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(LifeSiteNews) – Daily Wire host Michael Knowles highlighted on his show on Friday the story of a woman named Helena Kerschner who has “detransitioned” after taking hormones and living as if she was a man for several years.

She told Knowles that self-esteem issues as a teenage girl drove her online, where she began to learn about transgenderism. Kerschner took hormones at 18 years old, but now at 22 has stopped doing so and is no longer pretending to be a man. She said pressure from groups online led her to mistakenly believe she needed to transition.

“Around the time I was 15 years old, I was going through a period in my life where I just didn’t have a lot of friends, I was having body insecurities that were just really kind of tormenting me, and this led me to go online a lot,” Kerschner said.

This eventually led her to the blog site Tumblr, where she said “gender ideology” is rampant.

“The gender ideology is very prominent there,” she said. She said there are a lot of “social incentives” to change your pronouns and embrace gender ideology to stay in those online communities.

She said those types of “internet communities” can “feel so accepting” and take an unhealthy role in a young girl’s life. “They’re what makes you feel accepted and they’re where you want to fit in, so you’re willing to do almost anything to kind of conform to that social group,” Kerschner said.

Online communities like this will encourage teens to explore transgenderism and will tell them that normal teenage self-esteem issues are actually signs of gender dysphoria. “There are people in these communities who will say, if you don’t like your body, that’s a sign of gender dysphoria, if you don’t fit in with other girls, that’s a sign of gender dysphoria, if you don’t like the way your voice sounds in a recording, that’s a sign of gender dysphoria.”

“As a teenager you don’t really realize how universal it is [to not like your body or voice],” Kerschner told Knowles.

Peers “validated” Kerschner’s decision to begin hormones and living as a man.

“It’s a lot of talking to other peers who are very creative [and] they’re imagining these ideas, they’re imagining what their future is going to look like, and just not really having any pushback against that from any of your peers,” she said.

This “spirals out of control,” Kerschner said.

“There’s also this element … when you are using social media and you’re constantly scrolling it all day, you’re just getting message after message, after picture, after idea … seeping into your mind,” she said.

She said further:

When you don’t have those good … stable relationships outside of the internet, it’s really easy for that to all go in question. So you can begin to form beliefs that don’t stand up to scrutiny and would easily kind of fall apart if you were to verbalize them to someone who is actually critical of those ideas, but engaging you in a compassionate way.

You’re able to just carry those ideas with you and make decisions based off of them when in reality, the ideas themselves, like, they don’t make sense. They’re not founded in reality. So for me, it was a lot of stuff just based on fantasy, based on literally just pictures that I was seeing all the time of cute boys and then these messages that were saying you know ‘your life is going to be so much better if you transition, you are trans, the reason you don’t fit in with other girls is because you’re trans.’

So it’s really this stew, this big complicated stew of unreality that young people fall into when they’re just scrolling all day on social media and don’t have pushback, really that technological point.

Kerschner shared that she faced little resistance from medical professionals in beginning to transition. She said it took just a short, 20-minute appointment at Planned Parenthood with a social worker to begin to take the hormones.

Then the nurse practitioner started the testosterone injections and “understated”  the risks, according to Kerschner. The formerly gender-confused woman told the nurse practitioner that she needed more testosterone and the health care professional did not question her or push back at all.

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