TikTok is enticing kids into having trans surgeries, take cross-sex hormones: child advocates warn

By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator Monday, December 27, 2021

Child advocates opposed to trans-ideology have warned about the risks of allowing children to use TikTok, particularly as evidence mounts that youth are being enticed to take experimental puberty blockers and undergo elective surgeries to remove essential body parts.

According to an analysis by the Daily Mail on Sunday, TikTok videos with the hashtag #Trans have been viewed over 26 billion times. Such videos often feature young people documenting in a fun, light-hearted way the various stages of undergoing experimental hormones and irreversible, body-altering surgeries to appear more as the opposite sex. The popular social networking service was reportedly the most downloaded app in the U.K. last year. 

Parents in the U.K. are increasingly concerned that the app is fueling a contagion, luring vulnerable young people into identifying as the opposite sex and potentially a lifetime of harmful repercussions. TikTok's own figures reveal that over 25% of TikTok users ages 15 to 25, and children between the ages of 4 to 15 use the service for 69 minutes per day on average.  

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Groups critical of transgenderism say that the proliferation of the ideology on social media puts young people at serious risk, given how it's promoted as the latest trend. 

Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend said TikTok is "hugely influential and it’s full of videos that portray medical transition as cool and edgy."

"Gender is seen as the new rebellion," Davies-Arai said. 

She added, "These social media platforms that promote medical transition should be made to include a warning on such material."

In an email to The Christian Post on Monday, investigative blogger Jennifer Bilek, who writes at The 11th Hour and has extensively documented how intricately tethered transgender activism is with the medical-industrial complex, said it's vital for the public to realize how much technology has grown. She stressed that technology has the power to influence everyone, especially children, in ways they are not even aware.

"Internet marketers are using that power to sell us dissatisfaction with ourselves and then the cures for that dissatisfaction. Children are less equipped than adults to realize what is happening to them, especially when the marketing is happening on their own social media channels. We cannot control children’s access to all mainstream media, but it is our responsibility as adults to protect them from predatory marketers on their tech platforms," Bilek explained. 

"That children could be exposed to such a thing as sex mutilating surgeries 26 billion times is unfathomable. That it is being marketed as cool via 'trans' models, surgeons, and make-up, on their social media is unconscionable. Parents and caregivers have to step in and become the tech police of what their children are exposed to because transition surgeries are being marketed to them and they are buying the illusion as a panacea for all their adolescent angst," she added. 

Similarly, Kate Harris of the LGB Alliance — a group of dissident lesbian, gay and bisexual people, which was formed in part because of opposition to trans ideology and activism in the LGBT group Stonewall’s policies — expressed concern over millions of impressionable children watching these videos. 

"It’s no coincidence that the growth of TikTok coincides exactly with the exponential growth of children presenting with gender dysphoria," Harris said, noting that some of the videos on the platform are "deeply frightening."

"The message is so often, 'Don’t involve your parents,'" she said. 

"What these videos would lead a generation of children to believe is that it is easy to change sex and that it is the answer to all of your problems."

It was recently announced that the video platform was formally partnering with Stonewall, the most prominent LGBT rights group in the country, in order to promote transgender-themed material.

A spokesperson for TikTok told the Daily Mail: "We are honored that the LGBTQ+ community has embraced TikTok from our very early days, as a platform for self-expression, education, community-building and joy."

Similarly, a spokesperson for Stonewall commented that content "allows young LGBTQ+ people to know that they are not alone in their experiences."

The Daily Mail's analysis of the data about the normalization of taking experimental drugs and undergoing trans surgery comes on the heels of a prominent publication showcasing the most radically invasive transgender surgical procedures. 

In its most recent edition, New York magazine featured as its cover story an article about the journey of journalist Gabriel Mac, a woman who has openly recounted her extensive psychological struggles as she underwent a phalloplasty, an operation that removed layers of tissue and fat from her thigh to construct a fake penis.

Mac was photographed wearing nothing but Calvin Klein underwear with the surgical scar on her leg clearly visible. The article, titled "My Penis, Myself" detailed the operation as a necessary step for her to feel complete in her chosen identity. 

Until recent years, gender dysphoria diagnoses were extremely rare and seen almost exclusively in pre-pubescent boys. Today, post-puberty teenage girls are the predominant demographic, and the kind of gender dysphoria they report experiencing is not traditional but is, according to public health researcher Lisa Littman, the result of a largely internet-fueled peer contagion.

The phrase "rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)" emerged from Littman's groundbreaking study in 2018 to describe the phenomenon many young people were experiencing. This medical mystery was subsequently explored in greater depth in the book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier.