Transmania: From Cool to Cringe
Not too surprisingly, one of the stupidest junior high school trends ever, transgenderism, is finally falling out of fashion.
The transmania that swept junior high schools during the Great Awokening is rapidly becoming cringe.
Psychologist Jean M. Twenge, one of the leading researchers into the rise and fall of fads that sweep generations, says a second data source vindicates Eric Kaufman’s assertion last week that the transgender/nonbinary fad declined strikingly in 2024.
Among American 18-22 year olds in 2022, 9.5% (eyeballed from this graph below) claimed trans or nonbinary identify in 2022 (6.3% trans and 3.2% nonbinary) vs. 5.4% (3.4% trans and 2.0% NB) in 2024, a decline of 43% in two years.
Note that “nonbinary” shoots up in 2023 because “trans” wasn’t a choice on the survey that year.
Twenge also provides a graph of the fad not by calendar year but by birth year:
When transmania took off in 2013-2015, very few people over 40 said, “Yes, finally! I now have the freedom to tell the world whom I’ve always been deep inside, a broad-shouldered 6’3” lady in a frock!”
Nah, the craze was pretty much restricted to the callower, more naive, fashion victim ages.
Transmania would be a good title for an Australian sit-com about a rural high school in Tasmania that is the last place in the world where being trans is still considered cool. Then, a snobbish Sydney Inner Harbor mean girl has to transfer in and is appalled by how gauche and 2020 her backward new classmates are.
What's a publicly available data source to measure whether the aligned pronoun fad is also dying out?
If you look at the Philips Andover data that Kaufman uses, it's declining super rapidly among elites.
If you look around, you will see it still plowing through working class kids.
I suspect the proliferation of kids who looked nothing like Eliot Page and everything like a podgy lost kid from a hopeless home is what really killed it. some really really sad kids glommed on to it, making it instantly unfashionable. Those kids are extraordinarily vulnerable to free goodies offered by deranged predatory adults, and the promise of status and admiration from a society that otherwise ignores them. They won't have family resources to help with aftermath of any medical interventions. It's going to be hard to help them, but what we as a society can do is make sure the adults who hurt them go to jail for a long time. That's the final phase of this madness: not a quiet "whoopsie" but many, many, many prosecutions.