When The ‘Glitter Family’ Is Already Family
By Genspect
An excerpt from Sacrificial Lambs: A Liberal Reporter Exposes How the Progressive Left Harms Children in the Name of Gender Ideology by Anita Bartholomew, published by Pitchstone on November 4, available for pre-ordering (Amazon link)
Sophia was a quiet child. Home-schooled from second through fifth grade, she began attending a progressive independent school in Chicago from sixth grade on. Preferring to sit at home to playing in the park with friends, Sophia didn’t quite fit in. “I remember going to parent-teacher conferences and the teacher said, you know, she does well academically, obviously,” recalled her mom, Jeannette Cooper. “She’ super smart and all that stuff. She has trouble kind of connecting with her peers.”
As often happens when a kid doesn’t fit in, Sophia was bullied mercilessly.
Still, as far as Jeannette knew, even if Sophia’s tormentors at school sometimes made the kid’s life hell, she seemed happy when the two of them were together.
Jeannette was what most kids would call a cool mom. Super-progressive, she eschewed rigid stereotypes. She wore her light brown hair punk style, short on one side; shaved on the other.
Sophia, by contrast, had lush, long dark wavy hair, and preferred more feminine styles.
Though her relationship with her mom was close and secure, the bond didn’t appear quite so stable with her dad.
“I mean, a third of his custodial visits, which were about twenty-four hours in a week, a third of them he missed because he was out of town working,” said Jeannette. “He’s gone on some business trip. Yeah, so, yeah, out of, you know, fifty-two weeks in a year, he probably saw her about thirty.”
Meanwhile, because Jeannette was working longer hours, the child was spending more time by herself.
Although Sophia had been getting less and less of her father’s attention, she seemed to have genuine affection for her new stepmom, a licensed psychotherapist, and she adored her new baby half-sister.
In the summer of 2019, Sophia took a ten-day vacation with her dad and stepmom.
At seven-thirty on the Sunday evening that Jeannette was due to pick her up, she sent her ex a text that she was on her way. Her ex wrote back that Sophia wanted to stay another night. Jeannette said no. That wasn’t their agreement.
She drove the ten minutes to her ex-husband’s house and texted again, saying she was outside and waiting.
This time, her ex didn’t respond at all.
Another text was also ignored. She called on the phone.
“I don’t remember whether he answers or not, but he comes outside. And I get out of my car and say, you know, ‘Where’s Sophia?’”
He told Jeannette that Sophia wasn’t coming. Check with her tomorrow.
She begged her ex-husband to explain why her daughter didn’t want to come home. All he would say is that Sophia would call.
“I got in the car and I actually wrote to my attorney at that moment, and I said something is wrong. I don’t know what’s happening right now, but something.”
By the morning, Jeannette still hadn’t heard anything. She willed herself to stay calm.
This shouldn’t have happened but it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Sophia was about to turn thirteen. That’s the age when kids start to rebel, she reminded herself. Even a sweet quiet kid like Sophia could do it.
“So then sometime in the afternoon, I saw an email pop up,” said Jeannette.
It was from Sophia. In it, the child claimed she was trans and said, “I’m going to stay at dad’s while you process this.”
Jeannette didn’t believe that Sophia had come up with that line herself about processing the trans claim. She also didn’t think for a minute that her kid was trans. She didn’t believe anyone was trans — and she’d made that clear on many occasions with her daughter. She’d spoken with Sophia about how transgenderism promotes worn-out sexual stereotypes. There was no “right” way to be a woman, Jeannette had explained to her daughter, and no need to pretend to be male if a woman didn’t fit the conventional image of femininity. A woman can be anything she wants to be, dress however she chooses, live her life in whatever way she wants. She was still a woman.
Jeannette thought she’d succeeded in instilling these values in her daughter. But her daughter’s email showed otherwise.
“I gave her a call later that night,” says Jeannette. “And I said, ‘Hey, you know, you have to come home.’ And she said, she sounded so weird to me, a different person.”
