways that can stoke violence, such as archaic anti-trans conversion therapy practices.

As the trans “social contagion” panic about trans people proliferates today in the form of state, federal and international attacks, at least one thing has become clear: This vestige of hate never really went away to begin with.