Joyce activated, issue 24
Last weekend I attended the Battle of Ideas in London, and took part in a panel entitled “The Trans Teen Trend: A Case of Social Contagion?” This article is a tidied-up version of my speaking notes, rounded off with what happened right at the very end
Last weekend I attended the Battle of Ideas in London, an event run by the charity Academy of Ideas with the strapline “Free Speech Allowed”. Both the event and its director and creator, Baroness Claire Fox, are controversial and hard to pin down. Claire is a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party who became a libertarian; a Brexiteer who contested and won election as an MEP; and a peer despite long having opposed the existence of the House of Lords. She was one of the publishers of the magazine Living Marxism, which claimed evidence of the Bosnian genocide was faked; along with others in her circle she made the baffling journey from communism to libertarianism as the magazine morphed into the Academy of Ideas and Spiked Online.
If this newsletter was forwarded to you, you might like to sign up for free updates. I hope that in the future you might consider subscribing.
I can’t even begin to explain any of this, but the festivals BoI runs are genuinely, passionately committed to free speech—no bullshit about how “cancel culture” is really “accountability culture”; no smug dudebros ponderously telling you that akshually the First Amendment only concerns restraints on speech by government, not those by private actors. Free speech is understood to be a practice: a joint endeavour that involves everyone saying what they genuinely think as clearly as they can, and listening carefully in order to understand what other people say.
In her opening remarks Claire laid out the ground rules—I wasn’t taking notes, but from memory, she said that for the next two days nobody should shut anyone else down by saying that they found that person’s words unacceptable or offensive, but should instead seek to win the argument on its merits. Perhaps the only banned words for the weekend were: “You can’t say that.”
Free speech as an overriding consideration does mean more topics, and more panellists and audience members, leaning towards the cranky and contrarian. But after three years on the gender frontlines, it felt like a very small price to pay for experiencing a sudden widening of the Overton window, and knowing that I could say what I wanted to say and trust that others would do so in return.
I was speaking on a panel with James Esses of Thoughtful Therapists, who talked about what is known and unknown about gender dysphoria in young people; Jennie Bristow, an academic I hadn’t come across before at Canterbury Christ Church University, and Katy Jon Went, a transwoman who does diversity training for businesses and schools. It was an excellent session (if I say so myself!).
James, as I already knew, is a fantastic speaker; Jennie raised many points I had never heard before about how generations define themselves in part in response to world events and in opposition to previous generations; and though much of what Katy Jon said made me inwardly shrug, he is disarmingly willing to contradict the dominant transactivist narrative. I’ve resolved to find out more about Jennie’s work, in particular—almost everything she said was fresh and interesting to me, and it was a fine example of what can happen at conferences but does all too rarely.
We were all given 5-7 minutes for an opening statement. I decided to focus narrowly on the title of the panel: “The Trans Teen Trend: A Case of Social Contagion?” Most of the rest of this article is a tidied-up version of my speaking notes, rounded off with what happened right at the very end…
I want to start by telling you the story of how anorexia came to Hong Kong.
The idea of starving yourself to death is, as far as we know, one that pops up very occasionally and wholly unbidden in every place and time. Every now and then a deeply unhappy person lands upon it as a response to an empty life, to joylessness, as a way to bring an unwanted existence to an end. But “anorexia”—the distinctive experience of seeing yourself as grotesquely fat even as you are wasting away, and starving as an act of mastery over your unruly flesh, is a distinctively modern experience.
People engaged in what we might call the non-specific form of self-starvation know very well what they are doing, and they know they are getting thinner and thinner. They don’t say that they are fat, but that they are not hungry, or that they cannot force food down because their stomach will not accept it, or because there is some sort of obstacle in their throat. This is a death of despair: the giving up of a life its owner feels is not worth living. And although it’s rare, it seems to happen now and then throughout history and around the world.
Anorexia nervosa, by contrast, is what sociologists and historians of medicine call a “culture-bound syndrome”—a condition that in its particularities and experiential quality is limited to a specific place and time. For anorexia, initially that place and time was America, starting somewhere around the 1970s. But as journalist Ethan Watters explains in his excellent book “Crazy Like Us: The Globalisation of the American Psyche” (2010), America’s global cultural dominance means that its culture-bound syndromes tend to break their bounds. And as mass media spread this emerging notion that a teenage girl could demonstrate self-hatred, assert self-control and express anger at societal expectations of her sexually developing form by reconceiving of her flesh as gross and super-abundant, and whittling away at it, anorexia spread around the world.
