I am a 54 year old working mom of a 15 year old gifted girl, 14 at the time of her trans self-identification—my only child. Our story is a textbook story of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) in almost all aspects. The difference is my daughter’s cluster of mental and endocrine diagnoses that went undiscovered until she was 14, after she had already fallen in the trans trap. The toll the trans bomb has taken on my child and our family has been tremendous.
I really applaud the efforts you’ve made for your daughters healing. I have similar Dxs including PCOS and autism (late diagnosed at age 25) that also caused me to retreat into overeating and way too much time on the internet. I became aware of gender ideology when I noticed many of my own peers begin ID-ing as non-binary, all of them women who don’t conform to sexist stereotypes. I fully believe this is a response to societal misogyny and sexualization of women and girls, and if I had been a few years younger I know I would’ve been susceptible. Medical professionals need to grasp the connections between autism, PCOS and trans ID.
Your daughter sounds like me as a kid - although I didn't get my autism diagnosis until adulthood. In and out of psychiatric hospitals in middle and high school. Anorexia, bulimia, depression, anxiety, and I was a cutter. I was not dx'ed with PCOS until my 20s. I was not diagnosed with autism until adulthood. It never came up, with all those years of treatment! I was too "high functioning." But when my own daughter was dx'ed, sitting through her evaluation felt like getting smacked in the face - that's me! I am officially diagnosed through a long and horrible evaluation - not just self ID'ing from her eval.
Suddenly... everything made so much sense, looking back. I understand why I have never felt like I fit in - a normal sensation for all teens, but i think worse for us on the spectrum. I battled puberty - I wore a toddler t-shirt to smoosh my developing breasts in 4 grade, until my mom found out. With the eating disorder came a lack of periods - or maybe it was the PCOS. Who knows, at that early stage. I have never been able to say when the PCOS problems began, due to how many issues were blamed on the eating disorder - but I was a fat kid and it definitely runs in my family. I welcomed not having periods - such a hassel and I got mine so young. My means of keeping track of them was to simply hope the next one never came!
I didn't think I was a boy but I definitely didn't want to be a girl. I tried to get my teachers in school to call me Jo, like in Little Women... but it never felt natural, it never stuck.
I think inititally what got me down the whole rabbithole wondering about why so many tween girls are going trans now, is it similar to how many of us wanted to revert back to childhood with an eating disorder? I know it was not an uncommon thing among girls with eating disorders then. I've actually kept in touch with some women I knew from treatment (back when we were kids) to discuss this. Is this resisting of womanhood actually a "normal" stage of develoipment which leads some girls to eating disorders and now girls have a different outlet for? There was one boy in treatment with me who I really liked and have been trying to track down - no luck. I really want to know his male perspective. Was it also reverting to childhood? I hope he is doing well, wherever he is.
The internet did not exist when I was in middle school, and I had very fledgling use of it in high school. In college I became aware of the "pro ana" and "pro mia" boards on line and while I wasn't in to them, I could imagine how "inspiring" they would have been for the younger crowd. I had to rely on library books and the encylopedia for whatever materials I needed back then. My mental health struggles were so bonkers and bizarre that I have never been terribly open about all of it, assuming it was some strange quirk unique to me... I wear long sleeves to hide my scars, it pains me if I meet someone new and I feel them staring ... I have struggled to explain it, even to myself, why I cut. It wasn't to release the pain - which is why the doctors say you do it. It was because I didn't fit in... never fit in... and if I couldn't fit in, I wanted to stand out in as weird and freaky a way as possible. Well it worked - and now I am stuck with the consequences. I've looked into laser scar removal but it's so expensive... that money could be spent on more enjoyable things... and just a little bit, right now, I am kind of grateful I have some tangible mark of the hard things I went through as a teen. If all I had were words, I could make up and say anything - but my arms make it clear.
With all I read about now, I am certain - if I had been a teen with what is on the internet now, I would have 100% fallen into this ideology. The trans umbrella has become so large that fitting under it at this point is meaningless. There is a space for EVERYONE - except for those easily sneered at cis-hetero people, oh my goodnes, you don't want to be cis hetero. That's so basic. EVERYONE is non-binarary. (What does that even mean? How many among us are truly binary?) My oldest announced he was non binary years ago (actually aromantic, agender, and something else) and not knowing this was part of something bigger, I smiled and said "As long as you're not racist, we're OK with you however you are." Now I have daughters of the age where I'd need a third hand to count all the "theys" they know, and at least three girls now actually insist on male pronouns and use male names. I wish now at the time years ago I had asked my son what he meant, why he feels that, why he feels everyone else isn't. This is the kid we bought nothing but "gender neutral" toys for, who kind of played with them, and then fell in love with a toy truck at Walmart, had to have it, and slept with it for the next few weeks. He was raised to not have gender constraints. Coming out as "non binary" was the point!!!
