Transgender identification is a “social contagion,” years of data prove, according to an evolutionary biologist and scholar with the Manhattan Institute.
Colin Wright, who is an atheist, formerly worked as an “academic scientist” until he was forced out of academia for providing his opinion that the increase in transgenderism was due to social pressure.
Wright first made the observation in 2020 in reference to a Swedish study. Brown University Professor Lisa Littman also hypothesized in 2018 that girls were being peer pressured into declaring themselves as the opposite sex, a term known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. Littman was also canceled for her research.
Now at the Manhattan Institute, Wright regularly comments on transgender issues.
He wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal:
Suggesting that social factors might cause or contribute to transgender identification violated fashionable left-wing dogma: that “gender identity” is an innate and immutable trait, and that some people are born with one that conflicts with their sex. This claim underpins both medical practice and legal strategy—from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for minors to arguments that “gender identity” deserves civil-rights protections akin to race or sex. Progressives treat those who question these ideas as heretics and bigots.
Critics of the social contagion view argue that there has been an increase because people are more accepting now. However, Wright says that the identification as transgender should plateau, but it has not.
He wrote:
Recent data offer a mixed picture. An analysis of campus surveys by Eric Kaufmann of the University of Buckingham and the Center for Heterodox Social Science found that the share of college students identifying as transgender fell 50% between 2023 and 2025. Psychologist Jean Twenge’s analysis of the annual Cooperative Election Study, administered by YouGov, found that transgender identification among 18- to 22-year-olds declined by nearly 50% between 2022 and 2024. She concluded that “it looks like the peak of trans identification is in the past.”
A new report from the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine seems to tell a different story. Drawing on data from the larger National College Health Assessment, the report found that transgender and “nonbinary” identification among U.S. college students is at a record high—between 4.7% and 6.7%—though it may be reaching a plateau.
Brown University has also seen an increase and then decrease in total LGBT identification, as reported recently by The College Fix.
It is not “hateful” to point out a social trend, Wright said.
“The surge in transgender identification in recent years wasn’t the revelation of a hidden biological truth,” he concluded. “It was a social phenomenon shaped by imitation, ideology and institutional reinforcement.”
