Megan Bashaman examines how studies like Dr. Lisa Littman’s 2018 "rapid onset gender dysphoria" research—later suppressed by Brown University—suggested peer influence drives transgender identification in teens, with 60% of Northwestern’s 2024 sample reporting clustered adoption tied to preexisting mental health struggles. Critics dismiss parental data, yet UK findings confirm social transitions worsen outcomes, while Sweden and the Netherlands now restrict youth gender clinics amid backlash against ideological haste over evidence. The debate exposes a clash between unproven policies and mounting scientific caution, with dissent labeled "hate speech" in schools like Milwaukee’s. [Automatically generated summary]
So obviously, when we're talking about the kind of unity, the kind of mono-government that now includes not just the actual government, but also the corporations and the press, their newest kind of fad is transgenderism and convincing us all that what is not true about it is true and what is true about it is not true and especially interested in corrupting our children.
Every month, if we can, we love to have Megan Bashaman, our cultural reporter at the Daily Wire, who is really doing great work.
She's written an article about this that I wanted to talk to her about.
Megan, always good to see you.
How you doing?
I'm doing well.
It's always good to be here.
You know, your piece, as always, your piece is just really terrific.
It's on a study.
Well, I'll read the headline and I'll let you talk about it.
Studies on transgenderism and kids show pressure, social contagion, the main cause.
That's pretty shocking stuff after we're told this is all just something that bubbles up in children naturally.
Where is this study from?
Right.
And that's the most amazing thing, right?
So this came from a researcher at Northwestern.
And part of what you hear is there is very little research on the ground.
And you wonder, why is that when we have so many children who are transitioning, when you're seeing these things being fought out in dozens of states, when you're seeing courts wrestling with it, why do we have so little science to go to?
And so that was kind of why I first started digging into this question is that there isn't the research that you feel that there should be.
And one of the first names that came up when I started looking into it was Dr. Lisa Littman out of Brown University.
So back in 2018, she was the first one to do a big groundbreaking study on this question of gender dysphoria.
She was the first one to coin the term rapid onset gender dysphoria.
She did this study.
Brown celebrated her.
This again was in 2018, somewhat in some before times.
And the journal was very happy to publish it.
And then basically all hell broke loose.
So I'm going to let her a little bit describe what happened to her in a podcast interview I saw her on.
Okay.
Well, I was not expecting it to be this controversial, controversial, actually.
So that was a little bit surprising to me.
I heard some inklings online before publication, and I thought maybe there'd be, you know, some people who were not pleased, but that's nothing new in public health.
I mean, it's kind of commonplace that research does not please all individuals.
So at Brown, it was interesting.
The first emails that I received were congratulations for shedding light on a very complicated topic.
But shortly after, there was a social media uprising.
There were people who were very upset by the research and were making claims of that it was transphobic.
And they were tagging the university and the journal.
And I heard that there were that Brown heard from other people as well.
So yes, then it was, then it became fraught.
So it's follow the science until you follow the science.
Right.
And let's keep in mind that Dr. Lisa Littman was both an MD and a PhD, eminently qualified in this field to be doing this research.
So after that, Brown apologized to the trans community.
They took the announcement about her study down.
It had been up on the university's website.
They took that down.
The journal decided to put her research through a second round of expert assessment, quote unquote, very unusual.
So at that point, you really didn't see many researchers stepping up, you know, really wanting to go into this field because after that, she had to leave Brown and go found her own research institute.
So not a lot of people wanted to talk about it.
And when you saw people even reference her science, reference the research that she did, they get shouted down for hate speech.
And as I was working on this piece, I found this clip and it made me laugh out loud with sort of black humor.
It was a clip just from last month at a Milwaukee, Wisconsin school board meeting where a guy brought up this particular research on social contagion.
And just for fun, I just want to show you what the reaction was.
The comment that really took the cake for me was Kristen's when she said she would like to see an LGBTQ curriculum implemented.
Such nonsense is merely an effort to normalize the transgender social contagion that legitimate experts agree is most often hate speech psychological problem.
What?
I want to warn you about hate speech.
That's not allowed during public hate speech.
It's considered hate speech.
By who?
You called them a social contagion.
That's what it is.
It is hate speech.
Mr. Ridley would not say speech.
It will not be allowed during this public comment.
Your opinions are fine.
Everyone places.
You can't honestly believe that this is based on science.
Wow.
Wow.
That unbelievable.
You know, if in fact they thought they were telling the truth, they wouldn't silence people at all.
They would discuss it with them.
But they know they're lying.
I mean, they know they're right.
Right.
Parents and Gender Clinics00:06:45
And that was the key point was that she found overwhelming evidence that this is a social contagion issue, particularly with girls who are more susceptible to social contagion.
We've seen that in other spheres, not just with transgender research, but in things like in the 1990s, sort of the abuse scare where a lot of girls were having false memories of having been abused because girls are just very susceptible to that for various reasons.
So now there's a new study that has come out.
And this one came out of Northwestern, a researcher there, Dr. Michael Bailey.
And basically everything he found backs up what Littman found in 2018.
So he based his study on a parents website where they were sharing their concerns about their children who were going through gender dysphoria.
And this was the largest sample ever used.
So when he looked at it, he found, once again, not only was social contagion the key factor in what was driving these mostly young women, they were hearing that a friend, 60% of the young women in this study had a friend who also came out as transgender.
So that's fascinating.
And then the other really big key finding was that most of these girls had other mental health issues that they were dealing with, whether it was anxiety, depression, someone in their life having committed suicide, just these sort of mental distresses that other normal adolescents might not be experiencing.
And they've been experiencing it for, on an average, about four years.
