When I was a kid I hated being a girl. The first incident I remember was when I maybe six or seven years old and a boy came up to me and said, “Boys are stronger than girls”. I actually started crying. I remember not being allowed to buy a pair of shoes I really liked because they were made for boys and therefore, did not fit me properly. I was upset and asked my mom why don’t they make these shoes for girls. The answer was they just don’t. So, to me, boys got cool things and girls just didn’t. As a kid I wanted to play baseball but, for whatever reason, I wanted to play specifically baseball, not softball. I think the reason was something about the name “softball” and the different pitching style suggested to me at that age that it was an easier game for girls because they were weaker. I remember on school picture day in fifth grade my mom made me wear a fancy dress which I absolutely did not want to wear, and I cried all morning and hoped my eyes weren’t too red for the photo.

Now, this is all true but there’s more that I’m leaving out. In preschool I didn’t want to go to a school pajama party because I didn’t have a nightgown and I thought people were going to make fun of me for having “boy pajamas”, even though they definitely weren’t. In truth I wasn’t uncomfortable with being a girl until puberty which for me started at seven. When I identified as transgender I sure as hell remembered every single incident, but I left this one out. I blocked it from my mind and never told anyone, because it didn’t fit with my narrative about myself. The narrative that I was a boy trapped in a girl’s body and just didn’t realize it until now. That’s why I hated myself. What I also left out is every other potential explanation as to why. Was I really “born in the wrong body”, or was I just going through puberty? Was it because of my parents’ messy divorce around that same time? Was it because of being insulted by family and peers for poor social skills? Was it because of depression that I would continue to have for years? I don’t know, it’s probably a combination. But I certainly don’t think it’s all explained by me being “born in the wrong body” and hating myself because I should have been a boy.

The problem is that any questioning disrupts that narrative. If you were to suggest this to me at age 13, I would have thought you hated me and were transphobic. But I remembered differently too. And I didn’t just deny my own memories in a story I tell to others, I twisted and denied it in my head too. I think parents with trans identified teens have seen them twist or deny their memories and reality to fit a narrative. And if there are any trans identified or ex-trans teens reading this they may be aware that they have done it too. I am going to explain why.

Doctrine over people is an idea by Robert Jay Lifton which is outlined in “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China”. In the book he outlines eight criteria for thought reform in the context of cults, one of them being doctrine over people. “Members’ personal experiences are subordinate to the sacred science; members must deny or reinterpret any contrary experiences to fit the group ideology.” But why?

I’ll start by saying manipulation and grooming does not usually feel like abuse. It feels normal, it feels like the truth. Abusers make it normal. They make themselves seem like kind people. Think of how many trans related spaces are called “safe spaces”, how many adults call themselves a “safe person” or say they will be your mom or dad, big brother or sister, aunt or uncle, or family. They also use love bombing, which is immediate extreme affection to make you attached to them. They specifically target this towards vulnerable people, kids, victims of abuse, and people who are mentally ill.

It is usually not one single abuser, but either a school system, peer groups, online communities, a team of mental health workers and doctors, or any combination of these, which makes it a lot harder to recognize manipulative behavior. Once you establish these people are safe, they give you the “new reality”. The truth, that you are trans, and it feels like an explanation to everything. It’s the reason you feel all this pain that “cis” people just don’t understand. It’s the reason you don’t fit in. It’s the reason you are gender nonconforming or gay. It’s the reason you are mentally ill. And the idea that transitioning will save you from suicide or a living hell in your own body. Then there is the idea that everyone who disagrees with you hates you. After all, why would they prevent you from getting such “lifesaving” treatment and doing such “easy” things to prevent your suicide. Surely if they cared about you or even didn’t care with no malicious intent they would affirm your new identity, right? This doesn’t apply only to people but to information.

Sources that are critical of trans ideology cannot be trusted, as they are hateful. This leads to affirming people and sources being the only source of companionship and information. But you are under suspicion as well. You cannot say anything critical of the trans ideology narrative or you are hateful too. So, any misstep in your speech leads to rejection from your only social circle, rejection from your “safe space” and these “kind” people who truly love you. It teaches you to watch your mouth. But thoughts lead to speech and wrong speech is dangerous. It leads to you policing your thoughts. You internalize that trans ideology is the truth and that any other truth is hateful. You don’t want to be hateful to your own group, even in your head.

This brings us to your own memory. The unquestionable truth is that you were born in the wrong body, and gender dysphoria is making you miserable. So, what about your own memory of times where you had no problems with your gender? They don’t fit the narrative, the truth, and it would be dangerous to say. They need to be altered or ignored. Doctrine over people comes into play. The reality of your life is irrelevant, it fits the narrative or it doesn’t exist.

Anticipate punishment → censor speech → internalize rules → watch your thoughts → censor thoughts → edit memory/perception

When I identified as trans, I remembered perfectly instances where I had no problem being a girl. As a child I proudly imagined I would grow up to be a woman. I even remember an assignment in school where I had to write about what it would be like to be a boy, and instead of saying my life would be easier like most of the other girls did I actually wrote it wouldn’t be easier I would just have to follow male gender roles which I also found restrictive. But that goes against my new perception of reality, that I’m a boy who was born as a girl, and that being in a female body is making me suicidal. I simply ignored those memories. I picked the ones I wanted to remember, the times I hated being a girl, as proof, and the rest I ignored. And I thought if you brought them up you were undermining my judgement and decision making, and that you hated me. I have heard people say that their kids or their therapists twisted the narrative instead of ignoring it, which is also common. Saying things like you weren’t truly happy then you were just hiding your true identity. That is truly undermining someone’s judgement, saying their own memory is wrong. But it’s a lot harder to spot when it’s people you trust, and it’s easy to falsely read if you’ve been taught to believe the person speaking hates you.

When you read my point before about groups of abusers, knowing that kids are often treated this way by other kids, you may wonder why do kids help manipulate each other? It is because they are in a similar environment. They have been treated this way by “safe” people and assume that love bombing and affirming is kindness, and shunning when people say anything against the narrative is normal and self-protection.

This creates an unintentional abuse dynamic. I don’t believe the kids that shunned me were bad people, but their actions were abusive and manipulative. I may have engaged in this behavior myself at the time without intending to. It is also partially because there is no “leader” to decide what speech and thoughts are acceptable, just an ideology and mentally ill kids. The person in control in any group is often just the person who is the most reactive and engages in the most canceling, the most sensitive. It’s either shun or be shunned, and kids who engage in this behavior are protecting themselves from abuse by becoming abusive.

Annotated Resources for Homeschoolers of Children Aged 13-18 and anyone struggling with gender ideology (in three parts)

PART 2, PART 3

Dear S.,

I’m glad you reached out. I’m not sure if this would be of any help, but I’ll share all my thoughts and experiences without reservation, in case anything in this email will end up being useful, even if just as a starting point.

When I look back and how we approached the process of deprogramming our son, I’m now able to see it as more of a pattern and a strategy. Back then, though, it was all trial and error, intuition and luck. I will try to describe the process. As with every strategy, it has to fit each particular family, so you would be tweaking and changing things, but I hope that my description of what we did will provide some help and guidance.

This is what we had as a baseline, which simplified things significantly.

1. We have always homeschooled, so we were very used to sitting together for breakfast to watch a video and for me to read out loud to the kids, even if they were already teens.

2. Our son has always been easy-going. He didn’t have autism or ADHD.

3. While he was more depressed than usual in the beginning, he was no way near qualifying for a diagnosis of depression.

4. Neither he nor his younger sister had cell phones. They did have laptops in their rooms (which in retrospect I should have never allowed.)

Aside from making sure we continued having a good relationship, as this was the most essential foundation, my goal was to give him vocabulary to critically discuss gender ideology.

More specifically I wanted to convey the following ideas to my children:

1. people are easily manipulated; psychology of persuasion is a thing

2. brainwashing is real, it works, and it destroys you

3. social media and media in general are tools for brainwashing

4. cults destroy you and your sense of reality

5. the brain is plastic

6. medical malpractice / medical scandals have always existed

7. family is very important

8. biology can’t be dismissed

Human biology was the last step and it was the hardest. My hope was that if he could talk about all of the above and understand what was happening, he would be able to see all the red flags of the gender ideology.

I told him early on that discussing gender was between him and his life coach, but we did have “explosions” when we tried to talk about gender. For most of the time, though, especially for the first year, we didn’t touch the subject of gender and gender ideology.

I outlined two phases below, but in practical terms, at some point these phases are used intermittently, depending on what is going on. The whole approach is of applying pressure, then releasing pressure; making them uncomfortable then drawing them in, as well as tweaking parenting strategies. This builds resilience and helps them to be able to discuss emotionally challenging subjects.

Another issue is that many say that their kids won’t watch a documentary or a podcast for an hour. My response is that you can really build up to it. We were able to build it up, so it is entirely possible. Several months before he shared that he thought he was trans, he was already easily distracted and moody. We would watch about 20 minutes of a documentary of his choice and he would ask to leave. I would encourage him to rest or go for a walk, but I would basically let him quit because I thought that he needed to rest. But when I realised what was going on, I started replying with, “I’m sorry you are not feeling well, but we will still continue until we are done.” He would stay, even though he was visibly uncomfortable. However, overtime we built up to three to four hours of homeschooling a day—watching documentaries, reading together, discussing, playing board games. I slowly built up the length of time we spent around the table together.

Phase One: Preparing the Ground and Planting the Seeds

To prepare the ground, I wanted to first make him understand that the woke ideology was psychologically unhealthy and was making teens sicker. The Coddling of the American Mind, a book by Lukianoff and Haidt is absolutely excellent. It is written in non-academic, accessible, conversational language with summaries at the end of each chapter, and it mentions gender only for a couple of paragraphs in one of the chapters. Since I was reading this book out loud to both kids, I skipped that part. The authors give examples of psychologically damaging strategies and policies both from the left and from the right, while saying that the left engages in them much more. Most of the examples are “from the left.” The premise of the book is that every element of the woke culture is the opposite of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and thus creates victimhood, rather than robust psychological health.

If your son is open to reading Thomas Sowell, his books are excellent as well. Both of my younger kids love Sowell. They watched many videos on YouTube and loved The Social Justice Fallacies and The Conflict of Visions. But if he sees Sowell as the enemy, he might not be open to him, at least not yet.

At the same time, I wanted to introduce my son to Jordan Peterson, without bias. I used to be biased against him, so I was careful how I introduced him to Peterson. We started with his Personality Course—the one that you pay for on his website (I believe it is offered now via Peterson Academy). I studied psychology in university and we typically talk about psychology with the kids, so incorporating personality psychology was a very natural progression. One of the lectures in this course IS on gender / sex differences, and at that time I was very anxious about showing it to my son, but we did it. After that, we started listening to Peterson’s old university lectures on YouTube—they were like a review of the condensed Personality Course. Peterson of his university years is quite different from Peterson today. He is an engaging speaker, his students love him, and my children enjoyed it. It also helped telling them that it was a second-year university course.

Concurrently we started listening to some of his podcasts as well.

To understand social media influences we watched The Social Dilemma (documentary). I thought that it was “too kiddy” but both kids, 16 and 14 at the time, really liked it. They agreed with all of what was said, and after we watched it, I told the kids that their internet will be turned off at 10:30 pm every night, as well as other restrictions. We said that this would be a trial period of 30 days. They were not thrilled, but it made sense to them and they didn’t protest. Later my son came to me with good arguments of why he should continue having unlimited internet…The arguments were truly good. The Old Me would have agreed, and I was very, very close to agreeing. However, I said that I was very firm on my resolve and that we would continue with the experiment beyond the 30 days. He did have to admit that it WAS helping him schedule himself better. There were times when he would get really upset about not being able to be online when he wanted, but we persevered. In retrospect, this was one of the most difficult and best parenting decisions.

Following the interest in psychology, we watched several documentaries on Freud’s nephew, The Century of The Self, on YouTube. Again—psychological basis for the manipulation of the public. This goes hand in hand with The Social Dilemma.

The Push on Netflix also goes hand in hand—a documentary / mockumentary about manipulation of those who are susceptible. Unlike The Century of The Self, this is modern, fast paced, and more of an entertainment.

Naturally, The Milgram Obedience experiments, Solomon Asch Experiments and The Stanford Jail experiment (though this last one seems to have some kind of issues and fudged data, so be careful with that one) and various obedience and conformity studies—many have documentaries made about them and we watched several. We also recently watched a great documentary called Radical Evil on YouTube. It is about the Holocaust and mentions many of the conformity experiments in a very impactful visual way. I highly recommend this one—very difficult to watch, very impactful and has all the right messages and a lot to discuss.

I will continue in the next email. Let me know if you have any questions.

Lots of love,

H.

The state of Minnesota used Child Protective Services to take my child away from me and place her in foster care - all because we wouldn’t affirm her trans identity.

I refused to use a false name or wrong sex pronouns and it was always going to be over my dead body that any harm came to her physical body.

It was only when we got unentangled from the abusive state that my daughter desisted and we were finally able to reclaim her mental health, as I always knew would be the case.

I have spent the years since then trying to wake people up to the dangers of gender ideology, largely to no avail.

People don’t want to hear it. People assume I’m a bigot just for talking about it.

People called me abusive and right wing and a transphobe.

The Minnesota Department of Health Service was warned about this years ago, as were Amy Klobuchar, Tim Walz, Tina Smith, several Democratic and Republican state representatives.

I tried to file reports against the CPS workers who affirmed my daughter and wasn’t taken seriously. They all knew and they all ignored me.

