There are a plethora of stories of children being pressured into adopting transgender personalities, but don’t bother using Google to search for them. I tried, and the search engine spat out unsolicited propaganda and falsehoods about children and transgender identity.
I searched for testimonies from young people who adopted transgender identities “because it was cool” — like the story of Ash Eskridge, a young woman who became convinced she was a boy after watching social media influencers promote transgenderism.
But Google’s AI tool brushes off the idea that transgender identities are often a social contagion, despite evidence to the contrary. A 2018 study from Brown University — which was quickly repressed after outrage from transgender ideologues — found that 87 percent of the children in question “became gender dysphoric after friends did, after increasing their time online, or both,” as my colleague Joy Pullmann reported at the time. The study included examples of friend groups all adopting transgender identities together, and of kids being rewarded for transgender identities with social incentives like popularity and praise. Another study, by researchers at Virginia Tech in 2023, found girls who adopted transgender identities were “more likely to be accepted by peers.”
The search engine would have you believe that children are not just capable of arbitrarily choosing their sex but of doing so before they graduate from diapers. “Gender identity typically solidifies between ages 3 and 4,” the AI overview claims. The hard scientific proof that your toddler’s biology is actually backwards, it says, can be a “girl playing with trucks or a boy preferring dolls.”
One of the sources collated by the AI summary is a Mayo Clinic article that instructs parents to reinforce and show “admiration” for children who show an interest in stereotypically cross-sex behaviors. You can even “help ease a child’s depression and anxiety” by socially transitioning them, say the Mayo Clinic staff. All of this so-called medical advice points to reinforcing a child’s gender confusion, never challenging it.
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If you think you know better than Google’s slop aggregator, it scolds you for “misunderstanding” and falling for “misinformation.” Linked as a reference for that line is an ABC News article about a 12-year-old whose mother allowed (or perhaps pressured?) her to give a speech to her local school board scolding people who “think that genitalia will make someone uncomfortable” in the locker room.
A gender dysphoric child’s “gender identity is different from their gender assigned at birth,” Google says, parroting the false claim that sex is just a random letter scrawled on birth certificates rather than a biological reality.
Finally, the search engine lectures us on the importance of “supporting” this destructive ideology that encourages kids to carve up their bodies and ingest synthetic hormones with irreversible consequences. Linked is a post from the Human Rights Campaign, which repeats the common emotional blackmail tactic of telling parents their kids might kill themselves if parents don’t fully endorse their gender delusions.
The Federalist asked a Google representative whether it plans to remove the one-sided propaganda, which obscures the real stories users like me are looking for and spreads lies about sex and gender dysphoria. He responded asking for more details about the initial search but did not provide an answer by publication time.
Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
