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I mean I think the social contagion aspect is ignored far too often (in fact, outside of anti-trans politics it’s rarely discussed), and the working assumption is that any person, child or adult who expresses any sort of negative feelings towards their natal gender must be trans.
But especially for children this doesn’t make sense. Kids are impressionable, they tend to believe and accept what adults tell them. They’re pretty conformist as well and therefore will be quite aware of the ways they don’t fit in with their natal gender roles, they actually don’t necessarily quite understand that sex, gender, and gender roles are not all the same thing. They might well believe that being a boy means liking football and cars, not have interest in those things and instead prefer things they perceive as female, like cooking and art. Adults understand that men can like cooking and art and gardening and still be a man. But could a small child? A girl who is active and loves sports and climbing trees might well understand these as male-coded interests, and not understand that they can like those things and still be a girl.
Because the adults are pushing to normalize this, and will not only affirm but celebrate any kid who goes down that road, it’s something that might well be attractive to a kid who doesn’t fit in with the lifestyle of their natal gender. Add in the medical establishment being uncritical of anyone who claims to be trans, and the social contagion becomes a konga line to hormones and surgery.
Yeah, this is the key. And it's not just that kids will believe facts you tell them, they'll absorb anything, often randomly, from their surroundings. Show someone ballet on TV? Maybe the kid (usually a girl, but sometimes a boy), will want to do ballet. I know someone who wore skirts for a few years around age 12, just because they said they wanted to and their parents didn't care. (It wasn't even associated with anything else gender-related, they were otherwise typically male). Raise a child on an isolated farm somewhere, appearing to genuinely claim that Zeus is a real god of thunder you worship and do rituals around, and there's a good chance they'll have spiritual experiences about the reality of Zeus. Of course if trans is a thing that kids read about, some kids will decide they're trans for no particularly strong reason.
I think the social contagion-ness of trans is definitely true, but bit overstated - at least in MtFs, it's also tapping into a very real tendency that exists independently of the contagion.
Something that more centrally embodies social contagion theory imo are eating disorders among teenage girls. Zack M Davis pretty persuasively explained how he had urges clearly identifiable as transgender, or as he'd describe it AGP, a while before he had any idea what transgender was. But just by searching #edtwt on twitter and browsing for a while, I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion that this would almost disappear without the social factor. I find it insane that twitter will ban saying 'kill yourself', but not this.
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My guess is that "trans stuff" is a mixture of:
Legitimate trans, whatever that means.
Social contagion in various forms.
Malingering (see: prison).
A manifestation of some other mental illness (most commonly cluster-b pathology like borderline personality disorder).
Anybody who works in a prison will "know" that trans is just inmates looking for special privileges or being super crazy. Anybody who works in an inpatient psychiatric unit "knows" that it's all personality disorders. Most people who live in SF will be convinced that the real people are out there or will note that everyone seems to have some level of social disaffection.
Scholarly sources are biased and refuse to unlump these things despite identity disturbance being a DSM feature for BPD.
The media conversation is no better.
Until we can have a healthy conversation about this we have zero ability to untangle the phenotypes and figure out when they are applying (especially for vulnerable populations like children) and what to do with that information.
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