I have a dog – she’s lovely but she does have issues – and recently she led me to a surprising discovery. Trying to train her, I learned about the behavioural science concept of ‘extinction bursts’, and started thinking how it might be useful to the Trans+ community right now.
Through this concept, science and history combine into a lesson about maintaining hope and suggest practical ways to respond to the current anti-Trans ‘culture wars’.
Put simply, an extinction burst happens when reinforcement for a particular behaviour is suddenly stopped. Scientists discovered that at the point that the behaviour is about to die out, there is a sudden surge in its intensity, frequency, or duration.
Right now, my dog barks longer, louder, or more often, when she sees the postie. But this happens just before she starts ignoring them completely, because I’ve stopped yelling at her and treat for calm behaviour instead.
In thinking about this I was struck by a potential similarity between training my dog not to be such an idiot and the current anti-Trans ‘culture war’ backlash. I wondered whether the behaviours involved, and therefore the successful responses, might actually be similar.
Extinction bursts aren’t confined to mad Border Collies. We all do them. Frantic stabbing at a light switch when the bulb has blown. A toddler having a meltdown when simply crying about having a toy taken away doesn’t work.
There are also many historical examples of groups of people acting in an apparently similar way. In 1888, women workers at the Bryant & May match factory went on strike over their horrific working conditions. In response, the company initiated a burst of counter tactics – intimidation, eviction threats, and fabricated press stories, – in a frantic attempt to crush the movement. They were joined by the state, who used acts of Parliament, judicial rulings and police action to resist the rise of the new workers’ unions. But before the end of the year, the Matchgirls Strike had won, creating a template for over a century of successful union action since.
Eighty years later, the imminent passage of the Race Relations Act of 1968 triggered Enoch Powell into delivering his, now infamous, Rivers of Blood speech. This in turn caused a violent burst of resistance to the changing tide of opinion about racial equality. But the tide changed all the same.
In 1988, responding to local councils publishing inclusive educational materials, the Conservative government passed Section 28. A law explicitly banning local authorities and schools from ‘promoting homosexuality’. A state-enforced attempt to freeze traditional family norms at a time of rising public acceptance of gay rights and families. But acceptance continued to rise throughout the ‘90s, and Section 28 was abolished in 2003.
All of these historical events have modern parallels – notably, the political and media re-use of Section 28 framing to respond to the perceived rise in ‘gender ideology’. But are these extinction bursts?
Culturo-Behaviour Science identifies that cultural practices are maintained by cultural reinforcers (power, status, systematic advantages), and that when a social movement disrupts these reinforcers the dominant group experiences systemic disruption, leading to aggressive pushback. In short, when people are faced with a change that will disrupt them, they try to reject it. Similarly, Political Science refers to ‘status threats’ and ‘cultural backlashes’, which resemble in many ways the effects of an extinction burst.
In the 2026 study, “Extinction Bursts: A Multilevel Psychological Model of Reinforcement Collapse”, researchers specifically noted that extinction bursts occur in collective systems too, and concluded that when an ideological group or dominant culture experiences a failure of expected social reinforcement, the group registers an existential threat and responds with amplified behavioural output and heightened affective arousal.
But what can we learn from behavioural science and history as we respond to these extinction bursts? Here are six practices, suggested by behavioural science for managing toddler tantrums, and used successfully by some of the world’s best known civil rights activists.
First, behaviourists say we should reframe the extinction burst, the sudden increase in tantrums, as an indicator of imminent success. During his work in the civil rights movement in the USA, Martin Luther King Jr framed the violent police brutality to which they were subjected as a sign that their campaign was working.
Second, we should disengage from the outrage loop. Behavioural therapists recommend removing all attention from the screaming sprog, subtracting your energy from the equation. During the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963, activists ignored the racist taunts and provocative media statements of their opponents – thus starving them of a counter-narrative.
Next, the science confirms the value of anchoring anchor ourselves in community and safe spaces. Creating a safe space for the child, giving them a physically secure environment away from the frustration, allows them to de-escalate. In response to Section 28, the queer community established support networks, queer bookshops, and helplines, to maintain their sanity, away from the headlines.
It’s also important to use a calm, matter of fact tone. By responding to the child in a completely neutral way, you prevent them from using your emotional energy to escalate. Activists in the Suffragette movement would respond to aggressive anti-suffrage crowds, with silence and a disaffected posture, refusing to give them the theatrical display of anger that they wanted to feed off.
Once the peak of the tantrum has passed at last, behaviourists recommend re-directing the toddler’s attention to a concrete and achievable task. In the Matchgirls’ Strike, the strikers ignored the propaganda arrayed against them and worked to focus on material, tangible progress, concentrating on building their union and on documenting factory safety.
Lastly, the moment the extinction burst stops, psychologists recommend flooding the child with positive reinforcement, joy, and affection. During the Anti-Apartheid Movement, activists integrated communal singing, dancing and cultural festivals into their resistance, actively refuelling their spirits. As this example shows us, we can lean into joy, and use rest as resistance during the fight too.
What all of the texts about extinction bursts have in common is one golden rule: do not give in, especially not when the noise is loudest. Stay calm, stay focused, and keep on doing what you’re doing. It may not seem like it, but victory is within our grasp.
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