Today I’ve been reading through the 418 comments (and counting) on my ‘Transtopia’ article. That figure doesn’t include replies to comments so I don’t really have an accurate figure on the overall comments made: let’s just call it ‘a lot’. Many are from the parents- mostly mothers- of children who have just ‘come out’ as ‘trans’.
What I see in the words of these parents, and in the voices of the parents who email me (so many go unanswered, I’m sorry) is a deep and fierce love for their children and a determination to support them while keeping a strong grip on reality.
Society and the media respond to this by calling them unsupportive, uneducated & transphobic. This is untrue and they deserve better. Many of them are highly intelligent people who have researched the subject extensively.
Here’s a comment I made on 4thwavenow earlier this year:
Parents who resist the current gender narrative are not selfish or unsupportive
what these parents are is silenced.
So I’ve gone through their comments and taken just a very small sample of their words to share with you, because a short post on my blog is not much but it is better than nothing.
I’ve tried not to quote the same parent more than once, although there are likely to be a couple of accidental repetitions. These are the voices of parents who can see what is going on; the voices of parents who love their children and want what is best for their happiness; the voices of parents who deserve to be heard.
My 16 year old daughter is having Gender Dysphoria. I feel devastated and I am going through the same thoughts and fears that you were going through…
I am a mother of a 14 year old daughter who feels she is a boy. Deep in my deepest heart I know that she is not…
My daughter was in this same exact situation. A “normal” girl until the internet got its hands on her…
The fact that I affirmed and supported her social transition for an entire year, makes her situation all the more challenging….
My 15 daughter came home from 2 weeks with friends thinking she is a boy. She had facebook messaged her grandmother that she was trans…
I have Kaiser (insurance) and they will fully cover my (18 yrs) daughter’s top surgery, much to my dismay…
It’s truly like she’s been sucked into a cult and I don’t know how to get her out. Her best friend is doing the same thing…
Where is the intelligent, thoughtful journalism on this?…
Our daughter is out there somewhere flying through Outer Space. She has destroyed herself from the inside out. There are times I fall to the floor and cannot get up.
Trust me, it is no picnic for families to see an out-of-the-blue transitioning of your young adult kid…
I am just being grateful for time and the fact that I have four more years while my daughter is still a minor…
As the mother of a young adult male who suddenly decided after internet bingeing that he was really a woman, every time I hear “Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?” I just want to scream…
The therapist would have gladly written a prescription for T had I not been so vociferous about all my concerns and doubts …
My biggest fear is that if I keep pushing her to stop binding, she is going to get a mastectomy at the first opportunity…
My daughter has an IQ of 150, yet she’s been sucked into this cult of nonsense. ..
Every session that my daughter had with the therapist was asking her “so what is your next plan for transitioning?”..
I am a parent of a beautiful girl who thinks she’s a trans and in a secret relationship with another trans…
My daughter is also brilliant, but at the same time on the autism spectrum…
She is already having back problems but refuses to give up the binder…
I have two years before my daughter turns 18 and I know I am running against the clock…
She wears her too small falling apart binder (which I bought six months ago because she was using duck tape and bandages)…
My kid (just over 18) does NOT want to hear about any health risks related to any aspect of transition. Like, fingers in the ears, la la la, can’t hear you…
My daughter thinks she’s a gay boy: I don’t even know what to think on that one…
My daughter’s gender therapist fully and nonchalantly agreed with my observation that groups of girls are doing this: entire friend groups!…
My 18yr old daughter now looks like a 13 year old boy…
Last year she was ok with being lesbian. This year she told me “ew that’s gross!! That’s not me!”…
Another young lesbian lost to the infectious misogyny of the trans trend…
If there was a louder narrative that they were strong young women rejecting sexualisation in a way society would not sneer at, perhaps that would help….
What a lot of us parents are experiencing is a sudden change in our kids, with groups of girls in school all doing it and having to pretend that they’re suddenly gay boys…
My 19 year old daughter said to me “I know there are girls just doing this and they are not really trans but I REALLY AM!!”…
Suddenly there are thousands of them, identifying their teenage dysphoria as being caused by being ‘born in the wrong body’, surrounded by adults who are eager to tell them it is true…
The treatment team for my daughter affirmed her choice in every way and recommended that we immediately start hormone suppression…
Our kids are basically guinea pigs…
She was one of those teens that never showed any sign of wanting to be a boy until a heaping dose of social media…
The tension around this issue is unbearable. She is so concerned about how others perceive her, and seems to think being called ‘he’ will magically solve all her other issues…
She goes by male pronouns everywhere now, but is just as depressed as ever…
I’ve even had child services called on me for not allowing my child to transition since I didn’t care for one therapists approach, which was to hand my child a pamphlet on how to transition…
I am feeling really stressed and hopeless. I am terrified for my daughter. I tried to talk to her again. I really believe this is dysphoria with life not gender…
This trans stuff has messed with her mind and I don’t see how weekly therapy is helping undo all of this damage…
I thought surely after the autism diagnosis they would see what I see, especially after I told them about all the kids she knows that think they’re trans…
It was so obvious she was trying to fit a stereotype that she was not accustomed to. It is like she was an actor in a play…
In 6 months she went from lesbian to trans and wanting testosterone and top surgery…
I feel that this rapid transness is some kind of coping mechanism for whatever my daughter is feeling uncomfortable or unsure about…
I have come a long way from the grief and anguish I felt last year, although it is still the first thing I think of on waking, and the last thing at night…
My daughter was very happy and very confident before she discovered the trans community. Now she is fighting her own biology and getting more confused….
