TikTok is fuelling interest in transgenderism among young people, child advocates warn

(Photo: Unsplash/Kon Karampelas)

Child advocates opposed to trans ideology have warned about the risks of allowing children to use TikTok amid growing concern 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 UK last year.

Parents in the UK 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.

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."

Courtesy of The Christian Post