6 Social Media in the Development of Gender Dysphoria
A recent study documented an increasing trend among adolescents to self-diagnose as transgender after binges on social media sites such as Tumblr, Reddit, and YouTube. In on-line forums, parents reported that their children seemed to experience a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330
Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same time frame. Parents also report that their children exhibited an increase in social media/internet use prior to disclosure of a transgender identity. In many schools and communities, there are entire peer groups “coming out” as trans at the same time.
Parents reported subjective declines in their child’s mental health (47.2%) and in parent-child relationships (57.3%) since the child “came out” and that their child expressed a range of behaviors that included: expressing distrust of non-transgender people (22.7%); stopping spending time with non-transgender friends (25.0%); isolating themselves from their families (49.4%), and only trusting information about gender dysphoria from transgender sources (46.6%).
Most (86.7%) of the parents reported that, along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, their child either had an increase in their social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar time frame, or both. This suggests that social peer influences may be at play in the rapid growth of GD students.