The Violence From Trans iPad Kids is About to Get a Lot Worse

Maybe you’ve got strict screen guardrails at home, but do you want your kid in the same room, or even the same building, as the iPad kid every day for 12 years?

here is an idea floating around right-wing circles, popularized by Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option, that normal families will need to strategically withdraw into intentional communities as mainstream culture continues its decline. I’ve been skeptical of this idea, having lived all my adult life in big cities, and have maintained a belief in engaging with the broader culture and fighting back where I can.

But after yet another massacre inflicted by a “person in a dress,” I am coming around to this idea of re-tribalization and expect elite society to increasingly revert into gated, high-trust enclaves. We are witnessing the very beginning of an epidemic of trans violence, which will accelerate this trend, because there’s little one can do to safeguard one’s children outside of a full retreat from mainstream society. I’m not thrilled about this, but your calculus changes when you have kids of your own. And the math is not looking good.

After Tumbler Ridge, Nashville, Minneapolis, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and others, so-called experts are still saying the uptick in trans violence is a myth. And although a relatively large portion of the mass shootings of the last few years have been perpetrated by trans-identifying people on a per capita basis, it’s overall still a small number. But I suspect this trend is going to get harder to dismiss over time.

The trans mass shooter is a confused, lonely loser who’s had his brain discombobulated on a cocktail of sissy hypno porn, digital grooming, and experimental pharmaceuticals with irreversible effects. Everyone in his world (doctors, teachers, parents) is telling him he’s normal because, throughout the West, it’s de facto prohibited or, in some places, even unlawful to say otherwise. Everyone has to affirm and support his decision to take powerful hormones and drugs to feel normal, but he can never seem to quite achieve that elusive state of normalcy, so anything that punctures the delusion is perceived as an existential threat. A genocide, even.

Many of the kids who start down this path are realizing too late that there are no takebacks, and a dozen or so have already followed it to the bloody conclusion that we’re seeing splashed across headlines.

If you don’t have kids, you may not yet realize how much worse it’s going to get. But unlike today’s extremely online shooters, the generation just now becoming teenagers came online, often without any adult supervision, before they knew how to walk or talk.

iPad Kids

I know how tempting it is to throw a tablet at the kids to shut them up for a half-hour so you can take a work call. It’s like having a free, live-in babysitter that buys you peace for hours at a time. But, of course, this comes at a cost. Ask any teacher, and they’ll tell you they can clock today’s “iPad kids” within seconds. They can’t focus, have no emotional regulation, experience stunted socialization, and can’t do simple tasks like brushing their teeth without the soothing glow of the screen. They don’t want to be offline. Without that dopamine drip, they’re jittery and prone to tantrums. They develop obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and they don’t grow out of it.

My parents put the family Compaq Presario in my bedroom before I was a teenager, and I’ve been extremely online ever since. But back then, my parents were paying attention. We had time limits, the door was open, and even then, it took a full minute to load Playboy’s homepage. Voice chat wasn’t around yet. I could only get into so much trouble.

Tonight, thousands of teenage burnouts will stay up till dawn, frying their dopamine receptors on hardcore pornography and whispering to older men or maybe their new best friend Claude — the only one who really understands them — and likely hear back some version of, “What you’re feeling is totally normal.”

I couldn’t do that on the Compaq Presario. It’s just different now, and the self-styled internet experts quoted in corporate media, who would reduce these concerns to reactionary Luddism, are coping.

Now, if you’re a parent and you’ve read this far, you’re probably in the 99th percentile of conscientiousness. You recognize the cost of screentime and use it sparingly. But most parents don’t and aren’t.

When you notice your kids have been zoning out on the iPad for too long, you feel a pang of guilt. Maybe you only use it in “emergencies” — on an airplane or in the car. But that’s you. Now imagine you’re a working single mom who’s just barely trying to make it through the day — every day. There’s a reason why those brain-dead, low-budget nursery rhyme videos have tens of millions of views on YouTube. It’s because literal babies are watching them one after another, all day long. You’ve seen the video where the babies react to Ms. Rachel, right? Babies aren’t even supposed to watch screens until they’re 2.

A 2025 report by Common Sense Media found that 40 percent of children have an iPad by the time they are 2 years old.

On top of all this, Google and other Big Tech firms have somehow convinced virtually every public school that no kid will survive the digital age without their own personal screens.

Disembodied Generation

It’s become a cliche that our tech overlords ban screens at home, but how can one not shudder at the implications of this choice? Are we about to experience something close to a speciation event, where kids who are raised by mindful, present parents branch off from the iPad kids and rule over those who can’t compete due to their stunted development?

One thing is certain: We’re raising a generation that is living online, finding their identity online, finding emotional connection online, and escaping into an online world that is colonizing their brains with destructive memes and compulsions, seducing them toward self-annihilation with pretty lies. Many kids will end up alienated from society, their families, and their own bodies.

