Detransition activist Elle Palmer, a biological woman who identified as a transgender man through most of her teens, told The Tennessee Star she was optimistic legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), proposed by Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), would “inspire parents” to keep a closer watch on their children’s use of the internet.
Palmer, who recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to support Tennessee’s law banning transgender treatments for minors, told The Star last week that she became enraptured with online discussions related to feminism, gender theory, and ultimately transgenderism during her teen years, when she described herself as anxious and inverted.
She told The Star she was first approached by older men on Facebook when she was just 11, and by time she was 14, Palmer said she met a peer who introduced her to an online community that would captivate the remainder of her adolescence.
“They taught me about feminism. They taught me about leftism,” said Palmer, explaining she “started believing all the stuff that they were telling me.”
Palmer first identified as non-binary at age 14, and told The Star she used information gleaned from social networking websites, particularly Reddit, to convince her parents to allow her to transition from her biological sex to the male gender before her seventeenth birthday.
“By the time I was 14, all of my Twitter friends were starting to come out as non-binary or trans,” said Palmer. “Everybody had already been gay. That wasn’t the exciting thing anymore. [Transgender] was like the trendy thing… I just walked into this thing, this culture, I had no idea that it existed.”
Palmer detransitioned to her biological, female gender at age 19. Now 25, she told The Star that she was optimistic a new law could give parents the motivation they need to keep other children from falling victim to questionable online communities and trends.
“I think legislation, it might help. It might make it easier, especially letting parents have more control,” said Palmer. “I had friends in high school who had their parents take away their phone at certain times, and only allowed them on the internet at certain times, and I was amazed by that. I was like, ‘I wish that my parents had done that for me,’ because I would have been saved a lot.”
Still, Palmer surmised she “would have squirreled my way around that type of thing” as a teen, and suggested families could not depend on legislation alone.
“I do think maybe some sort of legislation will inspire parents to have more control over their what their kids are doing online,” said Palmer.
Blackburn’s KOSA was recently rewritten with the help of Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of Elon Musk’s X, with Donald Trump Jr. assisting in a last-minute push to pass the legislation before the end of this year.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
