Overview

Mimetic desire is the idea that people rarely want things simply on their own. We learn what is worth wanting by watching other people want it. The French-American thinker René Girard (1923–2015) built a whole theory of human life on this idea. It moves from envy and rivalry between individuals to the way groups calm their own conflicts by turning on a single victim, which he called the scapegoat mechanism.

Some detransitioners use Girard's ideas, or ideas very like them, to make sense of what happened to them. Looking back, they describe wanting to be like particular people: an online creator, a friend who came out first, a sex whose life looked easier from the outside. Some also see Girard's scapegoat in the way certain online communities turn on people who leave. This page sets out what Girard actually argued, what research on imitation supports, how the frame applies to gender identity, and where it stops being useful. It is one of several lenses described under philosophical frameworks.

Who Girard was

Girard trained as a historian in France and spent his career in American universities, mainly Johns Hopkins and Stanford. His work crossed literary criticism, anthropology, psychology and theology (Andrade, IEP). His theory, usually called mimetic theory (from the Greek mimesis, imitation), was developed in three main books:

• Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961; French title Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque). A study of Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust and Dostoevsky that argues the great novelists all discovered that desire is copied.
• Violence and the Sacred (1972). Extends the idea to anthropology: imitation produces rivalry, rivalry spreads, and archaic societies settle the crisis by uniting against a victim.
• Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978). A long dialogue with the psychiatrists Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort. It pulls the theory together and includes a section Girard calls "interdividual psychology", a psychology of the self as formed between people rather than inside one.

Later books, especially The Scapegoat (1982) and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999), develop the religious side of the theory. Girard was a practising Catholic and argued that the Bible exposes the scapegoat mechanism by taking the victim's side.

Desire borrowed from models

Triangular desire

Deceit, Desire and the Novel opens with Don Quixote, who models his whole life on Amadis of Gaul, the hero of the chivalric romances he has read. Girard writes:

Don Quixote has surrendered to Amadis the individual's fundamental prerogative: he no longer chooses the objects of his own desire—Amadis must choose for him. — (Girard 1961/1965, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, ch. 1)

Girard calls the admired figure the mediator (or model) of desire. Instead of a straight line from a person to the thing they want, there is a triangle: subject, model and object. The object gets its glow from the model. Girard calls the common belief that our desires come straight from our own depths the romantic lie. The novelistic truth is that they are borrowed.

External and internal mediation

Girard separates two kinds of model (Andrade, IEP):

• External mediation: the model lives in a different world from the imitator (a fictional knight, a distant celebrity, a saint). Imitation is open and even proud, and there is no rivalry because the two can never compete for the same thing.
• Internal mediation: the model is close by, a peer, sibling, classmate or friend. Now the two can want the same things, so the model turns into a rival. The imitator usually hides the imitation, even from themselves, and admiration sours into resentment.

Metaphysical desire: wanting to be someone

At its most intense, Girard argues, desire stops being about objects at all. What the imitator wants is the model's way of being: their apparent fullness, confidence and ease. In Violence and the Sacred he puts it this way: a person "desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess" (Girard 1972/1977, p. 146). Girard calls this metaphysical desire. It cannot be satisfied, because getting the object never delivers the being that seemed to come with it. The IEP summary notes that it tends toward "total obsession with and resentment of the mediator" (Andrade, IEP).

From rivalry to the scapegoat

Mimetic crisis and doubles

In Violence and the Sacred, Girard argues that when many people in a group imitate one another's desires, rivalries multiply and the differences between people wear away. Rivals become doubles: mirror images, each convinced the other started it. Girard calls the point where this spreads through a whole community a mimetic crisis (Girard 1972/1977).

The scapegoat mechanism

Girard's best-known claim is about how such crises end. Imitation spreads hostility as easily as it spreads desire. At some point the "all against all" suddenly becomes "all against one": the group fixes on a single person (often someone marginal or different) as the cause of its troubles. The victim is blamed, expelled or killed, and the group feels a rush of peace and unity. Because the unanimity is itself the product of imitation, nobody in the group experiences it as a choice. Each person simply sees that everyone else agrees. In archaic religion, Girard argues, the expelled victim was later treated as sacred, both cursed and the source of order (Andrade, IEP).

