The Gummy Bear Cult

By March of 2020, we could no longer leave the house unless we had an “attestation,” providing a legal justification for being outside.  The European country where we lived as American expats had one of the strictest lock downs in the world. 

Within a week of the restrictions, I lost my sense of taste. I was pregnant but was advised to stay at home because, at that point, the hospitals were full.  Patients were being transferred by medical trains across the border.  Breathless and coughing, I self-isolated in an empty room in the attic, sleeping on a mattress my husband pulled up the steep staircase.  To everyone’s relief, in two weeks, I was better.

The routine that waited for me downstairs, however, was a new source of stress.  Both my husband and I have demanding jobs. My 12-year-old daughter and her little brother had zoom school. His was a half hour cacophony, with the teacher interrupting the lesson every few minutes with instructions on how to mute or turn on the microphones. My daughter was at the other extreme with nearly eight hours per day.    

We had no childcare.  Wherever possible, I would put off doing work and then stay up past midnight to catch up but that was not enough.  My husband and I were regularly in zoom meetings that lasted past dinner time. I would see my children out the window in the garden eating instant noodles that my daughter had prepared.

In the evenings, we would read or watch videos.  One night, I heard my daughter laughing in her room.  She showed me a TikTok video of a boy in a bulky dinosaur costume dancing on stage with the caption “when you didn’t get the memo that the school talent competition was for singers.”  We laughed together.

Around May, when on a walk, my daughter told me that she was bisexual and that one of her new friends introduced her to a WhatsApp group for LGBT kids.  My daughter had switched schools right before COVID and had struggled to make friends.  I responded that it was hard for her to be anything sexual as she was not yet a teen and had never been in a relationship. She should keep an open mind but, of course, we love her and it makes no difference to us. I gave her a hug and felt her heart beating quickly against me.

As COVID came and went in waves, school in the fall of 2020 was by turn in person and via zoom. I was busy taking care of the baby I gave birth to in the summer.  That year was more of the same except my daughter was clearly exiting the preteen years.  She gained inches and her body was changing. She cut her long hair to shoulder length and started experimenting with her style.  Ariana Grande was forgotten in favor of punk and alternative rock.

My daughter was still part of the LGBT group in school, which did not alarm me. I am liberal and have close gay friends. The only thing I requested (and this was immediately after she told me that she was bisexual) was that she delete the WhatsApp group from her phone, because it included people that she did not know of various ages and from other countries. The group was called the Gummy Bear Cult.   

In mid-2021, over the summer, my daughter cut her hair very short and occasionally asked which male names I like.  At the time, I didn’t think much of it. In August, she spent a few weeks with a relative where she had a lot of time to look at social media without parental control. Only later did I learn that she had spent countless hours on TikTok and YouTube. Her whole feed was short clips of trans identified girls sharing advice or posing to catchy music.

In September, when my daughter started school, an American teacher handed out a worksheet asking the students to indicate their name and pronouns. My daughter put down a male name and “they” pronouns. A month later, I received a text from a male name I did not recognize. It was my daughter.

When I went into her room, I saw school papers that had that same name on them.  At that point, my daughter was 13. Her style had changed radically. She now wore only boy clothes: high top sneakers, oversized shirts and pants. Her hair was short.  She did not look or act like her former self, down to her mannerisms, which she copied from the kids on her TikTok feed.

Unlike my daughter, I was a tomboy growing up and, well into my adulthood, most of my friends were male. I work in a field dominated by men.  Whatever troubled my daughter I was fairly certain that it was not being a boy trapped in the wrong body.

My husband and I knew so little about this that we didn’t know how to approach the issue and were even hesitant to talk to the school.  Nevertheless, I sent an email to the director saying that we were surprised to learn that our daughter was going by a boy’s name. At the meeting that followed, the director was understanding and to a point apologetic. Teachers were not allowed by law to change names without parental consent. In fact, not every teacher at the school used our daughter’s new name and there was no question of using the boy’s name on any official document or the yearbook.  

We didn’t want to embarrass our daughter by asking the American teacher to change course but we also did not want this to go further.  We asked that those who use her newly chosen name, continue, while those whom she has not asked, refrain from doing so. 

At home, we did not affirm. I listened to my daughter but what she said didn’t make sense. She said: “Imagine a room which represents everything you can do as a girl. Now, imagine there is this other room where there are things you can do as a boy. Why not be part of the two rooms?” Her argument seemed sexist and I told her so.

