Social Contagion and the Death of the Individual

I used to think teenagers just wanted to fit in. Turns out many of them now want to disappear into the crowd so completely that even their own biology has become negotiable.

We are watching the most successful conformity experiment in human history play out in real time. It’s not new—conformity is as old as the tribe—but the speed, the scale, and the ruthlessness of it are unprecedented. And the primary vector is social contagion.

The most explosive example is the trans phenomenon among youth. In 2012, the prevalence of gender dysphoria in adolescents was roughly 0.01–0.03 %. By 2024, in some Western high schools it is pushing 10–20 %. Entire friend groups—usually clusters of girls—are suddenly “trans” or “non-binary.” TikTok videos titled “Top Signs You’re Actually Trans” rack up tens of millions of views. Detransitioners later describe the same story: loneliness → online immersion → new identity → social reward → medical intervention. This is not organic discovery. This is contagion, pure and simple, spread through the most addictive medium ever invented.

But it doesn’t stop at gender.