As one proponent of legislation that would restrict access to care for trans teens claimed, social media platforms are where trans youths are falsely “convinced” that their feelings of identifying as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth – known as gender dysphoria – are valid.
These fears of Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok as breeding grounds for instilling gender dysphoria in young people recall other moral panics over new media, from the Victorian-era paranoia that serialized stories called “penny dreadfuls” were going to incite a youth crime wave to 20th-century anxiety over children’s exposure to violence on television.
Moreover, it ignores the long-documented history of trans youth in North America, while assuming that trans youth using media to find social support and build community is somehow a new phenomenon.
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