Abstract The myth of trans contagion, legitimized by the pseudoscientific diagnosis of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), has in the last decade become a powerful tool for stoking anti-trans panic and advancing a conservative agenda. Drawing on a juridicopolitical, medicoscientific, and sociocultural analysis of ROGD discourses from 2015 to 2024, this article examines which conditions produced today's moral panic around trans contagion, who is understood to be a victim and why, and toward what political horizon the panic aspires. The author begins by contextualizing today's trans panic in a legacy of prior United States sex panics, highlighting how the discursive construction of the feminized white child as the symbolic victim of trans contagion works to reify a patriarchal feminization of vulnerability. The panic about this symbolic child, rendered by eugenicist logics as the ideal reproducer of the nation, reveals anxieties about the need to defend against perceived threats to the nuclear family qua parental rights and protect the normative social order that such rights are mobilized to uphold. Though the violent effects of the trans contagion myth inspire an impulse to deny the contagiousness of gender and social life, the author argues against this turn toward bounded individualism, instead embracing our intersubjective contagion and the collectivism potentiated therein.
Koda Sokol (Sun,) studied this question.