Hong Kong provides a remarkable case study. In the early 1990s the island’s sole doctor specialising in self-starvation saw a handful of patients a year. But then a schoolgirl who was starving herself in what we might call the old-fashioned, non-specific way—an unloved child with no friends and no talents or interests who gave up on life—collapsed and died on a busy street. The journalists who sought to explain this extraordinary event turned to the newly emerging internet—and found American media reports.
And the story they told the islanders was the classic story of high-achieving, anxious girls with distorted body images starving themselves as an expression of anger at the limits put on girls, and as an act of control. And from just a handful of cases a year, suddenly that specialist started seeing multiple cases each week. So that’s what a social contagion can look like.
A question a journalist recently asked me revealed something I should have noticed earlier: that people sometimes misunderstand the phrase “social contagion”, and think it means direct person-to-person transmission, something like an STD. No! It’s not that anorexic people have “anorexic germs” that get breathed in or rubbed off on other anorexic people. It’s like the idea of anorexia is in the air you breathe. It’s a concept, a cultural template—a meme, if you will. You pick it up unknowingly by existing in your place and time, and if at some point your life brings you to a place that you wish to express certain sorts of distress, that template is there for you to copy and fit into.
It’s not just how likely a certain sort of distress is to be experienced that is subject to social contagion; it’s how the distress plays out, too. The way we express and experience our misery is extremely malleable and subject to influence by authority, especially medical authority. Edward Shorter, a famed medical historian, coined the term “symptom pool” for the way doctors and patients together shape bodily distress into a recognisable syndrome.
Saying that a disease is a culture-bound syndrome or a social contagion doesn’t mean it’s “all in your head”. The trigger may be physical, for example. The point is that the details of how we experience it—how it’s “somatised”, or embodied—are shaped by the culture we live in.
That shaping used to be done largely by doctors, or by doctors and patients together as they co-interpreted the patient’s symptoms. But towards the end of his book “From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era” (1993), Shorter says something ominous: that the media now play a huge role in this shaping. He meant print and broadcast media, of course—but nowadays social media is perhaps the primary vector.
It’s my contention that gender distress, and subsequent trans identification, are a culture-bound syndrome that arose in America (specifically blue-state America), and which, like anorexia, has since spread around the world. That’s why we see it most vividly in the English-speaking countries, which are culturally closest to America and most open to cultural transmission, and next the highly educated North European countries where English is widely spoken.
I go into more detail about why it emerged in my book, but briefly, the factors I see are:
The culmination of several decades of surgical and hormonal experimentation on sexed bodies by doctors who promoted a diagnosis of “transsexuality”
Legal scholars and activists who lobbied to classify such people as members of the sex they wished to be, rather than the sex they actually were
The outworkings of 1960s French postmodernism as it morphed on American campuses in the 1990s into a radical subjectivity that reified self-described identity over embodiment, and
Queer theory—an approach to categories that sees them as inherently oppressive and seeks to blur all boundaries.
And then along came social media, and to an extent anyone older than about 30 is utterly blind to, children are now raising and socialising each other on sites like Tumblr and then TikTok, and on fanfic websites, with no adults around. Sometimes people speculate why this trend has overtaken specifically teenage girls; one answer is that’s who was on Tumblr in the first half of the 2010s, when posts glorifying starving and cutting started to be taken down, after years of pressure from campaigners, and gender became the endless obsession.
You only have to think of “Lord of the Flies” to see how badly wrong self-socialisation of children by children can go. Children are inexperienced and febrile, and trends can run through groups with extraordinary speed, mutating all the while and ending in very dark places.
So, I’m contending that gender distress as it’s experienced across the Anglosphere is a culture-bound syndrome that originated in America, much like anorexia. But there’s an important difference between gender distress and self-starvation, and it’s one that means the potential reach of gender distress—the population at risk—is far larger.
It’s that gender non-conformity is extremely common. Arguably we’re all gender non-conforming to some extent, and therefore susceptible to the notion that we aren’t exactly “of our sex” if that’s how non-conformity is understood in our culture. By contrast the willingness and ability to starve oneself, or to cut or make oneself vomit, are much rarer.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of groups who are in varying ways gender non-conforming:
People who are gay, and that includes kids who are destined to grow up gay but don’t know it yet. There’s a really strong statistical link between extreme gender non-conformity in early youth—meaning acting in ways that are stereotypically understood as reserved to the opposite sex—and growing up to be same-sex attracted.
People on the autistic spectrum. These people are often rigid thinkers, who struggle with blurry or ill-defined categories. Now, the two sexes aren’t blurry or ill-defined categories, but the social categories of masculine and feminine certainly are, and in a culture where those categories are rigid, demanding and tightly enforced, a child who is on the autistic spectrum may conclude that their own failure to perfectly match the Platonic ideals of masculinity or femininity means they are not “really” a boy or girl. Moreover, ASD people are often ill at ease in their own bodies, feeling overly sensitive, for example, to the sensation of thick body hair growing during puberty. Again, if they look online, they will find the explanation that this bodily discomfort probably means they are trans.
