My 8 year old daughter came home a few weeks ago and told me that she's 'not happy with her gender'. This is the girliest girl you'll ever meet, she loves makeup, spent her toddler years refusing to wear anything except princess dresses etc.
We had a conversation about it and it turns out she saw it on Youtube and she doesn't want to be the helpless damsel in distress (I'm obviously paraphrasing here). I explained that she can do about anything she fucking pleases with her life.... it just takes work. If she wants to play guitar, work on cars, or any stereotypically masculine thing, I'm going to support her. She's still a girl who will grow up to be a woman. The kind of woman she will be is up to her.... but she will be a woman and there isn't anything wrong with that (hell, if she's better at building engines than I am, I will have succeeded as a father).
We also talked about how there are bad people on the internet who want her to do or believe things that will hurt her (which isn't a far stretch considering that I had the police over here because she set up a TikTok account without my knowledge and was being groomed... I caught it 5 days later).
I don't want my kids on the internet and I don't want them exposed to this shit but her school requires internet access for course work (and I'm not in a position to put her in private school at the moment.... or at least I'm not ready to yet... If it gets bad, I'll burn every penny I have to keep my kids away from this shit... even at the cost of my retirement). Right now she doesn't have unsupervised access to anything except Kid's Youtube (which is where she found this shit).
I'm about to setup PiHole so I can block Youtube from any device she uses or comes near.
This is the second time in less than 4 months that I've found something that is deeply alarming coming from the internet (it isn't being taught in her school, I've verified that).
I'm not going to punish her for being open and talking with me about things (and I hope to sweet Jesus that I continue to catch this shit early... but the reality is that some of this shit will slip past me.... I pulled shit my parent's didn't catch (though that was mostly drinking beer in the back of my buddy's pickup in a cow pasture)).
The stakes are so much higher here and the results (if not caught in time) are so much more devastating.
In an effort to stay on subject, I found this on the internet while we we were (still are in South Texas) blocked.
7,449 Likes, 335 Comments - Jeffrey Marsh (@thejeffreymarsh) on Instagram: "family 💛💖✨️🥰☺️ #lgbtq #nonbinary #trans #cptsd #trauma #healing #wellness"
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Can someone spell out how this isn't fucking grooming? Someone needs to walk me through how this isn't predatory as shit.