Monday Miscellany, 11/3/25

But such reforms were painful, especially in a country used to the socialist policies pushed by the late former dictator Juan Peron and his successors.  Milei’s popularity seemed to have declined, he had only a narrow margin in the legislature to work with, and some of his reforms didn’t seem to be working.

He was widely thought to be in political trouble, to the point that President Trump tried to bail him out with a $20 billion currency swap, a promise of $20 billion more in private investments, and, most controversially, a plan to import more Argentinian beef, which has many of his rural supporters up in arms.

But in Argentina’s recent multi-party parliamentary election, President Milei’s Freedom Advances party defied the polls and expert predictions by winning 41% of the vote, doubling his party’s representation.  Now he controls at least a third of the representatives in both houses of parliament, preserving his veto power and his ability to keep his reforms in place.

Social Contagion Is Real

In Sweden, between 2008 and 2018, the number of 13-17-year-old girls diagnosed with gender dysphoria jumped 1,500%.  In 2020, Penn State researcher Colin Wright linked to the article giving those figures and added a comment:  “Two words:  social contagion.”

For those two words, Wright was vilified, canceled, and blackballed as a “transphobic” bigot.  “My academic career never recovered,” he said.  But he was alluding to a separate body of research that argued that the recent huge increase in the number of young people claiming to be transgendered “was best explained by social contagion, meaning the spread of ideas or behaviors through peer influence. The term isn’t an insult; it’s a well-established sociological concept used to describe how trends such as eating disorders and even suicide clusters can spread.”

Now even more evidence has come to light of how social contagion contributes to the transgender phenomenon.  Wright has written an article for the Wall Street Journal about this entitled Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis.

Against this view, cultural progressives have been arguing that gender identification is an innate characteristic, even when that identification is contrary to the “gender assigned at birth.”  The growth in reported cases, according to this view, comes from the stigma against that sort of thing removed.  All of those Swedish girls were always “gender-non-comforming.”  Now they are just feeling free to be open about it.

But now, as we blogged about, the percentage of young adults who identfy as trans or as non-binary has dropped dramatically.  Observes Wright,

If transgender identity were an innate trait, like left-handedness, we would expect identification rates to rise at first when it became socially acceptable, then plateau and remain stable at a fixed level. If the phenomenon were instead driven by social contagion, we might expect a boom-and-bust pattern: a spike followed by a rapid decline once the social forces driving it weaken.

And that’s what we are seeing.  Wright does point out that the biggest drop is in the “non-binary” category, those who claim to be neither male nor female, or both, or something else, such as “demiboy,” “two-spirit,” or “genderfluid.”  But those categories are also the largest cohort of the transgender movement.

The overwhelming majority of those driving the trans craze fall into the “nonbinary” category—adopting identities which are said to be neither, both, or somewhere between male and female. These include labels such as “demiboy,” “genderfluid” or “two-spirit.” These are social identities, not biological ones. Unlike left- or right-handedness, which describe objectively measurable traits, “nonbinary” identities have no anatomical or physiological referent. They are conceptual, political and responsive to cultural trends—hallmarks of social contagion.

The concept of social contagion can apply, though, to far more than the transgender phenomenon, such as the use of recreational drugs and the embrace of Islamic extremism on college campuses.  We used to call it peer pressure.

Canceled Professors Are Winning Their Lawsuits against Woke Universities

“So strong is the gravitational pull of ‘wokeness’ that it has caused many college and university leaders to approve of appalling treatment of faculty members who dared to question the prevailing leftist orthodoxies,” writes George Leef for the James G. Marshall Center for Academic Renewal. “Fortunately, our legal system still protects the rights of professors against such mistreatment.”

His article Woke Witch Hunts Are Losing in Court tells about three recent cases in which faculty members who were professionally cancelled by their institutions for dissenting from the leftist party line were vindicated in court, costing the universities lots of money in court costs and damages.

One professor at Portland State replied to a tweet from the schools’ DEI division, “All men are created equal.”  For that quotation from the Declaration of Independence, he was blocked from university forums.  He sued to get access, a rather small assertion of his free speech rights, but the university spent half a million dollars to fight his lawsuit, only to lose the case and be forced to spend $193,000 more for the professor’s court costs.

Another professor at the University of North Texas wrote an article taking issue with another scholar who maintained that a particular musical theorist was racist and that his approach to musical analysis ““exists to benefit members of the dominant white race of music theorists.”  The Texas professor, who edited a journal devoted to music theorist being attacked, defended him from the charge. For this academic debate, the professor was condemned as racist, his professional society threatened to expel him, and North Texas grad students and 17 out of the 23 music faculty demanded he be fired.  The university had a hearing and convicted him of “unethical behavior” and took away his journal.  The controversy started in 2019, but the consequent lawsuit dragged on.  After a court ruled against  the university’s motion to dismiss the case, it became clear to the university that it didn’t have a leg to stand on, so last summer the university settled the case, giving the professor back his journal and paying him $400,000, plus $325,000 to cover his legal fees.

Another professor lost his job at the Ohio Northern University School of Law, despite having tenure and a pristine academic record, simply for opposing the school’s DEI policies.

In all of these cases, Leef’s article notes that the universities–and thus since these are public institutions the taxpayers–had to pay the legal expenses incurred by their administrators.  One would think that if the administrators themselves would be held liable for violating the rights of their faculty members, we would see fewer of these cases. Then again, universities have liability insurance and they give individual policies to their administrators.  Any professor who sues them, though, doesn’t have that advantage.  So it was a risk for these faculty members to sue.  And their colleagues, hostile though they might have been, should thank them, as should all Americans.