So very sad and heartbreaking. This story is so familiar to our situation with my beautiful baby girl. I love your last line! My daughter’s smile is such a joy to behold and I too will fight for her. God bless you and give us all the strength and wisdom to get our children through these scary and unbelievable times. 🙏🏼❤️
Wow, the comments on here are nasty. I suspect the people commenting aren't living this nightmare. I have a 19 year old daughter struggling with this. I have thrown away binders, they find a way to get them . I have parked myself outside of a lab with my legal guardianship papers to find out the Dr s name that s ordering the labs to get testosterone. The Dr s are protected. The only way I have managed to contact them is by fax, faxing my legal guardianship papers and a letter describing my daughters disabilities. My daughter proceeded to tell me the Dr said guardianship doesn t matter. The pediatricians are suggesting these clinics if your adolescent is suffering from dysphoria. After researching , I chose not to bring my daughter as they all seem to be affirming. You would think , and hope they would need years of therapy before medicalizing. I have learned , because my daughters 18 , she can get testosterone after 3 visits. I attended a presentation to one of the best hospitals in the U.S. They commented your child may comit suicide if you don t affirm. Does any parent want that? My questions after the presentation went unanswered. One was” Is there ever a time you don t affirm, as in someone on the autism spectrum, who has underlying depression?” The other, “ Isn t it true affirmation will not prevent suicide, as some comit suicide after transition?” I have refused to bring my daughter to a gender clinic, but I suspect she will find a way to get there 1 1/2 hours away. So please , until you walk in our shoes please don t judge . This is tearing us apart and it breaks out hearts!
Gosh.. the viciousness of some of the comments on here. She said that there are pro trans charities that provide binders free. And anyway the kid presumably gets pocket money and can but what they want. A draconian approach to young people will drive the activity even further underground or drive them away and all chance to counsel be lost forever. Social workers and the courts can and do intervene… to all classes. Hell in Scotland we have the Education Authority saying that children as young as 4 can be supported to trans and if they don’t want their parents to know the school couldn’t tell them. Greer, thank you for this article which was very thoughtfully written and made such a good point. I truly hope your daughter can be helped from her delusion and wish you both well
I hesitate to point the finger at any individual parent but there does come a point where one has to question why a source of unambiguous physical harm is being tolerated in the home. Similarly the curiously helpless attitude toward decisions taken by the school, let alone a private school the parent is paying for. I also can't help but notice that virtually all parents who write accounts like this are mothers, and they rarely mention a father - whether entirely absent or simply disengaged from the daughters' upbringing is rarely made clear. Although this particular article skips it, this type of account also usually begins with a big disclaimer about how lefty and with-it the parent generally is. At some point you have to question whether this is really such a good thing, whether the left's embrace of trans is really an unaccountable inconsistency, a one-off oopsie in an otherwise unimpeachable movement. And whether it was really ever true that women are the be-it and have-all, men/fathers dispensable and irrelevant, and traditional, high-investment motherhood oppressive bosh.
There are class issues here, too. It's not unheard of for middle-class girls to trans. But the number of accounts like this that mention private school dynamics, the dilemma of paying tuition for universities that draw kids into the cult (in a country where most parents can't even begin to think of paying college tuition), the dilemma of whether to pay for the drugs and surgery (in a country where many can't even pay for medical care their kids actually need), "our annual trip to the beach," etc etc etc...... if you're at a place in life where giving up certain status markers is unthinkable, even as you watch them destroy your kid, you're morally paralyzed. There are worse things in life than a public commuter school, and if you don't see that by now, there's a limit to how much you can legitimately complain to the rest of us about what's going on culturally.
Perhaps many parents have fallen for the idea that to put your foot down and make real changes when you see a kid going the wrong way will just drive them away and make things worse. But if your kid's ribs are getting crushed that concern seems kind of abstract, if not contrived. What seems more likely is that the careers that pay for it all just don't leave enough time to really take an up-close personal role in the child's daily life, so the ability to actively influence what goes on in your own home evaporates many years before the child actually develops their own adult judgment. In many cases I think the ultimate, unspoken factor may just be the mortgage. It's very human not to realize the dimensions of things like this in advance, and our culture is ruthless in applying certain incentives and sanctions, especially to highly educated women. Again I don't condemn individuals. I'm talking about a general cultural phenomenon here. But to the extent things like this happen because you don't want to have to live in a house like mine, well..........
I have a daughter mixed up in all of this too. She has been wearing a binder for 3 years now and never swims anymore. I wish I could stop this madness. I have so much grief over these lost years to gender ideology. Thank you for writing this and sharing the links. So spot on!
My daughter too wore a binder under a swim shirt with shorts to the beach this year. This even after I offered her a sports bra/swim top. However, that wasn't good enough. After two days, she announced that she would not go swimming again until she has top surgery, which she hopes to do at age 18 (she's 15 now). After that, she didn't go to the beach at all, and she never swam in the pool at our hotel, instead spending endless hours in the room, ruminating (other than the days we scheduled other activities, like kayaking and bike riding). My daughter used to love the ocean and pools, and she always said she was born to be in the water. She speculated that her real father was Poseidon (a fantasy, like the current fantasy that she's "really" a boy). It brings tears to my eyes thinking of how much gender ideology has ruined her teenage years, and the adolescence of so many teenage girls and boys. I have no idea when this will end, but some day it will be looked upon with shock and disgust that girls were ENCOURAGED to distort their bodies - no better than foot-binding in China. My empathy to you and all the parents watching as their children get sucked into this insanity.
