Trans identity among young people is a social contagion or fashion
Andrew Gold said:
“I guess what people think is that this is a fashion, primarily. There's a small percentage of people who have I believe is a mental illness, what you would say is they were just born in wrong body, but mostly this is a fashion. Huge number of celebrities, you know, as 15 years ago they were adopting children from Africa, today they've got trans kids, like some of them have got like 2 or 3 that are all trans.”
The observation that cultural trends shift and that celebrities influence what is considered desirable is broadly true. The specific detail of multiple trans children in one celebrity family sounds like concrete evidence of something unusual happening.
The rise in young people identifying as trans is real, and it deserves a real explanation rather than a fashionable one. What the research actually points to is increased visibility and reduced stigma: when something becomes safer to name, more people name it, and that is true of left-handedness, of being gay, and now of being trans. The social contagion hypothesis sounds compelling, but the most prominent paper behind it was substantially corrected after publication because it recruited its participants from gender-critical forums, meaning the sample was built to find exactly what it was looking for. As for families with more than one trans child, gender incongruence has a documented heritable component, so siblings sharing an experience is no more suspicious than siblings sharing any other trait. The real cost of framing this as celebrity-driven fashion is that every trans young person's sense of who they are gets treated as a symptom of culture rather than knowledge of themselves, and that makes it easier to deny them the care that helps.
Trans young people, whose identities are reframed as a product of celebrity culture rather than genuine self-knowledge, making it easier to dismiss their need for care.