Visibility creates safety, and safety allows people to be honest about who they are. Wealthy, connected families with affirming parents are precisely the environment where a trans child is most likely to come out rather than suppress. That is the straightforward answer to a question that the New York Post has decided is suspicious.

The piece lists celebrity parents whose children are trans or non-binary: Charlize Theron, Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, Dwyane Wade, Jamie Lee Curtis, and others. The list is presented as evidence of something troubling. Something statistically improbable. Something worth scrutinising.

What it actually is, is evidence that when children grow up in homes where they are loved and believed, they tell the truth about themselves.

The article leans heavily on Dr Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist who is herself transgender. She raises concerns about celebrity parents who celebrate rather than simply accept their children's identities, and about children being placed in the public spotlight. Some of that is reasonable. A two-year-old does not need a press tour. Children deserve privacy. Those are fair observations.

But they are not the argument the article is actually making. The argument is contagion. The argument is that progressive parents in comfortable bubbles are manufacturing trans children. The argument is that a dress at age two is the first step on a conveyor belt to hormones and surgery, and that parents are failing to apply sufficient scepticism.

That framing is wrong, and I want to be precise about why.

The reason more trans and non-binary children are visible in Hollywood is not that Hollywood is producing them. It is that Hollywood is one of the few environments in the world where a child saying "this isn't quite right for me" is likely to be met with curiosity rather than punishment. Most trans children grow up in families, schools, and communities where the safest thing they can do is say nothing. They learn to perform. They become very, very good at it. The ones we see are not the ones being manufactured by progressive parenting. They are the ones who were allowed to speak.

The framing of Megan Fox's three sons as "alarming" is particularly telling. Three boys who wear what they like, who have a mother who bought books about gender diversity. The article asks whether parental influence here is "neutral compassion or enthusiastic encouragement," as though enthusiasm for a child's self-expression is itself a red flag. What I see is a mother doing exactly what a good parent does: creating the conditions in which her children can show her who they are.

The social contagion theory has a long history and a very thin evidential base. It has been used to explain why there are "too many" gay teenagers, "too many" bisexual young women, "too many" non-binary adolescents. Each time, the suggestion is that identity is being spread like a virus through social proximity and parental permissiveness. Each time, the simpler explanation is ignored: that acceptance produces honesty, and that visibility gives people language for experiences they have always had.

The children of celebrities are not more likely to be trans because their parents are progressive. They are more likely to tell their parents, and more likely to have parents who listen.

The article ends with the line that "anywhere that it seems like a trend must be scrutinised for the sake of the wellbeing of the children involved." But the wellbeing of trans children is not served by more scrutiny, more scepticism, or more parental doubt. The research on this is consistent. Trans young people do better when they are believed. They do worse when they are questioned, delayed, and made to prove themselves. The harm in this story is not parents who affirm. The harm is the culture of suspicion this kind of piece actively builds.

There are real conversations worth having about children's privacy, about the difference between allowing a child to express themselves and turning that expression into a public identity for a parent's benefit, and about making sure that any steps towards medical care are taken thoughtfully and in the child's own time. Those conversations are worth having warmly and carefully.

What is not worth having is the conversation that says: we see too many of these children, and that alone is proof that something has gone wrong.

It has not gone wrong. Something has gone right. These children are being seen.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.