The Cinderella Effect - Another Way That Adults Harm Children
Glitter moms, “chosen” families and other groomers
Cinderella is a folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world. The protagonist is a young girl living in forsaken circumstances who is suddenly blessed by remarkable fortune, which concludes with her ascension to the throne via marriage to the prince of the realm.
The version that is now most widely known in the English-speaking world was published in French by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697 as Cendrillon and was anglicized as Cinderella. Another version was later published as Aschenputtel by the Brothers Grimm in their folk tale collection Grimms' Fairy Tales in 1812.
In English language folklore Cinderella is an archetypal name. The word Cinderella has, by analogy, come to mean someone whose attributes are unrecognized, or someone who unexpectedly achieves recognition or success after a period of obscurity and neglect or is otherwise singled out for their particular “specialness”.
The Cinderella effect is also used in the social sciences literature to describe the situation where stepparents physically and or emotionally abuse their stepchildren, while favoring their biological children.
I believe there is a new category of Cinderella children that is growing exponentially: “trans kids”, whose loving parents are being replaced by groomers and other adults who do not have the best interests of these children at heart in any way at all.
Glitter families will love you forever!!
I can remember being a child and being very pissed at the general unfairness of life and of my parents in particular. “If they really loved me they would [fill in the blank with the desire du jour]!” Why can’t I have a pony was a big one for me at one stage; I can remember being heartbroken and sobbing when my parents stuck to their firm “no” on this one. Of course from my now adult, parental point of view, they were dead right about this decision, as they consistently were about many other desires and wants that their children expressed to them over those long haul years of parenting. Did they always get it right? Hell, no! Forcing us to eat the occasional serving of my mother’s overcooked calves liver put me off this for life. (My youngest sibling got this one right as she was never forced to eat it again after vomiting the whole lot up at the dinner table one evening. I take my hat off to you, sis!)
It is apparent that as children grow and especially during adolescence, that our species learns through testing boundaries that our parents and wider society imposes on us. The aim of most parents is to raise functional adults who are socialized to fit in to the culture they inhabit, which is a long term “project” that involves many long years to come to fruition and while often rewarding, is also often just hard work.
I well remember a conversation I had with one of my children as a teen who seemed to be losing his way in life. Trying to redirect him back to a path that I knew would be more beneficial in the end, he told me, “It’s alright for you, because you don’t mind doing the boring bits”. Oh sweetheart, most of adulthood is doing the “boring bits” over and over and over…!
Until recently, children who were angry at their parents for anything at all, were just stuck with the “dumb” parents they were born to and dealing with not getting everything they demanded was a vital step in acquiring the resilience and maturity that is a hallmark of adulthood. This sort of struggle is inevitable, beneficial and largely normal. (NB, I am not talking about families where true abuse, neglect or deprivation was happening.)
I have written at length about my belief that there is no such thing as “trans kids”, there are only confused children led into deceptive thinking by an adult. Here is one other post on this topic:
Today’s young people no longer have to suffer the indignity of living in a family where they can’t have an impossible goal encouraged and respected in the form of being transgendered. Nope, they can go and find their own “glitter family” that will let their true and “authentic” selves live their “real” lives. The current answer to multiple mental health challenges, many of them such as a normal discomfort with a changing body, is to utter those magic words, “I’m trans”.
“If your parents don’t support you, I’m your mom now!”
There are two main categories of “glitter moms” roaming the internet hoping to snag a few new children to add to their online “families”.
One is men claiming to be not men and the other are women who are trans allies.
One man is Jeffrey Marsh who identifies as “nonbinary” and always appears in lurid garish eye shadow above his masculine 5 o’clock shadow beard, high heels and figure tight dresses or similar. He loves to tell the world and children in particular about how “happy” his life is and assures children everywhere that he will be their mom if their real mother is bigoted and transphobic. He does not appear to consider that real mothers might have heavily invested in their children for many years, might love them and be afraid for their futures if they support the unattainable goal of gender or sex transformation. Here and here are two of his videos aimed at your children.
Dr Rachel McKinnon (who now goes by Veronica Ivy) is a childless biological male who put out a video aimed directly at children with “unsupportive moms” to contact him for mom support. He mansplains in excruciating detail how to deconstruct those appalling “heteronormative” families (you know, those bigoted couples who are happy operating as a one mother/one father model of family life) and offers up so many more exciting possibilities that are not so boring!
I will leave it to you, dear readers, to decide how appropriate it is for this middle-aged man to solicit children to privately contact him. One more fun fact about Rachel/Veronica is that he has cheated his way to many women’s cycling victories and considers himself to be a “biological female” because he is a “biological organism” and he has legally changed his sex. Um, yeah, sure, right.