Erotic cross-dressers. A few decades ago, before the gender madness kicked in, one study suggested around 3% of men get a sexual kick out of wearing women’s clothes. That thrill may become all-consuming, and the imagined woman may become so real that the man feels driven to adopt that persona full-time—especially if his culture praises and rewards him for doing so.
Again, this list is non-exhaustive. All of us are gender non-conforming to some extent; nobody at all is a human Barbie doll, or for that matter a G.I. Joe.
But I picked these three groups for a reason: until very recently they accounted for nearly everyone identifying as trans, and nearly everyone seen at gender clinics. But now some new subgroups are emerging.
One consists of young men who are Very Online. As readers of my book will know, the established classification of trans-identified men is into two groups. The first is “homosexual transsexuals”—hyperfeminine gay men who find they fit in better and perhaps find it easier to sleep with men they find attractive if they present themselves as women. The second is “autogynephiles”—men who may not be at all feminine in their style or presentation, but who have an erotic interest in imagining themselves as women. This interest may become a fixation and drive them to cross-dress, take hormones, have surgery and claim to actually be women so that they can intrude upon women’s spaces.
But very recently, therapists who talk to teenagers and men in their early 20s are starting to see some trans-identified men who don’t look like either of these groups. These are boys and men who spend most of their time online, who live through avatars, who may become obsessed with animé (and perhaps animé porn), who may have autistic traits, and who are at risk of being groomed online by older men who get a kick out of encouraging younger men to transition. It doesn’t help that these boys are short of role models, and hear too much messaging about the evils of men and “toxic masculinity”. I’ve heard way too many parents tell me that one of the things their trans-identified sons have said to them is that they hate and fear manhood and don’t want to be associated with a social role they see as stigmatised and violent.
The other emerging group of trans-identified people consists of perfectly ordinary girls with none of the risk factors seen in the “early adopters”. If feminism is the “radical notion that women are human”, transgenderism is the “regressive notion that to be human, a female must identify out of her sex”. In many respects gender can be a prison. Who can blame teenage girls who know what their male classmates are looking at in the way of porn, or who think the pornified, bimbofied self-presentation that’s now de rigueur for female teenagers, if they decide they want no part of it all? If you stand outside school gates now, the girls are either Kardashian-a-likes or identikit kooky. I think there’s a connection between the hardening of gendered presentation and the growing number of girls who are opting out. The tragedy is that the culturally sanctioned way to opt out is to reject your sex, rather than the gender rules.
The fast-changing profile of transitioners is, by the way, one of the signs that gender distress and trans identification are strongly socially mediated—a psychic contagion, as Carl Jung would have called it—rather than a naturally occurring, stable condition with physiological causes that is emerging only as stigma fades.
The contention of the “culture-bound syndrome” hypothesis is that how you interpret and experience bodily disease varies from culture to culture. But there’s something additional in this particular social contagion, namely an enormous increase in the sum total of bodily discomfort being experienced. It’s encouraged by dissociation due to living online, associating with avatars; by lack of exercise and time outdoors with nature; and by the atomisation of society, with people waiting longer before starting families, and having fewer children or, more and more often, none at all.
My precise contention is that what’s happening right now is:
Encouragement of rumination about gender
An environment changing in many ways to make it more likely that gender is experienced in a painful and uneasy way
The creation of a “symptom pool” that shapes all sorts of distress into gender-related distress
And, most importantly, a historically unprecedented interpretation of gender-related thoughts and distress as meaning that a person is, in some sense, not actually of their sex.
Does it matter? Culture-bound syndromes flare up and die down—like fashions, which in a way they are. If being non-binary and inventing neo-pronouns is like being a goth or an emo, who cares?
The answer is yes, it does matter, a lot. There’s a wider mental-health crisis, and I think it’s in part because we are doing precisely the things that make people anxious, depressed and self-obsessed. And rumination over gender, and fancy gender identities, is a big part of this.
It is in general really bad to encourage rumination. If you are suffering mentally you may visit a therapist, and they may ask you to explore your feelings, but they are trained and know what they are doing. They’re not engaging you in a pointless, directionless project of pondering over your miseries and exaggerating the things you hate about yourself. Which, sadly, is what “mental wellness” programmes in schools do: teachers who have gone on a short course, with the best of intentions, actively encourage children to think in ways that will make them feel worse.
But it’s particularly bad to encourage rumination about something as fundamental and immutable as a person’s sex. We’re creating a truly enormous amount, a historically unprecedented amount, of misery. And then we’re doing about the worst thing we could do with that misery.
