Why has identifying as transgender increased so much among young adults?

And why the answers to that question are instantly political

In my last post, I highlighted the data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor survey showing a large increase in identifying as transgender. Among young adults (18 to 24), identifying as transgender quintupled, increasing from .59% in 2014 to 3.08% in 2023. However, there were no consistent increases among those over age 35.

The much more difficult question to answer is why: Why have so many more young adults in the U.S. identified as transgender in the space of a decade? To complicate matters further, the answer to that question almost immediately becomes political – and not just political, but culture war, cancel-worthy controversial. Thus, this post is just as much about the current state of discourse around this question than it is about why transgender identification has increased.

The political left’s favored explanation for the rise is greater acceptance. Over these years, transgender people became more visible and were seen more positively. Thus, more people felt comfortable identifying as trans.

The challenge to this explanation is that there was no change in identifying as transgender among those 35 and older. If acceptance grew, wouldn’t that impact everyone of all ages?

Those on the left say there may have been a greater increase in acceptance among younger people compared to older people. With their peers more accepting, more young adults identified as trans, while older adults did not feel more acceptance from their peers.

It's also possible that it is much harder to upend your life by identifying as trans when you’re 35 or older – you’re more likely to be married and have settled into a career, for example. When Gen X’ers and Boomers were younger, being trans wasn’t accepted. They didn’t come out then for lack of acceptance, and feel it’s too late to transition when they are older even though acceptance has increased.

The political right’s preferred explanation is social contagion – that ideas about being trans spread quickly among certain groups, especially among girls and young women (sometimes called those assigned female at birth). It is true that in recent years more young adults identified as transgender men (people assigned female at birth) than as transgender women (people assigned male at birth). Among older people, in contrast, the ratio tilts toward transgender women.

Social contagion has historically been understood as operating in schools and in friend groups. Given that, you’d expect the increases to be larger in liberal states, where there might be more acceptance or encouragement of identifying as transgender. However, that’s not the case; increases are fairly similar in more conservative red states and more liberal blue states.

So whatever is going on – whether that’s more acceptance or social contagion or both – it’s happening nationally, not just regionally. That points toward online and social media sources rather than neighborhood ones.

It's difficult enough to try to consider these possible causes along with the data. What makes it almost impossible is that mentioning – or not mentioning -- one of these causes can lead to big reactions. Some on Twitter/X, for example, were incensed that my and my co-authors’ academic paper on these trends did not mention social contagion or the work of Lisa Littman and what she labeled Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). Littman’s 2018 paper led to an avalanche of criticism (see, for example, the discussion of ROGD on Wikipedia).

In 2020, a lawyer for the ACLU – the same organization that was once so staunchly pro-free-speech it fought for neo-Nazis to be able to march in a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois – tweeted that “stopping the circulation” of a book about ROGD “is 100% a hill I will die on.”

In short, if you mention social contagion, you will be harshly criticized by the left. If you don’t mention it, you will be harshly criticized by the right. This is where we are.

I also wonder if the polarization around this question has led us to ignore other potential explanations. There may be reasons other than greater acceptance or social contagion for why transgender identification has increased. One possibility is greater access to information about being transgender. That is not the same thing as social contagion, which usually involves interacting with other people (in-person or online), as opposed to (say) reading websites or watching videos describing transgender identity. More access to information is also only indirectly related to greater acceptance. So that might be a third explanation worth considering.

I am curious if there are other plausible reasons for these trends that have not yet been considered – what do you think?