I feel like I am losing my mind because I can see through what this is - how much it is a trend - how the appeal is especially strong for kids like me - how much it is kids wanting so badly to do what kids have ALWAYS wanted to do - they want to be unique and special, and they want to fit in. We have somehow gone from a decades battle of telling girls they can do anything, that being a woman does not limit you - to embracing the slightest deviation from textbook femininty and declaring ourselves the proud parent of a trans kid.
It horrifies me to know this could have been me - when from the comfortable position of middle age, I can look back and say for sure this is NOT me. I have never been a girly girl but I AM a woman. Being a woman is hard - hating our bodies is as old as time - but how do we teach our girls to be strong girls and strong women while humoring the notion that they are not really women?
I am horrified at how many kids being swept up in this are almost certainly undiagnosed autistics - I know how hard it is for girls to be diagnosed (and I worry that the more we try to blur sex and gender, the more we risk losing knowledge about WOMEN'S health care) - I know how many of these kids just want to belong and fit in and this is an easy way to do it. Many will merely dabble and drive us crazy with terminology and then outgrow it in look back with embarassment - this will be like my vampire phase in the 90s - but in the mean time - for so many kids, this becomes their only identity. It is not PART of their personality, it becomes their whole personality. And when all your "socializing" is on line these days with people who speak just what you want to hear - how on earth do we overcome that and help our kids find out who else they are? What else makes them special? What makes them unique that is REALLY unique, not just being part of something edgy that everyone and their uncle is getting in on now?
I applaud you getting your daughter out of that situation, working on her health, getting her involved in other things. The work with animals sounds great! Good exercise and a sense of accomplishment!
I hate that I feel like I can't talk about this... I see vulnerable kids getting sucked into an ideology that isn't good for them. A whole generation of girls is going to be impacted negatively by this. I have always considered myself liberal and open minded and supportive of "trans rights" -- but over the last year I have seen what this is doing to our young people. I almost compare it to celiac disease - which is a real thing - and everyone jumping on the gluten inolerant bandwagon. We can't speak objectively about what it going on for fear of being called transphobic. The fact that the slightest bit of adolescent discomfort or body disastisfaction is getting enbraced "you must be trans" is going to backfire in the long run. For some kids, it's true - but for most of these kids, it is taking up the time and brain space where they should be discovering who they are and finding friends based on that, and coming to terms with what it means to live in a woman's body. (And even for the kids for whom it IS true - again this is becoming their whole ideology. Those kids also need to find out who they are outside of being trans)
Your story is the one that finally made me activate my account and come out of lurking. I wish nothing but the best for all the kids I have seen posted about here but your daughter... her story really hits home for me. So many important pieces of my puzzle, I didn't have until much later - she has a great start at least knowing those things now.
2) Cell phones/social media are the means of infection
3) Parents are the stop-mechanism.
a) When friends get into this situation, do parents get together on this? What did the other parents think?
b) Social media cut-off needs to be done immediately
c) Psychologists, therapists, and even pediatricians need to be avoided or eliminated
d) Changing locale is important. Can the parent take the child to another state? It probably needs to be another state .Make sure that if you go to a relative, they are not Woke.
e) Getting the kid away from social media is COMPLETELY ESSENTIAL. Take that phone away. Change the password, Eliminate family computers.
I live in LA county and I feel that is extremely toxic. I am wary of therapists and doctors here.
I insist in taking vacation on farms and nature and my whole family seems to be better, even here in CA when we go to the mountains or nature. The schools are promoting the trans-agenda so bad, we parents have complained over and over on school boards, but it is coming from above. I am planning to move to a place outside of the city..
Wow. I cannot believe the suffering you and your daughter have been through. What is happening to our kids??? And how did the trans cult capture the medical community???
I think you are 100% spot on with the cure to this- getting away from our sick cultures and getting as close to nature as possible.
SO familiar. Good for you for your bravery in taking her away from it all. None of this is your fault. A medical degree wouldn't have saved her, or you, from any of this. Good luck!
I really applaud the efforts you’ve made for your daughters healing. I have similar Dxs including PCOS and autism (late diagnosed at age 25) that also caused me to retreat into overeating and way too much time on the internet. I became aware of gender ideology when I noticed many of my own peers begin ID-ing as non-binary, all of them women who don’t conform to sexist stereotypes. I fully believe this is a response to societal misogyny and sexualization of women and girls, and if I had been a few years younger I know I would’ve been susceptible. Medical professionals need to grasp the connections between autism, PCOS and trans ID.
Your daughter sounds like me as a kid - although I didn't get my autism diagnosis until adulthood. In and out of psychiatric hospitals in middle and high school. Anorexia, bulimia, depression, anxiety, and I was a cutter. I was not dx'ed with PCOS until my 20s. I was not diagnosed with autism until adulthood. It never came up, with all those years of treatment! I was too "high functioning." But when my own daughter was dx'ed, sitting through her evaluation felt like getting smacked in the face - that's me! I am officially diagnosed through a long and horrible evaluation - not just self ID'ing from her eval.
Suddenly... everything made so much sense, looking back. I understand why I have never felt like I fit in - a normal sensation for all teens, but i think worse for us on the spectrum. I battled puberty - I wore a toddler t-shirt to smoosh my developing breasts in 4 grade, until my mom found out. With the eating disorder came a lack of periods - or maybe it was the PCOS. Who knows, at that early stage. I have never been able to say when the PCOS problems began, due to how many issues were blamed on the eating disorder - but I was a fat kid and it definitely runs in my family. I welcomed not having periods - such a hassel and I got mine so young. My means of keeping track of them was to simply hope the next one never came!
I didn't think I was a boy but I definitely didn't want to be a girl. I tried to get my teachers in school to call me Jo, like in Little Women... but it never felt natural, it never stuck.
I think inititally what got me down the whole rabbithole wondering about why so many tween girls are going trans now, is it similar to how many of us wanted to revert back to childhood with an eating disorder? I know it was not an uncommon thing among girls with eating disorders then. I've actually kept in touch with some women I knew from treatment (back when we were kids) to discuss this. Is this resisting of womanhood actually a "normal" stage of develoipment which leads some girls to eating disorders and now girls have a different outlet for? There was one boy in treatment with me who I really liked and have been trying to track down - no luck. I really want to know his male perspective. Was it also reverting to childhood? I hope he is doing well, wherever he is.
The internet did not exist when I was in middle school, and I had very fledgling use of it in high school. In college I became aware of the "pro ana" and "pro mia" boards on line and while I wasn't in to them, I could imagine how "inspiring" they would have been for the younger crowd. I had to rely on library books and the encylopedia for whatever materials I needed back then. My mental health struggles were so bonkers and bizarre that I have never been terribly open about all of it, assuming it was some strange quirk unique to me... I wear long sleeves to hide my scars, it pains me if I meet someone new and I feel them staring ... I have struggled to explain it, even to myself, why I cut. It wasn't to release the pain - which is why the doctors say you do it. It was because I didn't fit in... never fit in... and if I couldn't fit in, I wanted to stand out in as weird and freaky a way as possible. Well it worked - and now I am stuck with the consequences. I've looked into laser scar removal but it's so expensive... that money could be spent on more enjoyable things... and just a little bit, right now, I am kind of grateful I have some tangible mark of the hard things I went through as a teen. If all I had were words, I could make up and say anything - but my arms make it clear.
With all I read about now, I am certain - if I had been a teen with what is on the internet now, I would have 100% fallen into this ideology. The trans umbrella has become so large that fitting under it at this point is meaningless. There is a space for EVERYONE - except for those easily sneered at cis-hetero people, oh my goodnes, you don't want to be cis hetero. That's so basic. EVERYONE is non-binarary. (What does that even mean? How many among us are truly binary?) My oldest announced he was non binary years ago (actually aromantic, agender, and something else) and not knowing this was part of something bigger, I smiled and said "As long as you're not racist, we're OK with you however you are." Now I have daughters of the age where I'd need a third hand to count all the "theys" they know, and at least three girls now actually insist on male pronouns and use male names. I wish now at the time years ago I had asked my son what he meant, why he feels that, why he feels everyone else isn't. This is the kid we bought nothing but "gender neutral" toys for, who kind of played with them, and then fell in love with a toy truck at Walmart, had to have it, and slept with it for the next few weeks. He was raised to not have gender constraints. Coming out as "non binary" was the point!!!
