My kid once owned a millennial t-shirt featuring an image of Darth Vader that read: “Come to the dark side: we have cookies.”

Apart from its humorous 21st-century rendition of the greater-good argument, the meme also brings to mind the hidden forces now able to hack us and exploit our basic needs like cyber criminals scraping personal data — this time mining our vulnerabilities. (READ MORE: Let’s Just Say It: Transgenderism Is a Mental Illness)

The dark side of female subcultures, namely social media persuaders targeting gender-nonconforming individuals, was codified by Lisa Littman in 2020. She identified these online figures as the major driver of trans-identification, and the reason for the demographic shift away from middle-aged fetishistic men seeking trans-medicine to the younger aged, predominantly female, cohort seeking double mastectomies.

But do the facts around trans-ideation remain in the dark? The fact that influencer media directs gender nonconformists to trans-mills has now become evidentiary material in at least one recent lawsuit brought against trans medicine. Luca Hein’s filed a lawsuit in September of 2023 against the Nebraska Medical Center and Nebraska Medicine. According to Hein’s lawyers, the medical center had ignored the prima facie spread of trans-ideation on social media which led to negligence and malpractice. Hein, who was then 16, explains, “I was talked into medical intervention that I could not fully understand the long-term impacts and consequences.”

The central role of the trans-influencer markets on social media is an important inflection point going forward.

The Online Eco-System

Of course, marketing directed at the trans demographic is all over the media. As far as marketing discretely, however, social media has an advantage because it is ostensibly set up for social rather than sales interactions. The ace card for influencer marketing is interaction.

Social media shapes and is shaped by culture. Ever since the famous Asch study, we’ve known behavior can be molded by things like normative bias causing individuals to “go along” with the group. In the case of gender-nonconforming individuals, this is counterintuitive, but seeking out online subcultures is motivated in part by the universal need to fit in. Giving tacit agreement to trans-identification by following the group both affirms an outsider status and can encourage individuals to listen to advice recommending practices like binding. (Binding is the use of compressive material to flatten breasts and present a male chest contour, potentially leading to serious health problems.)

Trans-ecology online is a conjuncture of LGBTQ subcultures, trans-influencers, and curated spam bots. Forums and threads tend to be experienced as intimate friend groups organized around self-help information, but also host ads in the form of sophisticated bot traffic. Paradoxically, strong affinity within a gender-nonconforming group makes trans-affiliation more likely. In other words, unlike a random forum, self-organized collectives related to trans-help can be more effective at generating commonality with a sense of urgency around trans-identification and personal care suggestions like binding.

Exploiting cognitive shortcuts, influencer markets rely on social media’s information cascades fed by scattered covert bot activity. For instance, keyword hashtags distributed by fake accounts can amplify trans-hashtag networks mimicking a naturally appearing cascade of trans-messaging or fake consensus. Moreover, curated bots are sophisticated enough now to dialogue with targeted individuals or within threads along a trans-themed line of inquiry. Posing questions is well within the basic parameters of health bots, which are already designed to identify symptoms and suggest solutions. This is just a new application of the diagnostic bot; social media and curated bots can both establish and reinforce group norms around binding. (RELATED: It’s Time to Call Out the Misogyny of the Transgender Movement)

Social media invites conformity to group norms even when those norms are harmful or lack validity. The most questionable norms are those around “dysphoria” and “gender incongruence,” both of which suggest that the experience of mental distress must mean that a healthy body requires urgent surgical interventions. In place of fully explored psychological treatment, medicalization is not backed by evidence drawn from long-term clinical practice. Instead of providing ways to recover self-acceptance, a diagnosis of dysphoria or incongruence leads to dissociation and self-harm according to psychologist Amy Sousa. Sousa points out that the diagnosis perpetuates a false mind/body split, hence reinforcing dissociation from the body. As is becoming increasingly clear, where the goal is to alleviate underlying causes of distress, any approach perpetuating dissociation is unhealthy.

Self–Care vs. Self–Harm

The origin of binding as a social media phenomenon should be the first clue to therapists that trans-ideation leads to self-harm. Binding has many negative effects, including collapsing lungs and compressed ribs. Since this is the case, the fact that searches for binding come back with DIY “safe” binding tips as well as pages of chest binders for sale reveals that the magic of social media extends well beyond teen subcultures.

In the world of medicalized identities, binding serves as a primer or foothold — what marketing specialists term a foot-in-the-door for trans-medicine. Wearing a binder is no doubt presented as a temporary coping mechanism to calm anxiety (more likely, dysphoria). At the same time, however, binding concretizes trans-ideation. At that point, more pronounced medical measures enter the person’s choice horizon. Binding thus serves as a seemingly low-risk act and the resulting lessening of distress can be experienced as definitive proof of a trans identity.

Doctors who meet with the urgent demand for mastectomies may not recognize the pivotal role of what is essentially a failed coping mechanism: binding is never enough to address social media heightened and sustained distress. The overlooked influence of social media on the taking up of breast binding cannot be overstated: research shows chest binding originated not in clinics but on social media.

Binding never alleviates distress entirely precisely because it cannot be sustained around the clock, seven days a week.  Nevertheless, it continues to be advocated for despite the harm it causes.

The fact that the suggestion to bind in response to distress is a trans phenomenon that originated online rather than from clinics raises alarms in itself given the negative health impact of binding. As a necessary psychological precursor to surgery, coping mechanisms such as binding seem designed to fail, eventually encouraging individuals to seek the surgical remedy. In this way, a seemingly harmless health nudge possibly from a bot leads eventually to big-ticket surgical interventions. (READ MORE: Notre Dame Requires Gender Ideology Training Session)

Emulating the attitudes of social media influencers within the context of an LGBTQ-affirming public generates the cultural phenomenon of trans-identification. In other words, it is not just social media self-help groups that host trans-ideation, the mentality of the public is also being innervated. Acquiescing to the demands of bot-hacked echo chambers on social media has been detrimental, and it has largely played out at a stealth level.

Medical providers now tap into this dark side via covert health bots. Influencer media — together with its automated health bots — can thus infiltrate insular millennial self-help enclaves as an unsuspected influence operation opening up seats on the trans-train. Unveiling these shadowy virtual realities not just on social media but in the public sphere flips the script.

Dr. Faith Kuzma is a retired Assistant Professor of English.  Kuzma has written for Salvo, The Canadian Patriot, Psych Reg, and Mercator Net, among others. Find her @faithkuz