After the recent shooting, they are all scrambling trying to cover their asses on what their political ideology has caused, fighting online and via the news about who is to blame and whether it’s the guns or the mental illness. Meanwhile, my daughter, who is now very comfortable in her female body and is coming to terms with her same sex attraction, knows she is a girl, just a girl who likes other girls, and she has let go of the trans delusion entirely.

We spent yesterday having the best day with friends at the state fair. We had such a blast. We made good memories just living. We were able to do that because her father and I parented her through the identity crisis. We didn’t give in and let her be in control. She was a kid. What adult in their right mind lets kids run the show?

We told her no. We set limits and boundaries and expectations. We told her we loved her but we would not continue the lie that her teachers and therapists and everyone else told. We told her she was born a girl and will always be a girl. We affirmed her in reality. Don’t get me wrong, she was angry as hell at the time. But now she is thankful and she understands we were trying to protect her.

I want parents in Minnesota to know how badly they are being lied to. Teachers and social workers do not know your child better than you. It is not healthy to affirm mental illness as identity. Doctors don’t know what the hell they are talking about when it comes to gender affirming care. The one thing they do know that they are not telling you is that it is impossible for your child to change sex. We are mammals. Please use your brains.

Not affirming is really, really hard at first, and you will feel like a failure as your child rails against you. But then, something clicks, and they settle down. And then before you know it, they are happy and comfortable in their bodies again. And then you have wonderful days full of fun and making memories while the rest of the world obsesses about the worst aspects of the cult you just managed to save each other from.

The past few days have been surreal on many levels. Knowing I saved my daughter from a death cult and that we can still find so much joy together, while the rest of the world falls apart…this is what I want other parents to know.

You can parent your child through this, you don’t have to give in to the lie, you don’t have to feed the beast.

Be a parent, not a friend.

Say no.

And if/when the state comes knocking, fight back. They also don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.

There is joy and happiness after desistance, after the state attempts to destroy your family. It’s not always easy to find, but it’s there.

You don’t have to go along with any of it. Step up and start parenting again. It’s not your job to be their friend.

My daughter identified as nonbinary, chose a couple different names at a couple different times that I would never use, and wanted various pronouns that I just wouldn’t use.

A lot of people might say “she wasn’t ever trans if she only identified as nonbinary”, or “she never had gender dysphoria” and I would say that you are correct.

I don’t even know that she was ever even a ‘true believer’.

I know that she was a kid who was struggling socially after lockdown and with her own demons that she shouldn’t have had to deal with in the first place.

She said she was nonbinary and she got affirmation from teachers and therapists and friends and felt special.

She was experimenting or going back and forth with calling herself lesbian and bisexual and I could tell she was confused and really just tried to both encourage her to give herself space to figure it out and avoid adopting any labels or putting herself into a box while she was figuring it out.

And then as things progressed and she started sinking to darker places with her mental health, the identity almost became a tool to derail her family therapy sessions away from the hard issues. We would talk about something she didn’t want to confront and all of a sudden the conversation would turn to how we wouldn’t call her by her chosen name and wouldn’t use her chosen pronouns and that meant we didn’t accept her or didn’t love her.

It became a hammer that just stopped everything and turned the whole room upside down. If she could get the therapist or social worker on her side about the gender issue, she could get them to agree that we were harming her by not affirming.

And it didn’t help that so many of the other kids she did therapy with in the inpatient setting had gender identity issues and they were all feeding off each other.

They had us attend a family CRT program and they started it off by introductions with pronouns, for everyone, all parents included.

It was the first time I ever looked dead at that zoom camera and said, “no thank you” and immediately muted myself again.

Please explain to me what I am going to take from that on a therapeutic level. You just shut down all lines of communication with that ridiculousness and now I can’t take any of this seriously. That was my response, internally of course.

What I want people to take away from our story is that this is what gender affirming care is doing to kids and families who seek mental health care. It is taking the kids who don’t even view themselves as the opposite sex, the ones who wouldn’t even necessarily be obsessing over gender identity, and it is turning the entire focus of their so-called therapy onto identity and external validation. It felt like they were attempting to brainwash us as parents into going along.

The first residential treatment facility my daughter was placed in, we were met by staff members, one of whom introduced herself and the first thing anyone would see about her was the giant rainbow shoelaces on her tennis shoes. This was her primary therapist at this facility and one who would go on to try to talk us into affirming.

The second place my daughter ended up was small and it had a one room classroom and a main lounge area for visiting,

When you walked in you were greeted with the typical “all are welcome here” signage and there was leftist messaging on the walls. Black Lives Matter, the in this house we believe… signs, the progress pride flag, rainbow flag. All of it. In the lounge the walls were covered with paper flags of various gender identities made by the girls. It was everywhere.

There was nothing neutral about either of these places. And these were mental health facilities where so many kids are struggling with identity and this is what they are bombarded with from all angles.

This is part of “gender affirming care” that nobody is talking about. Kids who seek help for ED’s and grief and trauma are ending up with this.

I am an 18-year-old desister and, like most people my age, have had a great deal of exposure to the internet from a very young age. Various internet sources have created a narrative around trans ideology that many kids grew up on and therefore find it hard to question. I am going to explore various internet sites and resources and their messaging encouraging trans ideology, ranging from misinforming to abuse and danger.

A note about social media..

.

As social creatures, people need social connection and a sense of belonging. It is deeply connected to our sense of safety, being alone or rejected is dangerous and leaves us feeling vulnerable. Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory suggests that without social belonging we cannot focus on our personal growth and performance in our life because we feel unsafe. Social needs sit right above our safety and basic physical needs.

Many kids (and adults) who are feeling isolated or lacking social connection turn to social media to fill that role. Many people find it easier to befriend people and talk online. They worry less about social rules and judgement from others, which can be especially helpful for people with anxiety or other social struggles. Unlike at school or an in-person social circle where you just have to hope people are interested in the same things you are, you can talk to a wide variety of people from around the world online so many are bound to be interested in what you want to talk about. A problem that might seem too personal to discuss in person is shared by people online due to the sheer amount of internet users. People who lack social connection in person are likely to turn to online relationships through social media.

It’s not only isolated people who use social media. Pressure from existing friends to use social media can draw kids in. You don't want to be the only person in your group not "in" on something, because that can lead to rejection and like I've said rejection feels dangerous. It's also usually not enough to just have family as a teenager. Teenagers naturally want to branch away from their family so they can develop their independence. It is natural at that age to be skeptical of your family and rely more on your friends, teachers, or online communities for social connection, advice, and morals. Many also use social media just for the fun of it. There is an abundance of meme videos, funny discussions, fandom groups about video games, shows, and hobbies, and talking with friends when you can't be with them in person. It's not entirely dangerous but there are many dangerous aspects of the internet and it is not the fault of kids or often even their parents when kids fall into dangerous ideology, trans or otherwise. Nobody is immune to manipulation, especially not kids.

Reddit

Reddit is a widely used social media app and website. Reddit discussions are divided into topic groups called subreddits, and within those subreddits are specific titled discussions. Like many social media sites there is also private messaging. Subreddits and discussion titles are easy to look up so the information and posts are usually very public and easy to find. A lot of reddit subgroups are innocent and harmless, unrelated to trans ideology or even politics at all, ranging from fandoms to memes to life advice and stories. However, many have described Reddit as an "echo chamber" politically, with some spaces being intolerant of other political opinions even in subreddits you would think would have nothing to do with politics.

A google search of a trans-related question can easily point you to a reddit thread from a larger trans subreddit. While you can find people criticizing trans ideology on reddit, there are certain spaces that are very affirming and claim that people who criticize trans ideology hate you, are nazis, or want genocide against transgender people. Users on these subreddits makes posts celebrating their surgeries like vaginoplasties, double mastectomies, and phalloplasties, as well as post about trans people who have been hurt, killed, or who have committed suicide, as well as vandalism against people pride flags to further push or "prove" that there is a genocide against transgender people.

One post is titled "if you need to know if you're transgender" with a link to amitransgender.net . If you go to this site it says "yes." in bold, before linking to further resources. One of the resources is "8 signs and symptoms of gender dysphoria", which on this resource includes feeling like you have no purpose in life, feeling like you are different from other people, and feeling worse during puberty. All of these are normal and are certainly no indication that you would only be happy with yourself if you transition, yet that is what this advocacy pushes.

Tumblr

A lot of trans ideology as well as other disturbing content thrives on Tumblr. Detransitioner Laura Becker discusses trans ideology content and culture on Tumblr in this video. Tumblr engages strongly in cancel culture of its users, and any user who says anything against trans ideology will be shunned and users will attempt to bully this user off the platform. People who are against trans ideology are highly vilified on Tumblr. As Laura describes it Tumblr is a place where mentally ill people and outcasts keep each other company, and so users probably feel as though nobody will accept them outside of Tumblr and therefore wouldn't try to say anything that would get them rejected by what they see as their only community.

TrevorSpace

TrevorSpace is a forum website for 13-25-year-old LGBTQ people affiliated with the Trevor Project. Their website and crisis counselors will recommend people to go to TrevorSpace as a support community. The site has no age verification; I started using it at 12 and I’m sure I’m not the only one who lied about their age to join. From my experience the community at first is very affectionate and love bombing but they take away that affection whenever someone says something that the general site doesn't like. Do keep in mind that a good chunk of the users likely found this site from a suicide hotline crisis counselor. I thought that this community were the only people who could possibly care about me because of the sites advertising as being a safe space, and later trans ideology saying that anyone who didn't affirm hated me and wanted me to suffer. It was their affection that kept me hooked and the fear of its absence that made me watch my mouth for anything they wouldn't like.

The content on TrevorSpace is very disturbing looking back. There are a lot of posts suggesting a trans genocide and fearmongering already suicidal kids and young adults. Adult users would encourage teenagers to use "diy hormones" claiming it saved their life. Back when I was on my friend at the time got "canceled" by the site for not regularly wearing a mask when in his country at that time wearing a mask was very uncommon. He was already suicidal and depressed, we talked about that a lot together. I remember a specific teenage user would post about herself harm cutting habit and make posts saying she was gonna cut herself and that nobody could stop her, making concerning posts that she was going to cut herself deep enough to see her fat layer and along with pictures of beans. It scared the crap out of a lot of users including myself again keep in mind we were all mentally ill too. Many users tried to stop her but they could not. The moderators didn't say anything. Actually, it was pretty common for moderators not to do anything when there was a problem. There was another incident where a user joined the site and started mass banning people's accounts because if an account was reported a certain number of times, it was automatically banned. From what people said he was also bullying people but I don’t know what he did. The moderators did nothing because it was a weekend and they don't work weekends. That fact is concerning enough, as the incident could have been a lot worse than just account bans given that a large portion of the site is mentally ill and suicidal. Another user begs moderators not to remove a post warning users about a user who was allegedly abusing them, as well as saying that his username needed a trigger warning. Another user claims to have seen a lot of pedophiles on the site, which is not surprising considering the site is designed to be a mix of adults and vulnerable kids and there is no age verification.

TikTok

TikTok is a video sharing platform with a variety of videos, including many surrounding trans identity and ideology. Content celebrating trans people including trans kids, coming out videos, videos celebrating and encouraging medicalization, and videos suggesting "trans genocide" and other fearmongering are common.

Desister Forest Van Slyke shares her experience with TikTok

"TikTok was designed to be addictive. The algorithm shows you more and more content that you like. I kept seeing trans content, and in this content, people said, “If you see trans content, it’s because you’re trans.” My brain became stuck on a loop. It was all I thought about. People told me to cut out anyone who wasn’t supportive, so the only people I talked to were also trans. I talked to autistic, trans life coaches who also reinforced these ideas. Then my therapist affirmed them. Then my doctor prescribed testosterone. Then the govt. put me on a waiting list for top surgery. Nobody actually helped me."

Discord

Discord is unique in that it’s less of a social media app and more of a private messaging app. You can only join chats by being invited to them, and many chats are innocent and harmless such as chats between friends in person, or fandom and meme groups with users online. However, because it is a lot more private a lot more nefarious activity takes place on discord, and a mutual friend either in person or online can invite you to a group chat with groomers, pedophiles, or abusive people. Because discord is private you can send and receive explicit images and messages with predators as well as have them send you things like "diy hormones". With the narrative that parent who don't affirm are abusive and want to hurt you, it's easy for a predator to exploit this and ask for an address to pick you up or for you to go to if you'd rather "live with them". This isn't as easy on general social media as it is usually monitored for predators to some extent although sometimes not well. There is a reporting feature on discord but groomers start with kindness and affirmation to get you to get your guard down, so that you don't see it as a threat when they start to act inappropriate. When I was browsing my old socials to attempt to get evidence of things I saw, I saw messages from people I thought I trusted that were very inappropriate and creepy. But I did not feel this way at the time at all because these people started off by being very nice to me and establishing themselves as "safe". Even now despite how I feel about the messages I don’t know how to feel about this person, because of how he treated me before I’m reluctant to call this person a groomer. Which is the goal of groomers.

Final note

A lot of people who are aware of this internet activity and behavior say to never allow your kids on social media. I want to agree but it’s worth mentioning that I accessed all of this as a child while technically not being allowed on social media. I think there needs to be a more effective solution but I don't have one. I truly wish I did and I wish I had a solution for people struggling right now. But for now, I will do what I can which is make people aware of internet behavior and how kids and adults come to believe harmful things that you can't imagine how they don't see right through.

Being Proactive is the Only Way

Helping your child desist is not easy or quick but becoming proactive and trusting your intuition is crucial. Don’t wait for your child to come out of this phase on their own—they don’t have emotional or cognitive resources to do it without your help.

You Do Have a Good Relationship with your Child

You know your child best. If you feel that the recent months or years have weakened your good relationship with your child, drop everything and work on rebuilding it—it requires a focused effort, but it is not as difficult as you think. Remember that despite appearances, your child still needs his or her mom more than you think. Having an upset teen doesn’t mean that the core of your relationship is broken.

The Good News (and the Bad News)

Your child is going through a normal unhappy adolescence and is attempting to individuate. The good thing is that this is all normal and healthy and thus will pass when this developmental phase evolves into the next. The bad thing is that the individuation via transgender identity is a maladaptive coping strategy and the entire world seems to affirm the delusion. This complicates things. Don’t get discouraged when your child doesn’t listen to facts and calls you transphobic. Teens all think that they know better, and while incredibly annoying, this is developmentally normal.

Do Talk About the Facts

For goodness sake, do talk to your child about the facts. Yes, they will cry, yell, storm out, shut down, call your names—at first. This doesn’t mean that you should be tiptoeing around those big feelings and waiting until your child will magically realize they have been misled by a cult. They need the facts about biological reality like they need air. Their initial emotional reaction is entirely normal and this doesn’t mean that sharing facts is ineffective, unproductive, and should be avoided. Remember that your child still implicitly trusts you. They are still subconsciously immersed in the feeling that you are their Entire Universe. Your child will not change his or her mind based on a single video that you might share, but without this video or that article there will be no growth and no foundation on which to build their path to desistance.

Do Talk about Gender

If you won’t talk about gender because it is uncomfortable and scary, who will? Your child’s non-affirming therapist? When a therapist tells you not to talk about gender and not to talk about the facts this therapist is telling you not to parent. No matter how non-affirming, any therapist was trained in the context and with the modalities of centering on their client above all else. In their training they were taught that it is the therapist who knows best, not the mother. An emotionally and cognitively immature teen will absolutely take therapist’s validation of his or her feelings as a validation of his or her gender identity. Only mothers know their child well enough to balance validation of feelings with the presentations of facts. Treasure your bond with your child, learn how to strengthen it through conflict and don’t outsource important conversations to those who are getting paid to have those conversations.

Do Not be Afraid of Big Emotions

Adolescence is the awkward time of big awkward emotions. It is normal for your child to be upset when their narrative is contradicted with the truth. Being upset and unregulated is the only way they can learn to regulate their emotions. If you are afraid to upset your child or you are afraid of being upset yourself, your child will be struggling to learn how to regulate their emotions at 30.

Do Not be Afraid of Conflict

Modeling to your child that you can have a fight and make up without affecting the core of your relationship is the best gift you can give to your child. Words are not violence. We grow through conflict. We grow closer through conflict and resolution.

Do Change One Thing about Yourself

None of us is perfect. We don’t have to be perfect. But we are good enough, and that’s plenty. This said, we each have one thing that we can change about ourselves and our parenting. Put your effort into changing one thing—this exercise will help you AND, indirectly, your child.

Do Not Expect Instant Results

It takes a while to change one’s mind, especially when you are a stubborn adolescent. No one ever changes their mind based on a single presentation of facts, especially if we are emotionally attached to the issue at hand. However, no one ever will change their mind without any facts at all. Desistance is a process. Conflict, big emotions, and uncomfortable conversations are a part of this process, and not a sign of failure. Be gentle with your child and with yourself—that one thing that you need to change about yourself won’t happen overnight either, and that’s okay too.

Do Fearlessly Expect Desistance

There are no guarantees in life. However, the chances of your child desisting are incomparably greater than the chances of your child being stuck in the maladaptive identity search, especially if their mother continues to parent with love, resilience, and a healthy dose of reality.

Also by this author:

Not a Desistance Story

The Many Months to Desistance

There are Two Phases

What Have I Changed My Mind About?

ROGD, AGP, Mothers, and Sons—Common Sense Thoughts by Not a Psychologist

For the last four years it has felt like my children and I are living in completely different worlds. What started with the difference of opinion during COVID quickly escalated into the realization that we had developed totally opposing world views.

At the start of 2020 we were a close happy family. By mid-2021, everything had changed. All three of my kids betrayed me and cut me out of their lives, even the 14 year old who choose her sister over me (Sister mother). All because I stayed true to the principals and personal beliefs that I had raised them to also believe, or so I thought.

Time passed and things seems to be on the road to healing in my family, right up until spring of 2023 when a whole new nightmare appeared in my life with the sudden announced from my only son that he is “trans”! He told me that he discovered his new gender identity two years before, during lockdown in 2021, and he was quickly affirmed by his two proud, politically queer, social justice warrior sisters.

I was shocked! My first thought was maybe he is confused about his sexuality. To my knowledge he has never been kissed. Between his awkward autistic personality and COVID isolation at a time when he should have been experiencing his sexual awaking while away at university, he has faced unfair challenges. But to decide he is a girl trapped in his healthy male body, that is IMPOSSIBLE.

Before he told me his big secret, I had noticed he had developed an interesting dress style, wearing belly button tops, flowy pants and grandma sweaters - all kind of odd for a 23-year-old young man, but I actually loved his confidence to express his cool non-conforming sense of style. He still wore his ACDC t-shirt, jeans and a ball cap to work, and he's always had long hair, but still is very masculine.

I saw nothing wrong with his unique sense of self- expression…Until I started to realize that there was something wrong with the world.

I then started seeing the lies everywhere in the culture. Sadly, before that I never gave it much thought. I’m ashamed to say because both my daughters had FTM friends that I just went along without question. Thinking it is a sexual thing like being gay and that it was none of my business to judge or even try to make sense of.

I knew there were people that say they were transgender, but I didn't think anybody really took it seriously. I didn't realize that people were being told literal lies, (that sex and gender are different things), in schools and online, since around 2010!

Being told the bizarre impossibility that someone may have been “born in the wrong body”, and that it is just some kind of explainable, natural progression in human evolution is ridiculous! As is being told that you're a hateful bigot unless you affirm, accept, celebrate and go with the flow.

I really hadn't given this nonsense a whole lot of thought until it was standing in front of me in my kitchen, informing me that this is just how the world is now. My first reaction was “Don't be ridiculous, God doesn't put people in the wrong body!”

I didn't yet know God personally but the words came straight from my soul. Then my son told me he didn't believe in God ( woke soul), because he knows how he “feels”! How he can somehow, impossibly “feel like a woman”, and that means he suddenly now just is one, so therefore he was made wrong! He further explained to me that thanks to modern “gender” science medicine, he can be his own creator with the help of a (monster) doctor. He says he doesn't need a “savior”; he's going to save himself.

It made my blood run cold. I felt offended by the blasphemy even though I hadn't been in a church in decades and really didn't even understand what my own spirituality meant to me. But this felt dark and demonic. And when my precious, gentle, sweet boy told me he chose a new name, and his birth name I lovingly gave him, is now hurtful. And then I was given the choice of a dead son or another beautiful daughter!

Trying to make sense of this evil madness took over my life and ate at me. I couldn’t believe I was being called hateful for telling the truth and wanting to protect him. That accepting my son unconditionally meant that I would have to go along with a lie!

The next blow was to discover that it is literally illegal in Canada to question someone’s self-declared “gender” as it is considered conversion therapy!! This is unbelievable! How can any parent agree to play along with this. I know the threat of suicide is terrifying, but it doesn’t take much research to discover that the rates are actually higher after transition, and that people are now detransitioning in growing numbers daily!

I have always been a natural health advocate and have been warning him his whole life about the dangers of pharma chemicals, (even more since Oxycontin killed his grandmother). How he can now talk so calmly about taking dangerous experimental drugs, that he is willing to be dependent on for the rest of his life, in order to pretend to be something he can never be?! He spoke of possibly getting experimental mutilating surgeries to his healthy body as if it was no big deal, my mind was blown, and my heart broken.

How can he think that he has to change himself, to be himself?

How had I never seen any of this in him before? Where is this coming from?

The following year was a very dark time in my motherhood journey, I had so much guilt for not seeing this threat sooner. How could I have been so ignorant, and gone along with this evil, ridiculous “trans” foolishness when it was other people's kids?

In my defense, I didn't realize they were being medicalized and told to pursue this impossible fantasy! How could I have known that pretending to be something you're not is now apparently how to be authentic!

For the past two years I worked hard for my honorary PHD in gender ideology (and Marxism), as I started to understand the destabilizing nature of so-called inclusion. If queer theory is behind all this, why are supposedly educated people so willing to fight for something that's just an unproven, scientifically impossible theory? It's bizarre to say the least, but the more I understood this madness, the more distant my son and his ally sisters pulled away from me.

At my lowest, feeling completely alone and abandoned in the world, I turned to Jesus. I didn't do it on purpose, a friend had posted a prayer, it was Good Friday 2024 and the prayer was asking for answers to my most pressing necessity…. And with my family divided and captured by this cult, I felt like my own life was on hold until I can find a way to save them. So, in desperation, I gave the prayer a try.

And the most amazing thing happened, God answered me! Showed me that my son is and always will be my son. That he is completely normal, there is nothing wrong with him! I got the message loud and clear that it's my job as his mother to stand up for reality. I wouldn't have believed that it was Jesus except that I specifically asked Jesus for guidance and within minutes was directed to the answers. It brought me to my knees. Jesus is real! And prayers work!

That was almost a year ago, and not much has changed with my son's life plans… but I have changed. I am a new creation for Christ, my life does have a purpose! I have been called to be a solider in this battle for truth.

This business of my son thinking he's a girl is now part of my life story too. I now understand that it takes great suffering and heartbreak sometimes to shape us into what we need to be, to accomplish what God created us for.

I know all the pain will make the reward ever more beautiful when it arrives. So I am choosing to keep my sights on that great day of celebration in the future, when my son comes home, and not dwell too much on the fact that it will be darkest before the dawn.

I have been walking on eggshells trying to keep a connection with all three of my kids so to not become estranged, as the thought of not knowing how or where they are is a living nightmare. I have given it up to God; but I can't just pray, and physically do nothing and watch as this destroys their lives. They might not want to listen to me, but they will have to listen to the world if enough people are awakened to reality and this madness is stopped.

I know I have to be brave, stop worrying about the eggshells, and trust God’s plan. He called me to this fight and with a federal Canadian election ahead, it’s time for me to stand up publicly and get loud, shining a light for truth. And to share my unique flavor of salt, because salt has no impact until it makes contact. Even though my children will probably completely disown me, for now, I have to do what I can and pray they will understand and maybe even be grateful when the blinders finally fall from their eyes.

This deep darkness that has torn my family apart can only be described as a spiritual war of good versus evil. As these demands for inclusion in the form of total acceptance of this new queer culture, is without any doubt the work of Satan.

To spite the pain, I am very grateful to now realize that you cannot serve two gods, it's either Christ or the culture. And I think siding with the divine creator, who made each of us amazingly, uniquely perfect and promises us eternal life if we just believe and follow Him…... feels like the safe side to fight for in this war for souls.

For more on this author.

Republished with permission from Maia’s Substack.

It took less than a year of unrestricted internet access to turn me from a happy, loving kid who obsessively researched niche neurological conditions for fun, into a 12-year-old who obsessively researched ways to kill herself because her parents refused to affirm her transgender identity.

After less than a year of receiving an iPad as a gift for my 12th birthday I went from watching hours of clips from the Ellen DeGeneres show to being carried along via the algorithm into believing that I was born in the wrong body.

Coming Out as Transgender

One spring day in 2012 I was desperate to tell my mom about the feeling that I was born in the wrong body. I was already in puberty for a few years and was fully convinced by online trans communities, documentaries, and talk shows about “trans kids” that if I waited any longer, my bones would fuse at the height of five foot one and make it impossible for me to really ‘pass’ as a man. I knew that time was of the essence. I was convinced that if I wasn’t allowed to transition immediately, I was doomed to suicide. In a desperate bid to save myself from my own developing female body, I had finally decided to stop delaying the inevitable conversation.

After fretting about ‘coming out’ to my parents all day at school, I decided to summon my mom into the parked car outside of our small house for a private conversation. My mom sat in the driver's seat and I sat behind her in the left passenger side, instinctively buckling myself in— though we had no plans to go anywhere. After I’d buckled myself in and sat in silence for seconds that felt like hours, my mom asked me what it was that I wanted to tell her.

I felt as if a block of cement had settled in the base of my throat, preventing me from uttering the words I so badly wanted to say. What came out instead was: “I can’t say it. Can you try to guess?”

Without hesitation, my mom asks: “did you get a ‘B’ on the math test we studied so hard for?”

It makes sense that this would be her first guess. After all, I was struggling to pay attention in math class and my mom, dissatisfied with American math pedagogy, had spent hours educating me herself from Singaporean math books and with the help of her old childhood Soviet textbooks.

“Yes, I did get a ‘B’” I answered, “But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.”

Sensing my nervousness, my mom fixes her eyes on the idle steering wheel. She asks, “Are you gay?”

I wasn’t expecting her to cut through the noise in my brain so quickly and get so close to the secret I’d been keeping, but I should have. After all, I had been obsessed with two lesbian TV personalities: Ellen DeGeneres and Jane Lynch, as well as with the broader Gay Rights Movement at the time. I had already begun to have crushes on other girls but was too confused about what a crush was to understand that it was feelings of budding romantic attraction rather than an orange-flavored soda at the supermarket.

How a Normal Adolescent Experience Sent Me Into a Gender Identity Crisis

Here’s the story of how my first crush sent me into a trans tailspin:

My voice shook as I responded “no.. not really… but you’re close”

She looks at me through the rearview mirror and asks, “Do you want to be a boy?”

