A letter to my ex-husband and the father of our son

A little over one year ago our son began acting oddly. I asked him what was going on and if I could help.  I also asked him if he had a girlfriend (or boyfriend) because I knew something up.  He told me he had neither, that he has too much to do to get through school, but that he was fine.  

He continued to act differently and started spending a lot of time in the bathroom as well as on his phone.  He then shunned a group of friends and started hanging around almost exclusively with new friends who I later found were in the LGBTQ community.  I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Fast forward to December when he came out to me as transfemme.  It was also then that I found out that you, without consulting me, had already made an appointment with the adolescent/gender clinic at Children’s Hospital.  I RELUCTANTLY acquiesced to this appointment because you had put me in a precarious position with our son.

I was hoping that the clinic would not be all affirming but was dreading that it might. And I was right to be concerned.  I urged you to research the social contagion of trans-ideology and the explosion in the numbers of teens identifying as trans. I wanted you and me to be on the same team.  BUT that didn’t happen. Rather than address our son’s obvious mental health issues and dive into how and why he came to this conclusion, the affirmation ball just kept rolling and served to reinforce our son’s self-diagnosis.

Fast forward again to Good Friday, my son and I were supposed to have a conversation about the (horrific) health implications of medical transition.  This didn’t happen.  He was a different person, a person I did not know, a person who blamed me for his Adderall addiction, a person who suicide bated me, a person who set a timer for me to be allowed to talk, just to yell over me and say some very mean and nasty things.  So, I said to him, “you need to go to your dad’s for a while”.

In that moment I was blindsided, gaslit and very hurt. I was shocked to find that he immediately blocked me, and I couldn’t even get through to wish him a happy Easter. That’s when you should have stepped in and put a stop to this madness.  That’s when you should have said to our son, “the three of us need to get together and work this out”.  You should have done whatever it took for our son and I to be reunited (as I would have done for you without hesitation). You didn’t.  

It appeared to me that you washed your hands of it, and with that, pretty much reinforced our son’s behavior towards me.  This last year should have been different. We TOGETHER should have found a therapist who ISN’T affirming and isn’t willing to quickly consent to the use of hormones and harmful surgeries, just because a 17-year-old with OTHER mental health issues says he wants them.  We together should have found a therapist WILLING to ask tough questions. Instead, he got the GENDER AFFIRMATION STATION, with some of the so called “mental health professionals” even stating outright falsities.

You had been vague with me on every level during the last four months of our son’s status as a minor, ignoring my emails, not keeping me in the loop at all regarding my son’s well-being and therapy sessions.

On the contrary, you have allowed and have been ok with our son not having a relationship with his mom, and to seemingly do whatever he wants.  On the two occasions I got to have lunch with our son, he looked thinner and thinner each time. And, while I was grateful to have a few moments with him, they were very superficial interactions.

My heart is breaking over these last seven months without my son in my life. It has been agonizing. I have missed very important events in his life. My son didn’t even call or text me when I was in the hospital.  My birthday came and went without so much as a message.

That is NOT like my child. Our son is now 18 years old and it is too late for his PARENTS to help. He has started down the path of medical transition. A year ago, and even seven months ago, it was not too late. NOW IT IS. Our son is not well.