A growing number of teenagers and children are diagnosing themselves with mental illnesses based on what they see on TikTok. It is a serious problem, and some people are making it worse by just accepting these non-doctors’ self-diagnoses at face value.
Surely, such a thing could never happen with transgenderism and gender dysphoria.
According to the New York Times, “a number of mental health providers say that they are seeing an uptick in teenagers and young adults who are diagnosing themselves with mental illnesses — including rare disorders — after learning more about the conditions online.” Many children are then embracing ineffective and inappropriate treatments for their imagined issues, and some “will choose to believe TikTok over a therapist.”
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The piece goes on to emphasize how easy it is for children to misdiagnose themselves and how easy it is for them to fall down the rabbit hole of “mental health experts” on TikTok, but there is a noteworthy omission. Nowhere in the piece is gender, transgenderism, or gender dysphoria mentioned. But it is clear that the social contagion leading children to identify with rare mental disorders is the very same one leading to a surge in gender-confused children.
There has been a surge in children identifying as transgender in recent years, even though most children grow out of gender dysphoria by the time they reach adulthood. TikTok has become a cesspool for toxic gender ideology, convincing children not just that they may be transgender but also “nonbinary” or “gender fluid” and that it is important and easy to transition, which includes promoting double mastectomies for young girls. All you have to do is “yeet the teets.”
Turns out my surgeon is on tiktok advertising her services (username: gendersurgeon). She loves talking about “yeeting the teets”, which I guess is the, uh… professional term for double mastectomy these days? pic.twitter.com/tJ4ihhrdaa
— Grace (@HormoneHangover) February 13, 2021
The Times piece claims that the silver lining in this phenomenon is that “finding a positive, supportive community online can be powerful.” But nothing explains the surge in transgenderism among children better. On TikTok, transgenderism is a virtue, and the online community is swamped in support and “affirmation.”
This has bled into school policies as well. Is it any surprise that children would choose to identify as transgender when there are so many social incentives for doing so?
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Social media has plenty of issues (and TikTok is the worst of them all), but this one is entirely unsurprising. Children are impressionable, especially after living through more than two years of social isolation, anxiety, depression, and school lockdowns. Children diagnosing themselves with mental illnesses deserve support and understanding, not mindless “affirmation,” as the Times piece illustrates.
The same applies to children who decide they are transgender.
