I’m a little surprised there hasn’t been an effort to cancel this author yet. The piece she wrote was only published today so maybe there’s still time. She writes under the pen name Charlie Jacobs and her bio states she’s a California wife and mother of two teenagers. The story is about one of those teens who she says was always a “ultrafeminine” since birth. But after her daughter participated in a school program called Teen Talk she and all of her friends began talking about how to label themselves. None of them wanted to be labeled “basic” which meant straight.

Jacobs said she attempted to monitor her daughter’s social media use but didn’t realize she’d set up multiple accounts. Then, after meeting an older girl at an anime convention in Sacramento everything changed.

She started making gross TikTok videos, her language became vulgar, and she redecorated her room to look like a cave. She self-pierced her nose with one of those bull rings. She broke every family rule. She was morphing into an emo-Goth-vampirelike creature. She was unrecognizable. Her personality descended into anger and rudeness.

The summer before ninth grade, she announced that she was transgender. Post-announcement, she began to threaten suicide. She sunk into deep depression.

At that point, Jacobs gained access to all of her daughter’s social media accounts and was stunned by what she found there.

Almost everyone that she was conversing with was a stranger, except for the SacAnime friend, who sent her a self-made masturbation video. The discussions on the Discord platform online involved fetishistic sexual conversations. Kids were sending each other erotica, including involving incest and pedophilia.

Older girls were instructing younger girls how to sell nude photos of themselves to men for money.

To cut off the influences of strangers, Jacobs wiped her phone and got her a new number. Then she blocked her access to social media sites and began immersing herself in the issue, reading books and articles about it and attending protests. She says it took about 18 months but gradually her daughter changed.

After a year and half of utter hell, my daughter is finally returning to her authentic self—a beautiful, artsy, kind and loving daughter.

I am not sure what the actual ingredients for the magic potion were for alleviating gender dysphoria in my daughter. The formula will vary, but what I did was, after a very brief misstep of using a male name, our family and all of the adults in my child’s life only used her birth name and corresponding pronouns.

My own take on this is that some amount of acting out is pretty normal for young teens, all of whom are in a kind of endless competition for more attention and approval from their friends and dealing with the onset of hormones. But obviously having older kids sexting young teens isn’t appropriate regardless of the gender issue.

The whole article is worth reading. I’m sure some will conclude that Jacobs went too far cutting her daughter off from social media and pressing her to consider a different point of view. But suicide is on the rise, especially among teen girls. So if a child is expressing suicidal thoughts a good parent is going to do everything they can to disrupt whatever negative pattern that child has fallen into.