The World Is Full of "Thought Daughters," and It Might Not Be a Good Thing

It seems like there’s a new piece of vocabulary to learn every day thanks to TikTok, and the latest is a play on words related to a former trend. Women all over the platform are calling themselves “thought daughters,” and those who aren’t up on every single fad and trend don’t actually understand what it means.

However, it’s basically exactly what one would think it is. As young women and teenage girls call themselves “thought daughters,” the term has found a way to define a generation riddled with anxiety and depression. Daughters aren’t just “cute little girls” who grow up to please their parents anymore — now, we’re faced with the weight of the patriarchy, a broken society, and an impending climate disaster on our shoulders, turning us all into “thought daughters.”

Basically, a “thought daughter” is a woman or girl who overthinks everything. That could define many people of all genders, but this term specifically came from a different trend. A couple of years ago, in 2021 or 2022, a trend circulated on TikTok asking people if they’d rather have “a thot daughter or a gay son” as a supposedly challenging hypothetical.

The original trend was offensive at best — it made having a gay son sound like a burden instead of a gift and labeled young women “thots,” which is a misogynistic term for a woman. Thot stands for “that h-- over there” and dates back to millennial slang for a promiscuous or sexually liberated woman, first seen on Urban Dictionary in 2012.

However, since the trend first circulated on TikTok, many women have begun joking that although their parents might have originally chosen to have a “thot daughter,” they ended up with a “thought daughter” instead, making light of how “thot” and “thought” sound the same. It’s kind of like the classic 12-inch pianist joke, but with feminism and mental health.

As the world continues to feel like it’s falling apart, it’s no surprise that we have an abundance of “thought daughters.”

One TikToker, @catethegreat1224, shared a video with the title, “pov: your parents got confused and chose thought daughter so now every birthday you cry.” For other girls who cry on their birthdays every year, this is extremely relatable. It’s the one day of the year you want to go perfectly and you want everybody else to be happy so much that you forget to enjoy it.

Another TikToker, @mk9unit, shared, “Parents chose thought daughter but got confused and had pot daughter who became dependent and turned into no thought daughter so she quit/went to therapy and is now distraught daughter.” She’s making light of the rhyming and similar sounding trend of the wordplay while also sharing a possible trajectory for a classic “thought daughter.”