I’m so old that I get to begin a lot of thoughts these days with “I’m so old that I can remember. . .” And one of the things I recall from a couple decades ago was the epidemic levels of eating disorders—especially anorexia and bulimia—among young women. Older readers may remember the intense media scrutiny, the public service ads, and the rest of the Concern Industry drawing attention to the problem. There was definitely an aspect of “social contagion” to the anorexia-bulimia epidemic. It certainly seems that we don’t hear as much about it these days.
Likewise there has been a lot of informed speculation that the number of teens who now “identify” as some variety of transgender—the percentage has gone from less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent in the last decade and a half—reflects another social contagion. Here’s one piece of evidence (and no, I don’t know what the scale of the y-axis denotes—I spotted this on Twitter):
Here’s a more fine-grained look at just the transgender trends from Gallup and from General Social Survey data:
And so not surprisingly we see this:
Meanwhile, transgenderism is considered part of the intersectional matrix of identity politics that begins with race, as this Google result shows:
Except it seems black Democrats didn’t get the memo:
