A mom of a nonbinary teen became an anti-trans activist, fracturing a California family

Sacramento Bee - 4/4/2024

Dotted around Beth Bourne’s cheerful east Davis bungalow are projects her eldest child crafted growing up: bright flowers made from felt; a picture frame decorated with foraged leaves and twigs carefully glued by a child; crooked, hand-painted ceramic bowls; a colorful knit throw quilt on the arm of the family’s sectional couch.

The walls haven’t been painted in years, nor has the furniture been rearranged. Pictures of Beth’s two children are taped to the refrigerator, to kitchen cabinets. A large family portrait of the three of them hangs on the wall, comparable in size to the mounted TV.

“I want it to be familiar to Lily,” Beth says, “if they ever come back.”

Lily is Beth’s 18-year-old child, her eldest of two, who came out as trans five years ago, and now identifies as nonbinary.

Lily moved out at the end of their junior year of high school, after years of clashing with their mom about their gender identity.

In the years since, Beth has become one of the most vocal and adamant anti-trans activists in the state, as chair of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, and a regular fixture at the California Capitol, school board meetings and protests for parents’ rights.

The tense relationship between mother and child represents a deepening tension not just in American households, but in its classrooms, legislatures and courtrooms, where conversations about gender, and the rights of trans youth, have fractured communities like Davis.

Deep conflict for mother and child

The name “Lily” comes out of Beth’s mouth slightly strained — it’s not a name Beth has ever called her child to their face. It’s not the name Beth gave them when they were born, nor is it Ian, the name Beth called her child when they identified as a boy in adolescence. By the time Ian transitioned to Jude, and began to identify as nonbinary, using they/them pronouns, they had moved out of Beth’s home and in with their dad and stepmom. They adopted the name Lily after high school.

As Lily explored their gender identity and grew closer to the queer community in Davis, Beth grew closer to members of the parents’ rights movement, who believed, like she, that public institutions such as schools and local governments are usurping parental authority by affirming kids who say they are trans, and allowing them to use different names or pronouns.

Conflict between parents and their adolescent children is normal, if not expected. But for Lily, the constant fighting and denial of their person-hood went deeper than everyday bickering – they were sharing a roof with a mother who actively, publicly, opposed the person they were becoming.

“I was ready to come out to everybody because I had been holding it in for a really long time,” Lily said. “From my coming out to my moving out, her views that she expressed to me started to get more aggressive and more extreme.”

Lily stopped communicating with Beth at the end of their junior year of high school; in the years since, Beth, encouraged by a therapist, has sent gifts on holidays or birthdays, and the occasional email.

“I don’t know if she opens them,” Beth said. “But they don’t bounce back.”

Flourishing now at a small university in the Pacific Northwest, Lily owns their identity and said they feel like they have a fuller version of self than they ever have.

“Going off to college has allowed me to just be a person,” Lily said. “Just be a musician, just be a student. And not have to have everything be about my identity. Because that’s just such a small part of me.

“I only think about my gender when I have to,” they added.

After Lily moved out, Beth’s politics became more extreme, her presence in the public eye more common.

A cause and a fractured relationship

Like many others in the parents’ rights movement, Beth believes that in American public schools and health care systems, there is an ongoing effort to indoctrinate kids into identifying as trans.

Beth has turned the effort against this indoctrination into a personal crusade; she is prepared to discuss her child with any given person at any given moment, carrying with her a folder with photos of Lily at varying stages of their transition, “just in case anyone asks or wants to talk about it.”

(“Oh, lovely,” Lily said with a sardonic laugh upon learning this. “That’s just great.”)

As Beth becomes more well-known in Davis, she is eager to tell people about what she has been through — Lily’s transition and the indoctrination she believes fueled it — at the pool where she swims laps, at the Davis farmer’s market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and seemingly anywhere else where people will engage.

But this crusade has taken an increasingly fanatical turn.

Last spring, she was served a restraining order from the Davis Joint Unified School District for sharing school teachers’ personal information. (The restraining order was ultimately revoked.) And she was at the center of several clashes at a Davis public library when a former college athlete tried to speak out against trans women in sports. She appears at most school board meetings to speak during public comment, and doesn’t shy away from shouting matches at protests and gatherings.

Her Facebook page is public, and she appears to be perennially online, responding to comments whether they condemn her for “bigotry” or celebrate her “bravery.”

“You can’t decide a child is transgender, or believe a 12-year-old or 14-year-old is born in the wrong body,” Beth said. “Because that’s not possible.”

Yet she corrects herself when referring to Lily as Ian or their birth name, quick to adapt to Lily’s preferences. The mention of her oldest child makes her eyes water. And in the intimacy of her sunny home — surrounded by the relics of that estranged child, and the piles of books, legal documents, fliers, voter guides and policy notes that clutter her dining room table and floor — she seems closer to the verge of emotional breakdown than she is to the verge of an insult.

She is exhausted and frenetic, a mother muddled in grief, adamant that there is no such thing as being born in the wrong body, and desperate for her child to understand that there is no right or wrong way to be a girl — but that there is also no such thing as being transgender.

“People say, ‘If you stopped doing all this, there is a better chance she’d come back in your life,’ And that may be,” Beth said through a sob. “Maybe one day she’ll forgive me, but, like, I can’t, I can’t just be quiet with what’s going on.”

‘I am really excited about my life’

Lily, a green-eyed college freshman, is active and creative, studying psychology and music. Their SAT score was nearly perfect. They took four AP classes in their senior year at Davis Senior High School, where they graduated in 2023, while coaching swimming and participating in the school’s music and choir program.

