I’ve Got A Social Contagion

Part 1: Infecting Our Youth

We're entering 2026 with an emergent definition of "social contagion" that revolves around a reactionary theory of a viral transsexual psychopathology that infects young people. 

The implicitly transgender "social contagion" is placed within the explicitly racialized umbrella term of the "woke mind virus." The latter term's use of purposely appropriated AAVE reveals a centrally animating anti-Black politic, though usage has come to encompass virtually any minoritized population currently under target, especially young people involved in far-left organizing or movement work. Together, these terms are central dogwhistles of contemporary fascists (particularly, but far from exclusively, within the United States).

The terms "social contagion" or "mind virus" are inevitably followed by the phrase "infecting our youth." Embedded in the conversation on "social contagion," therefore, is the implication that children must be isolated ("quarantined" if you will) and have all information about nascent uprisings and liberatory social possibility censored.

The political project accompanying the rhetoric demonstrates this intention plainly. The internet is being censored aggressively, especially for legal minors. Public resources where young people can access free information outside the internet (such as libraries and schools) are also targeted by constant censorship laws. All of this censorship focuses on ensuring that youth cannot come across the Black radical tradition, transgender liberation, or decolonial and anti-imperialist solidarity movements (especially Palestinian liberation). 

The emphasis on youth, particularly those who are understood as challenging parental power, cannot be overlooked in this construction. In fact, the contemporary sense of social contagion can be traced directly from figures in the medical, psychiatric, sexology, and behavioral genetics fields allying themselves with abusive parents. 

In 2016, a physician from the United States (Lisa Littman) posted on exclusively anti-trans websites to solicit survey participation from parents who believed their child had "a sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria" A conclusion in search of data.

In 2017 Psychological Perspectives published a paper by a psychotherapist from the United States (Lisa Marchiano, who offered feedback on Littman's study without disclosing that she ran one of these anti-trans sites). In this paper, Marchiano argued that "social contagion" was the mechanism of "rapid onset gender dysphoria." 

That same year, a USian and Canadian sexologist (Ray Blanchard, infamous for his lifelong role in the contemporary form of the structural the oppression of trans women and girls) and a USian behavioral geneticist (J. Michael Bailey, also notable for his contributions to pathologizing trans womanhood) eagerly joined in by publishing their own joint article on the topic on a transphobic propaganda blog. By 2018, another USian and Canadian sexologist (Kenneth Zucker, who allegedly practiced the psychological torture of children known as "conversion therapy" at his now-closed clinic) had published twice on the topic. 

There are many people who have pointed out the obvious flaws of the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" model. As a Canadian bioethicist Florence Ashley wrote in their article for PsychCentral titled, "There is No Evidence that Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria Exists," Littman’s study "relies on parental report without independent confirmation and posted recruitment advertising exclusively on anti-trans websites” making any data collected so fundamentally biased as to be completely useless in identifying anything other than transphobic parents’ views about their kids.

Further, and more centrally, the study ignores the much more obvious explanation that trans youth whose parents frequent transphobic websites are likely to stay closeted as long as possible for their own safety and instead seek support from other trans people online. A parent’s perception that their kid is "suddenly" trans is very common. Even beyond the specific parent-child power dynamic, few people are likely to disclose vulnerable experiences that place them within a politically targeted and denigrated demographic with exactly those who are most willing and able to hurt them for it. As Ashley explains, when these transphobic parents do find out, they do not support their child, their relationship deteriorates, and this experience causes traumatic stress in the child. This is not an adverse reaction to transition but a predictable reaction to parental abuse.

I highlight Ashley’s apt critique, not to offer a “legitimate” application of psychology in contrast to Littman’s “illegitimate” one, but to emphasize the degree to which the “rapid onset gender dysphoria” notion relies on the dehumanization of abused children and the reification of parental control. This assertion fundamentally rests on the belief that legal minors are unreliable witnesses to their own lives, and that parents should have institutionally recognized epistemic privilege to define reality for all those legally dependent on them.

