Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-29-2025
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Transgender and gender diverse people often turn to online platforms for information and support regarding gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT); however, analysis of this social media content remains scarce.
OBJECTIVE: We characterized GAHT-related videos on TikTok to highlight the implications relevant to GAHT prescribers.
METHODS: We used a web scraper to identify TikTok videos posted under the hashtags #genderaffirminghormonetherapy and #genderaffirminghormones as of November 2023. We identified recurrent themes via qualitative content analysis and assessed health education videos with the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool for Audiovisual Materials (PEMAT-A/V) scale and a modified Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose (CRAAP) test.
RESULTS: Out of 69 videos extracted, 71% (49/69) were created by GAHT users, 24.6% (17/69) were created by health care workers, and 21.7% (15/69) were created to provide health education. Themes included physical changes on testosterone, GAHT access, and combating misinformation and stigma surrounding GAHT. Health education videos scored highly on PEMAT-A/V items assessing understandability (mean 88.3%, SD 11.3%) and lower on actionability (mean 60.0%, SD 45.8%). On the CRAAP test, videos scored highly on the relevance, authority, and purpose domains but lower on the currency and accuracy domains.
CONCLUSIONS: Discussions of GAHT on TikTok build community among transgender and gender diverse users, provide a platform for digital activism and resistance against legislation that limits GAHT access, and foster patient-provider dialogue. Educational videos are highly understandable and are created by reliable sources, but they vary in terms of currency and quality of supporting evidence, and they lack in actionability.
Recommended Citation
Beatini, Julia; Sun, Nora Yanyi; Coleman, Julianna K.; Haas-Kogan, Maetal E.; Pelletier, Andrea; Bartz, Deborah; and Keuroghlian, Alex Sogomon, "#GenderAffirmingHormoneTherapy and Health Information on TikTok: Thematic Content Analysis" (2025). Student Papers, Posters & Projects. Paper 160.
https://jdc.jefferson.edu/student_papers/160
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Language
English
Comments
This article is the author’s final published version in JMIR Infodemiology, Volume 5, 2025, Article number e66845.
The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.2196/66845. Copyright © Julia Rose Beatini, Nora Yanyi Sun, Julianna K Coleman, Maetal E Haas-Kogan, Andrea Pelletier, Deborah Bartz, Alex Sogomon Keuroghlian. Originally published in JMIR Infodemiology.