Laurel Duggan(Daily Caller)
The social media site TikTok is teeming with videos promoting “top surgeries,” double mastectomies performed on women — and in some cases on adolescents — in order to help them present as male.
The website contains countless videos of young people, most of whom appear to be in their teen years, showing off their mastectomy scars, lying in hospital beds after operations and trying to raise money for the procedure, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of the site’s content. Young people also share videos showing the impact cross-sex hormones have on their voice and appearance, with a consistent subtext of encouragement and the promotion of medicalization.
Many experts critical of the rising popularity of transgender identities view the rise among young people as a kind of “social contagion” and credit social media with helping to spread these ideas.
“Social media has presented an image of gender transition which is far from the reality, but many teenagers buy this positive spin on a difficult process,” Stella O’Malley, psychotherapist and director of the gender-critical organization Genspect, told the DCNF. “When teenagers look at trans kids on social media, medical transition seems edgy, cool, and interesting. In reality this is a difficult pathway that is littered with complicated problems that come about because of difficulties with medicalizing our bodies.”
Young transgender people share post-operation videos to TikTok and encourage peers who are considering the procedure with affirming messages, insisting that it’s worth the pain, that they’ll love how they look and they won’t regret it. They explain their recoveries, revel in their ability to go outside without a shirt on and share their glee over looking the way they want to in their favorite clothes.
Screenshot/TikTok
Screenshot/TikTok
In one TikTok, an adolescent who had undergone a mastectomy encouraged girls not to throw away shirts that made them feel self-conscious about their bodies, explaining that they’ll love how they look in their clothes once they undergo the procedure.
“My first piece of advice for those of you who have yet to get top surgery is very important,” one young person said in a TikTok offering post-mastectomy recovery advice. “Keep that fucking shirt. Keep that shirt that’s been in your closet that you look at and get sad about because you know that if you had surgery you would love the way that you look in that shirt.”
Some doctors who perform sex change surgeries or administer cross-sex hormones use TikTok to promote their work, such as Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based plastic surgeon who specializes in transgender surgeries. She has posted dozens of videos about the surgeries she performs and often shares photos and videos of her young post-operation patients to show off her work.
