'Unsupportive parents? I'm your mom now'

[TirisfalPumpkin]

and similar. I'm seeing a lot of images like this shared around uncritically by well-meaning friends during Pride Month, and I would like to challenge them. I thought I'd seen a good take-down of these on Twitter, but of course now it's disappeared into the aether.

See also the recent well-publicised 'you have a big sister!' solicitation from Munroe Bergdorf, and Rachel McKinnon's 'join my glitter family' post last year.

So. 'Safeguarding issue', obviously - the adult having secret, possibly embarrassing knowledge about the child puts the adult in a position of power. An adult intending to abuse the child could leverage this power quite effectively.

Special, secret friendships with cool grown-ups are how grooming starts.

There was another argument/principle to do with, iirc, creating a culture. IE if I invite troubled minors to contact me, I help them, I am an ethical person, all is fine for the individuals and no-one has been abused, but I've still breached safeguarding by normalising the behaviour - so when a predator next solicits children to contact them, 'it's fine, everyone does it'.

Can you think of anything else?

How about, these people don't actually know anything about that individual child and his or her situation, so really have no idea what support they need or what their challenges are.

'take your meds' ? Bit of an odd instruction, isn't it? Sandwiched between two standard self-care instructions.

In old folk tales, all across the world, there's stories of adults driving wedges between children and their parents. Those folk tales never end well.

We have organised, charities and services (which generally stick to safeguarding procedures) to help unhappy children. Adults who want to help should do things properly.

Unless of course they have other reasons to want to "help"

Bloody hell! I've seen so much of this shit now - "I'm your mum/ big sister/ auntie now, your -phobic parents don't care about you, run away and join my glitter family". I'm not saying that's what your friends are doing, but it's everywhere, usually accompanied by pics of someone with a full beard wearing something skimpy. I'm so enraged by this utter blatant lack of care for these children,

ADULTS: GET SOME FUCKING BOUNDARIES AND STOP UNDER MINING CHILDREN'S PARENTS/ GUARDIANS!

twitter.com/biomilkveronica/status/1138095703325126656

It’s all a symptom of this me me me culture, where everyone knows best and they’re too special for the rules to apply to them. Lived experience is seen as the only authentic thing, and because someone’s lived experience has been one way, it couldn’t possibly be different for someone else. You see it on here all the time, I’ve never seen that happen so you must be making it up.

Put that all together and what you get is a lot of probably well meaning people setting dangerous precedents for others because they’re too blinkered and ignorant to understand why things like safeguarding frameworks exist.

Then you have the less well intentioned people who ride on the back of the ignorant and ill informed.

It’s like putting your hand in a jar of sweets, they all look the same but some are poisonous, but you won’t know which is which until you’ve swallowed it.

Nobody in their right mind would encourage kids to eat out of that jar of sweets, but for some reason they can’t extend that analogy to complete strangers on the internet.

Like you can replace parents with complete strangers just like that.
It shows a total lack of understanding of vulnerable children's needs.

I was reminded of this:

We’re Still Here Conference 8th September: A report from the inside

TheHarpySings wrote:

"2) Education Panel:

There were 4 panelists and I didn’t get all their names. One was called something like “Zed”, who is NB (female) and works in a school. They want a trans ally in everyone school.

Anna Carlisle was also on the panel- she works at Goldsmiths and is a colleague of Natascha Kennedy.

This panel’s recommendations was to get the pro-gender extremist philosophy in at school governor level and find allies.

Some of their examples of where policy was good but inclusive practise was not good were hilarious. Apparently one of the panelists (who works for a charity) went to a school with an amazingly liberal dress code but none of the kids violated gender norms… so obviously there was a problem!

They want every single policy to be “inclusive”.

Jane Fae chipped in saying how sad she was that Natascha Kennedy got “monstered” in the Times that weekend and asked what could they do about “safety” re: universities with “known transphobic academics” like Kathleen Stock.

One panellist said naming and shaming doesn’t do any good. Anna Carlisle (NK’s colleague) said she was interested in what management’s response to the Times story would be.

One of the other panellists (a recently transitioned TW teacher) described the current events as a “war”.

Zed talked about offering a “safe space” for trans kids who maybe couldn’t be trans at home.. either because parents are unaware or unsupportive so the kids change at school and essentially live a double life.

Helen Webbeley (!!!!) then said she’d seen so much suffering of trans kids and asked about how to help kids who were trans who couldn’t face going to school.

