Bowing to Gessler's hat

A Swiss legend tells the story of Wilhelm Tell and Gessler, the tyrant steward of the Habsburg Empire. Gessler raised a pole in the market square of Altdorf and perched his hat on the top, commanding all who passed before it to bow in respect.

Wilhelm Tell, visiting Altdorf with his young son, could not bring himself to bow to the hat and was seized by the guards. Gessler sets up Tell to a challenge and orders him to shoot an apple off his son's head with his crossbow. If Tell were successful, he would be released, but if he failed or refused, both he and his son would die. To Gessler's annoyance, Tell split the apple and not his son's head.

In the German-speaking world, the term "Gesslerhut" still describes an institution whose only obvious purpose is the public enforcement of subservient behavior.

When our family moved to the US, my son was in preschool. A gentle but typical outgoing boy with a great sense of humor. I was a stay-at-home mum for the first years, raising him and adjusting to a new country. Later I started a career as a teacher.

The first Covid lockdown came in March 2020, and challenging times came with it. My husband lost his job, and I had to double my efforts to work. I taught online, and besides school, I tutored private students to make money.

My son, who had skipped a school year and attended a gifted program in his High School, started online learning too. Starting with puberty, my outgoing son became more of an introvert, although he seemed okay with the lack of socializing. He had a best friend, but the friend’s mother was scared of Covid so, despite living close by, our kids did not see each other for almost half a year.

Then my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I was the only one able to care for him. Online schooling made it possible to relocate, and our family spent a couple of months in our native country. Possibilities to go outside and meet people were rare as my hometown had a strict lockdown. By the time of the second lockdown I was with my dying father in hospice during the day, and teaching my students online during the evenings. My son spent his days sleeping, and his school hours started in the late afternoon. I later learned that, at night, he tumbled down the rabbit hole internet.

When we returned to the US, we were exhausted; my father's death and my husband's ongoing unemployment, had taken a significant toll on us—and our once health savings account was shrinking every day.

I hoped to return to everyday life, but my son was suddenly very depressed. He had overloaded himself with schoolwork, a blooming relationship with a girl he liked did not work out, and he spent countless hours in Discord, Reddit, TikTok—and porn.

After only a few weeks back home, bad news struck again—my mum had a stroke and was in a hospital for a couple of months in critical condition. During this time—once again dealing again with an ill parent but now from overseas—I learned about my son's gender dysphoria. It felt like being hit by a truck. Nothing about it made any sense.

Coincidentally I had once watched the documentary "I Want My Sex Back," and what stuck with me was not only the regrets but the high suicide rate in the trans community. I've never felt so scared for my son in my whole life. Nothing I had experienced before—worries about finances, grief for my father, fear for my mother's life—was compared to what came now.

Desperately I searched for therapists, but it took just a few minutes to realize that everyone who claimed to be a specialist for LGBT+ was deep into the madness themself. So I decided to stay away from them. Even with intense research, it took me a while to find the term ROGD and explain what was happening with the kids. Google is certainly not our friend. When I contacted other parents, and as they shared their stories, I saw the similarities. Our children, almost all exceptionally smart, had all kinds of issues—but they were not born in the wrong body. Years of bullying, frustration, teenage angst, porn, anime, brainwashing in school and social media, and lockdown isolation had damaged my child in a way I could not have imagined.

Through notifications popping up on my son's cell phone, I found out that he followed some disturbing trans porn on Twitter (until then, I was not even aware that Twitter had porn content). I tried to get him to read the book "Your Brain on Porn" by Gary Wilson to open his eyes to the fact that the weird kinks he had developed might not be as natural as he assumed and that there was even a way out of it. He blocked my attempts, even though I was sure he saw the connection between his porn consumption and his gender confusion.

Looking for the magical silver bullet to save my son, I researched everything I could get my hands on. I watched Benjamin Boyce's interviews, read Angus Fox's blog, and lurked on Reddit/detrans to figure out what was going on and how to stop it. Also, I went through countless medical studies, and this issue turned out to be much darker than I had already assumed. Hormones, blockers, and surgeries were not turning men into women, or vice versa, like the media, suggested—rather, it left altered, damaged people behind who needed constant outside affirmation not to break down. It was surely one of the greatest medical scandals of our time, and my child walked right into it.

I wanted to scream at my son and talk sense into him, but I smiled and stayed quiet. "Don't talk against the cult!" my new friends of the parent group warned me: "He will dig deeper no matter what information you will present him." So I stayed quiet, smiled, and started to ask questions. For months I pretended to be okay, smiled even more, and tried to get him away from the computer and outside into nature.

When my son told me he considered hormones and T-blockers, my facade broke, and I begged him to wait until he was 25 to give his brain time to develop. However, when my son realized I would not support medical intervention or any gender identity, his behavior changed. He—who used to be considerate and caring—suddenly pushed every possible button with his atrocious behavior and cruel demeanor.

I was afraid to scold him for his behavior or even kick him out, because I knew it could push him away into the hands of the destructive gender cult. Our close, loving relationship seemed to break apart, my marriage was on edge, and I barely slept 4 hours per night. My last thought in the night and my first one in the morning was about “trans”.