I tried therapy for myself, but the therapist just could not relate to this at all and I found it more annoying than helpful. In addition, she also kept pushing me just to accept my daughter’s transition as if it was no big deal…
When she got on the internet at age 15, things went downhill quickly. I would say she was sucked down a dark hole…
My mother-heart bleeds…
At her current treatment center of 35 girls with suicidal idealogy, 6 are trans and 5 of them are called by male names/pronouns and came from progressive families and communities that were supportive in their desire to transition…
I beg you. Help me…
I believe it is more of a defense mechanism as she is sick of men bothering her…
She had been suffering from acute anxiety and depression. I am terrified of alienating her, or pushing her into the arms of a trans cult…
The binding really bothers me. Had I realized that binding is a form of self harm, I would have never allowed it. Now it’s too late…
My daughter said she is trans in May of this year. I found out her school has been letting her use a boy name and male pronouns…
She already suffers from major depression and has Aspergers. It all seems so hopeless. I’m losing my daughter and I can’t do anything about it…
I told her I can’t just blindly tell her it’s ok to “cut her boobs off” as she says and/or take testosterone, call her he…
My daughter is now 13 and believes she may be transgender…
She said she determined this through the internet and seeing what others around her looked like and what they identified as…
The same therapist who was treating my child for other mental issues for some time before the trans revelation, now joyfully refers to my child by the new name and has gleefully stated that all the other prior mental health issues are just because my child now identifies as transgender…
On the day I read it (the Transtopia article) there was an opportunity to speak to my self diagnosed transgender teenager about it. Using some of your arguments I got her to a point where she said she now has a lot of thinking to do because what I said made sense!…
Both of my nephews, 13 and 15, know that this movement is crazy, but they’re also aware that there is a gag order about discussing it…
I am so angry at the many “experts” who happily took our money, scared us into believing them, never encouraging us to question anything — and now I have to figure it all out by myself.
Ten minutes after linking to this post on Twitter, I received this response.
An now NHS England is proposing to lower the age for adult gender services from 18 to 17. Adult services is all about medication and surgery pathways. No psychological support.
My beautiful, 35-year-old daughter, with a 6 year old daughter and a masters in physics, left her husband this past year, decided she is her daughter’s father, and claims to be in love with a man who divorced his wife and cut off his private parts – all in a six month span of time. She won’t talk to me because I don’t agree with her assessment that she is male. My daughter was sexually assaulted by her paternal grandfather after I divorced her father (when she was 3). I think this trans thing and her unresolved issues with men are connected but she won’t even consider it. I feel like my daughter is “gone” and she killed her.
I’m so sorry. Are you not talking at all? I hope you can stay in touch with your grand daughter.
Thank you for collating these. I’d like to show them to some valued colleagues in the field of counselling and psychotherapy who aren’t yet fully aware of what’s going on. I’m so angry that many of these families have had terrible experience with therapists, and I honestly can’t understand what the therapists are thinking. We’re not all dense/neglectful/reductive/dismissive/lacking in curiosity/overcome by our own anxieties. I’m sorry so many of us have been.
Please do! That would be wonderful. Voices like yours are so, so important. Many professionals are understandably nervous about speaking out because any dissent or reservation is seen as transphobic.
Lily, these horror stories are so like the ‘cult of repressed memory’ whereby some years ago therapists were persuading vulnerable girls/women who came to them with problems that it was all due to their being abused in the family as a child — something that the patient had no memory or sense of until the therapist got her hands on them. Thankfully, that vicious nonsense is now discredited. Would that the same might happen to the trans hysteria!
I would agree. I noticed my daughter rewriting parts of her childhood when she was trans-identified. Kids are fed a pretty clear ‘script’ of what they’re expected to say & how they’re expected to behave to show that they are ‘real’ trans if they get most of their ideas from the internet. I believe conforming with it is mostly subconscious: I think she honestly persuaded herself she never did anything remotely ‘girly’.
pleasepleaseplease tell me if your correspondent mothers are UK or USA based. I am also trying to inject some sense into the growing mass hysteria (in the UK) but I need to get my facts right. Thank you.
The comments are from all over – I think mostly the UK, USA and Australia. They were all taken from responses to my ‘Transtopia’ article and respondents don’t necessarily reveal their location.
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