Social contagion and the rise and fall of transgenderism (Anne Hendershott, 6/29/26, The Dispatch)
It is no longer possible to deny that the most plausible explanation for this pattern is social contagion. Not contagion in the medical sense, but in the sociological one: the spread of ideas, identities, and behaviors through imitation, visibility, and the desire for belonging. When a new identity becomes highly visible and socially rewarded, it becomes easier for others—especially adolescents—to imagine it as a meaningful framework for understanding their own distress.
Throughout it all, the Catholic Church was one of the few sources of reason—an institution willing to say what much of our culture rejects: that the human person is a unity of body and soul, and that the body is not a mistake to be corrected but a gift to be received. While nearly every institution—from medicine to media to education—has capitulated to the claim that a person can “change” his or her sex, the Church continued to proclaim the biological and theological truth that sex is not self‑created or socially assigned.
This is not a position of hostility but of fidelity. It is faithfulness to the created order and faithfulness to the belief that truth ultimately liberates rather than harms. The Church stood almost alone in insisting that compassion cannot require the denial of reality.
This is not an argument about sincerity. The young people swept up in the social contagion at their schools or online peer groups who adopted transgender identities over the past decade were not “pretending” anything. They were interpreting their experiences through the most available and culturally powerful script. And for a time, that script was everywhere: on TikTok, in classrooms, in friend groups, in media coverage, and in the political sphere.
The transgender identity became a widely shared cultural template for explaining discomfort, anxiety, or alienation—especially among adolescent girls, who historically have been more susceptible to socially transmitted forms of distress, from eating disorders to self‑harm.
But after a decade of expansion, the trend is now reversing.
Life is confusing.