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)
Let me clarify. Social contagion began to be widely discussed as a hypothesis for trans-identified adolescents around probably 2018-19. As time passed, however, and each year brought new surveys, polls, and studies showing higher and higher percentages of people (and younger generations in particular) identifying as LGB, the "social contagion" discourse has gradually expanded to absorb all LGBT. This has been a recurring theme with trans issues, where critics begin saying X about trans specifically, and then that morphs into being about LGBT as a whole.
There has been a regression in LGB attitudes among conservatives in the past few years. In fact, between 2022 and 2023, there was a seven-point drop in the number of people who say same-sex relations are "morally acceptable." Old-time homophobia is making a comeback.
"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*.
Pretending to be in a het relationship (with the implication of het sex) in order to please one’s parents and society is one thing. Actually *having* the het sex neither parents nor society asked to witness is another. A Kirk Lazarus–level commitment to the role.
Does Eric Kaufmann believe the social contagion hypothesis? I get the impression that he just agrees with you that people like Katy Perry are now identifying as bisexual. Perhaps for social clout or lack of stigma. Is there really a difference? I mean, if someone is mostly straight but has kissed a girl, whether she calls herself bi or not might be affected by whichever she perceives to be higher status. I am not sure there is a real disagreement here.
The paper he wrote has some nuance — much more than what you see from social conservatives — but it still suggests that the rise in bi identification among women is, at least to some significant degree, being driven not by authentic sexual orientation + more acceptance, but social factors. That is the social contagion hypothesis.
The scenario you describe is not a straight woman identifying as bi for clout, it's a bi woman choosing to come out because it's now acceptable and even beneficial to do so. "Mostly straight" is bisexual, by definition.
Social contagion would be straight women — women with opposite-sex attractions and no same-sex attractions — identifying as bi to seem more interesting or to get ahead professionally. That sometimes happens (just as the reverse happens, people pretending to be straight because it's beneficial), but the evidence that this is what's driving recent patterns is much, much weaker than the evidence that humans are actually really quite bi to begin with and it's now okay to be open about it.
I guess so. But I feel this is usually a you say tomato I say tomahto thing. Katy Perry was open about having kissed a girl and no one called her bi back then. Someone who gets a 1 on the Kinsey scale wasn’t considered bi in 2010 but maybe would be now. It’s legitimate to view this as a bi person coming out but it’s also legitimate to view this as a changing standard of what’s considered bi. It depends on your definition. As Scott Alexander writes, there is no “right” definition and the categories were made for man. I mean a straight man who is attracted to a female-presenting trans man wouldn’t be considered bi, right?
It’s not too dissimilar from people who are genetically 1/4 or 1/8 black start to identify as black. In the past it would have been a disadvantage because of classical racism and now it’s an advantage because of wokeness, affirmative action, and neo-racism. People follow incentives.
I know exactly where you're coming from. It's worth noting that for as long as bisexuality has been a recognized concept in psychology and sex research (the 1890s), it has been defined as homosexual and heterosexual attraction, without regard to behavior or proportion. This isn't some new redefinition being pushed by Gen Z or by LGBT activists, it's as old as the term itself, it's just that the public understanding of bisexuality has always been dismal.
Sure, I agree that's always been the medical definition. But in common usage it used to be different. I agree with you that it's best not described a "social contagion" though. With the trans extremist stuff people are doing new things they never did before. Here people are just being Katy Perry but calling it something different. More like a new social trend or a "preference cascade" than a social contagion.
Late to the party here--blame The Algorithm--and a lot has changed in a year and a half. But I think your headline muddles more than it clarifies, when the real lesson isn't "no reason to worry about social contagion" it's "stop mushing all these letters together."
It's hard to walk the line between celebrating mostly-straight people being able to be openly bi (a good thing!) while also acknowledging that the communities that were formed and the rights we had to fight for centered on the mid-to-mostly gay folks for good reason. A lot of us bristle at having our identity group (god forgive me for writing this) colonized and appropriated by people who wouldn't have faced much more oppression in the 1970s than they do now.
Even then I say appropriate away, it's only a bother when you're using your slight deviations from the mainstream as an excuse to speak as a representative of all of us, and only _really_ a bother when you start to drown out and drive away the mostly-gays who disagree with you.
It's all about context. In the early days, even the G's and the L's recognized that they only had so much in common, and anything labeled "gay and lesbian" usually had a specific political context where we agreed to work together toward a particular goal despite our differences. Then we'd split up and go to our Gay Men's Chorus or Lesbian Book Club separately, as God intended. ;-)
I blame college clubs for the Q-word and the acronym explosion, because in that context, sure, you're happy to invite just about anyone to the party, the more the merrier. There was no reason to gatekeep, and none of us wanted to see our identities used to exclude our friends from a fun time. But after the big political battles we all had in common were won, those folks in the college clubs picked up all the letters and turned them back towards more extreme politics, without any of the sensitivity to the limits of our commonality that we had back in the day, and it caught a LOT of us in the older generation off guard.
It popped up in the Explore option, upper right drop-down menu (if the stack you're on uses regular templates, and gotta be on an actual stack, not that new loathsome pop-up article view.)
Those titles sound promising, I look forward to reading them.
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).
A number of high quality studies or surveys showing that a substantial percentage of the people identifying as LGB have no same-sex attraction. In reality, every survey that asks about attractions (and not just self-identification) finds the percentage of people who report same-sex/bisexual attractions is far higher than the percentage of people who identify as LGB.
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
Let me clarify. Social contagion began to be widely discussed as a hypothesis for trans-identified adolescents around probably 2018-19. As time passed, however, and each year brought new surveys, polls, and studies showing higher and higher percentages of people (and younger generations in particular) identifying as LGB, the "social contagion" discourse has gradually expanded to absorb all LGBT. This has been a recurring theme with trans issues, where critics begin saying X about trans specifically, and then that morphs into being about LGBT as a whole.