My heart stopped. A hypothermic coldness overcame my body, starting from my chest and emanating throughout my limbs. I felt the block of cement that had lodged itself into the base of my throat, preventing me from saying the very thing I felt so desperate to say, had dissolved into a waterfall of tears. Within three guesses, my deepest secret had been revealed. To this day, I have never felt so naked as I did in that moment. I do everything in my power now to never feel those sensations again.

I should have known it was this easy for her to x-ray vision her way through the darkest secrets of my innermost soul- after all, I had been instructed by trans adults online to ‘drop hints’ about ‘LGBT topics’ to assess my parents’ potential reactions before coming out.

I had spent months dropping increasingly more obvious hints; from talking about gay public figures at dinner, to asking my mom if she knew what a “cis” person was as we loaded groceries into our car in the supermarket parking lot, and even inquiring if my mom knew what a “chest binder” was as she dropped a few bay leaves into her famous Borscht- which we would eat for the next ten days.

I decided to show my mom music videos of trans singer Ryan Cassata whose vlogs I was obsessed with. She was not amused. “I don’t think this person is a good role model for you, Maia” and I responded: “but mom, look at him. He graduated high school early and with honors”

I couldn’t understand why my mom would think that a transgender influencer who wore cool vests, RayBan glasses like mine, who sang decently well, who had a beautiful girlfriend who tenderly cared for Ryan following her breast removal, and who had even graduated early from high school- could possibly be a bad role model for me.

I had planned for the moment of revealing my innermost self-perception to my parents for months. But when my mom finally managed to guess correctly, I felt as if I had lost all control. All the tears I had repressed for months of this fraught identity exploration, over my newly developed desperation to become the impossible, all came flooding out. I immediately realized I had made a big mistake by disclosing my feelings to my parents.

I was met with panic, with a barrage of arguments about why my self-perception was false, and a bunch of questions which all seemed like a trap “how can you say you’re a boy? You write poetry, you love cats and you do theatre. Remember that ballet class I put you in as a kindergartener? You enjoyed it so much.” Then, my mom uttered the phrase that would change my life trajectory:

“This is just a phase.”

From that moment on, I became determined to ensure that this would not be a phase. I became determined to prove my parents wrong.

That day, I cried until my lungs hurt. I had just made the most important revelation of my life. My parents always told me they’d love me no matter what. Following my ‘coming out’ as trans I didn’t feel love, or warmth. I felt dismissed, confused and rejected. Worst of all I felt totally alone. I was scared to reveal such a thing to my parents, and their reaction only made me panic more. I was already anxious about the prospect of my parents saying “no” because I saw my time running out. I was convinced that the more I would progress through female puberty, the harder it would be for me to become a convincing man and to live a normal life as an adult. I fully believed that I would die if not allowed to transition- not because I was actively suicidal, but because I saw documentaries featuring “experts” like Johanna Olson-Kennedy, saying that kids whose parents don’t allow them to transition, are doomed to end their own lives. I became fearful of myself.

There are so many things I wanted to say to my mom that day, but the words swirling around in my head kept forming a barricade at the base of my throat- and they wouldn’t come out. As an adult, I now understand my parents’ panic and their impulse to not affirm. I frankly don’t know if I would have been able to handle the situation better than they did. But I do know that their panic only caused my distress to escalate. I needed someone to help me slow down my thoughts, to assure me that everything would be okay so I could get to the bottom of why I felt this way. Instead, I felt that a war was being waged against me.

The ‘Trans Kid’ Narrative in 2012

Leading up to 2012, many gay and some trans vloggers discussed how their parents had disowned them and had kicked them out of the house following their identity declarations. They advised us to prepare a bag of clothes and toiletries, and a backup ‘safe’ person to stay with in the event that our parents reacted negatively. I had gotten so caught up in the anxieties of disclosing my trans identity that I forgot to pack, or to plan anything. My mind went to the worst place- would my parents kick me out and I would have nothing but the clothes on my back?

This was of course a baseless fear put into my mind by online trans activists: that parents who don’t affirm a child’s trans identity will disown their kids over it. But I fully bought into this claim.

Following my Coming Out as Trans, My Parents Panicked - and So Did I.

I began to use my iPad to reach out to the moms of public “trans kids” for help through their publicly listed emails and the comments sections of their blogs, begging for help. Every email bounced. I began devising ways to bind my breasts without my parents knowing, based on online instructions published in old trans discussion forums online which I had already consumed. In the same way as my parents were scrambling to solve this problem- I was panicking too.

Over the next few days following my coming out as trans, my parents cracked down. They knew that I was getting these ideas from the internet, so they told me that I was no longer allowed to search for any “LGBT” content. They installed spyware on my iPad which slowed the already basic machine so much that it no longer functioned. I was angry and distraught. ​It wasn’t fair. I was the only member of the family whose internet use was restricted. My brother had won this latest battle in our sibling rivalry, openly flaunting his use of the internet around me, knowing that I could not do the same. It made my situation feel even more unjust. My parents said they were protecting me, but I didn’t believe them.

As a 12 year old, I saw my no longer having internet access as a punishment. I didn’t do anything wrong. I developed the courage to be honest with my parents about my feelings, and yet I got punished. Now that I no longer had internet access, I was stuck alone with my thoughts. If I were just born a boy like my brother, I wouldn’t be going through any of this. But I wasn’t going to stop researching trans content even though my parents had forbidden it- I just knew that I would have to become sneaky.

When my parents said they were protecting me, I thought this was yet another trap- an excuse for them to stand in the way of me becoming my true, authentic self. I thought they wanted to prevent me from healing my inner turmoil. I now saw my body as being at odds with my mind because surely it’s not normal for a girl to relate better with the boys than with other girls, surely it’s not normal for a girl to find it difficult to control her gaze in the locker room as the other girls are changing for gym class. Sure, I felt uncomfortable with my body developing earlier than other girls in my class- but I didn’t interrogate those feelings much or even feel that my body was fundamentally at odds with my personality until I adopted the caustic beliefs of gender identity theory.

I was a true believer in every single word that these online trans communities uttered and I became convinced that my parents hated me and were actively trying to harm me, which could not have been further from the truth. I thought surely that they would have rather I committed suicide than to have their daughter become a “trans son.” This baseless paranoia would consume me for the next half of my life.

I thought that my parents were as ashamed of me as I was of myself for having these feelings. In reality, they were just worried about the implications of adopting an identity which required life-altering and lifelong medical treatments in order to sustain. But of course, I was way too young to see that.

The 'Conversion Therapy’ Narrative

Some months after my trans coming out, my mom had revealed to me that a former classmate of mine, Joe¹, was struggling with similar feelings about his gender. She told me that Joe’s mom had found his social media accounts, where he changed his name to ‘Joelle’. His mom, she told me, had sent him to a therapist who was helping him become more comfortable with being a boy. She asked me if I would like to do the same thing.

Alarm bells in my head began to sound. Trans activists around 2012 were already deeply averse to any exploratory psychotherapy as a requirement for access to cross-sex hormones and surgeries, calling it ‘gatekeeping.’ They thought of any therapeutic attempts aimed at reconciling a dysphoric person with his or her body without transition as ‘conversion therapy.’

Around the same time, there were gay vloggers who discussed having undergone conversion therapy in which they were subjected to electric shocks and other forms of physical and psychological torture aimed at changing their sexual orientation. The outcome of this abuse was not only that the person’s sexual orientation did not change, but that they were now even more ashamed and psychologically tortured over their sexual orientation than they were before. Many of them were suicidal and had friends who had ended their own lives as a result of the same torture.

Because trans activists online had made the explicit claim that any therapeutic tactics which questioned one’s gender identity, or helped one to reconcile with their birth sex were forms of “conversion therapy” akin to electrocuting gay people, I was convinced that if I found myself in a therapist’s office over this, that I too would be electrocuted over my feelings.

Immediately, I told my mom that I didn’t need this therapy, that I was over my feelings and that I would stop thinking about them. At the time, I was surprised that she didn’t push harder to convince me to see a therapist. It turns out that in 2012, despite her efforts, she couldn’t find a therapist who would take my case, because these cases of pre-teen and teen onset gender identity declarations were practically unheard of at that time.

Giving a 12 Year Old Full Internet Access Was a Mistake

My life had become so complicated and filled with anxiety over these thoughts I couldn’t get out of my head. Though I had originally found solace in the trans explanation for my distress around my body and not living up to sex stereotypes, I began to wish that I had never come across the topic of “trans kids” to begin with. I knew that at that age, I could do very little of what I wanted without the permission of my parents and being presented with the option of transition and not being allowed to embark upon it caused me a new type of anxiety that I never had before.

I thought I would be able to stop myself from obsessing about the trans topic because of how much strife it was causing at home- but the genie was out of the bottle already. The harder I tried not to think about transition, the more I couldn’t stop myself from continuing my spiral into the obsession I had developed around learning everything I could about transition.

I found hope during this time within my school library. Not only did I have unrestricted internet access that I could use to consume more trans-related content, but the following school year there would even be a few books in the library featuring LGBT stories. My school librarian helped me locate the titles and I would sit in the library and read them as quickly as I could- even skipping class to do so.

Attempting My Own (Secret) Social Transition

I would sneak my brother’s old clothes into my backpack, change into them at school, and hide in groups of other kids as we made our way across the school between classes. I was terrified that my parents would randomly show up to the school and “catch” me. At the end of the day, I would begrudgingly change back into my ‘girl clothes’ and catch the school bus. Because my parents wouldn’t be the ones showing up to the principal’s office, advocating for me to be recognized as a boy, I felt the need to do all of this myself without anyone ‘catching on’ and alerting my parents. Even in the days before schools socially transitioned students behind their parents’ backs, I attempted to do the same thing and it left me in constant anxiety.

I had one gym teacher with whom I discussed my various topics of my obsession: from rare brain tumors, to Ellen DeGeneres, to my pocket-sized version of the US Constitution and even my fixation on all things “trans”. By eighth grade, I regularly showed up to school wearing masculine clothes. After class one day, I discussed my theories about the future of transgender medicine with my gym teacher. I remember the conversation vividly.

I stared at my tan cargo pants and blue velcro shoes (I would not learn to tie my shoes until I was 14- the following year) and suggested to my teacher that maybe someday there would be a way to avoid patients needing to inject cross-sex hormones for the rest of their lives, if only we could figure out how to stimulate the pituitary gland in such a way as to allow male and female bodies to produce high levels of these cross hormones by themselves. Was it a crackpot theory, devoid of any basic understanding of human biology? yes— but that’s not the point. The point is that I was by then, 13. I was so fixated on this topic that I couldn’t avoid speaking about it (or thinking about it) even though doing so was forbidden.

As the bell rang, my gym teacher asked me “Do you think you’re transgender?”

Being the paranoid teenager I was, instead of answering her honestly, I said “I’ve gotta get to math now” and scurried away with my textbook drenched in chocolate milk from lunch.

I spent several of my middle and high school years trying to attain whatever version of a social transition I could, trying to align my appearance with my male ‘gender identity’— without my parents finding out, and eventually the pressure was too much to bear. Despite my best efforts to conceal my social transition attempt, my parents were onto me, and we had daily arguments about my appearance while never addressing the important underlying issues regarding my trans identification.

My Clever Disguise

The pressure between my school life and my home life had mounted so significantly that for the last year and a half of high school, I made the choice to adopt a more feminine appearance. I knew I needed to get my family off of my back so I could have space to breathe. I made a pact with myself that if these two years of “pretending to be a girl” (dressing femininely) didn’t make me feel better, that I would go to college and begin the transition which by that point, would have been already six years in the making.

I thought that if I had attained a typical female appearance, either I could make my life easier and make my distress would go away, or I could later use it as evidence that I really had given ‘being a girl’ the good ole (high school) try- but that it just didn’t work out.

Deep down, I desperately wanted to grow out of these feelings and to be comfortable in my body and the social role of being a woman. But, wearing girly clothes made me feel like I was living a lie. I didn’t feel comfortable dressing in the most socially acceptable ways for teen girls to dress. I tried to live up to the phrase “fake it till you make it” and I’d always find a reason to smile, no matter how much it felt like I was betraying myself by putting on a dress. But I knew this was something I had to do if I wanted to experience less social tension for the time being.

I had swallowed whole so much gender ideology propaganda that I was convinced that masculine lesbians were actually just men without the right body parts, who would always struggle to find girlfriends and be lonely forever. I also thought that adopting a more feminine appearance would finally get me a girlfriend. After all, the lesbian representation on TV by that point had become mainstream, by featuring only lesbian couples where both partners were feminine and conventionally attractive. The masculine lesbians of past eras had already embraced transition and blended into society as men. I had no possibility model for becoming comfortable in my body and in my gender non-conformity (which is largely what motivated me to start doing this type of activism one year ago).

Having a few high school girlfriends to sneak around with took some of the sting out of getting out of bed every day and putting on clothes that felt like a costume, rather than my own. So I convinced myself that at least for a short while, I can swallow my pride and live like this.

The only thing that sustained me during this time was the affirmation I was getting from those around me, who were so relieved that I had finally “grown out” of this ‘tomboy’ phase and blossomed into a ‘beautiful young woman’. Little did they know that this feminine appearance was merely my last chance at deciding whether I would pursue lifelong womanhood- which I thought required me to wear feminine clothes. I thought that if in the next year and a half, I couldn’t manage to stomach becoming a feminine woman, I would discard womanhood entirely upon entering college.

I did not see the option of living as a highly gender non-conforming woman even being a possibility. I thought I had to either conform to every trapping of femininity, or to spend the rest of my life injecting testosterone if I wished to live a fulfilling life. When a 12-year-old is indoctrinated in this way, their thinking stays childlike well into young adulthood. All nuance gets lost within the rigid framework of gender identity.