Sophia sounded angry and frustrated. She told Jeannette she was a bad mom who didn’t care about her, who didn’t really love her. Jeannette couldn’t have known it at the time, but this is the script that trans activists use when they persuade kids to run away from home: that parents who don’t agree with trans ideology are abusive and don’t love them.
“I thought, what is happening? I don’t know who I’m talking to right now. Like overnight, you are a different person.”
Jeannette forced herself to remain calm, despite the untrue and hurtful things her child was saying. She listened quietly and then repeated: Sophia had to come home. Once she did, Jeannette reasoned, they’d work it out.
But Sophia didn’t come home.
Meanwhile, her ex bought Sophia a new phone and tried to switch Sophia’s account to it. Because the old phone was on Jeannette’s mobile plan, he couldn’t do it. But Jeannette could. She bought a new phone, and had Sophia’s account transferred to it, “And then I opened up her iCloud and all of her messages. And I could see that [the stepmom] had helped this situation happen.”
Sophia’s stepmother had been playing glitter mom, actively encouraging the girl to leave her mother’s home, and pursue a trans identity, and offering whatever help the girl might need to do that. In her texts with the child, the stepmom strategized about how Sophia could move some of her belongings without her mother noticing.
Maybe Sophia’s father wasn’t giving her the attention he had when her parents lived together, but the child was getting positively love-bombed by her new glitter relative.
In one text, the stepmom wrote:
I admire your courage. It would be great to talk at some point about what you want to be called. Ash? And any other stuff you want to shift. No hurry, but just know that I am open to any shifts you would like to make in name/pronoun/etc
In another, the glitter/stepmom wrote:
I am still so surprised to hear about your mom’s view on trans identity. It seems to me that she is questioning if she identifies as a woman…
In other words, by glitter mom’s logic, the only reason Jeannette Cooper could possibly be skeptical of transgenderism was if she was harboring her own secret trans identity.
The text messages between the two also made it clear that Sophia’s own therapist was coordinating with the stepmom about Sophia running away.
As for Sophia, once she adopted her new identity, the greatest rival for her dad’s attention became her greatest ally. And at the school where she had never fit in? Sophia was an instant rock star.
“[The school] said to me that, oh, this was going to give them such an opportunity to learn so much,” recalls Jeannette. “They were so happy to celebrate their first trans student. They sent out emails to all the parents in the entire school to announce their first trans student.”
Jeannette’s lawyer filed an emergency petition with the court. It seemed to be a straightforward situation. Sophia had been living with Jeannette since the divorce and this was the first time anyone questioned the custody agreement.
The lawyers squabbled about Sophia’s trans claim. And then the judge asked whether Sophia had ever expressed a desire to commit suicide.
As it turned out, after the divorce, when Sophia was nine years old, she had said something vague, like, “I wish I weren’t alive.”
Sophia had never threatened to actually harm herself but that was all it took. Like most people, the judge was aware of the claim that kids who said they were trans would commit suicide if not affirmed. Like most people, the judge had no idea the claim was false.
She ordered Sophia to remain with her father.
Jeannette has only seen her daughter twice since then: once in family therapy and once, three years later, for a visit in a coffee shop that her ex arranged. But she has followed Sophia on social media. The girl is now a beautiful young woman. She dresses in feminine styles. She currently appears to be calling herself non-binary. That can serve as an in-between identity. Kids often start calling themselves non-binary before going full trans; they also often claim to be non-binary when they’re on the way out of the cult but not quite ready to make a full break.
Jeannette, heartbroken, waits for the day when she’ll get to see her daughter again. She knows it will happen. She just doesn’t know when. She doesn’t blame Sophia. Her daughter was a child. It’s the adults who facilitated their estrangement.
No matter how many tens of thousands of children are afflicted by this madness, the worst of the insanity always can be traced back to the adults—the ones who should know better, but never do.
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. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.