Disoriented doctors

Trans social contagion affects not only teenage patients but the medical profession

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”—George Orwell

Social contagion within the medical and psychiatric profession has been documented repeatedly but never given its proper designation.

For example, a surgical procedure known as frontal lobotomy involved the destruction of brain tissue in people with chronic mental illnesses. It was hailed as the miracle cure for a range of previously intractable psychiatric conditions.

In 1949, Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for originating the procedure, after which it was practised on thousands of hapless patients the world over before falling out of favour in the mid-1950s when very poor longer-term outcomes were observed, and the first wave of effective psychiatric drugs were developed.

An eminent British neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh said—

“[Lobotomy] reflected very bad medicine, bad science, because it was clear the patients who were subjected to this procedure were never followed up properly. If you saw the patient after the operation, they’d seem alright, they’d walk and talk and say thank you doctor. The fact they were totally ruined as social human beings probably didn’t count.”

This comment, taken out of the context of frontal lobotomy, could very well be a contemporaneous comment about the practice of transitioning children and young people.

It is “bad medicine, bad science” and with no long-term follow up to reflect that the initial euphoria of all involved—including young people, parents, and doctors—is not sustained for an unknown number over the longer term.

Many of these young people are also “totally ruined as social human beings,” suffering “pervasive mistreatment and violence, severe economic hardship and instability,” discrimination, and significant negative physical and mental health impacts, “despite increased visibility and growing acceptance.”

Frontal lobotomy has not been the only medical scandal in recent years that has been spawned by the unthinking uptake via social contagion. There have been several others, each with equally dire consequences.

For example, the medical recommendation that infants sleep in the prone position was a practice that resulted in sharp increases in sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). This recommendation overturned years of wisdom that putting babies to sleep on their backs was safer.

It took just one influencer, Dr Benjamin Spock, and his populist book, Baby and Childcare (1956), to change previous recommended practice. Spock claimed that the prone position was better because it prevented aspiration of vomit and decreased crying.

It was not until the 1980s that research demonstrated that prone sleeping was a major risk for SIDS and the advice reverted to back sleeping for infants, whereupon the SIDS rate dropped, but sadly, not before the deaths of possibly tens of thousands of infants worldwide.

The opioid epidemic in the US, medical device failures and recalls (for example, Allergan breast implants, metal-on-metal hip replacement materials, vaginal mesh implants for stress urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse) were all preventable, iatrogenic harms had sufficient research been undertaken prior to implementation.

Between 1999-2021, 645,000 people died from an opioid overdose. Many of those deaths resulted from OxyContin, prescribed by medical practitioners who had been aggressively groomed, seduced, and rewarded by the pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, for increasing their prescription rate and dosage of this addictive and lethal drug.

Another procedure that attracted psychologically vulnerable young women who were susceptible to social messaging is leg slimming, also known as calf reduction/calf neurectomy that recently became a craze in China.

It was not medically necessary, advisable, or demonstrably positive in outcomes and was widely practised until it was eventually banned by China’s National Health Commission that ordered all such procedures to cease under penalty of law for surgeons who continued to practise this barbaric procedure that left young women with unnecessary pain, disability, and debt.

No such decisive action has been taken by any medical professional or legislative body with respect to gender-affirming treatment despite the growing evidence of not only its lack of efficacy but also the unacceptable harms accruing to its continued practice.

Socially contagious behaviour is not confined to the enthusiastic embrace of gender-affirming treatment. That the medical profession is prone to social contagion more broadly in general medical practice is demonstrated by the preceding examples. However, it was also demonstrated experimentally by Iyengar, Van den Bulte, and Valente (2011). They found social contagion in the prescribing patterns of doctors after controlling for marketing outreach and systemic improvements, such as the advent of new drugs and changes in the prevalence of diseases.

Shared geographical proximity, shared group membership, and self-identified ties between doctors were all factors in behavioural contagion, with self-identified ties the most compelling factor.

A critical factor in marketing attempts to manipulate uptake of a new drug or medical treatment is the identification of those in the network who are influential and those who are influenceable. Without individual uptake, a marketing campaign will falter (Christakis & Fowler, 2011). Central figures in the network have a stronger tendency to adopt early.

Of course, network contagion effects may be modified by product characteristics, for example, the perceived effectiveness and safety of a new drug.

Part of the gender affirmative discourse emphasises the safety and reversibility of puberty blockers that allegedly merely “pause” the development of puberty thereby giving children time to “decide” in which gender they wish to reside.

Yet, the alternative discourse, that puberty blockade is neither safe nor reversible has been largely silenced or ignored even in the face of evidence that the “idea” of pausing puberty is undermined by the fact that most young people taking blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones.

Network contagion is also apparent in the unified stance regarding the value and effectiveness of gender-affirming treatment of many peak medical bodies and their associated journals, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and the US Professional Association for Transgender Health.