The pressure of trying to conform to a social role in which I felt viscerally uncomfortable, finally got to me. The summer before entering college, I cut off my hair again, began to gather masculine clothes and got a formal breast binder which I shipped to my friend’s house. Then, I went off to college and introduced myself to everyone with a male name and pronouns. I could finally live the life that I had fought to create for myself since I was 12. I smelled freedom on the horizon, and I had successfully thrown my parents off my trail… or so I thought.

Conclusion

The story of my alienation from my parents and our eventual reconciliation does not end here. What you’ve just read is only the beginning. But for the purposes of this essay— I will end my story here with some reflections:

My parents’ refusal to affirm my trans identity was ultimately in my best interest, but it didn’t prevent me from transitioning and sustaining harm as a result— though, had they affirmed, my injuries would have been far worse. I railed against my parents’ attempts to protect me because the ideological beliefs I had adopted at a very young and impressionable age made it impossible for me to see them as anything other than a frustrating obstacle in my way.

My biggest transition related regret isn’t about the permanent damage I have sustained to my body as a result of a decade of breast binding, nor is it related to the low dose of testosterone gel I was able to acquire from a friend, or even about living a lie for so many years.

What I regret most about my transition are the years I lost have a close relationship with my parents. I adopted a belief system as a young child which convinced me that my parents, who were only trying to protect me, literally didn’t care if I lived or died— simply because they refused to affirm an identity I had adopted during a time of adolescent confusion. Now that I am older, I realize that everything they did for me was out of love. Though buying into the cult-like beliefs of gender ideology after being relentlessly bombarded with them at age 12 wasn’t my fault, I can’t quite forgive myself for it either.

For more from this author: Breast Binding, Genital Tucking, & the Lie of ‘Safe Gender Affirmation’.

I saw the storm brewing on the horizon, long before it officially blew in.

Changes were showing up in my workplace at the university, ushered in by the newest and youngest staff. Just over 10 years ago—compelled pronoun use, being referred to as a “cis” woman. I was skeptical, but it is also my nature to be curious and to consider others’ perspectives. Perhaps this generation was seeing a way to make gender less important in the long run? I was trying to look at it from multiple angles. At one point, however, in a meeting about reducing sexual assault, I was disdainfully schooled by a 20-year-old woman, who informed me that “cis women” were privileged, because we weren’t trans.

Meanwhile, my son in middle school was starting to talk about peers’ different identities. We would joke around about it.

By high school, he no longer joked with me about his peers’ identities, but instead started to educate me about them, with an air of impatience and superiority when I held on to my skepticism. The first raindrops had started to fall at home.

My younger child, three years behind her brother in school, started telling me about friends who were “pansexual”—this was in elementary school! Where were they learning this?! As they moved into middle school, most of the girls in her friend group identified with “he/him” pronouns. She made pronoun friendship bracelets for a “gender-fluid” friend, so that the girl could notify people which pronouns she was using at a particular moment by wearing the corresponding bracelet. I observed that gender had become a Gen Z hobby.

And then there was the sixth-grade art teacher, a loud and proud trans-identified woman (FTM). My daughter is very creative and she admired this teacher. At the time, I had no concerns about that. Now, however, I am grateful that the pandemic shut down that class.

And then there was her best friend, our neighbor, who had started cutting. Then all the girls started cutting. And then they stopped eating. And then they stopped sleeping. And then everyone was talking about suicidal thoughts. It was competitive dysfunction and the social contagion was clear. And they were all terrified that their friends would die, yet they kept dropping suicide as an attention-seeking bomb.

I kept my eye on my daughter and did my best to coach her through it. Taking the approach of not wanting her to go too far underground where I couldn’t see her activities at all, I tried to coach her online use rather than ban it completely. She was an adolescent after all, and they are wired to rebel. They were communicating on a private Discord server that was originally pitched to me as a way to chat during COVID. I encouraged my daughter to take a leadership position on the server and set boundaries. She followed my guidelines and set the rule “No more posting about self-injury or suicidal thoughts” and she also shared official crisis numbers. This was an important step in promoting some healthier online habits among her friends. I also figured out how to look around on her Discord account, and then back out, covering my tracks.

Meanwhile, I searched for a counselor for her. I knew that the adolescent years were a time when kids pull away from their parents, so I was hopeful the village would provide guidance while parents were viewed as “clueless.” However, when looking for someone to see your daughter and state laws prohibit parental access to records after age 12, do you really want to leave your kid alone with the counselor who advertises that they are “kink-positive”? “Sex worker allied”? One counselor even stated in the same sentence, “I am polyamory friendly and I see clients 13 and older.”

The first full in-person school year post-lockdown was eighth grade. My daughter was 13 years old. She started the year dressing like a middle-aged male philosophy professor and she chose a backpack that said “trans” on it. I asked her if she thought she was a boy. She said no and stated she was a lesbian. I dropped it. Like many parents, I had no problem if she was a lesbian, but I kept watching.

As the year progressed, my daughter developed a swagger and wore baggier clothes. She started borrowing XL shirts from my husband’s closet. She reported her female friends were having problems with sexual harassment from their male peers. I suspected my daughter was covering her changing body to try to stay under the radar.

I installed the phone monitoring app “Bark” on her first smartphone. It started sending me alerts that included her messages to friends about choosing a new name, as well as mentions of embarrassment about her breasts and a mention of “top surgery.”

And then the gray clouds opened and the storm officially hit. She was 14 and the school year was ending. One day, driving home, we had an argument and I asked, “Do you think you are a boy?” As we arrived at the neighborhood mailboxes, her scripted speech began. She expressed that it was normal for me to grieve the idea of a daughter, but she was really my son. I started to sob. She hadn’t planned to come out to me yet, but I had pushed the matter.

I learned that she had already told her father weeks prior, when I was out of state helping my 90-year-old father. My husband was always the more permissive parent, so of course she told him first, and he had agreed to her request to purchase a breast binder. Then the trans flag arrived in the mail, too. Allegedly, they were waiting to tell me once my eldercare stress lightened. Meanwhile, he had sought advice from his bisexual, nonbinary male coworker who told him to affirm our daughter.

I also learned that her middle school had already socially transitioned her behind our backs.

I told her that I needed time to “educate myself” before I could fully respond to her request that I use a new name and pronouns. I spent the next two weeks making a full-time job out of learning about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and the current state of the gender industry. And then I was truly, truly terrified. I realized that these kids were ACTUALLY MEDICALIZING these identities and that there was an entire system in place to help them do that! Where did society go so wrong that it started encouraging adolescents to make fleeting identity choices permanent? Were these adults ever teens themselves? What happened to understanding the stages of childhood development, especially among educators and healthcare professionals?

My father died three weeks after my daughter made her trans announcement.

I swiftly moved from eldercare crisis mode to teenager crisis mode. I found Sasha Ayad’s parent coaching website, and I was so grateful. She grounded me in the skills I already had, but I had forgotten them in crisis mode. Focus on my relationship with my daughter first. I took her to Kanab, Utah to volunteer at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. The two of us stayed there for two weeks. In Kanab, the only rainbows were real. We cared for parrots, cats, guinea pigs, and bunnies, cleaning their pens, after which we earned playtime with them. We stayed in a cottage and watched lots of “Friends” episodes—recorded before gender ideology had infiltrated our culture. We watched thunderstorms spilling over the red rocks. We visited nearby Zion and the Grand Canyon.

We unexpectedly (but of course!) adopted a kitten and flew home. He became an important anchor for her.

I supported all hobbies that were not gender. As the months went on, I handled conversations surgically. I used my intuition to determine when to state facts such as “We both have XX chromosomes and that will never change.” She sometimes screamed and ran to her room. I distributed just enough truth to shine sunlight on reality without letting it dominate our family’s entire world.

I tried to compromise and use her chosen name occasionally as a nickname but, viscerally, I just couldn’t. I never wavered from feminine pronouns. She was disappointed in my perceived lack of support and wrote class assignments about how my boundaries showed a lack of love for her. I slipped new sports bras in her drawer, which decreased the use of the binder.

I showed up at our family doctor’s office asking for help with insomnia. I told her why—my daughter says she is a boy. This helped me to vet our doctor on this topic. She agreed with me that girls can never be boys and that the healthcare industry was aiding and abetting an illusion. A sigh of relief—I could trust her with my daughter.

I was already seeing my own counselor, who thankfully was safe to talk to as I unpacked my sudden learning curve regarding gender. There, I processed my disillusionment and sense of betrayal with many of the institutions I had trusted—the education system, the Democrats, my blue state, my mainstream media sources, my helping profession, my local community, and even charities I had been donating to. I realized that disillusionment was really a particular flavor of grief. I spent about a year navigating the shock of those losses, in addition to grieving my father.

I found a new wariness with both old friends and new connections. Who could I trust? I found online communities of similarly terrified parents and similarly skeptical professionals, many of them also disaffected Democrats. These became my havens. I became more acquainted with my lifelong feminism. I found a home among radical feminists. Apparently, believing that women don’t have, never have had, and never will have penises is, well, “radical.”

I exempted my daughter from the school’s sex ed. I had been a strong advocate for quality sex ed. However, when I reviewed the curricula and expressed concerns about removing the words “woman,” “man,” “male,” and “female” from the “pregnancy and anatomy” lesson, I was patronized and dismissed. Also, teachers told me about how “helpful” Planned Parenthood was in supplementing the district’s sex ed. At first, months before my daughter’s trans announcement, I naively believed that—until I later did my own research on Planned Parenthood, a major purveyor of both cross-sex hormones and myths about gender research. They omit the fact that many who medically transition are really gay or lesbian. They omit the statistics on desistance and detransition. They grossly overstate the incidence of suicide attempts among adolescents questioning gender.

I dodged taking my daughter to a counselor for as long as I could. While I had tried to avoid indulging the Gen Z rush to diagnoses, I decided that identifying as anxious, depressed, or ADHD was healthier than identifying as a boy. I took her to a competent psychologist just long enough for an ADHD assessment and accompanied her in those sessions, remaining alert to the risk of the psychologist trying to rescue my daughter from a non-affirming parent. Yes, my daughter had mild ADHD, like many gender-questioning teens.

Somehow, restorying her troubles and validating them with a label helped her to see herself differently. She said, “I’m not just lazy!” She started taking responsibility for compensating for ADHD in an impressive way. I advocated for her to receive accommodations at school. I strategically communicated with school staff, always afraid to be seen as the non-affirming and, therefore, “abusive” parent which might leave my daughter vulnerable to “rescue” by a glitter family.

I showed our family of four a podcast with middle-aged trans-identified women (FTM) honestly discussing their choices to medicalize. I knew that indoctrinated kids had been instructed to avoid detransitioners’ stories, but how could she call trans-identified people transphobic? (She tried!) She clearly saw the lack of glamour in women who looked like bald, bearded, middle-aged men with bellies. She angrily stormed out, calling them “four sweaty men in a basement!”

One week later, however, the clouds started to part. I took her to the mall. Assuming she wouldn’t set foot in Victoria’s Secret, I said I needed some underwear and could find her later. She chose to join me and soon was oohing and ahhing over frilly bras! I pulled out my credit card, asking no questions. I would pay for it, no matter the cost.

She wore the binder once more—it had always been used when among peers, which told me it was really a social comfort, almost like swaddling. And then the false identity was shed. She announced one night, in the dark, that she decided she was a girl again—but she planned to keep her chosen name longer. In the coming months, she moved from “he/him” to “they/them” and by the next school year “she/her.” She kept her chosen name for a year-and-a-half after declaring desistance—take-backs are embarrassing—only giving it up this fall when she made a clean break to attend community college in our state’s “Running Start” program.

She is now 17 years old. She exudes a peaceful comfort in her female form. A month ago, she started dating her first boyfriend. They are enthralled with each other. He is a sweet, highly motivated young man. He adores her. They share an innocent first-love relationship that I cynically did not think even existed in these times. Sometimes, it is great to be wrong. She has grown from an awkward duckling into an elegant swan.

In brief moments, my daughter has shared, “I went through that phase because I didn’t like how big my breasts were.” She also said that she thinks it was important in helping her to appreciate being a girl, and that she wishes I had affirmed her while she figured it out. I bite my tongue and just let her talk it through. Someday, she will understand just what was at stake and why I couldn’t humor this delusion.

My husband? While he supported my interventions, usually silently, he recently admitted that if the parenting had been left solely up to him, our daughter, tragically, would now have a beard and amputated breasts.

As for her older brother, early on I told him that I did not expect him to choose sides because the quality of their sibling relationship was more important. He chose to use her preferred name at the high school they both attended and her given name at home. He learned some important reality from the podcast with the “four sweaty men in a basement” and he offered friendship when his sister’s “trans” friends eventually rejected her.

For me, I feel more secure within myself knowing I am capable of challenging my beliefs in long-cherished institutions and that I will set them aside if they no longer work. I remain precariously politically identified—suspended between today’s blue and red camps in a way that makes most people uncomfortable. Some have cut me off for questioning the emperor’s new clothes. However, because I know that other families are still facing the deluge of the gender storms, I continue to try to shed light on the dangers of this cultural movement.

Some friends hear my story about my daughter and sympathetically view it as my narrow experience and personal interest which does not affect them. I know, however, that our family’s experience is a symptom of a larger problem that jeopardizes all women and children.

Fight for your kids.

She is desisting. After over three long, grueling years, it is finally happening. I'm watching her wear earrings, buy dresses and skirts. Her trans flag is no longer on the wall. But it really is true, she really is desisting. She is using her real name at school, and on her art. She is growing her hair out and she is modestly showing off her figure, not flattening it or burying it under a black mountain of a hoodie.

