From Indigo to Trans Children: The Status-Worthy 'Special Child' Trap
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
There's a strong connection between suspiciously neurodivergent 'strange kids' in the 2000s' 'Indigo' mini-craze, and today's trans kids driven by parental status-seeking
If you were old enough in the ‘90s and ‘00s, when ‘progressive’ was still a respectable rebrand for ‘liberal’, you might remember the ‘Indigo children’ phenomenon. Especially if you were into alternative spritituality, like Paganism or the New Age.
The Indigo concept is one chapter in the history of New Age parenting labels that entered the public eye via a whisper rather than a roar with the publication of a book by a self-described ‘synesthete’, one who claimed she could see peoples’ ‘colors’ via their auras. She claimed she’d begun seeing indigo hues around certain children. But two later authors, citing her initial observations, turned Indigoism into a late-stage New Age craze: 1999’s The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived by Lee Carroll and Jan Tober.
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Amazing psychic abilities were attributed to these supposed ‘star children’, including a more deeply empathic feeling for others; they were said to be especially strong-willed; possessed a high IQ, had particularly intuitive senses, were viewed by others as fairly odd and, my personal favorite, possessed a strong feeling of entitlement and a resistance to authority.
The culture arose, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, during the Millennial generation and progressive laissez-faire parenting techniques including an unwillingness to discipline or even say no to their children. ‘Crystal children’ and ‘Rainbow children’ soon followed, the post-Indigo ‘generations’. Believers attributed to these wunderkind telepathic, clairvoyant, and other psychic powers along with boundless optimism and lovingkindness. These ‘special kids’ exhibited certain behaviors: Creative but easily frustrated, delayed speech development, fearlessness; high-energy; optimistic.
Claiming one of these children conferred special status in progressive/New Age communities. Pagan author Lorna Tedder claimed that practically every Pagan woman she knew who’d had a child or was expecting a child claimed it was an Indigo.
Later ‘generations’, the Starseeds and the Diamond/Golden Others, embraced any child whose parents felt the desire for ‘special’ children.
According to one uncritical website, “Indigo children can sometimes find it difficult to integrate into mainstream society, which leads to them being misunderstood, rejected, or misdiagnosed.”
Misdiagnosed, indeed. Or, what we could today call ‘neurodiversity.’
The new ‘special children’
“There’s a terrifying conclusion for parents who were wrong: Indescribable psychic pain realizing they allowed their child to harm themselves.”
Anyone who has followed the rise and current decline of the kiddie transgenderism craze recognizes the patterns: The status gain and ‘coolness’ factor of having a kid who’s different, outside the mainstream, completely misunderstood, ergo superior to your boring little not-above-average conformist. Instead of ushering in a peaceful New Age of Humanity (how’s that working out so far, Indigos?), ‘trans children’ were expected to usher in a new era of equality, with the smashing of gender stereotypes and the erasure of what they claimed was a ‘human construct’, biological sex.
‘Indigo children’ were said to possess an innate, pure, spiritual truth; ‘trans children’ are believed to possess a similar infallible ‘inner knowledge’. Both movements deify the child’s “inner truth.”
They’re ‘aura’ and ‘gender’ become metaphysical.
What connects the two cultures most closely is the chronic parental fear of having an ‘average’ child, or worse, one with diagnosed developmental challenges. Many parents from the ‘Indigo Age’ rejected diagnoses that their child had ADHD or a higher seat on the autism spectrum. Recognizing what wasn’t as well-understood thirty years ago hasn’t diminished the Indigo movement; neurodiversity has been incorporated into the spiritual belief system without rejecting the galactic fluff.
It may be more difficult, though, for today’s parents of trans kids to do the same. They’ve argued the science is on their side from the beginning, yet now we know it’s not: The earliest ‘science’ was based on an admittedly flawed Dutch study and it’s been established for decades that most ‘gender dysphoric’ kids are gay. Evidence-based critiques of gender-affirming care, numerous global systematic evidence reviews, and especially the UK’s comprehensive Cass Review have all but debunked the transactivist claims to science. The trans True Believers more closely resemble Christian Creationists, clinging like barnacles to their cherished belief system. There’s a terrifying conclusion for parents with a ‘trans child’ they supported who now may be experiencing regret or real anguish: Indescribable psychic pain realizing they allowed their child to harm themselves—and that the gender critical, especially conservatives, who fought it all along, were right.
Ironically, Indigoism, however quieter, survived to the modern day because its fundamental strength was faith. The lesson for social justice is that basing it in ‘science’ invites destruction.
Plus, no one wants to give up the status in their social bubble.
How LGB got their groove back: Welcoming T
It’s cooler to be ‘trans’ than, frankly, boring old gay. It manifested in Hollywood, where actors and actresses, after years or decades of success, suddenly announced they were gay, to much media fanfare. Oh, how brave they are to come out in this homophobic world! But the attention began to peter out, especially after gay marriage’s 2015 Supreme Court decision, which ruled the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry and be recognized in all fifty states.
With one Supreme Court decision, homosexuality suddenly lost its ‘cool’. Gay married couples proliferated, and homosexuality mainstreamed, about as comment-worthy as last night’s TV dinner.
