Originally a comment by Holms on Mermonsters.

I remember visiting an acquaintance’s place years ago, a guy I thought of as decent and level-headed. Part way through the afternoon his young son arrived home from school or barged in during dinner or something, and approached his parents with the air of someone with Important News. He informed the room that he had been penalised points on a science test at school, maybe even failing it, because he answered everything in the biology section with ‘evolution isn’t real’ and ‘God created Adam and Eve’ and similar, instead of the answer he knew was expected of him.

Both parents immediately beamed at him, congratulated him for his good christian values and so on; effectively, they flooded him with approval and positivity. They then informed the rest of us that they had not coached, pressured, proselytised or anything of they sort; they insisted they had raised him with strict neutrality regarding the question of evolution versus creation.

I had known the family to be christian, but there was a distinct pang of dismay at realising they were that sort of christian. At the time, I thought the big lesson to take from this was that even generally reasonable people can have irrational – even delusional – beliefs. While this remains true, I now take a second lesson from that day. I believe those parents genuinely tried to be neutral towards their son regarding evolution, making no overt effort to pressure him into creationism; I also see that their idea of neutrality is heavily biased, undercutting their conscious effort to be neutral. The delight they showed was a strong social cue to him that choosing creationism over evolution was the one that earned parental approval, and while it was the first such instance I’d witnessed between them, it cannot have been the first time ever. The mere fact that they still claimed to be neutral with him on the matter – while love-bombing him – showed me that claims of neutral treatment of a question cannot be trusted. That may have been their genuine goal, but the selective approval shines through.

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TRAs like to say they do not exert influence on children to be trans, that the urge bubbles up entirely from within. But they also do this:

A moderator also publicly congratulated a teenage user for deciding that they were transgender by the age of 13 and deciding that they wanted drugs and “all the surgeries”.

Positive reactions, celebratory receptions like this are a strong social cue, and children are not blind to them.