Washington Examiner Columnist Claims Social Contagion, Provides No Evidence

Even by right wing propaganda standards, this was weak sauce.

by Evan Urquhart

According to commentary writer Zachary Faria, whose opinion piece turned up in the right wing Washington Examiner today, a social contagion is causing children to identify as transgender. Here, just look at this evidence:

So we know these data are some voluntary surveys from a single county’s public schools, and the school says they aren’t meant to be scientific in any way. But what happens if we wildly hypothesize about them anyway? Well, if we do that, then we might make the wild assumption that more students were meeting with counselors and fillng out voluntary counseling surverys during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Or, we might guesstimate that the 2022—2023 school year data isn’t complete yet, so the 41 students who have completed surveys are only a partial count for this years data. Or, if we were a right wing commentator with a transphobic agenda, what the heck, we can just say the only explantion for fluctuating numbers is a social contagion, and head home early.

In the body of the Examiner column, it becomes clear that Faria grabbed this “data” from another trashy right wing website, Tucker Carlson’s old stomping grounds, the far right Daily Caller.

Oh, and what’s this, in the Daily Caller’s article Christopher Cram, the spokesman for Mongomery County Public Schools, clearly lays out exactly why this data can’t be used to describe trends among the student body. (The Caller completely ignore this and claim there was a big number percentage increase anyway, but at least they do include it.)

So, in conclusion, there’s no data supporting the idea that there’s a social contagion causing people to identify as transgender or nonbinary, in this or any other study, scientific or unscientific. The Washington Examiner doesn’t have data supporting social contagion, and neither does the Daily Caller. Both of those websites are still running pieces saying that there is one, but at Assigned, a one-man news site written by a single transgender individual, we’re a bit more ethical in our journalism, and a bit more cautious and conservative in our statements. At Assigned, we don’t make claims for things when there’s been no evidence provided.