The model as obstacle

Things Hidden adds a psychological point that matters for this page. A close model sends a double message: be like me, and don't take what is mine. Girard thought this double bind, where the model is also an obstacle, explains much of what psychoanalysis attributed to inner drives. He reread Freud's Oedipus complex this way: the child imitates the father, including his desire for the mother, and so the father becomes both model and rival (Girard 1978/1987; Andrade, IEP). See psychoanalysis for the Freudian view he was arguing against.

Concern for victims, turned into a weapon

In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard argued that modern Western culture has absorbed the biblical concern for victims so deeply that we now see scapegoating everywhere, in others. He warned that this concern can itself become a competition and a weapon. Groups can seek moral standing by claiming victim status, and persecute in the name of protecting victims (Girard 1999/2001). Several detransitioners describe online "oppression Olympics" in similar terms: "Whoever struggles the most is the winner" (andyazel, desisted).

What research on imitation adds

Girard was a literary critic, not an experimental scientist, and his theory is far broader than any study can test. Several research traditions do, however, support its starting point: people learn what to do and what to want largely by copying others.

• Social learning (Bandura). In Albert Bandura's "Bobo doll" experiments, children who watched an adult attack an inflatable doll went on to copy the aggression, often adding new aggressive acts of their own. Children who watched a calm adult did not (Bandura, Ross & Ross 1961). Bandura's wider social learning theory holds that much behaviour is learned by observing models, and that models who seem similar, rewarded or high-status are copied more.
• Infant imitation. The developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff argues, in a volume that brings Girard together with experimental research, that infants use imitation from very early on to work out that other people are "like me". On this view imitation is a foundation of social understanding, not a late add-on (Meltzoff, in Garrels 2011).
• Prestige-biased learning (Henrich). The evolutionary anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White argue that humans evolved to copy successful, admired people, and to show those people deference in return for access to them. They call this prestige, as distinct from dominance, which rests on force (Henrich & Gil-White 2001). One consequence is that people often copy a prestigious model's whole package (style, tastes, beliefs), not just the skill that made them successful.
• Peer influence in adolescence. A decade of research reviewed by Brechwald and Prinstein found that teenagers' behaviour shifts towards that of their friends over time. It is not just that similar teenagers seek each other out, and influence is stronger for some young people and some behaviours than others (Brechwald & Prinstein 2011).
• Social-media-spread symptoms. In 2021, German clinicians led by Kirsten Müller-Vahl saw a wave of mostly young patients with sudden, dramatic tic-like behaviour copied from social media videos. They called it a mass social media-induced illness. In a study of 32 such patients, all had recent psychological stressors and 94% had other psychiatric symptoms (Fremer et al. 2022). The symptoms were imitated, but they took root in people who were already struggling.
• Looping effects (Hacking). The philosopher Ian Hacking described how naming a new kind of person changes the people so named, who then change the category in turn. He called this the looping effect, and the process "making up people" (Hacking 2006). Unlike Girard, Hacking traces imitation to classifications and institutions rather than to individual models.

None of this shows that any particular identity is "caught". It does show that copying is ordinary and powerful, that it happens largely without awareness, and that it is strongest in adolescence and among people who are already distressed.

Applying the frame to gender identity

Online models and external mediation

Many detransitioners describe online creators as the first models of what transition could be. In Girard's terms these are external mediators: admired from a distance, offering a polished picture of a new self. Several commenters on r/detrans (the Reddit forum for detransitioners) describe wanting the being the creators seemed to have — popularity, confidence, attractiveness — rather than any particular physical change.