Gen Alpha is being “raised by the screen” more comprehensively and from an unprecedentedly young age. They’re being exposed to confusing content at an age far too young for them to comprehend it. Some detransitioners will tell you that such traumatic exposure played a role in their dysphoria. Saying that sissy porn made them trans is one of those celebration parallax things, where if you say it, you’re a bigot, but they’re proud to say it themselves. But beyond the porn, there is something about the disembodied digital experience that triggers the dysphoric impulse. The internet is doing something to these kids.

On Reddit, you’ll find posts from people dipping their toes into trans identity, wondering if their dysphoria is “authentic” or an outgrowth of some other hyperfixation, often internet addiction.

It often seems to start with gaming, then gaming forums and chatrooms, where boys encounter older men who have plenty of time to listen and sympathize. One destransitioner describes his experience falling down a rabbit hole of digital addiction that began with an OCD that led him to excessive gaming and culminated in sharing photos of himself with much older men as a coping mechanism for his assorted anxieties and compulsions:

I knew that if I ever felt doubt about my appearance, I could also go on a trans forum, Reddit, or even my own Facebook and share a selfie and be paraded with compliments. For me at least, this was a way of outsourcing my self-esteem to others, through permission seeking and validation. Every trans person who posts in those spaces knows that no matter how you look you will receive positive attention because any negative commentary is seen as transphobic or hurtful. This is how masculine-looking trans women believe they are unmistakably female: their self-image is based on FaceApp and filters, as well as toxic validation online in these trans affirming spaces.

Eventually, the boy thinks, “It’s not that I’m a dumpy, socially maladjusted internet addict who needs to step outside of his own body to feel OK. I’m actually, literally just a cute girl, just like the ones from my favorite cartoons and video games. And look, I have all of these friends online who agree.”

Among detransitioners, YouTube, blogs, Tumblr, and online forums were the top sources that persuaded them to transition.

The Hall of Mirrors

AI presents new possibilities for manmade horrors beyond your comprehension. Researchers in the 1960s discovered a psychological phenomenon they dubbed the “ELIZA Effect” after noticing the human tendency to project emotions onto their primitive chatbot. Today, every teenager has access to chatbots that are far more complex and capable of mimicking human behavior, and we’re already seeing pathologies emerge, from users falling in love with AI to being incited to take their own lives. AI developers are spending lots of money to prevent outputs that might result in such tragic outcomes, but the phenomenon is common enough that it’s been dubbed “AI-associated psychosis.”

As of this year, ChatGPT now supports an “Adult Playtime” mode. It’s age-restricted, but it’s there.

So this generation is getting drawn into a psychosexual hall of mirrors by bots trained on the world’s worst advice and by malicious adults on Discord and other social platforms who are getting off on further corrupting them. Many of these kids have already taken irreversible steps toward their delusion, and they may never again have another shot at a normal life. It’s my prediction that these kids will make today’s crop of a dozen-odd trans-identifying shooters look quaint.

Because eventually, reality breaks through and says, “No, what you’re feeling is not totally normal.” And after all the castrating drugs, hormones, and surgeries (that they were urged to do right now, before they fully mature), that won’t be a nice feeling. It will feel like the deepest sort of betrayal, and it’s going to hit hundreds if not thousands of kids over the next decade.

Eighteen-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, who killed his mother and stepbrother before slaughtering six others at his former school last week, lamented online that with his 6-foot frame, he would never be seen as a “petite” woman.

Benedict Shrugged

Maybe you’ve got guardrails at home, but do you want your kid in the same room, or even the same building, as the iPad kid every day for 12 years? The one who was exposed to extreme fetish pornography years before adolescence? The one who might one day become convinced that everyone — including your kid — wants to genocide him?

The risk of sending your child to any sort of school (public or private) where you don’t know the other parents very well (like in a homeschool co-op or some other tightly knit social arrangement), is going to hockey-stick over the next five years. We’re going to have dozens more of these tragic events. You’ll either need to homeschool or put your kids in an environment that’s been so tightly vetted that it might as well be your own house. Sending your kid to a school with a few thousand unknowns is going to be perceived as even more prole-coded than it already is, and anyone who has the means to avoid it will do so. Polite liberals will rationalize this choice in some other way, but they’ll want to get away from the danger too. Maybe this is how we get our re-tribalized society of tight-knit enclaves.

Because the best-case scenario is your kid’s friend from school shows them stuff on their iPad that you never wanted them to see, or worse, acts that stuff out on your unassuming kid. Still worse, your kid becomes one of the unlucky casualties of an accelerating frequency of school massacres carried out by schizoid transfolx who’ve reached the terminus of their self-deception.

But that’s not even the worst-case scenario. Even if you do everything right within your home’s four walls, no matter how vigilant you remain, there’s a chance they catch the contagion themselves somehow and become not just one of its victims, but one of its vectors.

https://thefederalist.com/2026/02/18/the-violence-from-trans-ipad-kids-is-about-to-get-a-lot-worse