Part 2: Greedily Imbibing the Poison of Mental Infection

Even before it was used to legitimate the theory of "rapid onset gender dysphoria" the psychological term of "social contagion" provided a violent rhetorical function. 

The American Psychological Association (APA) hosts an official Dictionary of Psychology in which social contagion is defined as the "spread of behaviors, attitudes, and affect through [types] of social aggregates... sustained by relatively mundane interpersonal processes." In other words, it describes people who are around each other, and, through ordinary social interactions, begin to do, think, and feel similar things.

This definition is vague enough to encompass virtually any collective social behavior within a shared space, and yet its connotative implication (that this particular sort of collective behavior constitutes a dangerous sickness infecting the national body) creates a ready tool for repressive propaganda. The APA mentions within their definition that earlier psychological discussion of this concept assumed it was caused by "the heightened suggestibility of members," and compared the process to the spread of "disease."

The earliest use I've found of the term “social contagion” in psychology is Herbert Blumer's chapter on "Collective Behavior" published in 1939 within Robert E. Park's An Outline of the Principles of Sociology. 

(Blumer cites his use of "social contagion" from Gabriel Tarde's 1903 text Laws of Imitation, although the phrase "social contagion" never appears within. Tarde's text is absolutely saturated with the metaphor of contagion, so it’s not hard to see why Blumer references Tarde when coining the term. Tarde applies a viral metaphor to virtually any instance where someone learns it is possible to do something and then does it, including but not limited to: creating tools, domesticating animals, leavening bread, engaging in fashion, practicing religion, taking part in political projects, and assimilating into a culture. The literary metaphor of contagion for describing widespread practices of behavioral imitation existed for a long time before Tarde, but his specific usage clearly inspired Blumer, so I mention him here. However, I credit Blumer for literalizing the metaphor through psychological pathology.)

In Blumer’s chapter, "social contagion" is repeatedly associated with ideas of "social unrest." Blumer structures the chapter around his belief that social contagion is a first stage, subsequently manifesting in collective behavior in crowds, and finally in mass movements. 

In the historical examples referenced in this chapter, Blumer repeatedly includes descriptions of labor suddenly not being done. In one story, workers (including women, young girls, and one man) in a Lancashire cotton mill fell ill into convulsions, and later were "cured" by social reassurance, drink, and dancing. 

In another example, the "dancing mania" of 1374 is described with language I might use for a mass strike:

"Peasants left their plows, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder... Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection" (880-881). 

Regardless of the actual historical details of this event, Blumer's account of it as an example of this pathology makes clear that his language of possession, poison, infection, and greed is directly linked to the abandonment of societal hierarchy. The agricultural, mechanical, and domestic workers all leave their duties together. The adult masters lose the labor of both their servants and their children at once. Everyone ceases to enrich their superiors in favor of dancing until exhaustion. It is the disobedience characterizing the behavior that we are supposed to understand as evidence of “contagious mass hysteria." 

Blumer goes on to describe immigration as a form of collective behavior, racistly comparing "mass immigration" to the movement of nonhuman animal herds, and thereby implying that migration occurs for unconscious and apolitical reasons. The rhetorical stripping of both agency and history from colonized people immigrating to the United States is visceral. His underlying belief in race science comes through, too, in his discussion of the psychology of crowds, stating, "moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization" (892). This slippage between metaphoric language and literal claims about hierarchies of life are common.

The initial "social contagion" construct is clearly laden with Blumer's own political anxieties. Communism in particular seems to be a central concern. Blumer lists examples of mass movements that have "hysterical characteristics" including: "anarchist-communism, Marxian socialism, industrial unionism, syndicalism, birth control, feminism, and many other movements and propagandas" (911). He goes on to dedicate an entire paragraph to psychoanalyzing members of the I.W.W. in a way that reads as both vaguely sympathetic and condescending. 

Blumer, at one point, admits that some forms of collective social behavior may even be "heroic" or "a symptom of health" in a society, depending on the circumstances. His distinction between positive social unrest and pathological social contagion comes down to his preference for reform over revolution:

"It is only when the process of disorganization goes on so rapidly and to such an extent that the whole existing social structure is impaired, and society is, for that reason, not able to readjust itself, that unrest is to be regarded as a pathological symptom" (926).

