Social Media Harms Girls

If you search online for the phrase “harms of social media on girls,” you will be able to spend the day investigating many sources, reading articles, and watching videos about how social media is harmful to the mental health of girls. It should come as no surprise that social media is perpetuating body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, social comparison, self-harm, and suicide. Girls can’t reach the unattainable physical ideals they see when browsing their favorite social media platforms. Social contagions are rampant, contributing to eating disorders, trans-identification, and a plethora of other destructive ideas. Of course, social media also harms boys, particularly when it involves unlimited access to pornography.

The topic of social media harm is well-covered by the media and generally understood and accepted by the public. I wish to dig deeper into one aspect of the harm: social media is contributing to girls declaring they are boys and asking for body altering surgeries, such as mastectomies. Any parent who has lost a precious daughter (or son) to gender ideology and medicalization knows that social media played a big part in their capture and subsequent pathway to taking drastic and irreversible, harmful actions.  

Anyone who grew up before social media existed knows that girls did not feel good about themselves when viewing magazines with airbrushed and photoshopped models, many of whom were dangerously thin. Now, we have filters on photos posted on social media sites that do not reflect the reality of what a teen sees in the mirror. It used to be that girls who didn’t want to conform to gender stereotypes were called tomboys. Many of my friends were tomboys in their youth and have expressed to me that had there been social media back when we were in high school, it might have influenced them to believe they were “born in the wrong body”. These former tomboys are thankful they were not pushed to harm themselves in the ways that gender ideology harms youth today. Gender ideology funnels girls with even the slightest tomboy inclinations onto the trans path - taking testosterone and possibly progressing to surgery. We are losing today’s tomboys because they have been pressured and persuaded to view themselves as wrong instead of just as non-stereotypical females.

We are also losing boys who display effeminate behaviors and preferences. Instead of letting these boys grow up into healthy gay men or just acknowledging that they, too, don’t fit typical men stereotypes, the push is to give them estrogen and surgeries to make them appear to be girls, effectively moving toward gay erasure. Parents who want their kids left alone without drastic, irreversible medical interventions are demonized and considered not progressive.

How can adolescents grow in self-confidence and bodily acceptance when the way they measure themselves is artificial? They often determine their social standing by the number of likes, comments, and followers they have online. When radical surgery is normalized to be the solution to complex, underlying issues or simply non-stereotypical preferences, how can a parent ever offset that indoctrination? Kids today obsessively view social media day and night. Influencers pushing gender ideology suggest that parents are no longer of value unless they go along with the kid’s self-identification, declarations, and demands.

I recently read The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Jonathan Haidt, has been writing high-quality books for many years. I first discovered his wisdom in The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Next, I read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. In The Anxious Generation Haidt mentions two current trends: 1) overprotection in the real world and 2) under protection in the virtual world. Both lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues for the generation born after 1995. He refers to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood.

The author suggests four foundational reforms:

1. No smartphones before high school

2. No social media before age sixteen

3. Phone-free schools

4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

The book was well-researched and compelling, and I hope every parent reads it. That being said, the book describes just the tip of the iceberg of when it comes to kids caught up in gender ideology.

Now, proponents of gender ideology are teaching kids that they can be born in the wrong body. If a child ingests the notion that they can be either a boy or a girl based on thoughts and feelings and that biological reality no longer exists, it causes them much confusion. Suddenly, kids are changing their names and using opposite-sex or non-binary pronouns—they/them/their—on a whim. Boys wear dresses to school, and girls switch to a boy’s look. They are encouraged to self-ID and then gain access to the opposite-sex bathrooms and changing rooms/locker rooms should they wish to be thought of as the opposite sex. Boys can now compete in girls’ sports if they identify as female (although some states are cracking down on this in attempts to save women’s sports). Teachers and schools do not attempt to correct this switching of presentation and self-ID; they sometimes even encourage it and help hide it from the parents.

All this upside-down thinking is considered progressive by those immersed in social justice campaigns. Kids are now being put on puberty blockers, which are being shown to cause terrible health consequences and are being banned in many European nations such as the UK. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/uk/england-nhs-puberty-blockers-trans-children-intl-gbr/index.html But in the US and Canada, families are being misled and told that puberty blockers are safe and any affects reversible.

