While just 16 students claimed to be "non-binary" during the 2019-2020 school year, that number rose to a staggering 675 by the 2022-2023 school year, according to New Jersey Department of Education enrollment data.

Forty-one of the 675 are reportedly elementary school students.

Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit parental rights group, told the Free Beacon the jump reflects the fact that divergent gender identification has become a "social contagion."

"These numbers aren't surprising to anyone who has been following the massive social contagion of adopting different gender identities, especially among adolescent girls," Sanzi said.

Conservatives have vocally raised the alarm about the "social contagion" element of transgender and "non-binary" identification in recent years, noting that social media use among young people and the adulation for divergent "gender identities" has triggered the astronomical rise in children and young people claiming not to identify with their own sex.

RELATED: LGBT identification is largely driven by social media influence and peer pressure

Even Dr. Marci Bowers, president of the radical World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which sets the standards of care for gender clinics nationwide, recently acknowledged that transgender identification has become trendy.

"There are people in my community who will deny that there's any sort of 'social contagion'—I shouldn't say social contagion, but at least peer influence on some of these decisions," Bowers, a man who claims to be awoman, told The New York Times in January. "I think that's just not recognizing human behavior"... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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