More than the outward changes, there has been an inward transformation, a movement toward health and life. She is not lying anymore, or stealing food without asking, or lashing out with vehement anger at us. She is not cutting anymore. She loves her art, her music, her school - she loves herself again.

But God, this has been a harrowing road, and I won't be doing a victory lap. I think I'm too much in shock to really rejoice. My wife showed me a text just last week - her dear friend from church telling her that her daughter just went to the courthouse and legally changed her name. She now has a boy's name. What's next? Hormones? Mastectomy? Just two months ago I sat next to one of my closest friends in a parked car as he told me his adult daughter had just started testosterone, the result of consulting with a “gender affirming” doctor. He had been up all night trying to console his inconsolable wife. They are devastated. Their daughter's health was already poor. No, I won't be doing a victory lap - I will honor the suffering of my friends with humility and vigilance.

The road to get here has been torturous. I embraced it as a spiritual journey. On that journey, I learned to tell my daughter "Don't hurt yourself, don’t hurt your body”. These simple words. I told my daughter these simple words.

On another occasion, I sat in her room, looking at her pride flag, and her trans flag, and I was just exploring the pain and tragedy of it all. My wife held me as I wept, "They are sterilizing children! How could they do this?!" I needed to let the pain out so I could be at peace when I spoke to my beloved child. We worked so hard, my wife and me. We have five children - how could we balance all of their complex needs with this unfolding nightmare? It was hard. We read books, went to parent groups, and worked with a consultant, Stephanie Winn. It took time, effort, and money. Sometimes it was just too much for my wife, she had to focus on our other kids and their issues, while I focused on the trans thing.

My wife and I worked hard on our communication techniques. We learned how to respect our daughter’s sensitive ego and growing intellect, how to set firm boundaries, and deliver bad news when needed. Most of all we learned how to dance with our daughter, figuratively speaking, rather than fight or avoid, and we were dancing with her toward an exit door from trans madness.

I started having intervention conversations with my daughter - some deeper than others. We also had a number of unplanned parenting moments too, with their degree of drama, but now we had new communication tools, more insight into teenage psychology, and support when we needed it.

It was a long, slow road. But now my daughter and I can have open conversations about how destructive "gender medicine" is for people, how kids are being groomed at school, and how deeply misogynistic the trans movement is at its core. It was hard to get to this point. It was like we had to keep our daughter on chemotherapy so the disease cells could die. No internet, no smartphones, and draconian device protections. She hated the strict rules, resented what we were doing, and was jealous of her friends. I practically needed to hire an IT consultant - I'm an engineer and it is nearly impossible to keep my kids safe from the internet. She was so angry when we took her binder away. I felt so guilty and stupid for letting her have it to begin with. I didn’t want to curtail her freedom, but once I realized how much was on the line, I knew that autonomy was less important than safety. Eventually we extended more freedoms as she demonstrated responsibility, helped her gain autonomy, strengthened our relationship, and she could feel her strength coming back too, and even thanked us for being such devoted parents.

Yes, we worked hard, but there are also angels in our daughter's life. There is her senior-citizen godmother, who takes her out for breakfast once a month. There is her Tae Kwon Do teacher, a sixth-degree black belt, and an amazing role model of a strong woman breaking stereotypes.

I don't take any of it for granted. It didn't have to go this way. It doesn’t go this way for so many. Nor is the battle fully over, but we are in a new phase, the spell has broken. I pray that she continues to grow in her self-knowledge and recognition of the truth, and into full, complete rejection of gender ideology.

I am humbled and awed that it seems I may have the privilege, after all, of watching my daughter blossom fully into a woman. But I won't be doing a victory lap. It is not in me to be joyful that this scourge has been lifted from our family. I will stand in solidarity with the many thousands of other parents who are also fighting for their kids. I will always remember the pain. But I will breathe. I will exhale and allow the out-breath to relax my body and my mind, so I can be fully grounded and present for my whole family.

I had known about transgender people ever since I was a kid. I had friends in middle school who identified as trans and I would see videos of trans people online. I never considered myself to be trans until I was a teenager.

When I was 12 years old, I found out about a social media website called Trevor Space through the suicide chatline from the Trevor Project. I struggled with my mental health and liked girls and I thought a mental health site for LGBTQ kids would really help me. When I joined the site, I was "love bombed" immediately. Everyone was so accepting of me being gay and offered support for my mental health. I read posts from other users about being transgender and experiencing gender dysphoria. Everything they were saying sounded so familiar.

I hated my body as well. I wasn't very feminine but not very masculine either. I was into girls and I had mental health issues that I was now assuming could be because I was “born in the wrong body”. After some questioning, I decided I was transgender. I was affirmed by the site and told I should be affirmed in real life too. I attempted to "come out" to my mom but she did not affirm my transgender identity. People on the site told me this was abusive and I agreed because I thought my body hatred, my "dysphoria", could only be fixed by transitioning.

So, now I was at a point where I believed the only people who would care about me were people on the site and other LGBTQ or affirming people. This is when they started to control my actions through their "rules" and "standards". They had ever-changing list of rules about what was socially acceptable to say and opinions that were acceptable to have. Things like "trigger warnings" on everything, using people's "neopronouns", and believing that you didn't need gender dysphoria to be trans, essentially that everyone who says they're trans is. If you broke any of these rules, you would be alienated on the site.

It hurt me so much when it first happened to me, because I was rejected by the "only people who would ever like me". Because of this I conformed to their behavior and learned to keep my mouth shut and not question so I would have friends. I went deeper down the rabbit hole. I ruminated over gender dysphoria constantly and it got a lot worse. It was to a point where I would sometimes cry looking at my body. I saw my female body as deformed and was embarrassed by it.

I didn't do anything major to physically transition because I was trying to hide it from my mom who I was convinced was abusive by not affirming. I did however "bind" with multiple sports bras and wore men’s clothing (I still sometimes do wear a mix of male and female clothing).

I came out socially at school and asked my teachers and classmates to call me male pronouns and by my new chosen name. I specifically asked them to hide it from my mom. This went on for a while.

After going through a breakup with someone I "dated" on the site, I came to the realization that I had no real friends. I started to find that interacting on the site was more of a chore than a relief, so I left. I then joined some other sites going "stealth" and just calling myself a boy, not telling anyone I was transgender. I really liked people thinking I was just a straight boy. However, I felt inauthentic and still lonely, and eventually drifted apart from people on other sites too.

This was a part of my life where I had to accept being alone. I didn't have any friends but that's what it took to finally think for myself. I started watching gender critical content online, which I didn't always agree with but I was finally hearing something different and it was refreshing. I slowly let go of a lot of "woke" opinions, but my trans identity was one of the last things I let go.

I started with saying you needed gender dysphoria to be trans, then moved on to “I'm trans but we shouldn't medicalize children”. Finally, I questioned myself for real and decided I'm not identifying as trans anymore. This was after three years. Now I was starting 11th grade. I decided this year I'm going to be myself, and I'm not going to try to convince people I'm a boy. I never publicly came out as a desister so people still referred to me as my old name sometimes. It was awkward but it was a lot better than demanding people respect my trans identity. I didn't have to expect so much from others and I had a lot less to be upset about.

My dysphoria gradually went away as I stopped ruminating. It took some more time before I realized how manipulative and ridiculous this whole thing was. Now people say I'm a traitor to the LGBTQ community or that I was never trans at all. It's similar to how ex cult members are treated. To them, there's no legitimate reason to leave the trans community so, if you do, you are vilified. However, I still tell my story because I no longer rely on other people to like me or tell me what to think, and that is very freeing.

I'm 74 years old, have four children, four stepchildren and eight grandchildren, soon to be nine. Yet I was transgender for 15 years, between the ages of 12 and 26. It was a painful and unforgettable experience during which I was obsessed with not letting my trans-identity show through effeminate behaviour or a spontaneous reaction that would betray my homosexual tendencies. I mention it here because, at my age, you have to ask yourself what you want to do before you die. Well, I want to pass on my story to tell young people suffering from gender dysphoria that there are at least three ways of dealing with the pain of gender dysphoria:

1) Resigning oneself to living with dysphoria.

2) Changing one's body to match their mind via hormone therapy and surgery.

3) Reconciling your psychological identity with the biological identity of your sex with help from a qualified therapist. Today, this third path has become a new taboo called ‘conversion therapy’. It's a mistake to make it a new taboo, even if a famous documentary on the subject has mixed conversion therapy with exorcism, guilt-tripping speeches, group prayers and behaviourist therapies from another age, as well as some legitimate and honest speeches, with a certain amount of bad faith.

In 1976, after eight years of supportive psychotherapy, which helped me not to despair and not to commit suicide, I was able to meet a deeply sympathetic phenomenological sexologist psychiatrist who offered me, among other things, an experience of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). This delicate episode enabled me to overcome my fear, my deep-seated complex and my abysmal shame about my gender identity and my homosexual attraction. The experience was like being born again. I chose the third way.

Today, it's been almost 50 years since that happened and I've been able to have a love life with women, get married, have children and grandchildren as well as a free and fulfilling social and professional life. The term ‘gender dysphoria’ was completely unknown to me in 1960-70, when I suffered from it and felt monstrous and ashamed. But since the 2000s, the term has become commonplace in the media and I think that all mental health professionals are aware of it and that some of them try to help the teenagers affected by suggesting that they modify their bodies using puberty blockers, hormone therapy and sex surgery. There is now a heated debate throughout the western world surrounding this “gender affirming” care, accompanied by new taboos and condemnations, as if this would help the young people and their parents.

My experience seems to prove that there is a third way, which I call ‘reconciliation therapy’ between gender identity and sexual identity (not to be confused with ‘conversion therapy’). Yes, psychological identity is a flexible thing and there are therapies that allow you to change not only your behaviour, but also your self-image in the eyes of yourself and others. However, this approach is not well known, even though it offers an alternative to the early prescription of puberty blockers and cross-reactive hormones.

Adolescence is a very delicate period when you have to avoid making irreversible changes. However, in my personal case, if I'd had the opportunity to embark on the path of changing my body to become a trans-woman, I would have rushed into it, UNLESS I'd had access to a third way testimonial like this one. In that case, I would have thought about it and would have liked therapeutic support to consider the three paths, without excessive guilt, without hiding and without fear of the repercussions for my family, friends and society. I could have counted on supportive therapy until I was 18 to avoid depression and suicidal thoughts, and then made a definitive and informed choice between the three ways of managing gender dysphoria.

Background: The first main-stream experiment with children in what we now call “gender affirming care” occurred in The Netherlands in 2012. The team in the VU Hospital in Amsterdam started treating pre-pubescent boys diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria (GD) with Puberty Blockers (PB’s). The theory was that if puberty could be delayed, then these children would have time to receive therapeutic support to manage this distress. This is now known as the ‘Dutch Approach’. The first study started with just a few carefully selected boys, since then the numbers of children and youth treated on the gender pathway has avalanched.

Now the gender pathway refers to the treatment pathway for all children and youth who identify as Transgendered. The first step in the pathway is social affirmation which is the term often used when someone is affirming their identified gender in the social sphere. After this comes medical affirmation such as prescription of PB Hormones, then Cross Sex Hormones then gender affirming surgeries in order to alter their physical sexual characteristics to match their gender identity.

The premise behind these interventions is simple. These children and youth are born different, born not fitting into the binary sex or gender world around them, and thus need to be treated and supported in an appropriate manner to help manage the dysphoria and distress they experience. This premise is controversial however and is not universally accepted by society in general and health professionals in particular.

It is clear that the debate about the truths of Transgender Healthcare (TGH) is polarised and it is fought on a toxic battlefield (1). Some authors state that the science of the TGH field is well known and settled, (2) and that the ‘Trans-Critical’ activist creates confusion with the weaponizing of scientific-sounding language to dispute and challenge long established Transgender research (3). That the detractors that challenge the validity of Transgender research or TGH are dangerous, violent (4), and are spreading poisonous lies (5). Transphobic narratives and interruptions increase the likelihood of suicide (6), negatively affect other mental health issues such as body image and self-esteem (7, 8), binge drinking and drug use, overall health lifestyle, depression, anxiety, ADHD, and deliberate self-harm (9).

However trans-critical authors challenge the validity of the Transgender Ideology, which has been created by scholars with backgrounds in sociology, philosophy, law, literature or other humanities, but not in health. It is argued these ideologues regard access to gender affirming treatments as primarily a human rights issue, rather than a mental health clinical concern (10). Dr Hilary Cass who wrote the Cass Review which is “the most detailed, most thorough and most extensive review of the treatment of gender disturbance in children undertaken anywhere in the world at any time” (38). She states that there is a dearth of robust research regarding gender-affirming care, that the research is of disappointingly poor quality, built on shaky ground and is ideologically rather than scientifically based (11,12,13).

Every point or issue in this field seems to exist on a bed of conflict and emotive posturing. The existence, validity and relevance of Desistance is no different. One author (14) summed this up when he said “We can’t have an intelligent, informed discussion about these tricky issues if we’re going to ignore what is, at the moment, a solid scientific consensus (regarding Desistance).” It has also been said that “I have never encountered a movement (Transgenderism) that has spread so swiftly and successfully and has so fiercely rejected any challenge to its orthodoxy. The only thing more extraordinary than the rapid spread of this new orthodoxy is how little scrutiny it has faced, and the aggressive intolerance directed towards those who question it (15, 16).”

