[666lumberjack]

Anything can be 'the subject of academic research' if you just find one sufficiently biased individual willing to write an article.

The paper that you link (which is the only one that ever gets trotted out when this subject comes up...) had to be corrected after publication and has been widely criticised for its poor methodology.

The author sought to find evidence to support the idea of transgender identification as a social contagion by surveying only parents who reported 'rapid-onset gender dysphoria' in their kids recruited specifically from anti-trans / 'gender-critical' forums 'transgendertrend', '4thwavenow', and 'youthtranscriticalprofessionals'.

The fact that their sample was obscenely biased is right there in the intro to the study. The fact that the study had to be corrected is right there at the top of the page.

[ALittleLight]

It seems like you are shifting the goalposts somewhat. In my comment, the claim I'm responding to is that the idea that trans-identification is a social contagion is "an entirely scientifically baseless idea". To rebut that claim I linked scientific research supporting that idea.

You, in turn, replied that the research I linked was not very good. This is shifting the goalposts from "entirely scientifically baseless" to research that satisfies some unknown and nameless criteria of yours.

You also mention that it "had to be corrected after publication and has been widely criticised for its poor methodology." That's an interesting point, but to my knowledge, the critics that drove that correction were trans activists rather than scientists. It "had to be corrected" (to the state it currently is in today where it makes the argument I reference) because of protests from these activists. The wikipedia summary of the controversy surrounding this paper says[1]:

"Criticism was voiced by transgender activists, and two weeks after publication, PLOS One responded by announcing a post-publication review of the paper. In March 2019, the journal concluded its review and republished Littman's revised and corrected version."

It's also not really a coherent criticism to say that, when I was faced with a claim that something is entirely non-scientific, I responded by citing the most frequently cited scientific paper to rebut that claim. Okay, it's a frequently cited scientific paper. That still rebuts the idea that the social contagion hypothesis is entirely non-scientific.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_c...