If the social reality being created maintains the existing hierarchies it's healthy, but if it threatens them it's pathological. 

Locating ourselves as marginalized people often involves understanding on what basis we are being grouped together. So what do the "socially contagious" have in common?

We practice unauthorized ways of living and thinking which 1) is appealing to people--across classes--who find the present structure painful to endure, and 2) involves some form of collective disobedience which threatens existing hierarchies of economic and social valuation.

Part 3: Weakening Our Societies and Destroying All that is Good and Noble

Disabling rhetorics are layered over-top this psychoanalytic label of collective misbehavior. 

The metaphor of the "social contagion" casts people who participate in collective behavior as mentally inferior (i.e. overly "suggestible" to social influence), through comparison to immunocompromised populations. Nested within this construction of the "social contagion" is also the presupposition of what should be "done" with people living their lives with literal contagious viruses.

These two groups (people who live with contagious viruses, and those whose immune systems lead them to easily contracting disease) are subject to brutal forms of ableism. Consider for a moment, if you will, the treatment of people with HIV and long-COVID. Ableism towards those disabled people who are reduced to viral vectors is so naturalized that metaphoric comparison to them is understood implicitly as an argument for severe oppression.

This rhetorical disabling of gendered possibility isn't even recent. The 1917 Immigration Act in the United States, for instance, defined “abnormal sex instincts” as a form of “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” to block immigrants at the border (Dolmage, Disabled Upon Arrival, 101). The use of psychiatric and medical systems to pathologize—and thus functionally disable— trans people is global, and has been for a long time now. 

When we look at the material structures of transphobia, they indisputably overlap with the structures used on disabled people: Kinship restrictions, removal from public space through making bathrooms inaccessible, bureaucratic surveillance, legalized economic discrimination by bosses and landlords, removal of autonomy over medical decisions, and restriction of access through requiring extensive, demeaning, and privacy-violating "evidence" of need. 

Perhaps the most violent element of this construction of "social contagion" is the rhetorical slide between the "virus" and the "contagious" population. When a pattern of social life practiced by a given population becomes a "contagion," the population itself becomes synonymous with a threat to societal "health." (Of course, stripped of viral analogy, "health" here stands in for order.)

Before attaching to any particular group, this term already functions as a rhetorical target for violent repression. To name a group "socially contagious" is to assert that this group must be controlled immediately to reduce the spread of unsanctioned forms of social reality. 

We all know what it means when a population becomes synonymous with a contagion, likened to a virus, or compared to an animal culturally symbolic of the spread of disease such as insects or rodents. It is the language of genocide. 

The constant presence of the contagion metaphor in historical and ongoing genocides is notable. This is why, for instance, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security made a statement on 17 October 2025 condemning the "patently genocidal language of social contagion" used in the report published by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls (VAWG) on 16 June 2025. 

The Lemkin Institute states plainly: "efforts to erase trans life are genocidal and should be treated as such." The statement provides examples of this language being used by perpetrators of UN-recognized genocides and draws attention to historical claims of transsexuality being contagious arising for the political purpose of restricting the number of sex reassignment surgeries. I especially appreciate their mention of the latter, as it connects for readers the material structures preventing bodily autonomy over sexed traits and the ideologies arising to justify this control over the population. 

However, a central argument in The Lemkin Institute statement is that the "socially contagious" nature of gender dysphoria has been "disproven time and time again." They defend us by saying that genocidal language is wrongfully applied to us, rather than challenging the construct itself. 

The statement's author(s) go so far as to describe an apocalyptic fantasy, projected onto the political actors who apply the language of "social contagion" to trans people: 

"If nothing is done against trans people, somehow the invisible specter of 'transgenderism' will take over ever increasing numbers of people, especially our youth, weakening our societies and destroying all that is good and noble... If the social contagion argument held any water, the 'epidemic of gender dysphoria' that it has always warned against would have occurred at least a century ago." 