So very sad and heartbreaking. This story is so familiar to our situation with my beautiful baby girl. I love your last line! My daughter’s smile is such a joy to behold and I too will fight for her. God bless you and give us all the strength and wisdom to get our children through these scary and unbelievable times. 🙏🏼❤️
Wow, the comments on here are nasty. I suspect the people commenting aren't living this nightmare. I have a 19 year old daughter struggling with this. I have thrown away binders, they find a way to get them . I have parked myself outside of a lab with my legal guardianship papers to find out the Dr s name that s ordering the labs to get testosterone. The Dr s are protected. The only way I have managed to contact them is by fax, faxing my legal guardianship papers and a letter describing my daughters disabilities. My daughter proceeded to tell me the Dr said guardianship doesn t matter. The pediatricians are suggesting these clinics if your adolescent is suffering from dysphoria. After researching , I chose not to bring my daughter as they all seem to be affirming. You would think , and hope they would need years of therapy before medicalizing. I have learned , because my daughters 18 , she can get testosterone after 3 visits. I attended a presentation to one of the best hospitals in the U.S. They commented your child may comit suicide if you don t affirm. Does any parent want that? My questions after the presentation went unanswered. One was” Is there ever a time you don t affirm, as in someone on the autism spectrum, who has underlying depression?” The other, “ Isn t it true affirmation will not prevent suicide, as some comit suicide after transition?” I have refused to bring my daughter to a gender clinic, but I suspect she will find a way to get there 1 1/2 hours away. So please , until you walk in our shoes please don t judge . This is tearing us apart and it breaks out hearts!
Gosh.. the viciousness of some of the comments on here. She said that there are pro trans charities that provide binders free. And anyway the kid presumably gets pocket money and can but what they want. A draconian approach to young people will drive the activity even further underground or drive them away and all chance to counsel be lost forever. Social workers and the courts can and do intervene… to all classes. Hell in Scotland we have the Education Authority saying that children as young as 4 can be supported to trans and if they don’t want their parents to know the school couldn’t tell them. Greer, thank you for this article which was very thoughtfully written and made such a good point. I truly hope your daughter can be helped from her delusion and wish you both well
I hesitate to point the finger at any individual parent but there does come a point where one has to question why a source of unambiguous physical harm is being tolerated in the home. Similarly the curiously helpless attitude toward decisions taken by the school, let alone a private school the parent is paying for. I also can't help but notice that virtually all parents who write accounts like this are mothers, and they rarely mention a father - whether entirely absent or simply disengaged from the daughters' upbringing is rarely made clear. Although this particular article skips it, this type of account also usually begins with a big disclaimer about how lefty and with-it the parent generally is. At some point you have to question whether this is really such a good thing, whether the left's embrace of trans is really an unaccountable inconsistency, a one-off oopsie in an otherwise unimpeachable movement. And whether it was really ever true that women are the be-it and have-all, men/fathers dispensable and irrelevant, and traditional, high-investment motherhood oppressive bosh.
There are class issues here, too. It's not unheard of for middle-class girls to trans. But the number of accounts like this that mention private school dynamics, the dilemma of paying tuition for universities that draw kids into the cult (in a country where most parents can't even begin to think of paying college tuition), the dilemma of whether to pay for the drugs and surgery (in a country where many can't even pay for medical care their kids actually need), "our annual trip to the beach," etc etc etc...... if you're at a place in life where giving up certain status markers is unthinkable, even as you watch them destroy your kid, you're morally paralyzed. There are worse things in life than a public commuter school, and if you don't see that by now, there's a limit to how much you can legitimately complain to the rest of us about what's going on culturally.
Perhaps many parents have fallen for the idea that to put your foot down and make real changes when you see a kid going the wrong way will just drive them away and make things worse. But if your kid's ribs are getting crushed that concern seems kind of abstract, if not contrived. What seems more likely is that the careers that pay for it all just don't leave enough time to really take an up-close personal role in the child's daily life, so the ability to actively influence what goes on in your own home evaporates many years before the child actually develops their own adult judgment. In many cases I think the ultimate, unspoken factor may just be the mortgage. It's very human not to realize the dimensions of things like this in advance, and our culture is ruthless in applying certain incentives and sanctions, especially to highly educated women. Again I don't condemn individuals. I'm talking about a general cultural phenomenon here. But to the extent things like this happen because you don't want to have to live in a house like mine, well..........
I have a daughter mixed up in all of this too. She has been wearing a binder for 3 years now and never swims anymore. I wish I could stop this madness. I have so much grief over these lost years to gender ideology. Thank you for writing this and sharing the links. So spot on!
My daughter too wore a binder under a swim shirt with shorts to the beach this year. This even after I offered her a sports bra/swim top. However, that wasn't good enough. After two days, she announced that she would not go swimming again until she has top surgery, which she hopes to do at age 18 (she's 15 now). After that, she didn't go to the beach at all, and she never swam in the pool at our hotel, instead spending endless hours in the room, ruminating (other than the days we scheduled other activities, like kayaking and bike riding). My daughter used to love the ocean and pools, and she always said she was born to be in the water. She speculated that her real father was Poseidon (a fantasy, like the current fantasy that she's "really" a boy). It brings tears to my eyes thinking of how much gender ideology has ruined her teenage years, and the adolescence of so many teenage girls and boys. I have no idea when this will end, but some day it will be looked upon with shock and disgust that girls were ENCOURAGED to distort their bodies - no better than foot-binding in China. My empathy to you and all the parents watching as their children get sucked into this insanity.
THIS!!! "The pro-LGBTQ initiative, when it came to the T, was a superficial, misguided crock of manure mixed with virtue signaling."