I thought it would cure my loneliness. I thought I'd become outgoing and popular just like the trans women I saw on social media —xyjess, detrans male

I wanted to fill some sort of gap inside me with the attention I saw bestowed upon such trans people in these niche bubbles I frequented. —scoutydouty, detrans female

That second account also describes something closer to internal mediation once she was inside the community: "It's all about competition for uniqueness," with users competing over "who could be the most attractive, TikTok aesthetic, thinnest, wokest person." This is Girard's picture of models becoming rivals: once everyone is copying the same ideal, the ideal turns into a contest. On the role of particular platforms, see platform influence.

Some describe the imitation reaching the body's own signals. One woman wrote, "I think I was just forcing myself to feel dysphoria because I saw what trans people were saying and I had to copy them" (Batbat37, detrans female). This matches the tic studies above, where copied symptoms were felt as real and involuntary.

Friend groups and internal mediation

Girard would expect the strongest pull from people who are close, similar and equal. Detransitioners often describe identities spreading through a friend group:

i was one of the "true trans" and came out first. before long, my whole friend group adopted the trans identity. a few years later they all desisted —bradx220, detrans male

When my group full of trans people went quiet. I realized my "dysphoria" was just from hanging out with trans people all the time. —Huggy_nomnoms_you, desisted female

Survey data fit these accounts but cannot settle what causes what. In Lisa Littman's 2018 survey of 256 parents, who were recruited through websites where parents had described a sudden onset of gender dysphoria in their children, parents reported that in 36.8% of friendship groups most members had become transgender-identified. Most (86.7%) reported increased social media use, a friend group where one or more friends came out in the same period, or both (Littman 2018). Littman called the pattern rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a hypothesis that has not been clinically validated. In a later survey of 78 young adults who had stopped identifying as transgender, 53% said ROGD applied to them (Littman et al. 2024). Both samples were self-selected. A 2024 review notes that a Canadian clinic study by Bauer and colleagues found no support for ROGD as a distinct condition, and concludes that "Neither an attitude of generalized suspicion nor an uncritically permissive approach is adequate" (Leonhardt et al. 2024). See rapid-onset gender dysphoria and social contagion and peer influence for the full debate.

Among about 3,094 r/detrans stories in the site's AI-extracted cohort, online influence was clearly flagged as a contributing factor in 386 (305 of 2,344 women, 81 of 750 men) and peer influence in 187, with several hundred more uncertain (detrans.ai stats). These stories are self-selected and the figures are not rates. They do suggest that people who name social influence directly are a meaningful minority, not the whole story.

Envy and the desire to be

Girard's metaphysical desire, wanting another's being, is close to what detransitioners and trans people both call gender envy: an intense, painful wish to have someone else's sexed body or social position. In Girardian terms, envy is not just wanting what a model has. It is resenting the model for having a fullness you lack.

Women's accounts often describe envying men's freedom, or envying the attention that peers gave to boys. One lesbian woman described a full triangle — herself, the girls she desired, and the boys those girls wanted:

One big reason I transitioned because of pure envy and jealousy that all my female peers started talking about boys and giving boys attention and i FUCKING wanted that attention so bad. … part of my journey in transitioning was becoming a woman's "dream guy" and getting that attention from women i was craving, and curing my jealousy. —Chelstrawberrymuffin, detrans female

Men's accounts more often describe envying women's softness, beauty and care. The page on internalised misandry covers this "female envy" in depth, and internalised misogyny covers the mirror image in women. One detrans man described the comparison at the heart of envy:

it was easy to envy the areas where women have it better while overlooking the areas they have it worse, because men's problems are the ones directly affecting me. —Shiro_L, detrans male

Girard's theory also predicts that envy is aimed at particular, chosen models, not at a whole sex. A desisted woman put this to someone questioning: "So do you feel gender envy over Boris Johnson for example? Or Donald Trump? … Or your male neighbour? Or is it specific males?" (SmileRevolutionary82, desisted female). Asking which people you envy, and why those people, is a very Girardian question.

