What happens when you take a few lyrics from a song, pair them with a video, and upload it on TikTok? Congratulations, you’ve just made your first viral content.
Social media continues to shape how people think, and apparently, it also gives them a free pass to be mean.
When you first encounter the TikTok trend called “Factory Reset,” you might think it’s about change. You’d assume it’s about shedding old versions of oneself and finally living in ways that feel honest. For a brief moment, it seemed like the internet was making room for truth.
Then the jokes started.
Today, when you search “Factory Reset,” you’ll find videos mocking people who change their pronouns, their appearance, or their understanding of themselves. That’s not humor, it’s cruelty dressed up as a punchline. Comments like “Hangtud wala pay Mio, ma-factory reset pa na!” now appear everywhere, treated like slang and shared casually across social media.
Let’s be clear: gender is fluid. That isn’t a trend, and it isn’t a joke. It’s a reality many people live with every day.
Gender fluidity means understanding yourself over time. It means finding new language for feelings you’ve always had. When people joke about “factory resetting” someone, they reduce a person’s life to a meme. What they fail to see is that these jokes don’t land harmlessly, they land on people who are already vulnerable.
For someone questioning their gender, seeing thousands of likes on a video that laughs at people like them sends a clear message: You will not be taken seriously here. It tells them that confusion is shameful, that change is ridiculous, and that being honest will make them a target.
The truth is, most people don’t change because it’s easy. They change because staying the same hurts more. Yet instead of listening, parts of the internet choose to laugh.
As much as it saddens me, I’m not surprised by how this escalated. I’ve seen it happen with mental health. I’ve seen it happen with sexuality. Now it’s happening with gender. Humor becomes a weapon—a way to avoid empathy.
Humans aren’t devices you can reboot. We are not a game that can be easily reset. We need to stop pretending cruelty is comedy. We need to stop rewarding content that punches down.
Discovering that your gender is fluid is not something to be mocked. It is something that takes courage. If the internet can learn anything from this trend, it shouldn’t be how to make better jokes — it should be how to make more room. / Jamaica Bregente / Benedicto College