And that’s before we even take into account that some of the people who have been made miserable in this way go on to medicalise, harming the functioning of their healthy bodies, damaging their fertility, making them dependent on doctors and drugs, and probably shortening their lives.
And now, the final element I’m going to mention: a large industry has sprung up dedicated to spreading this culture-bound syndrome.
Because it’s not just on the internet that kids learn these ideas any more. They learn them from well-connected lobby groups like Stonewall, Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence, which coach politicians, officials and HR functionaries in their new religion. And, most disastrously, they coach teachers. This social contagion isn’t just spread by the medical profession and by social media: it’s being spread by schools.
They do this in three ways:
They teach it, telling children that sex is malleable or a spectrum, and that how you feel and how you perform gender stereotypes is what makes you a boy or girl
They socially transition kids in the name of social justice, sometimes without even telling parents
They encourage children to query their identities in the way they organise the school—telling them that boys who identify as girls can use the girls’ loos, wear the girls’ uniform, play girls’ sports and so on, and vice versa.
This isn’t just a social contagion; it’s a social contagion on a scale the world has never before seen.
I of course didn’t get to say all of what I wanted (and what is above has been expanded as I’ve edited it for this edition). But the conversation was lively, and as is standard at Battle of Ideas, a lot of time is saved for contributions from the floor. Many of these were extremely insightful, and nearly all were impassioned. The room was large and standing-room only. It was clear how much people wanted to be able to talk about this most taboo of topics, and how much they appreciated being able to do so in an environment specifically presented as cancel-free.
And, for the first time, I was speaking in front of an audience that included young people who disagree with me. Many young people don’t, by the way—I meet and hear from many of them, and I know how many loathe their generation’s orthodoxy and silently fume at not being able to say so. But it was new for me to speak in front young people who think I am a hateful bigot and dinosaur. There was a row of girls near the front, and they sighed and rolled their eyes throughout.
One of them stood up and took the mike, and said older people needed to listen to younger ones. She told a rambling anecdote about one of what appeared to be many conversations on the topic of gender with her mother, in which her mother apparently said: “Well, I suppose gender is fluid,” and the girl, who looked perhaps 16 or 17, presented that as a massive breakthrough. I felt sorry for the mother: such a trite point, and so irrelevant to any of the genuine issues I and other gender-critical women raise about women’s rights, child protection and so on.
But at least those girls were there, though I must say they didn’t give the impression they had learned anything. But then, I didn’t feel I had learned anything from her intervention that I didn’t previously know either! At least we were there together, and at least we were talking.
The standout moment of the session, however, was the very last question, when a young woman with an American accent who had, I found out later, been trying for ages to speak from the floor was finally given the microphone. She introduced herself as Michael, told us she was a man, and said that we were shameful bigots (I paraphrase, but only slightly). We had shown grave disrespect to trans identities, she said, and been scientifically inaccurate by using female pronouns for people “assigned female at birth”. She would have killed herself, she assured us, if she had not been able to bind her breasts and take testosterone (her voice suggested that if she is taking testosterone, she has only just started). You can see part of her contribution here.
Good on her for turning up, sitting through it all and saying her piece. But she definitely didn’t get the response she wanted. Claire Fox, who was moderating the session, replied pretty forcefully, reminding the young woman that, as she had said in her opening statement, during these two days nobody was to tell other attendees that they were being offensive. Arguments had to be won, not shut down. Then James calmly but uncompromisingly explained that “assigned at birth” was nonsense, among various unpalatable truths.
For my part, I told her that I was an atheist from a Catholic family, and that meant that some of my relatives thought not only that they had a soul but that I did too, whereas I believe not only that I don’t have a soul but they don’t either. And we just have to get along with each other, just as she is going to have to live in a world with people like me, who don’t believe that any man can be a woman or any woman a man.
I also had a go at her for repeating nonsensical statistics about suicide. I pointed out that if anything is known to be socially contagious, it’s suicide, and that perhaps the most wicked thing the trans lobby groups do is suggest to gender-dysphoric youngsters that their choices are transition or death. There is in fact no evidence that suicidality is massively elevated among trans-identified teens—but that would change if people like her continued to peddle the suicide myth. I do wonder if any of it sank in.
If you are signed up for free updates or were forwarded this edition of Joyce Activated, and you would like to subscribe, click below.
This Friday I’ll be at the LGB Alliance conference in London, and then Saturday to Monday in Cardiff for FiLiA. If you’re at either, do come and say hello. And then on Tuesday evening I’m speaking at an event at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, as part of an attempt to reclaim the public square from students who want people like me de-platformed. I’ll report back!