So this was an ongoing issue.
And I actually spoke to Dr. Michael Bailey, and he detailed some of his findings for me.
One of our main findings was that parents reported on a history of emotional problems in these children.
And on average, that was common, including formal diagnoses, the most common of which were depression and anxiety.
And on average, parents said that the emotional problems preceded any complaints about gender by almost four years.
That's a long time.
So it appears that these youth had long-standing issues.
And then for whatever reasons that we're trying to understand, came to the conclusion that they were transgender.
It really, you know, what amazes me about this is that Richard slash Rachel Levine is always saying the data shows this and the data shows that.
I've never seen a single reporter say to him, you know, what research?
What are you talking about?
Right.
And that's not to say that there have been no studies that transgender activists will point to.
There have, except those studies tend to be very biased in the sense that they put out an advertisement on social media to recruit kids who already say they're transgender.
So if you are asking these children who already identify as that, and then you study them, a lot of times you're going to get the kind of answers you want.
Now, those critics hit back at a study like Michael Bailey's and Lisa Lippmann's, and they say, but you're talking to parents.
You're not talking to the children.
And Michael Bailey was very transparent in that.
And he said, yes, in that sense, this would also be a biased study.
But every study is going to have some kind of bias.
Our standard was who is most likely to understand what's happening with these kids more than their own parents.
And politically, the majority of the parents in this study describe themselves as left of center.
So these were not particularly religious parents.
They were not conservative parents.
They were just parents who, based on what they were observing in their children, did not believe that this was true transgenderism, true gender dysphoria.
These weren't kids who from a young age said, I feel like I'm the opposite gender.
They weren't five-year-olds who always wanted to, you know, boys who wanted to wear dresses or vice versa.
This was something that came on very rapidly.
And they, again, saw that they had friends who were going through it.
And that raised alarm bells.
And then part of the issue is the other big contributing factor was that the parents took the children to gender clinics.
And 50% of the parents who took their kids to gender clinics said, we felt pressured to immediately transition.
And so that in itself brings up huge alarm bells going, why is that happening?
Why is there an immediate rapid movement to say, let's transition these kids?
Let's pressure them into that when there are still very large questions scientifically about what's happening here.
And then I want to add one more thing, Drew, and this has been really fascinating to me, is that same week, I think it was, in the same journal, a study came out of England that showed that these social transitions are not doing anything for the mental health of these kids.
Now, they were not looking at surgical or puberty blocker transitions.
They were just looking at we're going to let you dress differently, call you by a different name, use different pronouns.
But these were not, in this case, parents they were speaking to.
These were children that had been referred to the gender clinic.
So they were pulling from the exact type of sample that your doctor, Rachel Levins, would say you need to pull from that sample.
Well, they did.
And they also found that, yes, it looks like social contagion is playing a role here.
And we don't see that this social transitioning is doing anything for the mental health of these children.
And they found that, again, mental health crises in other areas were also driving this desire to change gender.
You know, they've also done studies that, for instance, have shown that something like half of the mothers of people who transition are themselves mentally ill or mentally disturbed in various ways.
There hasn't been time to do longitudinal studies.
There hasn't been time to see what's going to happen even to people like Dylan Mulvaney.
We don't know if that, you know, what's going to happen to him eventually as he goes forward.
So, you know, Douglas Murray makes this point in one of his books.
I don't understand why, what's the hurry?
What's the rush?
Why?
Why when you go to a gender transition place?
Obviously, this is how they make their living, but why should they be in such a big hurry when we simply have not had time?
They only made this up.
The left only made this up a couple of years ago.
So we haven't had time to study it in any kind of real way.
It's just odd to me.
It is odd to me that this is caught on so quickly with the left.
Reasons For Caution00:02:25
I mean, it's just part of their theoretical agenda, I guess, that it fits in with.
In Europe, some of it is being drawn back, right?
I mean, some of the people have, they've stopped doing transitions.
In quite a number of places.
So you've already seen in England, they have taken a huge step back.
They shut down the only pediatric gender clinic there, the Tavistock Clinic.
We've even seen it in what you would call the very progressive Netherlands, Sweden, those type of countries.
They're stepping back.
So we're actually the outliers as far as this issue goes.
And there's a number of reasons.
I look at it and I think, one, there's always got to be a new civil rights movement, right?
And this is sort of the new civil rights of the left.
They want to frame this as, once again, we're the guys who are trying to help an oppressed peoples.
But we're getting down to weirder and weirder and more niche group peoples.
But I also think that we're reaching a tipping point in a good way.
Because right before I came on, and I think it just came out like yesterday, a story in The Economist, which certainly not a bastion of conservatism, came out saying, look, the science on gender, particularly for young people, is becoming overwhelming that there is not a good reason to be rushing into this transitioning.
Really?
The economist.
And that was The Economist saying it.
Yes.
So, and it's very interesting when you go, we talk about all the time now the consensus of the science.
That is supposed to be the end all, be all authority if there's a consensus.
Well, there's a building consensus here that there is no good reason to be transitioning these children.
If it is something they want to do as adults, I'm still against it, but there is no reason to say that's a decision you can make once you're an adult.
So that cheered me when I saw, okay, we are starting to see some saner voices, even on the center left, prevail and say, it's time to put the brakes on.
You know, even with adults, I have to say, though I agree with you, I think it's in the rarest of cases going to be a good idea.
It's still not the question of transgender persons that we're actually discussing.
We're discussing whether or not we can speak honestly with one another without being censored and whether or not we can decide how to describe reality for ourselves.
Megan, great report.
Really good job.
And it's worth reading too if you have a reader's pass on Daily Wire.