August 12, 2024 // Perspective

When Smartphones Make Gender Unbearable

Brett Salkheld

By Brett Salkheld

The past 10 years have seen an unprecedented rise in people identifying as something other than their biological sex. Such a phenomenon seems to require an explanation. There are, of course, many factors at play, far more than can be investigated in one column. But surely it is significant that these increases become noticeable around the time when smartphones come onto the scene. And, as young people’s social lives have moved more and more online, cases of gender dysphoria and the adoption of novel gender identities has skyrocketed. What’s going on here?

Perhaps the most obvious issue is the content young people can access on the internet. Anyone who has tried researching such matters on YouTube knows the rabbit hole you can go down. YouTube is chock full of videos purporting to help young people identify their “true” gender identity. And once you’ve looked at one such video, the algorithm is going to show you more and more of them.

Reddit is another culprit here. In fact, one of the strongest predictors of opting for a new gender identity is time spent in certain Reddit subgroups. And we could go down the line: TikTok is increasingly prominent, and then there are things you’ve likely never heard of, but your kids have, like DeviantArt.

The content available on the internet is certainly a factor here. But there is more to it. The eminent Catholic communications theorist Marshall McLuhan’s most famous aphorism is “the medium is the message.” McLuhan learned this truth from the Incarnation. When God really wanted to get his message across, he chose the most intimate possible medium. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus say more, and say it more powerfully, than any other medium ever could.

So, it makes sense for us to think about smartphones, and about the various social media platforms on them, as media whose messages are more than just the content they convey. As Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si’, “technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities.”

One remarkable (if actually under-remarked) feature of a whole host of social media platforms is how they shape our experience of gender. Platforms such as Twitter and TikTok notoriously push boys toward things like political violence and girls toward things like eating disorders. In other words, their algorithms feed upon and amplify the kinds of fears and anxieties natural to any young person in an extremely gendered way and simultaneously make their experience of gender an experience of fear and anxiety.

Instagram has its own peculiar logic. The experience of curating one’s own appearance via filters can actually induce a kind of body dysmorphia when one looks in the mirror and does not recognize one’s own unfiltered face. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently did a piece on young women trying to resolve this dysmorphia by getting surgery to look more like their filters. One acutely heartbreaking scene featured a young woman wanting to be rid of a rather ethnically particular nose next to her mother who, it was acknowledged out loud, had given her that nose.

Dating apps are also in play here. Apps such as Tinder produce dramatically different experiences for men and for women. The primary experience of Tinder for the vast majority of men is a constant stream of rejection. For women, it is a constant stream of creepy strangers. The upshot is at least cynicism about the opposite sex and about romantic prospects in general, and sometimes sentiments much stronger than cynicism.

We could go on. The point is that our experience of a whole suite of apps, many of which completely dominate people’s lives, is strongly correlated with a negative experience of gender. We should perhaps not be surprised, then, that the most common forms of novel gender identification are not boys identifying as girls or girls identifying as boys, but both boys and girls identifying as something else entirely. When masculinity and femininity are both completely compromised and unappealing, to be some version of “non-binary” can be a way of opting out of the whole sorry mess.

And then there are the phones themselves. The more we live on our phones, the less we live in our bodies. Our lives and relationships can become as two-dimensional as our screens. Sometimes our phones can seem like another appendage. It might be closer to the truth to say that we are becoming the appendages, our bodily existence a kind of inconvenient addendum to our real lives. In other words, even before we get to the content of the internet, or the (mal)formation done to us by social media, our phones themselves are a disembodying technology. It should perhaps not surprise us that people who don’t live in their bodies sometimes struggle to identify with those bodies.

The gender crisis impacting so many young people is, to a large degree, a crisis of embodiment. In such a complex crisis, there is no shortage of issues that demand attention. But if we ignore the role of our smartphones here, we are surely missing something critical.

Brett Salkeld, Ph.D., is a Catholic theologian, speaker, and author. He serves as archdiocesan theologian for the Archdiocese of Regina, Saskatchewan.