Being transgender in the United States has always been a difficult and daunting experience, but it has only grown more dangerous since President Donald Trump’s inauguration a few weeks ago. This danger has especially increased for transgender youth, who are particularly vulnerable due to their lack of legal protections. 

Transgender youth cannot access gender-affirming care without their parents’ consent, and now Trump has made accessing care even harder by signing a bill banning transgender people under 19 years of age from receiving gender-affirming care. With so many restrictions and attacks being levied at transgender people, and transgender youth especially, many transgender individuals are choosing to go “stealth.”

In the trans community, going stealth means that a transgender person is able to pass in society as the gender that they are transitioning to without having to tell people they are a trans man or trans woman. For example, if someone identified as a man, they would be gendered as male automatically without having to declare himself as a man.

Being stealth also often means not disclosing that one is transgender to people one isn’t extremely close to, which is done to stay safe in situations where being transgender could put someone’s well-being at risk. 

This option of being stealth, however, has been ripped away from many transgender children who are exploited by their families online. 

Family vloggers have particularly infringed on the stealth of their transgender children. Many family vloggers display their family on the internet in order to make money through presenting their lives as a form of entertainment. This career choice often leads to deeply exploitative relationships between parents and children. 

Family vloggers such as TheMcLeodFam and Jonathan Joly have both documented their children’s transitions in an extremely publicized manner. In both situations, the children were less than 10 years old when they began to transition online. 

Transitioning can already be an extremely stressful and emotional time for transgender individuals — without their experience being broadcasted to millions of strangers. For so many parents to choose to share this extremely vulnerable time in a child’s life with millions of people on the internet, especially in this political climate, is almost unthinkable. 

Over recent years, family vlogs have increasingly received criticism from the larger public for their exploitative nature. 

Children across the internet are having vulnerable moments and awkward situations plastered online for everyone to see. These children also have very few legal protections guaranteeing them payment for their work or even the right to have videos of themselves removed once they turn 18. This can make the relationship between a vlogging parent and child exploitative, as the child has no autonomy or ability to refuse their childhood being on public display. 

Such exploitation is only compounded if the child is transgender. Not only are the parents exploiting their child to make money but they are doing so by tokenizing and monetizing their young child’s gender identity. This public outing opens up the child to a litany of potential problems such as harassment and bullying both in person and online, and in some cases could lead to the child being put in physical harm. 

A study published in the National Institute of Health found that one in 10 transgender students experienced bullying, sexual harassment, unwanted sexual intercourse and dating conflict over the course of the year — every form of victimization the NIH assessed. Additionally, more than 4 out of every 5 transgender youth in the study faced peer victimization in the last year.

By publicly displaying a child’s transition at such a young age, you take away their ability to choose to be stealth. You strip them of their autonomy in a way that can barely be fathomed, which is truly a cruel thing for a parent to do to their child. In order to protect kids, especially in this time of widespread hostility against transgender youth, parents must stop exploiting their children — transgender or otherwise — on the internet for views. 

A child’s decision to transition should be a private one done with care and consideration, not one done in front of millions of people. That is a vulnerability that very few people will ever experience in their life and to put that online leaves that transgender child open to absolutely all sorts of abuse. Now more than ever, we must pressure parents to take their transgender children off the internet in order to protect their safety and well-being. 

Peyton Dacy is a junior writing about the struggles queer people face on college campuses and beyond. His column, “Lavender Letters,” runs every other Tuesday.