I'll admit I'm sympathetic to the contagion argument at some level because my personal kink is explanations that are really fucking boring and have broad applicability. There's been a long-standing historical trend of finding out that things we thought were special are actually very ordinary, especially when that special thing has to do with us as a species.
I wasn't born speaking English. I was born with a brain that was predisposed to learning spoken language (compare the difficulty involved in teaching children written language). But the English words themselves aren't things that originated in my head. They are an infectious bit of information with a lot of good hosts available, and much like a virus they often mutate within hosts and spread new variants. This view, largely popularized in The Selfish Gene, applies to nearly everything social. I didn't invent French toast; I learned it from my mother. I adapted it, because you should definitely be adding a touch of honey and a pinch of salt to your eggs. That contagious idea has mutated and infected my daughter, who now knows my recipe.
So my main response to the theory of the social contagion of LBGT identification is "So what? So is everything else!" You can find ancient cultures that didn't even have words for sexual orientation. Was Alexander the Great gay? He was maybe in love with another man, but no. "Gay" didn't exist. In as much as being queer is a social contagion, so is a traditional marriage where the mom stays home and does the laundry while dad goes to make pocket watches or something. You didn't invent that; you learned it. It's like people who say "chemicals" as if it's automatically bad. Water is a chemical. With too little or too much of it I die. It's like people who say "natural" as if it's automatically good. Skin cancer is natural. The Sun gives it to you because you went outside too much.
So I mostly view it as a non-argument that says very little, applies to almost everything, and breaks down the moment you look back in time or across cultures.
It's been a couple of years since I read Shrier's book, but I don't recall her, nor any critics of trans ideology arguing the LGB portion of LGBTQIA+ was also spreading due to social contagion (SC). (Side note, found Joyce's book to far more polished)
Proponents of the SC hypothesis I thought were pretty clear it was 'eight percent as “something else”' which seems to spread through friend groups, clusters, etc. Even the most conservative mainstream voices seem to have finally agreed with David Cross that the LGB segment was "born this way". [1]
I don't recall if you have children, but my skepticism towards Littman et al's "ROGD" hypothesis has evaporated in recent years because I have seen the T (particularly the non-committal, non-binary section of "T") sweep through schools and friend groups, only to be forgotten about over summer. As a close friend who's a beloved high school teacher explained to me, for many of these kids it's like being "goth" - one week a bunch of kids will come up to him asking him to use new pronouns, names, to which he compassionately agrees to - the next week, they sheepishly ask him to "forget about all of that".
______________
[1] (I fucking love this whole album. Got me through the Bush Years)
"And they are bisexual whether they act upon their attractions or not. A gay man who goes through the motions of heterosexuality and represses his true feelings is still gay despite not consummating his desire..."
If "the motions of heterosexuality" include having sex with women, then we're talking about a bi man, not a gay man.
It's one thing to say that a man only having straight sex might nevertheless be bisexual. To ALSO say that a man having straight sex might nevertheless be homosexual *as opposed to bi* feels undercooked. If I had sex with a dead body even once, most would agree that'd suffice to identify me as a necrophiliac.
This suggests another question worth asking: are we *only* seeing "formerly straight" folks now identifying as bi, or are gays and lesbians also conceding that 100% pure sex orientation is the exception and not the rule? Identifying as straight can feel political, akin to identifying as Aryan. The pressure to prefer "bisexual" to "heterosexual" is not, I suspect, matched by pressure to prefer "bi" to "homosexual." This would be a matter of social *pressure*, not *contagion*.
It's a subject of ridicule in part because every other statistic shows Gen Z-ers are more miserable, more lonely, having less sex with anyone, and in fewer and shorter relationships. They have fewer friendships, and fewer are attending college. As far as whether "things are fine" - no, they're not. People are feeling bad and getting worse.
If one is accepting the framework of psychology, one cannot help but notice the "comorbidity" of these various symptoms in people really into the whole exacting self-definition thing. There's a common thread with people all stripes of nuts - I'm sorry, mentally ill - you're the ones saying you are! - and it's being too much on that big bad internet. Word on the street is that a lot of violent crime results from internet fights too. I'm really confused as to why time-out from social media is not a default part of every mental health intervention (of which criminal punishment, properly understood, is a subset).
Beside the point, but Jon Lovett of Crooked Media (and himself gay) once suggested that LGBTQ+ rebrand as “laquabata” — pronounced like Latin, emphasis on second syllable — and I kind of like it?