First of all, before we look at the differing views regarding Desistance, we need to define it. In the field of TGH, Desistance is defined as the natural resolution of gender-related distress typically during or after puberty, without medical or social intervention. And a change in gender identity from trans to cisgender along with the disappearance of the desire for medical intervention (17).

The ‘pro-trans’ narrative regarding Desistance states that once trans, always trans. That Desistance does not exist, that gender identity is immutable (18, 19, 20) and that any contradictory narrative is an example of a transphobic cis-dominant healthcare system which lacks accountability to trans communities (21), controls the economic environment (22), and “has systemic hierarchical barriers which need to be destroyed” (23). This narrative insists that trans children and adolescents will go on to be trans adults (24). This is the notion at the very heart of the ethical justification of social and medical affirmation (the gender pathway).

The trans-critical narrative states that “adolescents do desist” and that this is scientifically supported (25, 26, 27, 14, 39) and that if not ‘treated’ in a gender pathway, desistance will occur in most patients (28, 29, 30, 31). On this point even the authors of the ‘Dutch Protocol’ agree, saying it is ‘rare’ for a child to stay identifying as trans in post puberty (32). One 2023 study states this (55) even more absolutely that, “GD (Gender Dysphoria) is not a permanent diagnosis.” Another author (33) states that if a 4 per cent (current) prevalence of GD in children falls to 0.002 per cent in adults (as seen in their study), it means, mathematically, that over 99 per cent will “desist” from transitioning and revert to natal sex before adulthood as a natural process of life. Only a tiny minority would “persist” in their GD. Different researchers have recorded different rates of Desistance. One states 94% continued on to identify as binary gender (34). One of the lowest Desistance rates was about two thirds (37).

Why do these children and adolescents desist?

There is such a lot unknown about this field. “The etiology of gender incongruence remains unknown” (48), but some of the reasons these individuals desist are known.

1. Many researchers state that the majority of trans children desist and end up identifying as gay or bi-sexual as youth or young adults (35, 36, 39). So, when stating that they have GD and are trans, it appears they actually are in the process of discovering they are same sex attracted.

2. Social contagion appears to play a significant role and it is very common to see GD develop within friendship groups, which is statistically unusual and unlikely to be occurring spontaneously (40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47).

3. A Fad: John Whitehall who is Foundation Chair and Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Western Sydney states that Transgenderism has the hallmarks of a psychological fad, fanned by an uncritical, sensationalist media, given direction by private websites and even government funded programmes of ‘education’ (48). And with all fads, people grow out of it.

4. Co-Morbidity. “A large proportion of adolescents with GD have a substantial concomitant history of psychosocial and psychological vulnerability…” (49). Over 70% of young people diagnosed with GD had at least one other psychiatric diagnosis (67% of males and 76% of females). In order of decreasing frequency, co-morbid diagnoses were depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, borderline personality disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorders. (50). They were described as presenting with multiple co-morbidities and complex backgrounds (51). When these co-morbid problems are addressed, desistance is very common.

5. GD can be related to the typical discomfort/distress often experienced in puberty. The merits of the treatment used to delay the onset of puberty had been “oversold” and there was “very limited” evidence they were of use (52). Fortunately most children with GD as they get used to living in their new bodies will not remain gender dysphoric post puberty (53).

6. One study went into more detail about desisting (55). The factor with the highest rating of importance regarding Desistance was the participant’s “own thought processes” changed.

7. That “feeling that the causes for [their] gender dysphoria were more complicated than [they] previously understood them to be.”

8. And the participant’s “personal definition of ‘female’ and ‘male’ changed and [they] now felt comfortable identifying as natal sex”.

9. The authors noted that factors that might be described as ‘external pressures’ to desist or detransition obtained the lowest ratings of importance scores from these individuals. Including…

A. Transphobia or discrimination while transgender identified.

B. Pressure from family.

C. Religion or religious beliefs.

D. Peer pressure.

10. Some studies (56, 57) state that participants in gender research may feel disappointed that the results of their medical transition (e.g., hormone therapy or surgeries) do not align with their expectations, leading to disengagement and Desistance.

11. Some participants in this study (57) reported that they no longer felt that their gender dysphoria was alleviated by treatments like hormone therapy or surgery, leading to discontinuation of follow-up participation and Desistance.

12. Some participants expressed concerns about the long-term health impacts (57) of gender-affirming treatments, leading to discontinuation of these treatments and follow-up study participation.

13. Distrust in healthcare providers or dissatisfaction with the quality of care were mentioned as barriers to continued participation in follow-up studies (57).

While it seems clear that Desistance is typical with children or youth with GD this is only when they have not been socially and medically affirmed. If they are directed down the gender pathway this significantly increases the permanence of the GD (54).Unfortunately this pathway remains that endorsed by Clinical Health services.

In 2019, my mom died. She was an alcoholic and a heavy smoker. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in June and died that September. We were not close. I couldn't even bring myself to hug her or spend more than three days a year with her (we visited once a year). My parents divorced when I was eight years old and, along with my brother, I was shuffled among relatives and even spent nine months in an orphanage. My dad remarried and my stepmother was abusive. So, I had some trauma in my past.

I resented having to take care of my mom while she was dying. She was bedridden and the chemo and dementia, and, I imagine, the alcohol withdrawals, made her say mean and hurtful things. This experience traumatized me and bought a lot of hurtful childhood memories to the surface. Then came COVID lockdowns. In March of 2020, just seven months after my mom died, I was catching my breath and a new crisis hit.

I'm sure this story is familiar to PITT parent. My daughter spent a lot of time in her room, doing online school. We tried to adjust to our new normal, taking the kids on road trips, visiting with family, and having dinner together every night. We thought we were doing a great parenting job, given the circumstances. I even took my daughter to Universal Studios but her anxiety at being in crowds during a pandemic prevented her from relaxing and enjoying herself.

Three months later, my daughter informed me she was "non-binary", wanted to use "he/him" pronouns, and her new name was "Kai". She was at the end of sixth grade - exactly the age I was when I started having a lot of trauma in my life. Uncanny how history repeats itself. My reaction was confusion and anger. I thought I had been through enough. Was she doing this on purpose? I angrily vented to my husband that she was doing this for attention, that maybe it was a phase, that we should redirect her attention to other things, anything besides gender identity. I was very frustrated that another crisis had hit. We avoided any conversations around gender and just ignored it.

My daughter’s mental health deteriorated. When in-person school began, I would find her curled up in her bed in the mornings, sobbing, or sitting up in bed with the blanket over her head, unable to tell me what was going on. It might take her two hours to get ready for school. I wondered - had she had been bullied or assaulted? I begged her to tell me what was going on but she just didn't have words.

She started to see a therapist who specialized in DBT and it seemed to work wonders. I didn’t know that my daughter had talked to this therapist quite a bit about being transgender. On the night before our last family session, this therapist helped our daughter to "come out" to us. The therapist seemed to think this was no big deal but I couldn’t help thinking - this can't be happening. Everything in me was screaming that this was not who my daughter was, she was my girl and how could these other adults not see it? My child went from non-binary to transgender with the help of shallow therapy. It truly felt like I was in the upside-down.

We refused to call her by her trans boy name and refused to use he/him pronouns. That is when I joined a facebook group of parents with kids in the same situation as our daughter. Through this group, I found many resources and realized I was not alone. I found I should trust my intuition that I knew my daughter best. I had lost myself for a while, lost touch with my mom intuition, doubted myself. I learned what the word "gaslighting" meant.

As my daughter progressed into high school, her mental health really took a nose dive. I didn't know it, but she was experiencing crippling anxiety, OCD/intrusive thoughts, and depression. She was also diagnosed with ADHD. We had her see a second therapist (affirming) and start on medication with a psychiatrist (affirming). She went to an intensive outpatient program (affirming). We had to withdraw her completely from school. She had emotionally shut down and was at high risk for suicide.

She was still identifying as a trans boy. The word "safe" was mentioned in one of our therapy sessions. We were told that my daughter would be less likely to commit suicide if her family was supportive of her trans identity. After so much anger and raging against the schools and mental health system, I had to radically accept that my daughter’s actions may be out of my hands and she may end up transitioning. I became very depressed.

Our house is surrounded by very tall Douglas fir trees and I remember thinking, if one of those trees falls on this house and on me, it would be a relief. Sometimes I wondered while driving if I should just swerve into the oncoming traffic. I didn't want to be alive anymore. I didn't understand how something so very wrong could be embraced by other influential adults in my child’s life. I was in such crisis myself at that time that I had to take an antidepressant just to function. I was also seeing a therapist, then a parent coach. I read the book "Hang On To Your Kids" and that was when I started to focus on my relationship with my daughter.

Her mental health became so bad that she ended up ingesting a Tide pod and spending eight days in a behavioral hospital. When we called the hospital to talk to her, we asked for "Ollie" because we were fearful that if we seemed unsupportive of her trans identity, we might be prevented from seeing her. I really started to realize I couldn't rely on the mental health "professionals" to give me my daughter back. I had to do it myself.

As we spent a lot of one-on-one time together, my daughter told me later that, after her grandma died, I seemed very angry and took it out on her. I think this, and the new friend group she had at school who were all some different gender variations, were the catalyst for her downward spiral. She said I froze the first time she told me she was suicidal. She started really opening up to me about how my own trauma and parenting style of avoidance had affected her. (She was still identifying as a trans boy.)

As I worked on myself, my relationship with my daughter improved to the point where we could have short conversations about gender and I could ask questions without reacting, at least on the outside. She was learning to trust me again. She even "dated" another "trans boy", and I simply asked questions without criticizing and reacting. This was so counterintuitive but it worked. We had critical thinking conversations, not around gender. I spent every waking moment thinking about conversations we could have, how we could spend time together that day, and researching her mental health conditions. It was exhausting but so worth it. The progress was painfully slow.

After five long years, my daughter is desisting. She is embracing her femininity. Her big sister who is 10 years older was a big catalyst for this change. She is such a wonderful influence on my daughter, as well as my sister-in-law. I opened up to family and asked them to help me with my daughter. I couldn't have done it all on my own. This experience has taught me to trust my maternal instincts, to not let other adults run over me, and to be the mom that my kids can come to with anything, no matter how much I may disagree or how ridiculous I think they are being. I need to be their safe place. I know what unconditional love is and what it truly means to fight for your kids.

I can finally see my daughter coming back to herself.

For context: I am a 13-year-old desister and I wrote this because we're having a poem competition at my school. The topic is Social Justice.

This has been flying under the radar for way too long, but finally, people are starting to see the truth.

Kids have been pushed to transition, by adults, by teachers, by friends.

When parents say no, no one listens, because they are misinformed and afraid.

But we won’t be quiet, this is causing real harm. Kids are being sterilized and mutilated, it’s hard to accept but this is the truth.

We won’t be quiet. Those suicide statistics you pull out aren’t true,

Telling a vulnerable child that they will die if their parents tell them the truth, is cruel.

You say that this helps them, that regret is rare.

That too is a lie.

There is no credible evidence of benefits, yet there is of harm there.

How can we be so blind, when we’re clearly harming a child?

This is sexism all over again, just a different form.

Telling a young boy that he might be a girl because he likes Barbies and pink.

The stereotypes that our elders tried so hard to get rid of so kids can enjoy different play, are back again but this time they’re worse,

Because now we’re medically harming these kids,

Who will experience regret, but there’s no way back.

You can’t reverse the harm that’s been done,

But what we can do is talk.

We won’t be quiet,

The past of this topic is dark,

How John Money, a well-known predator started it,

But people are afraid to look back.

The therapists are saying that affirmation is the only way,

But what if, only for a moment, they would consider that kids constantly engage in imaginary play?

These kids’ minds aren’t developed,

They believe what they’re told.

But when the child decides to get off this dangerous path,

There’s suddenly no support.

We won’t be quiet; we care about all kids.

So, all we ask is for you to see the evidence and think about what you really care.

My daughter spent four years identifying as a "trans boy". During those years it felt like I was grasping, trying to pull her out while she was hanging off the edge of a cliff. She was simultaneously trying to free herself, screaming and biting my hand, while holding on for dear life. “I hate you, let go! Mom, mom, please help me. Don’t leave me. Don't let go!!”

She sunk into the hole of self-deception and misery as a 14-year-old girl and emerged as an 18-year-old woman, not quite sure how to act like one.  For a couple of months I watched with hope and pain as she tried to stuff four years of missed girlhood into one summer of trashy outfits.  

Why did she desist? I don’t know.  If you are a believer, you may say that my constant, desperate prayers were answered. (I don’t belong to any specific religion).  If you are inclined to interpret things from an evolutionary standpoint, you may say that her primal survival and reproductive instincts kicked in.  You may think that my strategy helped – while we rarely talked about her transgender identity, she knew I would never go along with it.  You may say that we just were lucky. I do think most of our kids who found trans identity while young and still living at home, will desist. With some TLC (truthful loving care) from the parents, trans fever will run its course and break.   

My daughter's fever broke, but the virus is still in her mind. She is still an "ally" and now more than a year after she desisted, I cannot fully relax. Don't get me wrong, I am immensely, immensely grateful and relieved that she desisted. However, as an ally, she is still a danger to herself and others.  Sometimes I lay sleepless at night, ridden with fear and guilt.  I should have done more to help her desist quicker.  I should have done more to guide her away from the ideology.  I made many mistakes of cowardice for which I have no excuse. During rare, painful confrontations I was tongue-tied and never satisfied with what I said. 

And so... here you are reading our story, rooting for us as we all do for one another.  Are you a mom of a college aged son who now goes by “Zoe” in part because my daughter voted for that name on reddit?  Are you a dad of a 17-year-old daughter who hides a binder in her school backpack in part because three years ago a friendly “trans boy” invited her to a GSA meeting?  I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.  

