Jonathan Haidt Promoted a Fringe Theory on Trans Youth

The author of The Anxiety Generation told Margaret Hoover for PBS that young people become trans due to peer contagion effects. There is no evidence that this is so.

by Evan Urquhart

A new pop-psychology book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” is causing quite a stir amongst anxiety-prone parents of late. The main thesis of the author, Jonathan Haidt of New York University’s Stern School of Business, is that smartphones are greatly detrimental to adolescent mental health. Haidt’s book draws on research that suggests advocates for more in-person playtime for children and restricting phone and social media use in the teen years.

According to an interview Haidt did with Margaret Hoover for PBS, the book includes a co-signing of the fringe theory that there are more trans adolescents due to peer effects, also known as social contagion or “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.” 

Hoover asks Haidt about his beliefs on gender dysphoria at minute 13:50 on the video linked above. Haidt starts by defining gender dysphoria and speaking in broad terms about the phenomenon of certain behaviors such as smoking being transmitted socially. Hoover follows up by asking more specifically why Haidt believes the increase in young trans people is due to more than the increased awareness and acceptance of trans people.

Here’s a transcript of that portion of their exchange:

HOOVER: And you think that the data demonstrates that it is above and beyond just the phenomenon of coming out and increased awareness?

HAIDT: Yes. Because it happens in clusters of girls. It happens in clusters of girls who had no previous gender dysphoria when they were young. So it’s very different from the kinds of gender dysphoria cases that we’ve known about for decades. I mean, it is a real thing. But what happened, especially when girls got, was YouTube and Instagram early, but then especially TikTok, girls just, you know, girls get sucked into these vortices and they take on each other’s purported mental illnesses.

None of the above has been demonstrated in any published research.

Assigned Media reached out to Haidt as well as to the man described as Haidt’s “lead researcher” on the contact page of Haidt’s website to ask about the research Haidt relied on to make these claims. Neither man responded by publication time.

In the absence of information directly from Haidt or his lead researcher, we turned to the supplementary material for Haidt’s book. In interviews Haidt has represented himself as grounding all of his conclusions in social science research, and has promoted a website dedicated to providing supplemental information for every chapter of the book. 

The words “gender dysphoria,” “transgender,” and variations thereof do not appear in the supplemental information for any chapter of Haidt’s book. 

The chapter Haidt discusses with Margaret Hoover in the excerpt is his chapter six, “Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys.” The supplemental material does not include any research into gender dysphoria. It does, however, include four reasons why Haidt thinks that girls are more susceptible to being harmed by social media than boys. These include: Reason #1: Girls are more affected by visual social comparison and perfectionism, Reason #2: Girls’ aggression is more relational, Reason #3: Girls more easily share emotions and depression, Reason #4: Men are more predatory.

There are no charts, graphs, or citations included for reason three, which seems to be the only place in the supplementary materials that reference the social contagion idea.

screenshot from supplemental materials linked on anxiousgeneration.com

Inferring from the available research, Haidt appears to be referencing is the research on ROGD. This consists of two studies, both of which relied on survey data from parents recruited from the same anti-trans websites that popularized the ROGD idea. A correction to the original study by Lisa Littman made it clear that it was merely a formalization of the hypothesis of ROGD, and did not provide any evidence that the phenomenon does or does not exist. (The second study, by Michael Bailey, added nothing of substance, instead retreading the same methodological ground by surveying parents on similar websites.)

Subsequent research by those in the mainstream has found no evidence among trans youth of “clusters of girls who had no previous gender dysphoria when they were young.” Although researchers have looked, there has never been any documentation of the phenomenon outside of the claims found in surveys of parents who frequent anti-trans websites.

The debate over ROGD is highly emotional and intimately connected with political efforts to ban gender-affirming care and with the wider moral panic over transgender identity in the US and beyond. Researchers disagree on how plausible the ROGD idea is. As always in science no debate is ever truly settled for all time: ROGD is a testable hypothesis that makes claims about the real world, and if evidence for the phenomenon ever emerges mainstream opinion about the theory will change. However, at this time, there has been no evidence whatsoever that ROGD describes a real phenomenon. Whatever the merits of the other research Haidt discusses in the book, on the topic of gender dysphoria in youth, at least, Haidt has shared a pseudoscientific myth.

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Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media and a member of the 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism fellowship class at MIT.