I'll admit I'm sympathetic to the contagion argument at some level because my personal kink is explanations that are really fucking boring and have broad applicability. There's been a long-standing historical trend of finding out that things we thought were special are actually very ordinary, especially when that special thing has to do with us as a species.
I wasn't born speaking English. I was born with a brain that was predisposed to learning spoken language (compare the difficulty involved in teaching children written language). But the English words themselves aren't things that originated in my head. They are an infectious bit of information with a lot of good hosts available, and much like a virus they often mutate within hosts and spread new variants. This view, largely popularized in The Selfish Gene, applies to nearly everything social. I didn't invent French toast; I learned it from my mother. I adapted it, because you should definitely be adding a touch of honey and a pinch of salt to your eggs. That contagious idea has mutated and infected my daughter, who now knows my recipe.
So my main response to the theory of the social contagion of LBGT identification is "So what? So is everything else!" You can find ancient cultures that didn't even have words for sexual orientation. Was Alexander the Great gay? He was maybe in love with another man, but no. "Gay" didn't exist. In as much as being queer is a social contagion, so is a traditional marriage where the mom stays home and does the laundry while dad goes to make pocket watches or something. You didn't invent that; you learned it. It's like people who say "chemicals" as if it's automatically bad. Water is a chemical. With too little or too much of it I die. It's like people who say "natural" as if it's automatically good. Skin cancer is natural. The Sun gives it to you because you went outside too much.
So I mostly view it as a non-argument that says very little, applies to almost everything, and breaks down the moment you look back in time or across cultures.
It's been a couple of years since I read Shrier's book, but I don't recall her, nor any critics of trans ideology arguing the LGB portion of LGBTQIA+ was also spreading due to social contagion (SC). (Side note, found Joyce's book to far more polished)
Proponents of the SC hypothesis I thought were pretty clear it was 'eight percent as “something else”' which seems to spread through friend groups, clusters, etc. Even the most conservative mainstream voices seem to have finally agreed with David Cross that the LGB segment was "born this way". [1]
I don't recall if you have children, but my skepticism towards Littman et al's "ROGD" hypothesis has evaporated in recent years because I have seen the T (particularly the non-committal, non-binary section of "T") sweep through schools and friend groups, only to be forgotten about over summer. As a close friend who's a beloved high school teacher explained to me, for many of these kids it's like being "goth" - one week a bunch of kids will come up to him asking him to use new pronouns, names, to which he compassionately agrees to - the next week, they sheepishly ask him to "forget about all of that".
______________
[1] (I fucking love this whole album. Got me through the Bush Years)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKpufAeTi0
"And they are bisexual whether they act upon their attractions or not. A gay man who goes through the motions of heterosexuality and represses his true feelings is still gay despite not consummating his desire..."
If "the motions of heterosexuality" include having sex with women, then we're talking about a bi man, not a gay man.
It's one thing to say that a man only having straight sex might nevertheless be bisexual. To ALSO say that a man having straight sex might nevertheless be homosexual *as opposed to bi* feels undercooked. If I had sex with a dead body even once, most would agree that'd suffice to identify me as a necrophiliac.
This suggests another question worth asking: are we *only* seeing "formerly straight" folks now identifying as bi, or are gays and lesbians also conceding that 100% pure sex orientation is the exception and not the rule? Identifying as straight can feel political, akin to identifying as Aryan. The pressure to prefer "bisexual" to "heterosexual" is not, I suspect, matched by pressure to prefer "bi" to "homosexual." This would be a matter of social *pressure*, not *contagion*.
It's a subject of ridicule in part because every other statistic shows Gen Z-ers are more miserable, more lonely, having less sex with anyone, and in fewer and shorter relationships. They have fewer friendships, and fewer are attending college. As far as whether "things are fine" - no, they're not. People are feeling bad and getting worse.
If one is accepting the framework of psychology, one cannot help but notice the "comorbidity" of these various symptoms in people really into the whole exacting self-definition thing. There's a common thread with people all stripes of nuts - I'm sorry, mentally ill - you're the ones saying you are! - and it's being too much on that big bad internet. Word on the street is that a lot of violent crime results from internet fights too. I'm really confused as to why time-out from social media is not a default part of every mental health intervention (of which criminal punishment, properly understood, is a subset).
Beside the point, but Jon Lovett of Crooked Media (and himself gay) once suggested that LGBTQ+ rebrand as “laquabata” — pronounced like Latin, emphasis on second syllable — and I kind of like it?