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Notes -
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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