My husband told her that he will call her “they” if she calls him “thee and thou.”  Exasperated, she quickly gave up. However, I mostly used her pet name and avoided saying things like “my daughter,” to avoid conflict.  

I talked to her every night and tried to keep her as close as possible. Because she broke the WhatsApp group rule three times by reinstalling the Gummy Bear Cult after deleting it, we had an excuse to restrict her phone access.

I tried to find a psychologist, hoping that some expert would solve this for me, but could not get an appointment.  As a family, we finally went to a psychologist who did not speak English. The language barrier did not help and we decided not to go back. I got on a waiting list to see a psychotherapist in the UK via zoom.  We did not get an appointment until two months later.  Ultimately, the sessions we had did not seem critical to our daughter desisting but they helped me get through a difficult time.

Unable to find a psychologist, I had the impression that I was waiting for Godot.  I had to act but where to start?  I remembered reading an article about a psychiatrist who worked at and was critical of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which runs the UK’s only gender identity service for children. After a few minutes on the internet, I found it. His name, David Bell, was the end of the string that I followed and which led me to the names of other psychologists, scientific publications, books and parent groups. One of the parent groups had a link to a video made by an Australian mother whose daughter desisted. I hung onto every word.

Many of the stories were nearly identical to mine. I could have written An Unremarkable Story from the Age of Trans myself.  (Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans subtrack, published on November 29, 2021).  The article starts: “My story is completely unremarkable. When new parents introduce themselves on the Genspect forum, the introduction is often word-for-word the same as mine.”

A parent shared a story written by Ray Bradbury in the mid-20th century, The Veldt. It is about parents being replaced by the children’s futuristic playroom, which can transport them to any location the children like.  It haunts me still.

I have a scientific education and was reading not just popular books like “Irreversible Damage” but also the underlying studies.  At first, I tried to share the information I found with my daughter but soon realized that it was not having any effect.  She lacked the maturity to place her personal experience within any framework. For example, we watched an excellent Wall Street Journal investigative video about the TikTok algorithm but when I asked her if TikTok had any impact on her trans identity, her answer was no, even though her entire feed was trans people narrating their experiences.  After a few conversations, I gave up.

The darkest time was in the winter. My daughter looked miserable. You couldn’t see her eyes behind her bangs. She told me she felt more like a “he” now than a “they”. At some point, I cracked and burst out crying, worried that the road she was on would lead to medicalization. I asked her to promise me she wouldn’t do anything until she was 25. My daughter thought I was crazy. I wonder if she realized that the androgynous look that so appealed to her was not natural. Many of the influencers she had followed were clearly on testosterone, or as they would call it, T.

This is where I stopped mentioning anything trans related entirely.  I have not talked to my daughter about her trans identity since.  

Instead of trying to reason with her, we followed the advice of psychologists and other parents and focused on nurturing our bond and our daughter’s confidence as a girl.

Although my daughter needed her phone for school, every minute she was looking at it, I feared she was on social media. We continued limiting internet access to mitigate the impact of screen time and social influencers.

I also encouraged her to participate in extracurricular activities. She signed up to a music camp that was run by a former teacher who only knew her by her girl name.

Christmas and February vacations were spent with family, with people who did not suspect that, at school and with her friends, our daughter was anything other than the girl they knew and loved. A parent on one of the forums advised me not to help my daughter come out to her family. If she wanted to, she would have to do the hard work herself.

After shopping with aunts and grandmothers, our daughter came back with a few dresses. At the time, we thought it was to keep up appearances. However, what I noticed at some point in the early spring was that she seemed to live a double life. She would don her boy uniform to go to school but at home she would try on my dresses and jewelry and wear night dresses as she cooed over her baby brother.

There was a breaking point when our daughter had a falling out with a girl, one of her closest LGBT group friends. She grew close to a boy from the same group and spent hours talking to him on the phone.  It may have been that spending time with a boy made it clear that she wasn’t one. In early April, she attended a birthday party of a friend at school wearing my dress.

Every weekend, we have been going to the countryside and spending lots of time together, riding bicycles and walking in the woods. We thought very seriously about moving there full time for the next school year but given that our daughter now goes by her girl name, dresses like a girl, and seems happy, we decided to stay.

Moving schools was what in part brought this on and we didn’t want to rock the boat again. Time will tell if we made the right decision. I can only hope that we will not share the fate of the parents in The Veldt.