If you go to the same school, you are more likely to be from the same social and circumstantial strata, which may be a bigger factor in openness to diagnosis and development of mental issues.
Yes, and people who have a certain mental architecture tend to associate with others who have similar brains. ADHDers tend to have friends with ADHD at least partly because they are more forgiving of some of the challenges of having ADHD.
This study is junk. There is no dataset or study design that is feasible for untangling the complexities of "like minds attract" to allow for an examination of the memetic spread of psychiatric disorders.
I can corroborate this, with an oddly well timed recent event.
In school I had a large friend group, none of us were diagnosed (publicly) with anything. We spent a few years together and then all scattered across the country and did not particularly keep good contact.
Cut to a decade and a half later, I'm attending a good friend's wedding back in my home town at the beginning of this month. I was diagnosed very late with autism back in 2019, then at the celebrations I discover the vast majority of my friends have had their own either autism or ADHD diagnoses since we last saw one another. Our crew ended up somewhere like a 3/4 or a 4/5 with a diagnosis, from a group larger than 30.
If we were included in the study's population, would the authors have declared that we "transmitted" these conditions to one another?
Yeah this is an error people make about transgender people all the time. Parents say "my child started hanging out with a bunch of trans people and then they told me they are trans, but they never told me anything about this before so I think they became trans because of those people" and it's like, no the child was attracted to the group of trans people because something about that group resonated with the child, and having spent some time seeing their perspective they felt that transition would better resolve some internal tension they may never have understood or had words to express. Being friends with trans people didn't make the child trans, it just showed them a new perspective they had been seeking when they decided to become friends with those people.
Similarly, people with various mental health conditions may have some attraction to others in the same boat, as they can find mutual understanding, learn coping skills, and vent about the other people who don't understand.
You could just as easily say mountain biking is socially transmitted because all these mountain bikers are hanging out together.
> and having spent some time seeing their perspective they felt that transition would better resolve some internal tension
Thing is though, that during puberty there is a huge amount of internal tension as one's body goes through significant developmental changes. Especially for girls as they start to be sexualised by men. The idea that transition can be used to escape this makes for a tempting second option, and if there are peers who also think that way, it can be very encouraging.
We know that the number of detransitioners is on the rise, and their stories are very often along those lines. They became obsessively drawn to the idea of transitioning, often through social media and peers, and later, when they had the insights of adulthood and the obsession had faded, regretted what they'd done.
The problem is that transition isn't actually a change to the opposite sex, it just creates a poor facsimile at best, and the medical pathway of blocking puberty and taking cross-sex hormones causes irreversible harms to one's body. Loss of sexual function is a big problem. And of course, teenage girls who undergo mastectomy to affirm their idea that they should be boys, can't get those body parts back.
> We know that the number of detransitioners is on the rise, and their stories are very often along those lines
For some extra context on this comment "on the rise" still constitutes an absolute minority of those who transition, I believe somewhere between 5% and 8% -- and the most common reason given for detransition is due to lack of support, coercion or pressure from family and friends rather than transition regret.
"Of those who had detransitioned, 82.5% reported at least one external driving factor. Frequently endorsed external factors included pressure from family and societal stigma."
Turban JL, Loo SS, Almazan AN, Keuroghlian AS. Factors Leading to "Detransition" Among Transgender and Gender Diverse People in the United States: A Mixed-Methods Analysis. LGBT Health
doi: 10.1089/lgbt.2020.0437
This article is useful because it explicitly mentions people often misconstrue detransition for regret, when that as a cause for detransition is considered uncommon compared to external pressure.
The reasons given for detransition vary by survey. In these two papers, lack of support was a minor reason amongst those surveyed:
Vandenbussche, E. (2021). Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey. Journal of Homosexuality, 69(9), 1602–1620. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2021.1919479
> The most common reported reason for detransitioning was realized that my gender dysphoria was related to other issues (70%). The second one was health concerns (62%), followed by transition did not help my dysphoria (50%), found alternatives to deal with my dysphoria (45%), unhappy with the social changes (44%), and change in political views (43%). At the very bottom of the list are: lack of support from social surroundings (13%), financial concerns (12%) and discrimination (10%).
