I object to the language of "contagion" being applied to transgender identities, no matter what the age of the person(s) might be. /1

First off, I want to explore the idea of "contagion" here. In general, the concept of contagion largely refers to disease, and even when it does not, refers to involuntary transmission. /2 https://www.dictionary.com/browse/contagion?s=t

To be kind, it is more than a little insulting to suggest that one person's identity can be imposed or impressed upon another person involuntarily. /3

But the more concerning part of it is the implications of how we handle disease: we isolate, quarantine, and eventually eliminate contagious disease.

Transgender identities are in no way a disease, and the implications of treating it as such are horrific. /4

The second part of the issue is the idea that one person's identity - especially on a matter as central to the human experience as gender - is so mutable that a person can "become" transgender merely through being exposed to the ideas or other transgender people. /5

This is where things get very, very messy. The reasoning is a form of 'tabla rasa' (blank slate) theory. In this kind of theory, the idea is that a person's traits are unset until some experience or another impresses upon the person. /6

In other words, a person raised "masculine" should identify as 'male', and a person raised "feminine" should identify as female. /7

This seems fairly intuitively obvious, until you become aware of a few things:

1) The lived experience of transgender people who were raised in one gender role, and still transitioned as adults. These stories are harrowing, especially the crisis that led them to start /8

2) The story of David Reimer, who was raised as a girl after a circumcision procedure went horrendously wrong. Tragic as the story is, it calls into question the idea that gender identity is ever "tabla rasa". /9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

Transgender people are not "contagious", meeting one of us won't make anyone else suddenly want to be transgender. You can't "catch being trans" from somebody else - even in those impressionable years from adolescence through teenager. /10

So-called "sudden onset" merely means that the person may not have had the language for what they were feeling until they found it, or until they put a bunch of pieces together and went "aha!". /11

Humanity is complex and varied. To claim that one minority group's identity is some kind of imminent danger in society is poor reasoning rooted in fear rather than in understanding. /12 ~fin~