“While HF 4138 does not explicitly censor words, its outright ban on “addictive interface features” for young people aged 15 and younger will effectively scrub the digital safe spaces where LGBTQ+ youth find the vocabulary to understand their own lives.”
As a licensed psychologist specializing in mental health for bisexual, nonbinary, queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and people of color in the Twin Cities, I see firsthand what heals our youth — and what harms them.
Almost every client I have, whether they are a newly legal 18-year-old or an adult in their 60s, tells me the exact same thing: “I wish I could’ve come out sooner. I wish I could’ve learned who I was sooner.” That early window of adolescence is a critical, fragile period of identity development. Protecting the ability of LGBTQ+ youth to be affirmed in who they are during these years is a matter of life and death. When these young people lack access to affirming resources and community, they spend their adulthood grieving lost time at best, and at worst, they die by suicide before reaching adulthood.
That is why I am deeply alarmed that the recently enacted HF 4138 will soon sever that lifeline. While the Minnesota Legislature has framed this bill as a safety measure, its sweeping restrictions on algorithmic curation and data tracking inadvertently sever the connection between vulnerable youth and critical, life-saving online communities. Now that the session’s fervor has passed, it’s critical that we recognize the harm this bill poses and commit to fixing it in the 2027 session.
While HF 4138 does not explicitly censor words, its outright ban on “addictive interface features” for young people aged 15 and younger will effectively scrub the digital safe spaces where LGBTQ+ youth find the vocabulary to understand their own lives. The law bans not only profile-based feeds but also basic platform features such as infinite scrolling, push notifications, autoplay video, display of likes and shares, and gamification features such as badges. To curb social media engagement, the bill mandates a blind, non-curated internet for early adolescents.
For a questioning teenager, a tailored feed isn’t an “addiction”—it is a vital discovery tool. Forcing platforms to strip away personalized curation means a young person looking for trauma-conscious, queer-affirming resources will instead be met with a generic status quo. It defaults their digital world to a heteronormative, “one-size-fits-all” model where they are made to feel like an anomaly.
Furthermore, the bill’s requirement for “verifiable parental consent” to even maintain an account creates an impossible barrier for youth living in hostile or unsupportive homes. For many LGBTQ+ kids, their digital space is their only private laboratory for self-discovery and their primary link to peer support groups.
By mandating that a parent must explicitly sign off on a child’s digital presence — and offering parents tools to rigidly cut off access times — the bill hands a weapon of isolation to non-affirming households. Many youths seek peer support on forums late at night when the pressure of performing a specific identity for their family becomes exhausting. If a child cannot safely ask for permission to exist online, they are completely cut off from the communities that keep them safe.
HF 4138 also mandates aggressive, ongoing age estimation. While the text steers clear of mandating physical ID uploads, it replaces them with something arguably more invasive: continuous behavioral tracking.
To achieve the bill’s mandated 90% confidence score regarding a user’s age, platforms will be forced to deeply analyze, profile and monitor the user data and online activity of Minnesotans. For marginalized youth, this level of back-end surveillance poses a severe privacy risk, threatening to inadvertently profile or expose an individual’s identity or location in a state that prides itself on being a refuge.
A “neutral” or “one-size-fits-all” model is harmful not only to mental health, but also economically. Research shows us that anti-LGBTQ+ approaches end up costing our communities the most. According to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics (Forsythe et al. 2022), non-affirming practices like conversion therapy impose a $9.23 billion economic burden on our country due to harms like substance use and suicide. Comparatively, affirmative support results in $6.19 billion in savings compared to conversion therapy and saves $1.81 billion compared to completely “neutral” or unsupportive models.
A heteronormative, non-curated approach costs our youth their health and costs our communities billions of dollars.
Minnesota has long been a refuge of equity, safety and inclusion for the LGBTQ+ community. That legacy now calls on the Legislature to act. I am urging Minnesota lawmakers to return to this issue in the 2027 session, to listen to clinicians, LGBTQ+ advocates, and the young people most at risk, and to craft targeted, evidence-based amendments before this law takes effect and the damage is done.
Jenna Brownfield is a licensed psychologist and the owner of Dr. Jenna Therapy PLLC, a Twin Cities-based practice specializing in mental health and affirmative therapy for bisexual, trans, nonbinary and QTBIPOC individuals.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Don’t let Jenna fool you, these kids need mental help and not life changing hormones or worse surgery. This is not Healthcare it borders on criminal.