They outline this phantasm, not just to highlight its ideological function as justification for a genocide already underway, but to "debunk" the fears of the genocidal. This leaves a pit in my stomach. The idea of "too many" people being trans is presented as self-evidently bad for society, and the defense amounts to "don't worry, it's under control!" 

Part 4: Unfortunates and Injurious Influences

Liberals defend trans people by insisting our numbers cannot grow.

The most common way this happens is the appeal to “nature” which sociopolitically functions as a category of traits considered “innate.” Depending on the prominent meaning-making institutions in a society, “nature” may be a designation that is religious, spiritual, scientific, or all three. For example, the oft stated claim that a trans person is “denying biology” is using the term “biology” interchangeably with a notion of “god’s will.” To assert that a particular use of the body is “against its evolutionary purpose” applies to evolution either a creationist idea of divine intention, or a spiritual notion of destiny. The notion of bodily purpose suggests that evolution is not random, but instead advancing, which implicitly contains within the racist and eugenic notion of there being "incorrect" shapes and uses of bodies capable of “degenerating” the species.

The best-funded LGBTQ+ movements in the United States strategically used existing legislation won by Black civil rights activists to argue for cis gay and bisexual rights within a “born-this-way” framework. Because they chose this tactic, much of the backlash has taken the form of rhetorical assertion that behavior transgressing the demands of sex assignment is voluntary and therefore can be "corrected." This is the political moment that we exist within and the likely reason that liberals constantly argue for a naturalizing framework.

If the oppression of people disobeying assignment is justified through claims that this disobedience is “unnatural” then, the argument goes, we simply prove that it is natural. This, like many liberal rhetorical moves, ignores the larger history. Those with bodies, desires, and behaviors that contradict enshrined patriarchal socioeconomic structures have been oppressed, globally, no matter how this gender transgression is conceptualized within a society’s official meaning-making institutions.

Still, the Western political discourses in the past century or so mean that the "nature and nurture" debate absolutely haunts all discussion of trans life. 

As Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini write in Gender Without Identity, the false dichotomy presented in mainstream discussions on trans life ("acquired-and-therefore-possible-to-eliminate versus immutable-and-therefore-fixed") sees transness as "a deviation from normal gender...bent out of gender's proper shape" (21). The "nature or nurture" question presupposes that the transness is somehow incorrect and must justify itself. 

It is worth noting that the “nature and nurture” phrase is derived from none other than Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Galton, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was born to a family of bankers and gun manufacturers and heavily influenced by phrenology (Chapman, Empire of Normality, 46). His life project might be summarized as obsessively measuring and categorizing every facet of human existence within a colonial hierarchy that placed those most like him as the pinnacle of evolution. He did this by fusing together the concept of natural selection with the work of Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian statistician who sought to map the bounds of “normality” onto human populations (Chapman, 47).

Galton coined the “nature and nurture” phrase in 1875 in his study “The History of Twins, As A Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture.” The introduction to this piece takes a defensive tone, responding to the critiques by others in his field that his notion of “mental heredity” does not account for the circumstances of people’s lives:

“No method of inquiry which I have been able to carry out—and I have tried many methods—is wholly free from this objection. I have therefore attacked the problem from the opposite side, seeking for some new method by which it would be possible to weigh in just scales the respective effect of nature and nurture, and to ascertain their several shares in framing the disposition and intellectual ability of men” (566).

This study consisted of interviewing thirty-five pairs of twins and analyzing a number of anecdotes. Though his data includes a wide variety of experiences, it is clear that he is determined to prove that a hierarchy of ability is innate, stating explicitly that his immediate objective is “to show broadly... that statistical estimation of natural gifts by a comparison of successes in life is not open to the objection stated at the beginning”  and so, unsurprisingly, he concludes that “nature prevails enormously over nurture” (576).

If you argue that gender transgression is an effect of “tendencies received at birth” (Galton, 566) the founder of eugenics might well agree with you. He would still support our genocide.

