One recent evening I walked into a busy pub in central London, looking for a secret meeting. They spotted me first, and I was ushered to a table where no one could overhear us. There, groups of women were quietly talking among themselves. They all had one thing in common: they had a child — a daughter, almost invariably — who insisted that, despite being female, they were actually a boy. Their teachers and friends agreed with them — affirmed their gender identity, as the current lexicon has it. Their mothers disagreed, and because of this many of them had been reported by their child’s school to social services for infractions such as using female pronouns for their daughter.
This was a meeting for the Bayswater Support Group, a grassroots organisation for parents whose child wants to change gender.
“We support our daughters, but there is a difference between support and enable. We can see that they’re struggling, and we’re trying to help them to love themselves, even if it makes everyone hate us,” said one mother.
The women talked to me about their daughters who had been bullied, or were gay, or anorexic, or on the autistic spectrum. In adolescence they had announced that they were a boy and threatened to commit suicide if their parents didn’t help them get sex change hormones and surgery. “It’s the same story over and over,” sighed one of the group’s organisers, whose daughter has since detransitioned and had a diagnosis of autism.
I’ve lost track of how many conversations I’ve had with friends about the disproportionate number of teenage girls suddenly insisting they’re boys. My friends always agree that it’s worrying, but worry that their kids will get cross with them for saying so. I can’t remember my parents ever not speaking an obvious truth because I might disapprove.
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Parenting has changed a lot since then. In an interview last month Michelle Obama said that she — unusually for a modern parent — never wanted to be friends with her kids. “Once you decide you want your child to be your friend, now you’re worried about them liking you. And there’s so much of being a parent that has nothing to do with them liking you.”
That is not a fashionable stance now. My contemporaries — Gen X and millennial parents — have been loath to relinquish youth culture to the actual youths; we believed we could defy the generation gap if we stayed in tune with younger people. In our desperation not to be like our own parents, who laughed at our ideals and thought Prince sounded like a girl, we veer closer to Amy Poehler’s character in Mean Girls, who insists: “I’m not like a regular mom; I’m a cool mom. You girls keep me young,” while her daughter rolls her eyes.
Being close to your kids is better than aloof detachment. But prioritising likeability brings its own set of problems, as Obama said. It also overlooks an obvious truth about child development, which is that at some point your child has to hate you in order to separate from you and grow up. That is what teenage rebellion is all about, and if you go to the same music festivals as your kids, maybe even did the same drugs as they’re doing now, then dabbling in gender ideology is an obvious alternative. My generation seems to find this more confusing than previous ones, maybe because they thought they were the cool parents. But they’re not. They’re just parents, and their job is to love and protect their kids, not to be liked and validated by them.
Another factor at play here is an increased awareness of young people’s mental health. On the plus side it has brought deeper understanding of adolescent anxiety. On the minus side it can tip into pathologising the normal human condition: anything other than constant happiness in one’s child is seen as a terrifying problem that requires treatment. “Your kids have to learn to live in their unhappiness,” Obama said, correctly.
Bayswater was founded three years ago, and the group has grown from 60 members in the first year to over 500 now. They meet in secret, away from the disapproving eyes of those who insist that the idea a child can be in the wrong body is as unarguable as gravity. “Why aren’t teachers asking why our girls hate being girls? Instead they’re giving them rainbow flags and telling them they’re special,” one parent said. Bayswater parents think their child’s belief that they need to alter their body to be happy calls for something more than rainbows and affirmation. They think it requires parenting.
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One Bayswater mother, “Emma”, told me that when she refused to buy her daughter a chest binder, her daughter sent her a link to a Stonewall study her school had given her, which claimed 48 per cent of transgender children attempt to kill themselves. “I thought that was an insanely dangerous thing to tell children,” Emma said.
Suicide is a subject I know more about than I’d like: in the summer my 21-year-old cousin killed himself, and I’ve lost three friends to suicide. None of them talked about suicide beforehand, ever. It was not a weapon they wielded to get their way. Suicide threats should always be taken seriously, but as a cry for help, not a demand for compliance.
No one ever confused parenting with a relaxing massage, and when you’re faced with a hysterical teenager, the path of least resistance can be extremely tempting. But, as one Bayswater mother said to me, “Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is say no and let them hate you.”