It's Not Just The Kids: How Social Media Captures Parents

By Zoe Kincaid

I wasn't always someone who believed there was anything wrong with stating “trans women are women”. Or at least, I wasn't someone who thought people's objections to that phrase were as important as being accepting and kind. It's hard for me to write this now, to admit to a kind of gullibility and a fear of being in trouble that I know is part of who I am, but it's where I started, and I doubt I'm the only one.  

In trying to untangle how I became caught up in gender ideology, there are a few factors to lay out: I had my first child ten years ago, at a time when social media had been around for a while (it had already fed me the idea that I could take full control of the birth of my child through my own will and that it was imperative that I did) and a lot of parents were seeking information from the internet, and community, too. After he was born, the internet was where I connected with my local sling group, bought cloth nappies, and found friends. It was where I found ideas about parenting that hadn't been available to me in my life up to that point, and after a c-section, a traumatic birth and a lack of in-person parental support, I outsourced it all.  

There was one group in particular that I found when it was fairly small and new, a private Facebook group that consisted of people who wanted to parent crunchy, but not too crunchy—a place where people talked about the evidence for the way we felt was the right one. There were debates—on breastfeeding, on maternal mental health and what that means to different people, on whether enzymes in washing powder really do cause eczema. I loved it. Mostly. I felt like I was surrounded by cool kids, and we all know social media is great for exacerbating that need to keep up. My memories from that time are a mixture of boredom, guilt, desperation, intense frustration that I tried to keep a lid on, and a sense that I was missing it all despite being right there, and there wasn't much relief. The only thing that helped was knowing that this was the right way. There was evidence.  

It isn’t easy to come away from social media when your alternative companion is a baby who doesn't have the same interests as you. It sucked me in, and I hated it, but I kept going back because I didn't know what else to do. Leaving the house was anxiety-inducing and exhausting (though I did it). House stuff was a maddening cycle—expecting it to ever be finished was like believing in an appearance from Godot. It was all that, and these are my excuses. And I know I wasn't alone.  

The group grew. It was about 300 strong when I turned up and hit about five times that when I finally decided to quit it for good (giving up took 3 tries). The tone of the group shifted over time, from mostly being attachment parenting focused (with the odd obsession over certain purchasable items thrown in, things we scrabbled over like schoolgirls over pickled limes) to conversations about special educational needs (SEN) support for school kids whose education systems weren't doing their jobs for. As the tone of the internet changed, so did the way people commented in the group. “Know better, do better.” became a favourite phrase. People were constantly expected to educate themselves, to accept that their old worldview was outdated and that it needed to shift with what we knew to be the right side of history. There was a conflation of neurodivergence and gender divergence, this idea that actually, we don't fit the patterns we're expected to. We don't parent like the mainstream. Why should we identify with their gender roles? Why should our kids? And what about adults who have the trauma of being born in the wrong body—surely they deserve our sympathy and protection? The labels for what we did and believed—attachment-led, gentle, natural—became synonymous with being kind to everyone. We were everyone's gentle parents. 

It was repeated often that anyone who denied the existence of trans folk was a terrible person. It was roundly accepted that the Tories (the UK's leading party, the Conservatives) were evil, the instigators of austerity measures after the banking crash, and we were not that. We were The Left, we cared, we were weird and we wore harem pants and breastfed our toddlers and dyed our hair and our kids wore rainbows because clothes aren't gendered! And people are who they feel they are!  

There were many flounces from the group over the years, of people who disagreed with the status quo and left (silly people, they were wrong!)—I left twice and rejoined, in an attempt to break away from this group that sucked me into oblivion while my child watched too much TV (not very “natural parenting” of me). It really was an addiction. People would post questions in the group, out of habit, often receiving the snarky retort “Oh, let me Google that for you” and a link to the answer to their question, googled. It became a familiar acronym in the end. We were all at it, turning to the hive before the search engine. The thing that tipped me over the edge was a post I made about a concern I had about children being exposed to porn that was being displayed, visible from the street, from a house near us. That was piled on by people saying I was trying to censor other people's private lives. Afterwards, a friend (who I knew in the real world as well as the group) described it as people trying to “out-liberal each other”. I quit. I saw the madness for what it was. The numbers had swollen, the people whose company I'd enjoyed were getting lost, and it was getting madder and madder.  

Mulling over things without the constant stream of other people's very strong beliefs left me with the feeling that I'd gone along quietly with too much stuff. I hadn't been able to think things over carefully before the next thing and the next, and the lack of sleep, and the small child, and the life. It felt like I very slowly woke up from a dream where I'd become, at certain points, a mouthpiece for views I didn't even know my true thoughts about. My friend's husband secretly messaged me about a post I shared that said “Trans Women Are Women”, asking me about the article and saying he’d wondered about himself, about his own masculinity, and how his gender “worked”. I realised then that I didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I was no authority. I had seen people chastised and not let myself expend my precious energy pushing back, and I'd ended up somewhere I didn't like. I pulled back from it all, eventually deleted my account, and sat with the discomfort that I'd pushed ideas out into the virtual world that I didn't understand properly.  

I found Genspect through Mumsnet, that den of iniquity. That was the place where I saw people challenge each other, disagree, ask precise questions about the nature of gender identity, and deconstruct the narratives I'd accepted because I hadn't had the ability to see them for what they were. (Or the amount of sleep required, probably.)  

I still wish I'd stayed away. I still have troubled feelings about social media, and concerns about what motherhood in isolation can do to a person. I no longer feel the need to agree with other people, and I recognise the flaw in humanity, to stick with the group for far longer than is sensible. But the weird insight into how this happens makes me feel like I understand the importance of recognising what this stuff does to young minds. If an adult can be drawn in by degrees, what hope do teenagers, with their morphing, unpredictable brains, have? I see, too, the ways that parents are pulled along with this, sometimes believing that the ideology gives us the truth. It's seeped into everything. And I worry—there are teenagers now who are finding this stuff for themselves, but what of the parents who found it first, when their children were babies? What about those who still believe it and are feeding a steady diet of gender woo to their children? Because I saw them there ten, nine, eight, seven years ago. I still see some now. Their kids are being told they can identify how they want, and it can be true. It's just so strange that in a place that was meant to be evidence-based, we all gave up on it when it came to identity.  

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Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position.