I am writing in response to a reader’s question, “If you had to guess, what most accounts for the steep rise in the prevalence of opposite-sex identification in the last decade?”
I think there are multiple reasons for the increasing prevalence of cross-gender identity (and its emotional correlate, gender dysphoria). One reason is social contagion, especially through the vector of social media. This is the most likely explanation for the explosive increase in gender-dysphoric teenagers (overwhelmingly girls). This type of nonclassical gender dysphoria, which is typically not preceded by substantial cross-gender behavior in childhood, has been called rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) by .
A second reason concerns interconnected trends in activist politics, legacy media, the NGO sector, and changing societal mores. This constellation of factors mostly concerns the increase in adult heterosexual men (nearly all autogynephilic) leaving their wives and children in order to pursue life in the female role.
Early in this century, trans activists reframed transsexualism as a political problem rather than a clinical problem. Trans people were not to be seen as individuals with a circumscribed but painful mental disorder meriting sympathy but rather as an oppressed group deserving social justice.
This change in perspective paved the way for an alignment of the trans movement with the progressive movement (“Wokism”). It was accompanied by supportive publicity from the legacy media, who are generally favorable toward anything they perceive as progressive. This was anyway not much of a stretch for the US legacy media, because large media companies had run sympathetic stories on trans, for their own circulation purposes, back to the 1950’s, with the splashy coverage of Christine Jorgensen. The forgoing factors and the larger context of changing societal mores enabled the emergence of role models like Caitlyn Jenner and Admiral Rachel Levine.
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