The American psychiatrist Jack Turban has used this seeming consensus achieved through network contagion to argue that the case is settled. If all these peak medical bodies agree, ergo, the position must be correct.

There are, nonetheless, some dissenting voices, for example, the American College of Paediatricians, who issued a statement that the transgender agenda harms children—

“Educators and legislators should reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts—not ideology—determine reality… Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”

So appalled were a group of leading scientists about the “new” science of gender that they formed a group called “Project Nettie: Scientists supporting biological sex” (2019) and issued the following statement—

“Sexual reproduction, the generation of offspring by fusion of genetic material from two different individuals, evolved over 1 billion years ago. It is the reproductive strategy of all higher animals and plants, including the mammalian class to which humans belong. Humans can be differentiated into two categories by their reproductive roles. Females make eggs and gestate live young. Males generate sperm to fertilise the female egg. In accordance with their respective roles, females and males have different reproductive anatomies (‘biological sex’). No other reproductive mechanism exists in humans.”

Nonetheless, these dissensions were not only ignored but decried and dismissed in a process that could be argued to resemble groupthink.

It is also evident in the transgender Standards of Care provided by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH, world standards) and the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH, Australian standards).

The 2018/2020 WPATH copy-cat Australian standards for transitioning young people, including when to commence puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, issued by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) were hailed by Victoria’s centre-left government as “the most stringent safety standards” for children and adolescents, as well as “the world’s most progressive.”

However, the AusPATH/RCH standards are not evidence-based. Rather, they invoke “clinician consensus” and “increasing evidence” for “gender-affirming care,” flag the need for more research but warn that withholding treatment is not “a neutral option,” assert that gender-affirming care is “lifesaving” and that failure to provide it may increase suicide risk.

In the recently published Cass review (2024), this RCH treatment guide scored 19 out of a 100 for rigour and reliability, compared with the Swedish guidelines that scored 71 out of 100.

Yet these same RCH standards, which were published as a peer-reviewed paper in the Medical Journal of Australia and praised by The Lancet, claiming international consensus, make no mention of a Dutch study (Vrouenraets, Fredriks, Hannema, Cohen-Kettenis, & de Vries, 2015) showing a worrying level of medical uncertainty and diametrically opposed views among 36 gender clinicians in 10 countries.

The Dutch paper highlighted seven areas of disagreement, including the cause of gender dysphoria, consent, infertility, the risks to brain development and cognitive function of interrupting puberty, and whether gender dysphoria is a mental illness or just a normal gender variation of human sexuality pathologised by culture-driven treatment.

This study underscored the lack of consensus regarding the safety, ethics, and benefit of the global trend to prescribe puberty blockers to increasingly younger patients predicated upon the unfounded assumption that pausing puberty affords time for them to “decide their true identity,” while reducing suicide risk.

Although the internet is replete with such claims, there have been blistering critiques showing that puberty blockers convey no benefit in reducing suicide.

British sociologist Michael Biggs examined data from the London-based Tavistock gender clinic between 2010 and 2020 and calculated that the proportion of patients who died by suicide was 0.03 percent.

Another register study of all-cause and suicide mortality among young people aged under 23 years who contacted specialised gender identity services in Finland in 1996–2019 (n=2,083) attempted to disentangle the role of gender dysphoria and other psychiatric morbidities on mortality (Ruuska, Tuisku, Holttinen, & Kaltiala, 2024).

There were 55 deaths, of which 20 (36 per cent) were suicides. All-cause mortality did not differ between the gender dysphoria group and controls (n=16,643), but the proportion of suicides was higher in the gender dysphoria group (0.3 per cent vs 0.1 per cent).

However, when psychiatric morbidity was controlled, neither all-cause nor suicide mortality differed between the two groups.

The authors concluded that gender dysphoria and medical gender reassignment do not predict all-cause or suicide mortality when psychiatric morbidity is controlled. They concluded that psychiatric co-morbidities, frequency of psychiatric contact, and male sex were the only predictors distinguishing between those who committed suicide and those who did not. In the gender dysphoria group, 0.3 percent died by suicide.

Equally concerning because they form the foundation of psychiatric assessment and treatment are the changes to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5 (2013) and DSM-5-TR (2022), in which the diagnosis of gender dysphoria focuses on distress and discomfort that accompanies being transgender, rather than on gender identity itself.

Similarly, in the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11, the gender incongruence diagnosis is placed in a chapter on sexual health that focuses on the person’s experienced identity and the need for gender-affirming treatment that might arise from that identity.

These changes have been hailed as a victory for “depsychopathologisation” of transgender identities, but they constitute nothing more than a sycophantic obeisance to the collective madness of gender ideology and its proponents.

This is an edited extract from Professor Kenny’s new book, Gender Ideology, Social Contagion, and the Making of a Transgender Generation, published by Cambridge Scholars Press. Professor Kenny, formerly at The University of Sydney, is a psychologist and psychotherapist whose clients include gender-questioning young people