I feel like I am losing my mind because I can see through what this is - how much it is a trend - how the appeal is especially strong for kids like me - how much it is kids wanting so badly to do what kids have ALWAYS wanted to do - they want to be unique and special, and they want to fit in. We have somehow gone from a decades battle of telling girls they can do anything, that being a woman does not limit you - to embracing the slightest deviation from textbook femininty and declaring ourselves the proud parent of a trans kid.
It horrifies me to know this could have been me - when from the comfortable position of middle age, I can look back and say for sure this is NOT me. I have never been a girly girl but I AM a woman. Being a woman is hard - hating our bodies is as old as time - but how do we teach our girls to be strong girls and strong women while humoring the notion that they are not really women?
I am horrified at how many kids being swept up in this are almost certainly undiagnosed autistics - I know how hard it is for girls to be diagnosed (and I worry that the more we try to blur sex and gender, the more we risk losing knowledge about WOMEN'S health care) - I know how many of these kids just want to belong and fit in and this is an easy way to do it. Many will merely dabble and drive us crazy with terminology and then outgrow it in look back with embarassment - this will be like my vampire phase in the 90s - but in the mean time - for so many kids, this becomes their only identity. It is not PART of their personality, it becomes their whole personality. And when all your "socializing" is on line these days with people who speak just what you want to hear - how on earth do we overcome that and help our kids find out who else they are? What else makes them special? What makes them unique that is REALLY unique, not just being part of something edgy that everyone and their uncle is getting in on now?
I applaud you getting your daughter out of that situation, working on her health, getting her involved in other things. The work with animals sounds great! Good exercise and a sense of accomplishment!
I hate that I feel like I can't talk about this... I see vulnerable kids getting sucked into an ideology that isn't good for them. A whole generation of girls is going to be impacted negatively by this. I have always considered myself liberal and open minded and supportive of "trans rights" -- but over the last year I have seen what this is doing to our young people. I almost compare it to celiac disease - which is a real thing - and everyone jumping on the gluten inolerant bandwagon. We can't speak objectively about what it going on for fear of being called transphobic. The fact that the slightest bit of adolescent discomfort or body disastisfaction is getting enbraced "you must be trans" is going to backfire in the long run. For some kids, it's true - but for most of these kids, it is taking up the time and brain space where they should be discovering who they are and finding friends based on that, and coming to terms with what it means to live in a woman's body. (And even for the kids for whom it IS true - again this is becoming their whole ideology. Those kids also need to find out who they are outside of being trans)
Your story is the one that finally made me activate my account and come out of lurking. I wish nothing but the best for all the kids I have seen posted about here but your daughter... her story really hits home for me. So many important pieces of my puzzle, I didn't have until much later - she has a great start at least knowing those things now.
I wish her and you the very very best.
More and more, I am coming to think:
1) Friends are the generator of this insanity
2) Cell phones/social media are the means of infection
3) Parents are the stop-mechanism.
a) When friends get into this situation, do parents get together on this? What did the other parents think?
b) Social media cut-off needs to be done immediately
c) Psychologists, therapists, and even pediatricians need to be avoided or eliminated
d) Changing locale is important. Can the parent take the child to another state? It probably needs to be another state .Make sure that if you go to a relative, they are not Woke.
e) Getting the kid away from social media is COMPLETELY ESSENTIAL. Take that phone away. Change the password, Eliminate family computers.
I live in LA county and I feel that is extremely toxic. I am wary of therapists and doctors here.
I insist in taking vacation on farms and nature and my whole family seems to be better, even here in CA when we go to the mountains or nature. The schools are promoting the trans-agenda so bad, we parents have complained over and over on school boards, but it is coming from above. I am planning to move to a place outside of the city..
where is this community, can we come too?
Wow. I cannot believe the suffering you and your daughter have been through. What is happening to our kids??? And how did the trans cult capture the medical community???
I think you are 100% spot on with the cure to this- getting away from our sick cultures and getting as close to nature as possible.
Your story- and enormous strength- floor me.
The first 5 paragraphs of this describe my daughter EXACTLY.
SO familiar. Good for you for your bravery in taking her away from it all. None of this is your fault. A medical degree wouldn't have saved her, or you, from any of this. Good luck!
Well done
I am so sorry. 💔 My heart hurts for you.
Horrifying that this is happening in our world right now.