This article analyzes how Moms for Liberty mobilizes neoliberal, white feminist rhetorics about girlhood in their public-facing recruitment and training events. Moms for Liberty’s training events on gender ideology and “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) teach that trans identity is a peer contagion that causes vulnerable teenage “girls” to mistake the inherent struggles of adolescence for gender dysphoria, putting youth on a pathway to “sterilization and mutilation.” I argue that Moms for Liberty’s narrative about ROGD borrows heavily from the figure of the girl constructed by the pop-feminist parenting classic Reviving Ophelia. Moms for Liberty’s rhetoric echoes the three major themes of Ophelia narratives: that puberty is uniquely stressful and traumatic for girls, that girls take on “false selves” to cope with the social and developmental challenges of puberty, and that responsible adult women must help to guide girls back to their “true selves.” The main character of Moms for Liberty’s story about ROGD is thus Ophelia herself: a girl in crisis who has lost her true, cisgender self due to peer and media pressure to identify as trans. Through this analysis, I show that anti-trans groups’ efforts to reify notions of a “natural,” essentialized gender binary are inextricable from efforts to reify “natural” and essentialized notions of adolescent development. Moms for Liberty co-opts neoliberal feminist rhetoric about the girl for robustly anti-feminist causes, mobilizing developmental stereotypes about girls as tools of gender discipline and social control.
Mary Byrne (Mon,) studied this question.