Sociological Contagion And The Growing Non-Binary Movement

Michael BrownApril 14, 2022

According to a controversial 2021 Barna poll, nearly 40% of Gen Z describes themselves as being somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum.

A 2021 Gallup poll cuts that number in half but still notes the upsurge in numbers: “Roughly 21% of Generation Z Americans who have reached adulthood — those born between 1997 and 2003 — identify as LGBT. That is nearly double the proportion of millennials who do so, while the gap widens even further when compared with older generations.”

Even Gallup’s lower figures still point to a dramatic upturn in LGBTQ identification, especially when compared to previous generations:

Gen Z (born 1997-2003): 20.8%
Millennials (born 1981-1996): 10.5%
Gen X (born 1965-1980): 4.2%
Baby boomers (born 1946-1964): 2.6%
Traditionalists (born before 1946): 0.8%

How do we explain this very drastic increase?

It’s not as if baby boomers didn’t ride the wave of the sexual revolution. (Think, “Sex, drugs, rock and roll!”) After all, the 1969 Stonewall Riots took place on our watch. (I write as a boomer myself.) Yet only 2.6% of our generation identifies as LGBTQ. How did we get from there to here?

How did we get to the American Library Association celebrating Drag Queen Story Hours for toddlers?

How did we get to Disney funding sex-change surgery for the children of their employees? (Disclosure: The Daily Wire has announced plans for kids entertainment content.)

How did we get to medical doctors talking about “people who give birth” rather than “mothers” or claiming that men can menstruate too?

How did we get to college classes beginning with each student giving out his or her preferred gender pronouns, including new “pronouns” such as “bun/bun/buns/bunself” or “zhe/zhir/zhirs/zhirself”? (The list is almost endless.)

How did we get to headlines like “Double Mastectomy at 15, Detrans 16-Year-Old Now Seeks Reversal” or “The White House announces moves to gender neutral passports”? (Though posted on April 1, this was not an April Fool’s joke.)

It’s as if something suddenly shifted in our culture, as if something was in the water or in the air — because almost out of the blue, our world turned upside down.

Even with a clear and definite strategy and as much ground as LGBTQ+++ activism has been gaining for decades now, if I had told you just 10 years ago that Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner would be named Woman of the Year by Glamour magazine and that the NCAA would defend the “rights” of a biological male competing against biological females in women’s sports, would you have believed me?

And what do we make of the new phenomenon known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)? This is an increasingly common, deeply troubling trend in which teenagers, in particular teen girls, suddenly begin to identify as transgender. We’re talking about kids who showed no signs of gender confusion all their lives and then, virtually overnight, begin to identify as trans. It is heartbreaking to read their parents’ stories as they agonize over the self-destruction of their kids.

I ask again: How did this happen?

But I’m not the only one asking this question. Matt Walsh recently documented a new internet fad in which young people are diagnosing themselves as suffering with Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and consequently identifying as gender non-binary. After all, if one of their personalities is male and another female and another bi, they are, by their own diagnosis, non-binary, and they refer to themselves as “the system.”

This is causing real chaos in the lives of these young people, as expressed to me by a concerned mother who sent me Matt’s video. She wrote, “Do you know anything about this??? I’m literally livid. This is how it started with us. Our daughter went on some social media site, convinced herself she was a system with lots of personalities, like 100. And did this exact same thing!!” Now her teen daughter is taking male hormones after identifying as trans and has cut off all communication with her mom. How on earth is this happening to so many young people at the same time?

Author J. K. Rowling recently expressed her grief after reading tweets like this: “At 16 I was prescribed testosterone after two ‘therapy’ visits. They didn’t ask about my bpd or past trauma. I now have PCOS and am awaiting testing to determine if I need a hysterectomy/have cancer, and I will never be able to afford breast reconstruction. My consent was not informed.” Rowling tweeted in response: “This breaks my heart. I’ve now spoken to many young women who tell similar stories.”

In an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast while speaking about these very subjects, psychologist Jordan Peterson made reference to the concept of “sociological contagion,” noting that opening the boundaries of “sex categories” would “fatally confuse thousands of young girls.” He also referenced the writings of Henri Ellenberger, in particular his 1970 book “Discovery of the Unconscious.” A new trend takes hold of culture, and suddenly, it’s as if a significant portion of the society has lost its mind.

This makes me think back to the Cabbage Patch Kids craze of the 1980s, when, out of the blue, our children just had to have one of these dolls.

History still cites this phenomenon as a craze: “The doll was in such rabid demand that shoppers camped overnight at toy stores, stormed displays, and mobbed parking lots.” Newsweek described it “as if an army had been turned loose on the nation’s shopping malls, ravaging the ficus trees, sloshing through the fountains, searching for the legendary stockrooms said to be filled with thousands of the dough-faced, chinless, engagingly homely dolls.”

And then, not long after this, our kids tossed the dolls aside. The craze was over.

Make no mistake about it. Sociological contagion is very real, and today, with the help of social media, the contagion (whatever it is) has the ability to spread exponentially.

Some parents of ROGD kids said this about this particular contagion: “Our children are young, naïve and impressionable, many of them are experiencing emotional or social difficulties. They are strongly influenced by their peers and by the media, who are promoting the transgender lifestyle as popular, desirable and the solution to all of their problems. And they are being misled by authority figures, such as teachers, doctors and counselors, who rush to ‘affirm’ their chosen gender without ever questioning why.”

Or, from a clinical perspective, “In on-line forums, parents have reported that their children seemed to experience a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion. Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe. Parents also report that their children exhibited an increase in social media/internet use prior to disclosure of a transgender identity. Academics have raised questions about the role of social media in the development of gender dysphoria.”

That’s why numerous countries report an exponential increase in children identifying as trans. They have been infected by this sociological contagion.

What makes this all the more tragic is that some of this strategy was laid out well in advance. Although, the truth be told, not even the strategists could have seen how far things would go off the rails.

I’m thinking back to 1990 when two Harvard-trained, gay sociologists, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, published their watershed book “After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s.” Their goal was the “conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.”

Add to “the media” the educational system, medical professionals, social media, and peer pressure, and the results have been devastating.

Only a massive wave of truth and reality — an awakening — can turn the tide.

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.