Is Tumblr making kids trans?

Daisy Strongin is a wife, mother, and de-transitioner who once truly believed she was a boy before finding Christ.

Strongin cites feelings of being uncomfortable with her own body and femininity, which led to her transition — as well as being chronically online at the young age of 11 years old.

It was 2009, and she had just gotten her first laptop.

Strongin spent most of her free time online, focusing on YouTube and Tumblr before stumbling on a Tumblr community with the same interests as her: "Doctor Who" and "Sherlock."

“I wasn’t at all looking for gender related stuff at first, but then the gender Tumblr stuff and the Doctor Who, Sherlock stuff — there’s some intersection,” Strongin tells Allie Beth Stuckey, adding, “I think that a lot of the girls that were in those fandoms also felt like they didn’t fit in.”

Strongin recalls stumbling on something that defined the term “gender queer” when she was in high school.

“It was basically saying gender queer is when you feel like you’re neither male nor female, or like you’re a bit of both, and I really resonated with that,” she explains, noting that the existence of the term made her feel better about herself because she wasn’t alone in her feelings.

“Then I kind of fell into a rabbit hole of all of these other different made up identities regarding gender and people,” Strongin says.

While in some cases, kids are groomed by adults into believing they’re transgender, Strongin is adamant that it wasn’t adults — but mostly other young girls online.

Then, she started watching YouTube videos of people documenting their transitions.

“As I sort of dove into the gender community,” she explains, “I started to convince myself that I’m probably trans, because there were a lot of influencers saying things like ‘If you think you’re trans you probably are.’”

Then, she started to hear people online claiming that if you believe you might be trans and don’t transition, you’re more likely to “off yourself at some point.”

Because Strongin was depressed at the time, she took the advice — or what Stuckey calls a “threat” — to heart.

“Hearing that,” Strongin says, “it went from being just like this silly little label that I felt like fit me and just kind of a personality trait really, to this is life and death.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.