While most people who transition are happy with the outcome, a small percentage (likely in the 1 to 3 percent range; detailed below) may later choose to stop their transitions or take steps to retransition back to their birth-assigned gender. These individuals are often referred to as “detransitioners” or “detrans”…

I experienced a weird confluence of events over the last 48 hours. Over the weekend, I listened to the Know Your Enemy podcast episode What’s Wrong With Men? It dissects two conservative books about the so-called “crisis of masculinity” and asks why the left has problems addressing the issue. Then…

And Recognizing the “Concerned Parent” Trope — We are currently in the midst of an all-out moral panic against transgender people. If I were to ask “who is driving this panic?” most people in the United States would likely say the far right and social conservatives who have traditionally been opposed to LGBTQ+ people. In the United…

NOTE: this essay is a 15 minute read. If it’s listed as longer than that, it’s because it contains a list of over 100 references at the end. Trans and gender-diverse people are a pancultural and transhistorical phenomenon. It is widely understood that we, like LGBTQ+ people more generally, arise…

Since 2017, I have been one of the most vocal critics of the hypothesis that transgender identities are now spreading among children via “social contagion.” I have penned multiple essays critiquing “transgender social contagion” and its more scientific-sounding doppelgänger “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD). …

and why “eradicating transgenderism” = eradicating transgender people — Yesterday, right-wing talking head Michael Knowles gave a speech at CPAC where he claimed that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” He is by no means the first conservative to say such a thing — such eliminationist rhetoric has become increasingly commonplace in GOP circles these days. When…

And Why Trans Male/Masculine Youth Are Relentlessly Depicted as “Girls” — In a companion essay, All the Evidence Against Transgender Social Contagion, I make the case that the apparent increase in the number of children identifying as trans is not due to transness suddenly becoming “contagious,” but rather stems from a reduction in anti-trans stigma and the accompanying trans awareness and…

Plus Thoughts on Why People Continue to Embrace This Zombie Theory — I first used the above graph back in 2017, in response to the then novel claim that being transgender is somehow spreading among children via “social contagion.” In the essay that accompanied it, Transgender Agendas, Social Contagion, Peer Pressure, and Prevalence, I made three points: 1) historically, the apparent number…

I’m old. Old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s, when mainstream media largely ignored trans people. I’m old enough to remember ye olde “transgender tipping point” in 2014, when the mainstream media suddenly acknowledged that trans people existed and patted themselves on the back for their…