Then, my son secretly ordered hormones and blockers, which I found in our home. I was beyond scared for his long-term health, development, and life, but I did not say anything. I just prayed that he would stop. My family has cases of males with Multiple Sclerosis and a disposition for Alzheimer's, but of which I had learned can be caused or worsened by estrogen and lack of testosterone in men. I'm pretty sure that neither my son nor the "doctor" who gave my son the prescription any idea of these known side effects—and both did not care either.

At the end of last year, I had a mental collapse. One morning the walls of my sanity just broke down. Almost one year of fear, anger, stress, and lack of sleep, broke me. I said things I deeply regret, things a mother should never say to her son. I left our house and sat in my car for two days and one night, sobbing and screaming—I even considered suicide. My mother talked me out of it—God bless mothers!—and she asked me to come to her to recover. I feel deeply sorry that I left my family for a couple of weeks, but it was the distance I needed to find new strength for my family.

Recently my husband confessed that he thinks one of the problems with getting a job is that the cult completely took over his industry. Wherever he goes to meet people, there is gender ideology. He was always open-minded, but now he pulls back and feels blocked, even though he loves his profession.

My work as a teacher had been my haven. Our small school focused on language and culture and was free of any ideology. Teaching young children gave me structure, purpose, and a place away from the mass psychosis that has taken over this world and my son.

That all changed though at the beginning of the 2022/2023 school year, when all staff were notified that we had to complete mandatory online Harassment Training, as required by state law. The first 10 minutes were similar to the training I had completed two years ago, with short video clips, interrupted by slides and followed by a quiz. Then the gender woo-woo started, with a video of an obvious female person with a mustache “educating” me about trans rights and training me on using preferred pronouns. On the slides that came up was the following nonsense:

• Gender Identity : A person’s sense of their own gender

• This may or may not match the sex assigned by birth

• Sexual Orientation: The gender of the person someone is attracted to

I stopped. After all the stress and pain, I could not finish it. The whole training was a virtual modern-day "Gessler hat." Finally, after a couple of days of evaluating what to do, I wrote the following email to my employer:

"I am writing these lines after much deliberation... I ask you and the employees of ... to treat this email confidentially and internally.

I have started the Mandatory Sexual Harassment Training and cannot complete it for reasons of conviction and conscience. I feel it is an ideological rape of my person.

First, I don't believe in the neo-religious concept of gender identity. Although I'm quite familiar with gender dysphoria, and believe that people who suffer from it should be treated with all compassion and respect.

In just ten years, gender dysphoria, aka trans, has increased by more than 5000% among young people, especially girls. Many experts speak of a social contagion, not a natural state like homosexuality, which is older than humanity itself. This is supported by the fact that the number of detransitioners has increased explosively for some time now. Their fates are the worst imaginable. Young men who have been castrated are now suffering from autoimmune diseases that will likely send them to their graves decades earlier.

Young women, some of whom are still children, have had their breasts amputated, including the nipples (in LA, a doctor cuts off the breasts of 13-year-old girls). If they're lucky, all they struggle with is growing beards and strangely deep voices from testosterone. But many remain sterile and suffer from numerous other diseases. The consequences of vaginal and phalloplasty are straight out of a horror movie.

The therapists who previously affirmed this "progressive" step have abandoned them now. The damage that doctors and the pharmaceutical industry are currently causing cannot be repaired. All in the name of a "gender identity."

Second, I disagree that sexual orientation is based on gender but that homosexuality is, as they say in English, "same-sex attraction." This point is incredibly homophobic. For years, many lesbian women have struggled with the accusation of being "transphobic" because they reject "ladydick", i.e. straight men who believe they are women when they put on a dress and push themselves into the dating pool of lesbians. Keyword: "Cotton Ceiling".

Being forced to conform to a dangerous, sexist ideology deeply disturbs me. I would like to quit.

It is a difficult step for me, the work at ... was important to me financially and personally, and I did it with great love for the children."

The response of my principal was regret about my leaving. But, unfortunately, our school is forced by state law to require those training. She also said she would like to talk to me privately as she was concerned about some of these developments.

Unlike Tell, we cannot save our children with a single skillful shot. Instead, we are forced to navigate our children through today's enemy territory. Everything that used to be a regular part of our world can work now against us: friends, schools, therapists, peers, the internet, doctors, and media.

Someone I considered a close friend even encouraged my son to take t-blockers and compared them to ibuprofen.

An entire society is attacking what we care about most: the well-being and future of our children, and barely anyone seems to understand us.

Here’s the good news: my son has saved himself over the last few months. He is still shy and addicted to the internet, but a part of him fought back, reclaiming his masculinity and searching for healing. He took hormones and blockers for a while, but stopped before they changed his body. Also, he learned a wonderful profession that connected him to people, made him conscious of body and soul, and met lovely new people. He and I were able to reconnect, sometimes even cuddling on the couch, laughing about jokes, or working out together. We don't talk about gender or trans; it's a topic we both want to avoid. So I can't tell him how I'm incredibly proud of him—but one day I will.

Still, I'm scared that he could bounce back. As long the gender cult lives on, we ROGD parents will be nervous and feel powerless. The only power we can take back is to speak out and let the world know that not everyone is getting along with the madness and that we will not bow to the stupid hat.