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Dr. Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), is himself a man who identifies as female. Mount Sinai Health System / YouTube

(LifeSiteNews) — The president of a leading transgender health organization admitted to the New York Times (NYT) that social contagion has played a role in the heart-stopping rise in the number of children and teens who identify as transgender.  

Dr. Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) which advocates for medical affirmation for trans-identifying youth, is himself a man who identifies as a woman. He is a surgeon and a gynecologist who has performed thousands of vaginoplasties, a procedure which purports to create for males a vagina from their existing genital tissue, but which not infrequently ends in disaster. 

“There are people in my community who will deny that there’s any sort of ‘social contagion’ — I shouldn’t say social contagion, but at least peer influence on some of these decisions,” Bowers told his NYT interviewer of the growing number of trans kids. “I think that’s just not recognizing human behavior.” 

NYT journalist Michelle Goldberg who interviewed Bowers also confessed, “I … think we don’t understand what’s behind the huge increase in adolescents — many with mental health disorders — identifying as trans.” 

Though transgenderism as a social connotation has been widely dismissed by mainstream media and certain outspoken medical professionals who earn their living by providing “gender affirming care” to youth and adults troubled by gender dysphoria, the numbers speak for themselves.    

The rise in trans-identifying youth, especially among girls, is not an illusion. The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) pro-LGBT Williams Institute has documented the skyrocketing numbers: 

Youth ages 13 to 17 comprise a larger share of the transgender-identified population than we previously estimated, currently comprising about 18% of the transgender-identified population in the U.S., up from 10% previously.  

In 2018, Brown University social-health researcher Lisa Littman dubbed the phenomenon of young women seeking sex-reassignment out of the blue as “rapid onset gender dysphoria” or ROGD.   

Like suicide, cutting, and bulimia, ROGD is clearly a social contagion that primarily affects girls.  

Teen and college aged girls who had never before shown gender confusion, suddenly decide to take on new male personae via new names, men’s clothing, testosterone, facial surgery, and double mastectomies.   

Chris Elston, an activist combating gender ideology in Canada, told LifeSiteNews’ Jonathan Van Maren last year:  

The number of children presenting as “transgender” has exploded several thousand percent over the past number of years. This same trend has been seen all over the western world. Canadian hospitals don’t release exact numbers of patients but where there used to be a handful of gender clinics across North America, we now have several hundred. The Tavistock Clinic, where all the children in England were sent to, saw more than a 4000% increase in referrals. Similar numbers exist here. This coincides with changes in school curriculum where gender identity ideology is now taught as though it is scientific fact, when in reality it is nothing more than a pseudo-religious ideology.

Despite the evidence pointing to transgenderism as a social contagion, loud voices within the “trans-affirming” medical community are working hard to cover up the fact.  

A recent paper in Pediatrics, which reportedly debunked the idea of ROGD and social pressure leading more teens to identify as transgender, was criticized for its faulty methodology.  

LifeSiteNews’ Matt Lamb explained shortly after the paper was published:

University of California San Francisco professor Jack Turban, a paid consultant for homosexual group Lambda Legal and the ACLU, claimed in an August 3 publication in Pediatrics  – a journal produced by the American Academy of Paediatrics – that his research called into question ROGD. ROGD is the idea that children are identifying as gender-dysphoric due to social pressure.

He is paid up to $400 hour by the ACLU to testify in support of transgender surgeries and drugs, according to a sworn declaration from a federal court case that stems from Alabama’s prohibitions on the chemical and genital mutilation of children. 

Results from this study also argue against the notions that [‘transgender and gender diverse’] youth come to identify as [‘transgender and gender diverse’] because of social contagion or to flee stigma related to sexual minority status,’ Turban and his co-authors wrote.

His research drew from survey data from 2017 to 2019. It did not study actual peer groups or interview individuals who identified as transgender nor their parents.  

His research methodology led one social science reporter to call it a ‘disaster.’

 ‘The study is a disaster — such a disaster it’s been torn apart by researchers who are very sympathetic to its overall argument,’ social science journalist Jesse Singal wrote on his Substack. Turban, Singal noted, has publicly testified in support of the chemical and genital mutilation of children. 

“In a field known for its weak methodologies and even weaker scientific conclusions, Turban’s study sets a new low,” observed the conservative Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir. 

“That a study like this can pass the peer-review process unscathed, especially at a time when European countries are shutting down or putting severe restrictions on pediatric transition, is a sorry statement about the quality of knowledge gatekeeping in the medical research community,” wrote Sapir.  

“American journalists tout its findings without giving readers relevant information about its flaws, while left-of-center journalists in Britain have been busy blowing the whistle on the pediatric gender-medicine scandal,” he continued. “The U.S. has a long way to go to bring medical practice in line with scientific knowledge and common sense.”  

Health officials in Finland warned in 2021 against puberty blockers for children and banned mastectomies for kids, while U.K. health officials took the extraordinary step of closing the Tavistock “transition” clinic after years of scandal.  

Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist who, like Dr. Bowers, is a man who identifies as a female, asked in a San Francisco Examiner opinion piece, “How is it possible that gender identity formation constitutes the only area of development in adolescence that is immune from peer influence?”   

Anderson wrote: 

As a trans woman and therapist to trans and gender creative people, I’ve worked hard to advance acceptance of trans identities, including those of trans youth. But increasingly I’m worried that in our zeal to identify and protect these special children and adolescents, we may have strayed from some core principles and we are in danger of losing our way. 

. . . 

In my over 40 years as a psychologist, I’ve seen psychotherapeutic phenomena come and go. Eating disorders, multiple personality disorders and repressed memory syndrome have in retrospect spread through subgroups of adolescents and the professionals who have treated them. This spread is like wildfire through vulnerable underbrush, clearly borne in an environment of contagion. 

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