In March 2022, I wrote A non-binary story (female version) for PITT. About three months later, to my absolute and utter shock, around her 17th birthday, my daughter started showing signs of desistance. The subsequent year was nothing short of astounding to me. She bought bras, began growing out her hair, got her ears pierced, and changed her clothing to a more feminine style, going so far as to wear a stunningly beautiful dress to the prom. That summer, after breaking up with her long-term girlfriend, she briefly dated a guy. She began university using “any” pronouns and her actual name, sometimes using a variation of it but definitely not the “chosen” name she had used in high school. She began wearing those itty-bitty tight tops that all the girls seem to be wearing. She bought sexy dresses. Another year on and she seems to fully accept being a bisexual female with a feminine appearance and uses her given name all the time.

Why did she desist? 

I have no idea. We have basically not talked about gender for years now. 

I have a few theories. The most plausible is that we got her horrendous periods under control. They were so bad that a couple of times she nearly fainted from the pain. For years she said she wanted no periods (and who could blame her?). After trying a variety of birth control pills that only nominally worked, she finally got an IUD. She almost never gets her period now, and she loves it. The second biggest is that she is dealing better with her anxiety. We were lucky to find an exploratory psychologist to help her sort through some things (did they ever discuss gender? no clue), and now at college she has an exploratory therapist (again, does gender come up? no clue). My third theory is that she just matured, got past the pains of puberty, and basically “grew out of it” (as predicted by Ken Zucker’s research). It’s possible that our approach of just loving connection, affirming her but not the gender identity, and generally not discussing gender worked, but I don’t really know. Her younger brother joining the same school as her may also have had an effect - after all, it is difficult to juggle your conflicting lives at the same time. Or maybe some combination of all of the above. Or maybe none of the above.

But the ripples - the aftereffects - keep on rippling, like a stone thrown into a pond. 

It took me these past two years to exhale - although not fully. Never fully. I wonder if the trans identity could come roaring back at any time, not least of all because she still could be classified as fully “woke.” She’s also doing a liberal arts major, and we all know the professors and students there tend to be extremely far left on the political spectrum.

I have changed as a person. My whole life I was firmly politically left leaning. No more. Now I would call myself independent, or middle, or perhaps politically homeless (although many on the left would now call me right-wing - I laugh at that). Colin Wright’s cartoon (see below) perfectly epitomizes my experience. I’m much more open-minded now in talking with people on the right and much less tolerant of the far left. I still won’t vote for Trump but no longer think Trump voters are evil (gasp!). I also can’t stand Biden/Harris’s position on gender and Title IX. I am now a skeptic of experts and journalists and educational institutions, even of places like the United Nations, which seems to have an overt political agenda. I see how gender ideology is connected to antisemitism and critical justice ideology and DEI. I don’t mind Jordan Peterson or Elon Musk - in fact, I’m grateful to them regarding the gender issue. Five years ago, I never would have imagined any of these things.

I am extremely lucky to have some very open-minded friends who were pillars for me during this difficult period - but not all of them. I still have to be careful who I open up to. I know I can get too dogmatic at times and people don’t want to think about it if they don’t have to (I can relate to Lisa Selin Davis). I have lost a friend over this issue - my best friend during my 20s.

I am overprotective of my son. I am paranoid about what he is taught in school and what he views online, even though he is clearly not susceptible in the same ways as my daughter is. I think he thinks I’m nuts about this issue. I also worry that because he is not susceptible to wokeness, he might be susceptible to far-right ideology. I worry about him being falsely accused of toxic masculinity and then I worry about him becoming a toxic male and then I simply hate the whole damned concept and whatever stupid academic dreamed it up. He doesn’t seem to be, he just seems like a normal (in the old-fashioned sense) teenage boy. My hope - and something my daughter agrees with - is to turn him into a gentleman. Whatever I do, I know I’m insecure about my approach, and I’m sure that’s affecting our relationship. 

Finally, my relationship with my daughter seems fragile. Can we ever fully trust each other? How much of it is normal teenage stuff and her growing up and separating - and how much is gender? Does she hate me, thank me, or perhaps most likely, rarely even think about me? Her therapist wanted us to do family sessions this summer and they were kind of a disaster. He says it’s because we can’t get to the root of the matter and probably, he’s right. But when we get close to the root, our relationship seems to deteriorate. Do we need full transparency? I’m no longer convinced. I know I’m far from a perfect mother, but then again, she has her faults too. Don’t we all just need to be a little forgiving? And yet I espouse this ethos of forgiveness at a time when the world, the internet, therapists, young adults, all seem to be a lot less forgiving, quite a few of them advocating “no contact.” Is that a possibility? Another thing I don’t know.

I am a sadder, more cynical person, and yet I’m happier than I have been in four years, or possibly longer. My mind feels freer even though I know we are all caged. More paradoxes.

I also know I'm incredibly lucky, that so many parents would kill to have my experience. So don't feel bad for me at all. I am not in the least looking for sympathy. What I hope to show is the incredibly insidious and multifaceted ways this ideology permeates so many lives.

And that is the aftermath of desistance, at least in my “lived experience.” As Stella and Sasha said (and I am paraphrasing here) on an episode of their Gender: A Wider Lens podcast, desistance is a constant question mark. I would add, for both the desisters and their parents.

Maybe I’ll write another article in two years with something more definitive. Maybe then the ripples will have reached the shore.

I think people react to grief and sadness primarily with tears, anger, action, or avoidance, depending on their personality. I am a crier. I have wept, deeply at times, over the years after my son told me he was no longer my son. I felt in my gut that it was wrong for him and I worried that he had surrounded himself with people who were lying to him, who encouraged the worst for him, and that he believed their lies. The separation from my son was foreign to me as we had always been close. It was severe and total for a time. The imposter moved in, took control, I felt helpless, at times, hopeless.

I let my grief and sadness sometimes overtake me. I couldn't help it, sometimes I didn't want to even try. One time, when my husband out of town for work for several days, I cried so hard, pounding my fists on the ground, heaving and screaming my pleas to God, that I felt like I might hyperventilate and I had to stop myself for fear I might pass out. I know this sounds dramatic and I'm not trying to be. Some of you can relate. Others react in anger or rage, saying things you wish you could take back. Some of us shut down, retreat inside, pretending that proceeding with normal life will nullify the pain and confusion, "If I just ignore it, maybe this nightmare will disappear one morning." Some retreat inside themselves.

Out of Control

Then something changed for me. I had a realization. I was listening to an estrangement coach's podcast and she was talking about a time that she had spun out of control in reaction to her daughter's rebellion and estrangement. I had very valuable one-on-one coaching sessions with this coach several times so I trusted her.  This mother was drinking excessively, going so far as to drive out of town to buy bottles of wine where she wouldn’t run into people she knew. In her desperation and depression, she gained a lot of weight and lost all ability to function normally. She became obsessed with following her daughter on social media. She was upset and distressed all the time. She stopped engaging in life and with friends. She obsessively worried about her daughter all the time, wondering if she was ok, if she was living on the streets, if she was safe or even alive. I had these same thoughts about my son who was estranged from me for over a year at that time. 

We All Have a Choice to Make

Then this mom's daughter was arrested. The police told her daughter she had a choice to make: to clean up her life and get straight, or face the consequences. At that time, her daughter chose not to make any changes. Her dangerous, self-destructive choices and rebellion took 10 years of her life, but she did eventually clean up and come back to her loving family. Then the police officer gave her mom the same advice: "Your daughter has a choice to make. So do you. If you don't take care of yourself, when your daughter comes out of this, she won't have a healthy mom to come home to. She'll go on and live her life and you will be sick, still living in pain, depression, having ruined your life. You have a choice to make too." Her doctor told her the same thing. After an appointment for a medical scare the doctor stated bluntly "If you don't start taking care of your health, your mental, emotional and physical health, you will likely have breast cancer or an autoimmune disease in the next few years. Chronic stress is damaging you."

This story sobered me up right away. It was like getting a bucket of cold water thrown in my face. I didn't change my actions right away, but I was more aware of the danger of letting my grief and sadness overtake me. I knew I had to fight for myself. But remember, I'm a crier.

Go Ahead and Cry

Crying is good for you. According to Harvard researchers, "crying releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins. These feel-good chemicals help ease both physical and emotional pain."

But staying in a state of heightened stress that doesn't release cortisol has been shown to have negative health effects, putting you at a greater risk of cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune disease. Yale Medicine reports that "Some experts go further to say that stress is a leading risk factor for heart disease—the biggest killer in the United States".

As for cancer, Harvard researchers found that "exposure to ongoing stressors can keep cortisol levels consistently high, which can wear down the body on a cellular level. They added that other studies have suggested this reaction may raise the risk of cancer or cause existing cancer to spread more rapidly."

Your immune system is affected by stress as well. The National Health Institute says that "many retrospective studies found that a high proportion (up to 80%) of patients reported uncommon emotional stress before (autoimmune) disease onset."

My emotional anguish caused such pain in my neck and shoulder that, at one point, I was writhing in pain and had to urgently lay flat on my bed to find relief from my muscles seizing up. My husband felt helpless watching me try to find a comfortable position to relieve the pain. Shooting pain in my neck and shoulder was caused by stress, worry, and anxiety. And grief. I started on anti-anxiety medicine during an emotionally difficult time with my two sons, while the one was trans-identified. My emotional pain was manifesting as physical symptoms. I had a choice to make.

I'm glad I journaled during these past few years. I found something that I wrote during a moment of futility over my lack of influence to change my son's outcome. In a moment of clarity I wrote: Write of forgiveness, moving forward, loving others, getting stronger, finding joy again in the midst of great grief and pain. God is releasing me from my control and paralyzing, grieving fear. I still have some fear, but I now know I am helpless to be responsible for the outcome. That's not mine to decide. Pray for God's protection and truth.

Memento Mori

I also found support here on PITT from another parent: The article, From the Parent of an Adult ROGD Child, was one of the many I've kept and reread that helped me through my grief and despair. One of the points made was:

Memento Mori – Remember that you will die. Try to meditate on it briefly each day. Is obsessing about your child’s spectacularly bad decision how you want to spend your precious time? 

Put another way, are you willing to trade your reasonably good health for their spectacularly bad decision? 

Through this medium of writing we can share our pain, but we can also share our wisdom. Don't let this tragedy that you are living through take your life, your health, your relationship with your husband, or your wife, your other children, or your joy in life. I didn't want to smile or laugh, or dance, or enjoy anything for two years. When I went hiking, I hung back and just cried the whole time. I was punishing myself for not being a good enough mom, for not doing more for my son when he was growing up. I was starting to internalize his anger and accusations of me, this son who was close to me growing up, who I loved deeply and gave myself to. I loved raising my boys. Even as a married adult at age 22, he and I went backpacking together, just the two of us. We were close even just years before all of this.

But this story from the estrangement coach really did instantaneously wake me up. I realized that if I didn't start trying to get a hold of my fear, sadness, and grief there could be long term health consequences in my future.

I had a choice to make. I had to choose me.

I Have to Fight

I choose to be more aware of my emotional state and to focus on my emotional health and to work to moderate my reactions and emotions and not let them overwhelm me. I remember telling my husband through fierce tears that I want to be able to smile and laugh with him, and be affectionate towards him, that I was trying really hard to be "normal". I had to fight to find myself. It was a battle. I often failed and fell into despair, self-pity, and depression. I cried a lot. But I didn't want to let my son's "spectacularly bad decision" cause me to ruin my health, my life. I tried at times to look to the future and think about how he would feel knowing he had caused me such pain and how it had contributed to my ill health, and how I had given up on life, not that I would tell him. I know he loved me, he was just going through his own pain, trying to figure things out for himself. I had to take control of my grief and despair.

Although the realization that something had to change was instant, the work wasn't.

• I had to consciously lower my shoulders and learn to relax tense muscles. I'm still tensing my muscles. I work to relax and lower them every day.

• I had to practice concentrating breathing and letting the stress go with the exhale.

• I let myself dance to loud music when I was home alone, just for a minute at first, feeling no joy initially. I had to push down the thoughts running in the background "how can I be happy when my son is so distressed?" It didn't seem right. I still find this kind of joy imbues guilt. I don't totally understand it. But I know I have to keep trying.

• I had to walk more.

• I had to try to find something, anything else to focus on, to research, to find interest in something that wasn't gender identity. I did a fundraiser to help a homeless organization in my community. I read books about amazing, brave people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Yeonmi Park and Megan Phelps-Roper who have overcome horrific challenges. Yet they are grateful, compassionate and brave, not self-centered and victims.

I was now trying to be the mom my son would need me to be when he came back to me.

Be an Example of Resilience

My son has since detransitioned, about a year ago. Our relationship is close again, although changed. Hopefully we can talk after some time about what happened these past few years. I love him. I still worry about him. I always will. He's my son. Now he talks about how he is going to take care of me and his dad when we are old. He is calmer, more caring, and thoughtful again. He still faces many challenges, things aren't perfect. Neither am I.

I want to be Strong Mom. I want my son to know I fought for him. I want him to fight for himself to overcome the challenges he faces, to draw from my strength. I don't feel particularly strong, I think I am still shell-shocked, but I'm working on it. I feel more sober. Sometimes I am tempted to withdraw from everyone and everything. I am still a crier, that's just how I process grief, I know that about myself. I don't particularly like it. But I surprise myself at work when I hear myself speaking with confidence, laughing with coworkers, I recognize that the person I used to be is trying to join life again, but forever changed, hopefully stronger, more resilient, like I want my son to be.

You have a choice to make.