Imagine coming home to find a cake on your kitchen table, iced in pink with a slice cut to show the blue sponge inside. With it is a letter from your teenager, saying: 'Mum and dad, I know you thought you had a daughter, but I now understand that I'm really a boy.'The pink-outside, blue-inside cake is just one of the scripts for coming out as trans to your parents shared in online forums. These portray parents who don't immediately adopt the child's new identity as 'transphobic'. Children are advised to bring them into line by complaining to schools and social services.In any other context – an anorexic threatening suicide if her parents refuse to let her starve, say – this would be recognised as emotional blackmail. But the idea that you can be 'born in the wrong body' – that everyone has a 'gender identity' which sometimes doesn't match their sex – is now widely presented as fact. And charities like and Mermaids claim that trans-identified children are likely to attempt suicide unless their identity claims are accepted, using catchphrases like 'better a live son than a dead daughter'.
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