A couple I know well has a Millennial daughter. I’ll call her “Marsha.” For years, she claimed to suffer from a severe case of self-diagnosed gluten intolerance. That fad eventually passed, though Celiac disease is real, and it appears to be on the rise. Nevertheless, Marsha recovered and went back to eating pasta and bread without any problems.

But she and her children have since fallen into a far more dangerous trend.

The transgender fad will fade away. But unlike the gluten fad, innocents are being disfigured for life and denied the pleasures of a normal adulthood — all in service to a runaway social experiment.

Her tween daughter now lives as a trans-identifying boy. And Marsha regularly dresses her preschool-aged son in little girls’ clothes.

These aren’t isolated choices. Marsha has once again been swept up in a social contagion — a phenomenon especially common among her age group. The gluten craze ended with little more than inconvenience. But the transgender trend leads to lasting harm. It encourages confusion, medicalization, and, in many cases, the sterilization of children.

At the height of her gluten obsession, Marsha treated every meal as a kind of dietary emergency. At restaurants, she would lecture the waitstaff about keeping all traces of bread and pasta away from her plate. If a dinner roll appeared by mistake, she wouldn’t just set it aside — she’d demand a completely new entrée, claiming the first had been “contaminated.”

She spoke and acted as if gluten carried radioactive properties. Today, her delusions have grown worse.

Marsha now believes her daughter is her son — and more tragically, she has convinced the child of the same. This is not just a personal fixation. It’s a mind virus, and it’s spreading. And it’s doing real, irreversible damage.

Legitimizing a ‘mind virus’

Elite academic and scientific institutions, now fully aligned with the political left, refuse to entertain any discussion of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” or its potential as a social contagion. Scientific American openly celebrates efforts to silence dissent. The American Psychological Association, joined by 61 other organizations, condemned any researcher who dares suggest that rapid onset transgender identification is real or that it’s affecting children.

When studies present data showing that “transitioning” may harm children’s health, the scientific establishment doesn’t engage with the findings. It demands retractions.

Compare this to the response a few decades ago, when anorexia and bulimia surged among young women. At the time, scholars rightly identified the trend as a social contagion. No sane person would have suggested that someone could be “assigned anorexic at birth.” And no ethical observer would have urged friends or family to support anorexic behavior by celebrating starvation as self-expression. That would have been seen not as compassion but as cruelty — and possibly a sign of mental illness in its own right.

Marsha’s pattern — first falling for the gluten fad, then embracing transgender ideology — shows why this trend deserves the same scrutiny. The signs point to another social contagion. Only this time, the cost is higher.

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  Photo by Jason Davis via Getty Images

Marsha’s parents seek to maintain a presence in their grandchildren’s lives. They want to help those children keep a foothold in reality while monitoring that no permanent damage is being done to their grandchildren. Puberty blockers and sex-change operations on minors are illegal in the state where Marsha and her children live. Many people are praying that Marsha’s current obsession won’t result in irreversible, lifetime bodily harm to her children.

Victimhood carries cachet

Many describe the transgender craze as a “woke mind virus” for good reason. It targets people like Marsha — white, straight, and desperate for meaning in a culture that elevates victimhood.

In an era where claiming oppression earns social status, Marsha fits nowhere. So she compensates. Over the years, she has loudly backed every progressive cause that allows a straight, white savior to feel virtuous: gay rights, Black Lives Matter, and whatever comes next.

But the need to feel oppressed is powerful. During the 2020 race riots, Marsha took to social media to tell her followers she felt “shaken” and “scared.” She claimed someone had stolen a BLM flag from her front porch in the dead of night. According to Marsha, her home security camera caught the grainy image of a figure — white, male, roughly 6', wearing a mask and baseball cap. By sheer coincidence, her compliant husband also happens to be white, male, roughly 6', and never puts up a fuss.

Now, with a “transgender” child, Marsha has finally secured what eluded her: a place near the top of the victimhood hierarchy. She eventually recognized that rainbow-flag-waving white allies had become punchlines in the very activist circles they tried to impress. But a trans child? That’s a ticket to credibility — admittance to the club, with VIP status.

Unlike gluten hysteria, the transgender fad won’t end with harmless dietary quirks. It leaves children scarred, sterilized, and denied the ordinary joys of adulthood. Marsha may see herself as a kind of brave victim. But she’s a willing carrier of a destructive social contagion — and her children will suffer the lasting damage.