Only 11 years after the twin study, German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, categorizing and pathologizing sexual variation. Kraff-Ebing writes pages on trans people in the third chapter, theorizing that some trans people are such due to nature and others to nurture, and that it is very important to figure out to which category each belongs:

“The prophylaxis of these conditions becomes thus the more important,—for  the congenital cases, prohibition of the reproduction of such unfortunates; for the acquired cases, protection from the injurious influences which experience teaches may lead to the fatal inversion of the sexual instinct” (320).

In other words, where trans people are “natural” we must be prevented from having children, and where trans people are “nurtured” children must be protected from our influence.

This argument should scan as familiar, because it is virtually identical to the notion of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” coined by Littman less than a decade ago. Her central point was that some trans people were born trans, but that others were simply being injuriously influenced into “irreversible damage” (i.e. “fatal inversion”). It’s been 140 years, and the argument has been recycled continuously.

Stripped of its ideological dressing, "nature or nurture" is a straightforward policy question: Must the government step in, or can this be handled in the domestic sphere? Do we need to sterilize people like this, or can we simply insist parents be more punitive and controlling over children? As soon as the question was asked, the answer has routinely been “both.”

Defending against accusations of "social contagion" with naturalization is letting eugenicists set the terms of the game. The only winning move is not to play. 

Part 5: Individual and Collective Agency

While sexgender classes are forcibly and legally assigned at birth, the functional social realities of sexgender are reproduced continuously through all of the ways we sustain our own lives in relationship with other people. This is not the complete picture, but an essential one when understanding identity formation.

Saketopoulou and Pellegrini state, I believe cogently, “the process of trying to theorize oneself is always allo-centric; it proceeds not around some truth at the epicenter of the self, but is always already decentered, having to do with how subjects respond to others' intrusive impact on us” (xxi). In other words, all aspects of what we understand as ourself, our identity, is defined through others’ reactions to, and interactions with, us. Identity does not emerge from within us, but through social processes and how we make sense of them.

For our purposes here, I am not concerned with any delineations between what is and is not “pathological” identity formation. However, I do find this passage from Gender Without Identity useful in framing the difference between a gender imposed externally and a gender that feels, for lack of better terms, real:

"As long as the subject is able to modify what was handed down to them intergenerationally and to forge out of those inheritances their own gender translations, gender is not pathology. To say this differently, no gender is unspoiled by trauma or uncontaminated by parental conflict. It is what the child does with those experiences (of trauma, intergenerational transport, etc.), how they are spun into gender, and whether such spinning acquires some autonomy from the original intrusion, that determines whether one's gender will feel viable, whether it will acquire the density of feeling like one's own" (29). 

What is key from this construction is the necessity of modifying gender, forging it, spinning it, with some degree of autonomy. The ability to engage actively in how one navigates gendered structures and interpersonal traumas is required for identifying with any particular gender.

Gender is not merely something done to us. Our sense of gender is not what is assigned to us or instructed for us, but the method by which we survive within a society completely structured by sexgender.

Therefore, our sense of individual sexgender is neither “biology” or “psychology” but socially constructed. When we say that sexgender is a social construct, that’s not an empty referent. It means something. So let us dare to ask: what is the literal labor involved in constructing it? 

I would like to argue that we can approach a materialist analysis of sexgender through examining reproductive labor.

Productive labor is all work which can be sold. If you receive an income for your labor, that labor is productive. Your labor-power is being sold to your employer, and your employer increases their capital with the surplus value your labor generates.

If you work all day at a job, when you get home you still cannot rest. You must attend to your health and hygiene, prepare food, clean, provide care for those with whom you live, sustain community relationships, and attend to all of the other tasks that must be done before returning to your employer the following day. This labor reproduces labor-power by enabling workers to survive and continue working. If you gestate a pregnancy until birth, and/or socialize youth into this economic structure, you are also reproducing labor-power by participation in the creation of a new generation of workers. Reproductive labor, then, is all devalued (overwhelmingly unpaid) labor which must be done to sustain life.