The other category of glitter moms are the trans rights allies/activists who, despite never having met your child, know absolutely that the only way forward is unstinting affirmation for whatever their little heart’s desire (in this exact moment, don’t worry about the future) and claim that a loving mother’s response is always “yes”. Even if that “yes” is allowing children to make irreversible medical decisions they may come to deeply regret. And I suspect this will be a feature in the ever-increasing number of court cases brought by detransitioners who are asking why no adult stepped in to stop them making such major decisions like seeking life-changing hormones and surgeries with an immature brain.
The US based group Free Mom Hugs has a Facebook page with 115,000 followers, who are all ready and willing to love those children whose mothers have “rejected” them.
Most of the children discovering a trans identity have coexisting medical and mental issues that are unknown or ignored by friends, schools, counselors, social media influencers, politicians, and various industries who rush to affirm the newly pronounced trans identity. Trans identification is used as a convenient way to explain away other problems but, unfortunately, it does not solve those other problems.
Concerned families are dismissed as “transphobic” or “bigoted” if they ask questions to try to understand the source of their children’s distress.
While other people, institutions, and media are pushing an inflammatory narrative about the parents, they are working towards alienating vulnerable kids from their families and the only people who really care about their children’s future lives and choices. Sometimes this culminates in social workers and courts removing children from their homes because they conflate a reluctance to use new pronouns with “abuse” and “violence.”
As usual, follow the money
Why are children targeted by so much marketing and pressure to be trans? One big reason is money. Go behind the curtain of online advertising to reveal a burgeoning industry of gender therapists, pharmaceutical companies and surgeons whose profits are soaring. They make no money off children who are allowed to make it through puberty and young adulthood intact. Those who learn to accept their own bodies yield no profits. Big money, on the other hand, is made on the lifelong medical patients that a medicalized identity creates. Catch ‘em young and you are profiting off them forever, even if they at some later point change their minds and detransition; those mutilated bodies still need ongoing medical support.
Asking questions does not constitute abuse
Some parents are unaccepting and abusive towards their children who come out as gay, which is very wrong, but those describing parents as “unsupportive” of their “trans kid” are very often talking about parents who are asking questions, wanting to research topics before rushing into anything big or irreversible, trying to understand why their child feels they are the wrong sex, and trying to see how this fits into a child’s bigger complex mental health, medical, or developmental profile.
Children and teens need to build family trust and bonds to have good mental health and those glittery posts that encourage children to disconnect from their families are causing harms by suggesting that some person on the internet “really loves” them, while their flesh and blood parents who are legally responsible for their overall wellbeing don’t love or care about them.
So called “sanctuary states” (in the USA) have been created as a “refuge” for the children with parents who do not immediately capitulate to the demands of children for “gender affirming care”.
If a minor child claims their parents aren’t climbing straight onto the gender woo express, all they have to do is make their way to one of these states and the taxpayers who live there will financially support them, presumably till they turn 18, with housing, schooling and most importantly, any medical care they request from their self-diagnosed gender dysphoria, even though there is no proof that these help to resolve this condition.
In fact, most studies conclude that the best “cure” for gender dysphoria is allowing normal puberty to proceed, alongside any supportive psychological care in the form of talk therapy.
Compounding the crimes involved in child experimentation and mutilation, is that some states requiring their taxpayers to pay for “gender affirming care” have passed legislation that forbids state payments for those who change their minds and want to detransition, leaving young people with altered bodies that no longer function as they were designed to do and no financial support for their very necessary health care.
It takes more than a rainbow meme to create a family bond and those posting are supporting their own feelings and not answering the complex, varying, and individual needs of the children they think they are helping and their families.
These Cinderella children will never meet their Prince
Because he doesn’t exist and neither does the ability for any of us to arbitrarily change our sex. No child is born in the wrong body, ever.
Would it not be more beneficial for everyone, but especially for children, if we put more effort into accepting children in all their glorious gender presentations as being in line with their reproductive potential, that is their sex? Cinderella’s step sisters were unsuccessful in their attempt to fit into her glass slipper and today’s children cannot be successfully squeezed into someone else’s body or a simulacrum of someone they were never meant to be; that only happens in fairy tales.
Lucy Leader, Yours is a crucial take on the current narratives around gender. I want to emphasize this disturbing point you make: Follow the money. Strength, health, balance, love, nature, respect... None of these can be turned into commodities. None of them can be bought or sold. Only by taking them away from us can others profit from the most vulnerable.
A very thought provoking essay which took me back in time to my childhood experiences with grooming. Back then, predators drove around in the neighborhood, trying to get kids to accept "a lift". They were teachers who "were concerned" about vulnerable kids and offered them "help". They were neighbours who slipped money into the hands of the "outsiders" for no reason other than to "buy an ice cream". Their actions were clandestine, flying under the radar in the guise of kindness.
Back then, kids had a haven to run to. Adults were more likely to help.
It is jarring to see how modern predators can act with impunity. It seems as if society approves of their actions