Mother Warns of Influence of Pornography on Gender Identity Among Youth

The mother of a teen girl who has recently detransitioned is warning parents about the influence of pornography and tight-knit online friend groups on youth who abruptly express a strong desire to transition. Jennifer* discovered her daughter Emily* was being groomed into claiming a ‘gender identity’ beginning from the age of 13 by programs at her school, older teens, and sexually explicit content.

According to Jennifer, her daughter began to question her identity after attending her school’s sexual education program called Teen Talk. Children were taught about pronouns and the meanings of sexual terms such as ‘pansexual’ and ‘polyamorous.’

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After the Teen Talk lectures, Emily, along with her friend group, adopted a variety of labels and shunned the term ‘cis.’

Speaking with Reduxx, Jennifer explained: “Nobody was ‘cis.’ They didn’t like that term. Being ‘cis’ is tantamount to being basic and none of them wanted to be that. That was my first inkling that something wasn’t right.”

Curious about the content of the sessions, Jennifer attended a talk for parents hosted a few months later. Parents were shown an image of a gender spectrum that had a GI Joe character at one end, representing ‘masculinity,’ and a Barbie doll at the other, representing ‘femininity.’

Jennifer described the gender identity lecture for parents as “nonsensical,” and stated they were encouraged to introduce their pronouns when speaking with young children.

“I raised my children to just be. You just are. You don’t need a label. Every time I raised my hand [to ask] ‘Why are you putting these kids in boxes?’ I was told to be quiet,” Jennifer said.

“These [gender identity lessons] are taught by third parties. They’re not taught by the actual teachers at the school. They don’t have a teaching certificate. So our tax dollars are being used to pay to indoctrinate our kids,” she added.

The following year, Emily began corresponding via social media with a 16-year-old girl who identified as a boy. The girl, who went by the name Billy,* admitted to having been sexually abused as a child. In group chats with much younger teens, she described sex acts in graphic detail.

Billy began sending Emily Japanese anime pornography in the yaoi genre, which often features feminine men in sexual relationships. It was around this time that Jennifer’s daughter began to believe she was a transgender boy.

“Anime is a huge component and it turns into gender-bending themes pretty quickly. Again, the girls in the anime are highly sexualized, and no girl wants to be that. They want to be the guy. My daughter thought she was a gay boy because she likes boys but she didn’t want to be a girl.”

In addition to the anime pornography, Billy sent Emily videos of herself performing sexual acts. Distraught, she opened up to her mother about her internet activity and shared all of her private social media accounts with Jennifer. Her daughter had “accounts in every possible platform – Discord, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok.”

“There were Discord and Instagram chatrooms where girls discussed whether they are bottoms or tops, givers or receivers, abusers or abused. My daughter started drawing penises on her walls in her room, her shoes and her pants,” Jennifer wrote in a blog post for Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT). Many of the girls in these chat groups identified as transgender.

Advice administered in the group discussions included the suggestion to enter prostitution, with an explanation being given of: “since you are really a boy, your girl body really isn’t yours so it’s no big thing to sell pictures to men for money.”  A tutorial for how to find a “sugar daddy” was also shared. According to Jennifer, the older trans-identified girls would groom the younger girls into creating sexual videos of themselves on Snapchat.

The history on every device her daughter used was filled with violent pornography which was “mostly guy-on-guy.” Her daughter had been consuming anime pornography filled with rape scenes, ‘pregnant’ men being sodomized, and illustrated child pornography. There were also internet sites that contained written sexual violence fantasies.

At only 13 years-old, Emily had been searching for fetish products involved in BDSM, including ball gags, whips, handcuffs, and leather outfits. The majority of her followers on TikTok also identified as transgender. Concerned, Jennifer began calling random contacts on her daughter’s phone and was shocked when adult men answered.

Jennifer explained to Reduxx that in addition to the private chat groups among teens, adult men on Twitter had been grooming her daughter.

“We had men on Twitter sending their homemade pornography to my daughter. It was like an onslaught. It’s almost as if… when a kid puts on their Instagram that they’re female-to-male, ‘FTM,’ it’s like a beacon that calls all the deviants out. These kids are vulnerable. They actually tell these kids, ‘It’s not your body’, they teach them to disassociate from their bodies,” she said.

“I think [pornography] is one of the biggest components in all of this. These young girls are exposed to pornography and they don’t want to be on the receiving end of what they see.”

Jennifer limited her daughter’s access to the internet and prohibited her from using social media. She changed Emily’s phone number and locked her devices in a safe. At the age of 15, Emily began to desist, and now no longer identifies as transgender.

Dr. John Money, the sexologist and psychologist from New Zealand credited with coining the terms “gender identity” and “gender role,” recommended showing pornography to children in order to help them develop their “gender schema.”

In his 1975 book Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a Woman, Money wrote: “explicit sexual pictures… can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education. The best time to introduce such pictures is before a child’s biological clock has signaled the start of puberty.”

Dr. Money conducted experiments on children and exposed his young patients to pornography. He would also force them to perform genital inspections on each other and to engage in what he called “copulation play.”

John Money’s theory of childhood sexual rehearsal play was published repeatedly in books and academic papers for decades, and such sexual abuse was considered critically important in the establishment of a healthy gender identity.

*Names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.


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Genevieve Gluck
Genevieve Gluck
Genevieve is the Co-Founder of Reduxx, and the outlet's Chief Investigative Journalist with a focused interest in pornography, sexual predators, and fetish subcultures. She is the creator of the podcast Women's Voices, which features news commentary and interviews regarding women's rights.
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