Littman L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners. Archives of sexual behavior, 50(8), 3353–3369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02163-w
> The most frequently endorsed reason for detransitioning was that the respondent’s personal definition of male and female changed and they became comfortable identifying with their natal sex (60.0%). Other commonly endorsed reasons were concerns about potential medical complications (49.0%); transition did not improve their mental health (42.0%); dissatisfaction with the physical results of transition (40.0%); and discovering that something specific like trauma or a mental health condition caused their gender dysphoria (38.0%). External pressures to detransition such as experiencing discrimination (23.0%) or worrying about paying for treatments (17.0%) were less common.
One major problem in fully understanding this phenomenon is that there is currently inadequate follow-up by gender clinics to collect data on detransitioners.
As the Cass Review notes:
> 15.50 Estimates of the percentage of individuals who embark on a medical pathway and subsequently have regrets or detransition are hard to determine from GDC clinic data alone.
> There are several reasons for this:
> - those who do detransition may not choose to return to the gender clinic and are hence lost to follow-up
> - the Review has heard from a number of clinicians working in adult gender services that the time to detransition ranges from 5-10 years, so follow-up intervals on studies on medical treatment are too short to capture this
> - the inflection point for the increase in presentations to gender services for children and young people was 2014, so even studies with longer follow-up intervals will not capture the outcomes of this more recent cohort.
The Review also noted the problem of clinics not adequately sharing the data they do have:
> 15.55 An audit was undertaken at The Tavistock and Portman GDC on the characteristics of individuals who had detransitioned. Most papers on detransition are based on community samples, and questionnaire reports, but this was a case series of 40 patients who had all been examined by a psychiatrist.
> 15.56 Findings from the audit were discussed with the Review. The time for people to choose to detransition was 5-10 years (average 7 years). Common presenting features and risk factors such as high levels of adverse childhood experiences, alexithymia (inability to recognise and express their emotions) and problems with interoception (making sense of what is going on in their bodies) were identified in the audit, and this audit would be informative for clinicians assessing young people with a view to starting masculinising/feminising hormones. The Review asked to have access to this audit in order to understand some of the qualitative findings, but the trust did not agree to this.
There is a gulf between the quality of the sources we're looking at here and I want to highlight it so it's not hidden behind links.
My supplied source in the GP comment is an n=27,715 cross sectional survey supplied to any adult who has transitioned in the past, it's not detransition specific and it's sort of like a trans census taken yearly.
Your first source is an n=237 online survey on a detransition specific website which did make any effort to verify if any of the poll answerers were trans at any point.
Your second source is an n=100 anonymous poll posted on social media. This could well have been a strawpoll on twitter.
I don't think that your explanation leads to the conclusion that these things are not socially transmitted.
Mountain biking as a sport would not be possible for the average person without the community. Sure, someone could be, and had to be, "the first" MTBer, make knobbly tires, build a suspension, go without a trail, etc, but that sort of spontaneous "new sport discovery" process is not going to happen at anything like the rate that people are attracted (via social transmission!) to the existing sport with everything in place.
The question seems to be whether being transgender, or being a mountain biker, is something that can exist purely in the mind, in the absence of the ability to realise it.
In some ways it feels like an unanswerable question because normal gender roles are socially transmitted anyway, so we can't even say whether "being a man" exists in isolation.
> The question seems to be whether being transgender, or being a mountain biker, is something that can exist purely in the mind, in the absence of the ability to realise it.
Agreed. And we don't generally refer to mountain bikers like that, but we do for trans people. Equalizing the analogy, it would be "person who would enjoy mountain biking" and "person who would enjoy gender transition". I think this framing makes it easier to see as something that could already exist within a person.
Of course the truth is that whether someone would enjoy mountain biking or whether someone would enjoy transition is related to both social factors and pre-existing personality traits.
The real problem comes when we stigmatize people for having these traits or for deciding to do something about it.
I agree with what you are saying up until the last part because "traits" as a general term are not all positive.
As an example, we stigmatize, and should stigmatize, the behaviours of those who are attracted to minors, and that stigma likely does reduce the social transmission of those behaviours.
The question I think comes down to essentially whether one considers the results of acting on gender dysphoria to be "bad".
If it is bad, then the question then becomes, is it a net benefit to stigmatize transitioning - i.e. do the benefits in reducing overall gender dysphoria outweigh the costs to those who would have it regardless of social factors.
Who here has independently arrived at the conclusion that they must don the toga virilis[1] between the ages of 14 and 16? It's a difficult position to be in.
This study is junk. There is no dataset or study design that is feasible for untangling the complexities of "like minds attract" to allow for an examination of the memetic spread of psychiatric disorders.