Mermaids are apparently interested in researching the crossover with trans/ autism and also sexual orientation. Also “queering” PE as a lot of trans kids don’t get involved and spend a lot of time online.

Notable misogynist Adrian Harrop then chipped in asking about Transgender Trend’s school pack (which, he was very sad face to say, is the top hit on Google) and how we can stop this sick filth getting into schools.

Anna Carlisle said the Transgender Trend pack “made her sick… it was so mean!”

Zed and another panellist said that their networks (through LGBT sectors in teaching unions) were trying to “make schools aware” not to pay attention to the TransgenderTrend packs. Apparently the Mermaids resources have been ok’d by the Human Rights Commission and will “trump” the Transgender Trend packs."

(Worth reading/re-reading the whole report as many of the strategies discussed in the meeting seem to be coming to fruition, including Edward Lord's plans about the cherrypicking of data.)

This is off the back of what has been the case in the LGBTQ community for a long time, when kids have been disowned and found support and family within their communities instead. I feel it is now being co-opted somewhat, however, in the current circumstances and by some dubious characters.

Thanks all.

Goosefoot - good point - you may well be getting half the story. It also puts the adult in a compromising position. If the child makes an allegation against the adult, even if it’s false, the adult would presumably have to explain why they were having private chats about sex and bodies with an unrelated child.

Scrimshaw - I think it’s Tumblr culture again. Everyone is mentally ill/on meds and you shouldn’t need-shame, dontchaknow.

Hammar - that thread is hair-raising, like genuinely, more red flags than a Communist party rally. ‘Even if your parents are supportive, you still need an adult trans mentor’. To ensure you don’t step off the path and remain ideologically pure, for the adult’s vicarious validation, or for more sinister reasons.

Fuckery - another good point. Every opinion/experience is valid and important. We’re all experts because we identify as xyz or read an article once.

I get the ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ mentality, and I don’t think anyone is saying that an adult should never interact with other people’s children, but... boundaries.

CrazyToast - i see a lot of this ‘chosen family’ narrative among some adult friends, particularly those who have had abusive/narc parents. It’s not bad per se - I think it’s actually pretty healthy to end abusive family relationships - but 👶 don’t have the same decision-making capacity.

Thinking back to my own past as a bi, GNC teen, I would’ve loved to have disowned my not particularly supportive parents and joined the glitter family. I’m also autistic and have a limited sense of stranger danger/ability to read motives - like a not-insignificant number of the ‘trans kids’ today. Nice people are inadvertently normalising predation.

Emoji invasion. I mean children/young people don’t have the same decision making capacity as adults. 👶 have even less, presumably

It's like when Oliver Twist was taken in by Fagen & co.

*Fagin

There's a HUGE chosen family narrative running through all this. I can't find it but I did a thread on this not long ago, a couple of academics from the university of Keele (one of whom is a NB kink/ BDSM psychologist) are making lots of FOI requests to universities about their trans policies (like 50+ in the last few months). They presented at a conference last month talking about pro kink/ pro chosen family topics. There was also some "queer feminist" a few weeks ago banging on about wanting to destroy the family unit and have all children raised communally (Plato's republic style). There's stuff about the apparent uselessness of the biological family in Dr Em's Trojan Unicorn thread as well. Add to that the push to promote surrogacy (especially to allow people to use a surrogate to gestate embryos that aren't biologically related to the intended parents), the use of the argument "being a TW is no different to being an adoptive parent - both are real even if their only made real by law", the push to create the idea that men can give birth (TM), TW can give birth (uterus implants), and people who have given birth can be legally recognised as fathers (current lawsuit by a TM), and the push to introduce Gillik competencies for transition (i.e. allow children to transition without parental consent). Roll that altogether with the bastardisation of the word "literally" (literal violence, TW are literally women) and I'm afraid that we're seeing the stage being set for people in the future to argue that children can and should choose their own families, that whoever the child chooses as a mother figure is literally the mother and should be given parental rights. The "but adoptive parents..., people born male can be mothers..., people who give birth can be fathers..., you can give birth without having any legal parental rights...." bits will be used as the "but intersex..." bit to create confusion and emphasise grey areas about what makes someone a "real" parent. The idea of a biological parent/ biological family will be declared a social construct that should give way to your "familial identity", and the policy capture already present in social care and children's charities will be leveraged to bring it into law. That's my very grim prediction any way.