In the college town where they now live, they are experiencing what most freshmen experience: new friendships in the dorms and in class, new hobbies (swing dancing), a dizzying course load, and the opportunity to individuate themselves from their parents and their childhood selves.

“Being able to be in a community of people with similar passions has helped me be able to feel more like myself,” Lily said.

“Because as much as I love Davis, the people here always know who I am. They know who my family is. They know who my mother is.

“Last year at one point, some people organized to stand outside the high school and district office with signs saying various anti-trans messages, and people would text me, ‘I saw your mom there, I’m so sorry.’

“I felt good that people are thinking of me,” Lily said, “but I don’t want that to be who I am in people’s minds. I don’t want to just be Beth Bourne’s kid.”

There’s so much that Lily is excited about, they said. They love their classes, and excel academically.

“I am really excited about my life, to keep going to school and studying. At the moment, I’m pursuing a career in counseling. I want to go to grad school to become a therapist, so that I can work with adolescents, probably in the trauma field.”

That might change, they said with a shrug. “But I’m excited to keep meeting people with similar interests to me. I’m excited to keep meeting queer people with life stories that are both similar and different to my own.”

A growing movement

The parents’ rights movement gained traction in the early years of the pandemic, where parents, angered by stay-at-home orders and public health requirements, protested and ran for seats on local school boards. More recently, parents’ rights groups have set their sights on gender and sexuality being taught in classrooms, and conservative politicians across the country have made parents’ rights a campaign priority.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a Parental Rights in Education law in 2022, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ran his successful 2022 reelection campaign on a Parental Bill of Rights.

California and the Sacramento area have taken the opposite approach, becoming, a sanctuary for trans individuals, and passing a slate of bills aimed at protecting LGBTQ youth and adults. State leaders like Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta have pushed back against conservative, parents’ rights-led school board policies.

But a fomenting grassroots movement is pushing back against California’s position as one of the most affirming states for trans kids. And Beth, a lifelong Democrat in one of the most liberal cities in the bluest state, and a parent to a trans child, has become a face of that movement.

Queer student unions, gender and sexuality alliance groups, “they really have kids believe that, that you can change your sex,” Beth said.

“They teach it, and then they have these groups. And I think it’s a social contagion just like vaping or cutting or, you know, eating disorders. Kids just do it, because teenagers like to be like their friends.”

“I think it’s just a form of either self-hatred or self-control, or having control that they pick transitioning to a new gender as a way to just get rid of their old self because they don’t like themself.

“You just get to re-create a new person.”

Lily is clear that they are not suffering from self-loathing.

“There wasn’t, like, a deep-seated hatred for myself as a child,” they said.

“The discomfort I developed for myself was not a product of my queerness, but instead a product of the attitude of people around me, because I was so worried about not being accepted.”

As Lily embraced their trans identity, they grew happier. Their father and stepmother affirmed the transition. Beth remained concerned about it, and increasingly radicalized.

In so doing, she isolated herself not just from her child, but her community.

Lost relationships

The leafy, decidedly liberal town of Davis is an unassuming location for a culture war conflict, and even more unassuming as a gathering place for Moms for Liberty — a largely (but not exclusively) conservative coalition of mothers concerned about vaccines, gender and sexuality being taught in the classroom, and school shutdowns. The group experienced a heyday during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and many of its members have run and won in local school board elections in the years since.

The college town is an idyllic place to go to college and raise a family. The infrastructure of the town is planned around its cyclists; world-renowned agricultural and environmental science programs bring in thousands of climate-aware students every year who find a home in a town among progressive, like-minded people.

It was for these very reasons that Beth and Lily’s father, Beth’s then-husband, chose to live there.

A lover of the environment and an avid cyclist, runner and swimmer, Beth now works in the university’s College of Engineering. She tries to keep her work life separate from her activist life but often works from home, and has gotten used to her colleagues “thinking I’m a terrible person,” she said.

“I moved here for like-minded people,” a decision that seems silly in retrospect. “Why should I want to just think like everyone else?”

Most of the relationships she spent years forming — as a mom, community member, and university employee — have now dissolved.

No one called her on her birthday last month, she said, through glassy eyes filled to the brim with tears once again. Attempts to connect with these former friends — by sending them controversial columns about gender identity, for example — are not received kindly.

“We don’t want to hear from you,” Beth said a friend recently told her.

“Don’t send us anything anymore,” said another.

‘We are...just people’

Lily, with their bag of yarn and knitting needles, colorful hair clips and alert eyes, is adamant that their life is not marred by tragedy — that, in fact, their gender identity is the least interesting thing about them.

“I want to make it really clear that trans people are just people who are trans, queer people are just people who happen to also be queer,” they said. “It is not the most interesting thing about us. We are also just people with goals and hopes and problems.”

Lily would much rather talk about a cat who lives in the dorms (Nebula, who is “very precious and very dumb”), the church choir they joined, the joy of being in a place “where nobody knows who I am.”

Beth believes Lily has been radicalized by gender ideologues. But Lily, too, has some thoughts about radicalization.

“One of the greatest motivators for humans is fear,” Lily said. “And (Beth) was really afraid, because she felt like she was losing her child. And when somebody tells you: ‘It’s not your fault. Somebody else is taking your child; it’s not your fault that you’re losing them,’ that can be really appealing, and it can feel validating.

“And so I think it’s easier to feel like somebody else has hurt you than to realize that you have made a mistake.”