Reproductive labor has long been a central concept in Marxist feminisms, as the patriarchal sexgender class structure involves unpaid reproductive labor being the central responsibility of women and children. Though women and children, historically and today, are often expected to take on productive labor as well, this labor is always performed in addition to their required reproductive labor. Working patriarchs can typically rely on women and children to do the bulk of this unpaid labor, such that the majority of their own labor can be sold.

I would argue that white supremacy is inherently a gendered relation, in that it enables white women to displace patriarchal responsibility for reproductive labor (including, in many cases, gestational labor, breastfeeding, and childcare) onto racialized women. The introduction of the racial construct to patriarchy enables a higher gender class for white women, enabling many to access some patriarchal privilege wherein the majority of their labor can be sold. The forms of reproductive labor for which colonized women and children are already responsible are forcibly extended by colonialism beyond their own homes into the homes the colonizers.

This racialized patriarchal structure contains bodily and behavioral expectations that many cannot meet. Those incapable of keeping up with all their expected reproductive labor within a capitalist system are structurally disabled, socially neglected, and often targeted for extermination. Because gestational labor is part of the reproductive labor expected of women, when someone in the “woman” class is incapable of gestational labor (be she cis or trans) she is usually considered of a lower gendered value than other women, and her other reproductive labor is even more thoroughly devalued. The disabled and/or transgender woman is sometimes expected to “make up for” this perceived lack through sexual labor (the exchange of resources for sexual acts), leading to statistical trends in which disabled and transgender women frequently find their opportunities for productive labor limited to sex work. Men’s entitlement to sex as part of the expected reproductive labor from women also maps to disabled and transgender women facing disproportionate rates of sexual violence.

One of the most promising applications of Marxism to trans life that I've read so far is "Social Reproduction and Social Cognition: Theorizing (Trans)gender Identity Development in Community Context" by Noah Zazanis, published in Transgender Marxism. 

"But if trans identification is not determined by our biology, neither is it an uncomplicated product of early socialization. Transgender identification is not inherent, or even necessarily constant. Instead, trans identities are framed responsive to their social context. We transition through the exercise of individual and collective agency. This occurs in community with other trans people, and through every day acts of reproduction--each of which influences social cognition" (33). 

Social reproduction theory (SRT) builds on Marxist theory, locating hegemonically naturalized categories, such as sexgender or family, as contingent on reproductive labor (Zazanis, 36). Zazanis draws on work by Jules Joanne Gleeson that explores how everyday practices of reciprocal recognition and social support, as well as processes of cultivating and sharing information, function together to cultivate and sustain trans life.

In addition to SRT, Zazanis draws on Social Cognition Theory (SCT), and particularly the concept of “triadic reciprocal causation” (38). Triadic reciprocal causation is a framework of gender identity construction that centers “personal, behavioral, and environmental” factors (38.) Here, the individual engages actively in constructing their social environment, and through processes of reciprocal social reproduction, develops a sense of themself in community with others.

Imagine a child assigned into a sexgender class at birth. They are chastised constantly for their interests, movements, mannerisms, speech patterns, desired relationships, bodily aesthetic preferences, or other elements of their person which would mark them as unsuited to their class assignment. Part of the socialization into sexgender economic structures is the coercion into assignment through virtually any means an adult chooses. Isolation is a particularly effective method of abuse because it prevents the victim from any agency in the construction of their social environment.

As soon as the child gets any shred of autonomy to expand their social environment (perhaps online through social media) they can actively shape this extension of social life. They can find pockets of people who do not consider them failures for their resistance to sexgender assignment. In these social environments, they can gain sexgender class consciousness and begin to take account of their reproductive labor practices.

Finally, with interpersonal networks of support, the child can claim for themself the epistemological right to describe their own experience navigating the sexgender class structure. They can insist on their right to move through these structures in ways they are most suited, for their own survival.

This is a process of nourishing transgender life. Transgender subjectivity emerges through the structural and interpersonal punishment we face for rejecting or failing to adhere to our assignment, but transgender identity and survival emerges through deliberate life-sustaining reproductive labor in relationship with other trans people.