There has been a regression in LGB attitudes among conservatives in the past few years. In fact, between 2022 and 2023, there was a seven-point drop in the number of people who say same-sex relations are "morally acceptable." Old-time homophobia is making a comeback.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/507230/fewer-say-sex-relations-morally-acceptable.aspx
"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*.
Pretending to be in a het relationship (with the implication of het sex) in order to please one’s parents and society is one thing. Actually *having* the het sex neither parents nor society asked to witness is another. A Kirk Lazarus–level commitment to the role.
Does Eric Kaufmann believe the social contagion hypothesis? I get the impression that he just agrees with you that people like Katy Perry are now identifying as bisexual. Perhaps for social clout or lack of stigma. Is there really a difference? I mean, if someone is mostly straight but has kissed a girl, whether she calls herself bi or not might be affected by whichever she perceives to be higher status. I am not sure there is a real disagreement here.
The paper he wrote has some nuance — much more than what you see from social conservatives — but it still suggests that the rise in bi identification among women is, at least to some significant degree, being driven not by authentic sexual orientation + more acceptance, but social factors. That is the social contagion hypothesis.
The scenario you describe is not a straight woman identifying as bi for clout, it's a bi woman choosing to come out because it's now acceptable and even beneficial to do so. "Mostly straight" is bisexual, by definition.
Social contagion would be straight women — women with opposite-sex attractions and no same-sex attractions — identifying as bi to seem more interesting or to get ahead professionally. That sometimes happens (just as the reverse happens, people pretending to be straight because it's beneficial), but the evidence that this is what's driving recent patterns is much, much weaker than the evidence that humans are actually really quite bi to begin with and it's now okay to be open about it.
I guess so. But I feel this is usually a you say tomato I say tomahto thing. Katy Perry was open about having kissed a girl and no one called her bi back then. Someone who gets a 1 on the Kinsey scale wasn’t considered bi in 2010 but maybe would be now. It’s legitimate to view this as a bi person coming out but it’s also legitimate to view this as a changing standard of what’s considered bi. It depends on your definition. As Scott Alexander writes, there is no “right” definition and the categories were made for man. I mean a straight man who is attracted to a female-presenting trans man wouldn’t be considered bi, right?
It’s not too dissimilar from people who are genetically 1/4 or 1/8 black start to identify as black. In the past it would have been a disadvantage because of classical racism and now it’s an advantage because of wokeness, affirmative action, and neo-racism. People follow incentives.
I know exactly where you're coming from. It's worth noting that for as long as bisexuality has been a recognized concept in psychology and sex research (the 1890s), it has been defined as homosexual and heterosexual attraction, without regard to behavior or proportion. This isn't some new redefinition being pushed by Gen Z or by LGBT activists, it's as old as the term itself, it's just that the public understanding of bisexuality has always been dismal.
Sure, I agree that's always been the medical definition. But in common usage it used to be different. I agree with you that it's best not described a "social contagion" though. With the trans extremist stuff people are doing new things they never did before. Here people are just being Katy Perry but calling it something different. More like a new social trend or a "preference cascade" than a social contagion.
Late to the party here--blame The Algorithm--and a lot has changed in a year and a half. But I think your headline muddles more than it clarifies, when the real lesson isn't "no reason to worry about social contagion" it's "stop mushing all these letters together."
It's hard to walk the line between celebrating mostly-straight people being able to be openly bi (a good thing!) while also acknowledging that the communities that were formed and the rights we had to fight for centered on the mid-to-mostly gay folks for good reason. A lot of us bristle at having our identity group (god forgive me for writing this) colonized and appropriated by people who wouldn't have faced much more oppression in the 1970s than they do now.
Even then I say appropriate away, it's only a bother when you're using your slight deviations from the mainstream as an excuse to speak as a representative of all of us, and only _really_ a bother when you start to drown out and drive away the mostly-gays who disagree with you.
It's all about context. In the early days, even the G's and the L's recognized that they only had so much in common, and anything labeled "gay and lesbian" usually had a specific political context where we agreed to work together toward a particular goal despite our differences. Then we'd split up and go to our Gay Men's Chorus or Lesbian Book Club separately, as God intended. ;-)
I blame college clubs for the Q-word and the acronym explosion, because in that context, sure, you're happy to invite just about anyone to the party, the more the merrier. There was no reason to gatekeep, and none of us wanted to see our identities used to exclude our friends from a fun time. But after the big political battles we all had in common were won, those folks in the college clubs picked up all the letters and turned them back towards more extreme politics, without any of the sensitivity to the limits of our commonality that we had back in the day, and it caught a LOT of us in the older generation off guard.
I hear your point. I've edited a couple pieces along those lines you'd enjoy.
https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/the-problem-with-queer
https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/the-deceptive-illusion-of-community
Out of curiosity, how did you discover this article? It's gotten a flurry of activity over the past couple days.
Excellent essays, couldn't have said it better.
It popped up in the Explore option, upper right drop-down menu (if the stack you're on uses regular templates, and gotta be on an actual stack, not that new loathsome pop-up article view.)
Those titles sound promising, I look forward to reading them.
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).
What type of evidence would you need to see to be convinced of the truthfulness of SC? Just as an intellectual exercise.
A number of high quality studies or surveys showing that a substantial percentage of the people identifying as LGB have no same-sex attraction. In reality, every survey that asks about attractions (and not just self-identification) finds the percentage of people who report same-sex/bisexual attractions is far higher than the percentage of people who identify as LGB.
That’s a good answer, I think
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?
That would make a funny standup bit.