Wanting to be him, or wanting to be with him

A recurring theme is confusion between wanting to be someone and wanting to be with them. Girard's triangle helps here, because it shows how attraction, admiration and rivalry can wrap around the same person.

a big part of me wanting to be trans was wanting to be like the guys i idolized. be a gay man instead of a straight woman. be an attractive man instead of myself. —portaux, desisted

a lot of my "gender envy" was just my heterosexuality. This "do i want to be him or do i want to be with him" thing. —DarichUbish, desisted female

Another described intense "jealous feelings" towards a trans man that turned out to be love: "I thought I was just meant to copy him and transition" (Luck_Unlucky, desisted). A desisted man put the male version in almost Girardian language. Being attracted to women while wanting to be one, he wrote, means "You want to both obtain an object of desire (a sexual partner) while simultaneously embodying that object of desire" (kitwid, desisted male). The link with same-sex attraction is explored in internalised homophobia.

Gender identity as a ready-made mediator

Girard's frame also sheds light on the wider culture. When an identity is defined only by self-declaration, there is no fixed external test of who belongs, so the main evidence that one is that kind of person is that one feels as others in the group describe feeling. This makes the category very open to imitation. "Egg" culture, where community members tell questioning people they are trans before they know it themselves, works as active mediation. Others point out the desire one should have. See egg-cracking and gender as an explanatory framework. As one desisted man put it, "Social contagions have always existed. We subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) seek consensus and belonging" (echo_prie, desisted male).

Scapegoating and the detransitioner

Girard's scapegoat mechanism is the part of his theory that detransitioners reach for most often, even when they don't use his name. Many describe being cast out by communities they once belonged to, in language of cults, apostasy and excommunication. See backlash against detransitioners.

Through my grief I slowly realized it was a cult and I was excommunicated for going against their beliefs. —walnut_hat, detrans female

A Girardian reading explains why leaving can provoke more anger than never joining. A group held together by shared imitation draws much of its certainty from agreement. Someone who imitated the group's desire and then gave it up makes everyone's desire look less inevitable. Detransitioners describe exactly this: their mere existence felt like an accusation.

Friends you make who happen to "be trans" will have their identity and motivation for transition called into question inadvertently by your choice to detransition and they'd rather attack you for making them reflect than actually reflect. —Hedera_Thorn, detrans male

Another described a support group where "my realisation that hormones did not help me cast doubt on my 'commitment' to the community" (strikelist, detrans female). The unanimity Girard describes, where everyone sees that everyone else agrees, shows up in accounts of pile-ons, mass downvoting and bans from spaces that have nothing to do with gender. One woman wrote that people "automatically twist us merely existing as an existential threat to their lives" (liketreesintheforest, detrans female).

Girard's frame cuts both ways, and honesty requires saying so. Detransition communities can scapegoat too: trans people, clinicians, or a vaguely defined "ideology" can become the single cause on which everything is blamed. Girard's warning about persecuting in the name of victims applies to any group that defines itself by injury. Recovery accounts that sound settled tend to move past rivalry rather than reverse it. One detrans man wrote that when he sees a trans woman in public, "i see my old self in them, all the pain and trauma i went through, and wish them the best" (loveincautionn, detrans male). See also community disillusionment.

Trans perspectives

Many trans people reject the idea that their identity is copied. They point out that they came to it alone, against social pressure, with no trans people around them:

nobody expects us to be trans and certainly nobody pressured or indoctrinated us to be trans. We came to that conclusion on our own —countvonruckus, trans woman (MtF flair)

Trans forums talk about gender envy openly. Some describe it as more than ordinary jealousy: "jealousy of women mixed with something existential" (lvl99_noob, trans woman). Others describe deliberately turning it "from painful jealousy into a motivational, aspirational envy" (Tinstrings, trans woman). From a Girardian angle, this last move is a decision to keep the model as a guide rather than a rival.

Some trans commenters turn the frame back on detransitioners, describing "detrans" as "a political identity akin to ex-gay" that some communities reward (satonabug, trans man). Girard would not dismiss this. If desire is mimetic, then detransition, too, can be modelled on others. One detransitioner acknowledged the same point about contagion arguments: "I suppose one can twist that back on detransition can't they?" (DetransIS, detrans intersex female). The fair conclusion is that imitation is a human feature, not a feature of one side.