Hollywood, always ready to infect themselves with the latest cultural contagion, applauded actors who ‘came out’ as as ‘trans’ rather than gay. Like Chaz Bono, who us Boomers and Xers remember as Chastity on her parents’ 1970s TV show; Eliot Page, née actress Ellen Page; The Matrix’s Lana Wachowski and Orange Is The New Black’s Laverne Cox. Celebrity influence pioneered childhood gender identity emerging with those who became famous by transitioning: Jazz Jennings, whose mother is widely believe to have pushed her son into it; Shiloh Jolie; and proud (i.e.: Cooler than you) Hollywood ‘trans parents’ Naomi Watts, Robert DeNiro, Jennifer Lopez and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Later, Bruce Jenner cemented the ‘coolness factor’ by ‘coming out’ as trans in 2015, advertising for the medical profession by appearing on the covers of Vanity Fair and Sports Illustrated.
Alongside the adult influencers, the notion that children were ‘born in the wrong body’, particularly if they were embarrassingly effeminate or butch, gained traction with anxious progressive (and possibly homophobic) parents who ignored the long-established traits of likely incipient gay children to hie them off to the doctor to be ‘normalized’.
They called it ‘gender-affirming care’ rather than what it was: ‘gay conversion therapy’.
Virtue signaling and the parental status marker race
‘Indigo children’ were said to possess an innate, pure, spiritual truth; ‘trans children’ are believed to possess an innate ‘inner truth’ transcending parental assertion.
Parents have always been in competition with each other, to have the smartest, brightest, fastest-developing, fastest-growing, superlatively excellent child. My next-door neighbor playmate was born three months after myself. When my mother reported to Benny’s mother that I had said my first word (on average, around 12 months), Mom heard the husband through an open window coaching his son to ‘Say Dada! Say Dada!” In the first year, infants develop at incredible speed but they have to master one skill before the next. They begin grasping toys around five weeks; they can (but don’t always) stop sleeping through the night around three months; begin eating solid food at six months; teethe at seven. At nine months, most babies can only babble, although a few can manage a ‘mama’ or ‘dada’.
If one’s baby is developing later, and parenting anxieties set in, it becomes easier to rationalize one’s seemingly underachieving infant as an advanced, enlightened being.
Hence the appeal of the Indigo and trans child with varying personality quirks, neurodiversity, or homosexuality, or who were simply victims of overly-permissive parenting.
Like ‘entitlement.’
The culture of the ‘trans child’ confers greater physical ‘proof’ that one’s child is ‘exceptional’. By delaying puberty, administering cross-sex hormones, and letting kids live as cross-sex or who-the-fuck-knows, one’s child is ‘taking charge’ of their life and not ‘consenting’ to puberty ‘just happening’ when they haven’t made up their mind (or maybe they have) which sex they ‘choose’ to be. ‘Trans children’ often enjoy increased popularity in school and an end to bullying; it’s cooler to be a ‘trans boy’ than a lesbian girl. Affirming parents receive kudos and kowtowing as they virtue-signal how wonderfully tolerant and affirmative they are. A commenter on my recent article The Beginning Of The End Of Transgendermania told the anecdote of a woman she complimented on her tote bag who lit up and exclaimed, “My daughter is trans, and I'm just so proud to represent her anywhere I go,” to which another mother responded, “Congratulations!”
Tote Bag Mom telegraphs how more hep she is than all those other unlucky moms and dads with gay kids who may yet grow up to give them grandchildren, because Mom and Dad affirmed their budding homosexuality rather than trying to ‘fix’ them.
My child is more special than your boring happy-in-her-own-skin daughter or your embarrasingly heterosexual son who brought a girl to the prom.
From vanishing labels to irreversible damage
The tragic difference between ‘Indigo children’ and ‘trans children’ is that once they grew up and had to confront their own mediocrity, the former weren’t left permanently damaged, especially if they decided they didn’t want to be known as an Indigo any longer; they simply abandoned the label and perhaps chose not to speak of it further.
All of this, for the eternal parental status marker race.
Trans kids, on the other hand, are left with permanent scars and irreversible damage. Substack’s Aaron Kimberly detransitioned from lesbian to male and back again, only to find himself permanently looking and sounding like a man, and ostracized from the lesbian community (I had no idea just how brutal lesbians could be against those who leave the fold.) Today he’s chosen, mostly out of fatigue it seems, living as a man. (To be fair, he was in his thirties when he began).
As detransition lawsuits wind through the courts and the frankly sensible Trump administration (on this issue, anyway) rolls back the special rights lobbied for by mostly transgender biological males, the glitter falls off the trans train, transgenderism loses its coolness factor and the pride of being a ‘trans parent’ may quickly turn dangerous.
But humanity being what it is, an eternally status-seeking animal forever in pursuit of ‘better than thou’, it’s highly unlikely the lesson drawn will be, “Be grateful for your healthy, normal child,” with some new fad to latch onto to ‘prove’ one’s child is the future of humanity, and yours is a retro ‘average’ loser.
At least until the regret sets in.
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