In the US, girls have easy access to testosterone, which harms their endocrine systems and many other bodily functions and makes them drug-dependent medical patients for life. The girls taking cross-sex hormones are then quickly funneled into the surgery schedule for a mastectomy, which they refer to as “top surgery” because it sounds better. Tomboys and lesbians are being erased as social media platforms persuade them to consider themselves as boys instead of just kids who don’t want to follow gender stereotypes or are uncomfortable with the awareness that they are lesbian/gay. Boys are being pushed to take estrogen and have their genitals removed if they are effeminate, instead of being allowed to grow up as healthy gay men or effeminate straight men. And of course, more scenarios are coming out, such as autogynephilia, where the boy or man is sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. Boys can also be frightened of becoming men because some people have vilified men as evil patriarchs who display toxic masculinity. For these boys, they might feel it is “safer” to present themselves as girls.

But this essay cannot possibly cover all the reasons kids are self-harming due to the influence of gender ideology. So let’s circle back to social media, particularly how it relates to girls. Online groomers are looking for distressed kids and suggesting a quick fix, a magic solution to their confused thoughts about their bodies: they tell them that they were born in the wrong body and need to undergo immediate medical interventions to fix it. And they tell pre-puberty kids to be afraid of the bodily changes that are coming and hold them off with puberty blockers. Never mind that puberty has often been challenging for kids. Thanks to trans activists, there is little help for distressed or gender-confused kids to navigate puberty naturally with safeguards of therapy or body-positive options. People don’t understand the harm, and too many are going along with the dangerous “affirmation only” policy because the ideologists had the safeguards removed.

Many parents are deeply concerned about the normalization of self-harm. Social media platforms prolifically use hashtags such as #trans, #transmasc, #mtf, #hrt, and #topsurgery. Girls who have had mastectomies are posing bare-chested, displaying their scars and celebrating cutting off their healthy breasts. Mastectomies for girls are being glamourized. Young girls incessantly scrolling on their phones can gain unlimited access to these social media sites, where they are encouraged to take this radical and drastic step to alter their body’s appearance. And before their irreversible surgeries, they are taught to bind their breasts, which is painful and causes serious health issues. Why is there no regulation of social media regarding this cultivation of destruction on a generation of girls being encouraged to cut off a healthy and beautiful part of their bodies? Has the world gone mad?

And here’s another incomprehensible aspect of this trend: If a parent protests or asks questions, they are demonized. Today, those who prescribe the drugs and perform the surgeries have lost all sense of the sacred body and the Hippocratic oath of “Do No Harm.” Social media has gone to the dark side in more ways than one. It needs to stop.

Thousands of girls who are rushed into medicalization at the first sign of gender confusion are regretting losing this vital part of their bodies and may have lost their ability to have children. Girls who have been lucky enough to retain the ability to conceive after stopping the use of testosterone have described how they sobbed at the birth of their children when they could not breastfeed their babies. Their infants cannot benefit from breastmilk or enjoy the closeness of the experience because a surgeon cut off and threw out their healthy breasts, without a thought, during a frenzy of this harmful fad that has run unchecked for years.

Yes, parents are angry and kids have been horribly hurt. Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation is a start to bringing awareness of what the digital world is doing to children and vulnerable young people. Parents need others to step up to expose more of the harms of social media. Pornography is easily accessible to all ages too.

Haidt’s suggestion of no social media before age sixteen is a start, but it isn’t enough. It may be time to consider that social media is like cigarettes. Smoking is not appropriate for kids and not healthy for adults. The tobacco industry underwent significant regulations when it was discovered how addictive and harmful smoking is to human health. Social media also needs the same stringent controls and efforts to regulate it. How many kids do we have to lose to self-harm or suicide due to social media influence before we put regulations and safeguards into place? The time is now. Everyone can participate in getting kids off social media and reducing their own use. It is course-correction time. Help us bring our kids back to family values and parent-led leadership. We have cared for these kids since they were born and are looking out for their futures. Please don’t undermine parents’ authority and care for their children’s well-being. Parents need support. Many thanks to authors such as Jonathan Haidt, who sees what is happening and wants to create positive change for a better future. 

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