The share of young people claiming another 'gender identity' exploded. Now surveys show it is receding.

I was an academic scientist at Penn State in February 2020, when I became the target of an online mob for tweeting about transgender identity. I shared a link to an article from the Guardian with the accompanying quote: "Sweden's Board of Health and Welfare confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls." My commentary was brief: "Two words: social contagion."

Within hours, colleagues denounced me as a "transphobic" bigot. Anonymous activists emailed universities to poison my job prospects. A professional job board even published mock job listings warning others not to hire me. My academic career never recovered.

But I wasn't making an offhand remark or comparing a group of people to a disease vector, as some accused me of doing. I was referring to research published by Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher formerly with Brown university, who had coined the term "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" in a 2018 peer-reviewed paper to describe a newly emerging cohort of adolescents -- overwhelmingly girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria or even sex nonconformity -- who suddenly began describing themselves as transgender, often after friends in their peer groups did the same. Dr. Littman proposed that this pattern was best explained by social contagion, meaning the spread of ideas or behaviors through peer influence. The term isn't an insult; it's a well-established sociological concept used to describe how trends such as eating disorders and even suicide clusters can spread.