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That might be ground zero for trans as social contagion. And his reader base is smarter enough to make the connection between anorexia history and the current trans movement.
For his writing style not saying it directly can slowly change the minds of true believers and the middle ground if he’s not immediately labeled a transphobe.
Also I’d say social contagion is a bit of high class way to say grooming and lacks the pedophilia connotations.
Regardless of the extent that social contagion didn't become top-of-mind for the readership until maybe then, I recall comparison between trans/anorexia as far back as 2015 (you have to read down a few comments, but the context probably starts around there). Perhaps there was already some undercurrent of folks implicitly believing something like social contagion for anorexia at the time, even.
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It’s a different phenomenon though. Grooming at least in the traditional sense is someone trying to create the disorder for their own reasons. The Geography of Madness version of social contagion is more that people become aware the disease exists, and then some portion of them get the disorder. The way the disorder is introduced is different.
My reading of the book was that the take is more that people already have distress and the knowledge of the disorder means they express it in that light. The publicization of the symptom pool gives them a way to finally get a response from medical professionals.
In that sense, taking a distressed autistic kid and telling them - not just via media but by people clearly acting in loco parentis - that their distress is due to transness, affirming them in this and potentially locking them into it imo can justly be called "grooming". Especially when we get into "you don't have to tell your parents".
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I think social contagion is actually a completely distinct concept from grooming. When I talk about social contagion I mean "a teenage girl starts restricting her diet/self-harming/identifying as a boy because all her friends are doing it". It's an organic undirected process.
When used metaphorically, "grooming" is more like teachers distributing literature to impressionable children which heavily implies that even banal gender nonconformance may be evidence of clinically significant gender dysphoria, and which misrepresents the efficacy of gender-affirming care.
"Social contagion" is a bit like mass hysteria. "Grooming" is recruitment. Believing that one of them is happening does not imply believing that the other is.
I can agree they are different words. And social contagion is likely the better word for this. That being said I think grooming and social contagion are happening at the time. And they have a lot of similiarities and I believe overlaps.
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Yeah, I don't believe in pendulums anymore, but here I'm getting the feeling the more savvy parts of the progressive movement are starting to believe they drove off a cliff, and are bracing for impact.
Social contagion is more like your teenage daughter getting obsessed with K-Pop or whatever it is teenage girls get obsessed over these days.
Grooming is more like Yvette Falarca using her position to recruit students into her political cult.
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Lisa Littman published her study on rapid onset gender dysphoria in 2018 where she argues it could likely be caused by social contagion. And she suspected it was a kind of social contagion back in 2016 when she first made the study. But the parents of these kids suspected something like social contagion much earlier even if they didn't have the word for it.
I think it's getting talked about more now, because the once successful effort to suppress talk of the idea has failed and even very mainstream center left publications have been talking about it as a not crazy idea.
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