Limits of the frame

Mimetic theory is powerful, and that is also its weakness. Before using it to explain a life, it is worth knowing its limits.

• It can explain anything. Philosophers have noted that Girard's theory "claims too much" and "is not falsifiable in Popper's sense", since every case, even an apparent counter-example, can be read as confirming it (Andrade, IEP). If every desire is mimetic, then saying this desire was mimetic adds little.
• It risks dismissing real distress. Saying someone "copied" an identity can sound like saying their suffering was fake. The tic research points the other way: copied symptoms took hold in people with real stressors and real psychiatric problems (Fremer et al. 2022). Littman's 2024 participants most often traced their trans identification to mental health problems or trauma they had mistaken for gender dysphoria (Littman et al. 2024). Imitation may supply the form distress takes, not the distress. See reframing dysphoria.
• People imitate within the bounds of temperament. Not everyone in a friend group follows the leader, and many detransitioners had no models at all. "I wasn't influenced or contagion'd, I never even talked to other trans people, or knew any IRL" (autochoris, detrans). Another woman "hadnt met any trans people … so i wasnt really talked into it either" (Greedy_Astronaughty, detrans female). Gender non-conformity, autism, trauma and sexuality shape which models attract a person in the first place.
• Selection versus influence. Friends resemble each other partly because similar people choose each other. Peer-influence research works hard to separate the two (Brechwald & Prinstein 2011), and most gender surveys cannot.
• Its own gender blind spot. The literary scholar Toril Moi argued that Girard's model is built around male rivalry and struggles to account for female desire on its own terms (Moi 1982). A theory that treats desire as rivalry between men is an awkward tool for explaining why so many of the young people now questioning their gender are girls.
• Theology. Girard drew strong religious conclusions from his anthropology. People can use his account of imitation without accepting them.

Used carefully, the frame is best as a question rather than a verdict. Whose life did I want, and what did I think it would give me? Some detransitioners find that answering it frees them from envy. Others find it changes nothing, because their distress had other roots. As one detrans man said of his former envy of women, "now they're just girls to me" (stallfishy, detrans male). The model had stopped being a model. For support with these questions, see the support directory.

References

• Andrade, G. René Girard (1923–2015). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(3), 575–582. source.
• Brechwald, W. A., & Prinstein, M. J. (2011). Beyond homophily: A decade of advances in understanding peer influence processes. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 21(1), 166–179. source.
• Fremer, C., Szejko, N., Pisarenko, A., et al. (2022). Mass social media-induced illness presenting with Tourette-like behavior. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 963769. source.
• Garrels, S. R. (ed.) (2011). Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion (incl. Meltzoff, "Out of the mouths of babes: imitation, gaze, and intentions in infant research—the 'like me' framework"). Michigan State University Press. source.
• Girard, R. (1961; English 1965). Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Y. Freccero. Johns Hopkins University Press. source.
• Girard, R. (1972; English 1977). Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory. Johns Hopkins University Press. source.
• Girard, R., with Oughourlian, J.-M., & Lefort, G. (1978; English 1987). Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. S. Bann & M. Metteer. Stanford University Press. source.
• Girard, R. (1999; English 2001). I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. J. G. Williams. Orbis Books. source.
• Hacking, I. (2006). Making Up People. London Review of Books, 28(16). source.
• Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. source.
• Leonhardt, Fuchs, Gander & Sevecke (2024). Gender dysphoria in adolescence: examining the rapid-onset hypothesis. Neuropsychiatrie. source.
• Littman, L. (2018). Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLoS ONE. study page, source.
• Littman, L., O'Malley, S., Kerschner, H., & Bailey, J. M. (2024). Detransition and Desistance Among Previously Trans-Identified Young Adults. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page, source.
• Moi, T. (1982). The Missing Mother: The Oedipal Rivalries of René Girard. Diacritics, 12(2), 21–31. source.
• detrans.ai. r/detrans user timeline statistics (self-selected, AI-extracted cohort; not rates). source.