This example of an emergent trans identity is purposely modern, offering a materialist description for these kids whose autonomously claimed social integration into transgender community is dismissively characterized as their being passively subjected to a “social contagion.” However, this process of trans identity emerging through social life is reflected in countless archival references to trans life.

As Jules Gill-Peterson writes in Histories of the Transgender Child:

"The broader point is that trans life had no causal reliance upon medicine during the twentieth century, and that the trans people who did interact with doctors brought their own embodied knowledge of the social realities of their transness with them to the clinic. What's more, the medical model consisted of a strategy to deny the social reality of trans life and confine it to a wrong body narrative by suggesting that trans women and men were not already women and men (as their lives frequently testified) but that they somehow aspired to become women and men" (16). 

Gill-Peterson clearly places trans identity as an embodied and lived social reality. Trans people were not created through these technologies, but rather actively and deliberately helped to shape them as yet another collective avenue of survival.

The phrasing of transgender people’s social lives testifying their gendered subjectivity parallels the literal testimony of Ava Betty Brown. In Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton writes about Ava Betty Brown, a Black trans woman who defended her womanhood in court in 1957 after being charged with “female impersonation” (162). As Snorton writes:

"In excess of the logics of law and medicine for which she was made to account, Brown shared with the court the critical detail that her friends and business acquaintances all knew her as Ava Betty Brown... [offering] an alternate set of relations--that of black sociality--as the site for her gender articulation... knowledge systems unrecognized by colonial authority have given rise to her mimetic form of being" (162). 

The white supremacist patriarchal court sought to naturalize their own forced assignment of Brown through conflating the legal structure with anatomy. Instead of conceding to this rhetorical trap, Brown offered the facts of her social reality, stating, “Everything I own is in the name of Betty Brown... If I am a man, I don’t know it” (162).

Sexgender is a social relation. If someone moves through the world as a woman, then she is a woman. All the bureaucratic and eugenic expectations placed on this social relation (that members of a particular class “should” have particular characteristics and legal documentation) are simply not necessary for the social relation itself.

Part 6: On the Streets, On the Internet, Communicating with Each Other

Taking the surrounding historical and political context, we can understand the accusation of “social contagion” much more thoroughly.

This is a construct emerging in an explicitly anti-communist context to pathologize collective behavior emerging from social unrest that disrupts class hierarchy through cessation of labor performance.

The eugenics movement naturalized hierarchy through scientific discourses by drawing on phrenology, natural selection, and statistical averages, for the political project of preventing the reproduction of those bodies and social practices which are devalued under the racial capitalist patriarchal economy. The pathologization of gender transgression into a “nature” and “nurture” framework helped to justify widespread practices of coerced and forced sterilization and the standardization of gender enforcement abuse within the household.

Preventing trans survival is achieved through structurally disabling us and isolating us from each other, especially intergenerationally.

This year, US Representative Ronny Jackson outlined the political project very clearly, stating: "We have to get [transgender people] off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can’t let them communicate with each other." This statement is direct, and reflects exactly the policy we’ve seen ramping up in the past five years.

The reactionary claim of transsexual “social contagion” is that children have no interiority and our existence is a virus that can infect them. This claim is not worth debating, because it is nonsense. This is not a belief emerging from sincere attempts at understanding, but a belief emerging from the need to justify increasingly brutal practices of sexgender enforcement to maintain relative power and a familiar way of life.

Obedience to sexgender assignment is necessary for the reproduction of the racial capitalist patriarchal economy. Greater numbers of trans people, practicing alternate forms of social reproduction, do threaten the ruling class. Yes, the increasing numbers of trans youth will threaten “Western civilization" (in as much as that phrase represents a colonial ordering of all life on earth). That’s a good thing.

If our practices of survival are deemed “social contagion” then, as far as I’m concerned, we are in good company. Let us embrace our commonality with the communists and anarchists and the servants leaving their masters to go dancing. The world needs more of us. Let us overwhelm them.

If our liberation is achieved, it will be revolutionary in every sense of the word.