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..........
If you haven’t been the parent of child who has been sucked into the cult of believing she’s really a boy, there’s just no way you will understand the complexities. Please let the parents speak from their experience. Clearly they know better than you what’s going on.
I can’t help but doubt the perspicacity of people whose minor children got sucked into a body mutilation cult while still under their roof. It’s just common sense to discern according to results. It doesn’t mean I hate them. If they cling to the comforting belief that it was impossible for them to do anything different and that resistance is futile, they’re in for much more trouble than I could ever bring them. Perish the thought that if I’m not the child who’s been sucked into an online cult, that might have something to do with my parenting choices. BTW, I was a GNC butch girl-loving teenager. Part of the group this is happening to. If I’d been born 20 years later it could have been me getting my breasts chopped off under the loving tutelage of a with-it leftist mom whose highest value is what others think of her. I see you ladies crystal clear and will carry no water for your failure to protect.
E.L., I've read your extensive comment through a few times and remain puzzled. You are making a lot of assumptions about the family here. Re: the absent father, we can't make judgments based on this author's decision to leave him out. The dads I've met are heartbroken and not sure how to intervene. Moms are often on the driver's side in parenting teen girls. I'm not sure what statements here gave you the impression that the mom is more concerned about appearances than the child's well-being. Perhaps you are conflating multiple articles you've read in drawing that conclusion? Yes, there is a preponderance of middle and upper-middle class white girls in this new cohort of trans-identifying teens. That points to social contagion rather than something truly biological (which the science supports as well). But, as you were a "GNC butch girl-loving teenager" who, by her own account, would likely be medicalizing herself as trans were you a teen today, I would think you'd be more alarmed about this new age version of conversion therapy instead of condemning the parents. The enemies are big Pharma, intolerant and bullying trans activists, insidious internet persuaders preying on lonely teens, doctors willfully ignoring science, and therapists jumping onto the leftist social agenda rather than what they should know about good therapy. I wonder if you're a parent, but even non-parent adults can remember the self-sabotaging effects of their mom/dad forbidding them to do x, y, or z. And when today's medical, therapeutic, and educational institutions are putting parents on trial, sometimes literally, and telling them their kids will kill themselves if the parents don't affirm, it's terrifying in a way that would be difficult for non-parents to understand. Regardless, the parents we are discussing here are joining forces and rising up against this outrageous and dangerous scandal. The fact that this newsletter exists is evidence of that. You seem like someone who would be want to advocate with the parents rather than demonize them. I hope you'll think about it.
Yes, I’m a parent. Of a teen. I forbid things that are seriously harmful, simple as. As my parents did to me. This helpless act - from, as you admit, some of the people with the highest levels of agency and privilege in every other area of life - just doesn’t fly with me anymore. And yes, I’ve read about a thousand versions of this story. I find it kind of amusing (albeit bitterly so) that you assumed I wasn’t a parent, then proceeded to talk down to me on the implicit assumption I must be young - it speaks volumes that middle-aged people just assume that everyone their own age will agree actual parenting to be impossible, and subject any criticism of not doing it to the “poor oppressed me” SJW victomology dialect which is such a huge part of transgenderism itself. And of course, if I dared suggest that heartbroken, helpless, and in the back seat in his own home is not an appropriate male gender role, and that re-examining feminism should be part of the solution, you’d almost certainly think I’m a misogynist.
I don’t think “appearances” really sums up the conflicting values here. The 4,000 sq ft home in the 95% white suburb, the yearly trips, the high wage all-consuming career, the prestige universities - those are all substantial values. The question of what the Joneses will think if you sacrifice some of them is just the cherry on top. But people are brainwashed into thinking that only lazy losers dare go without them. To large extent this seems to be a matter of people shocked because they were never informed what the trade-offs would be. Women were told in a million ways that time with children is a nice-to-have, but second fiddle to career - and actually a dishonorable thing if you indulge yourself in too much of. Women believed that childcare is only a concern up to the point where they won’t come to immediate physical harm when left alone - with the result that many adolescents are effectively unparented. Similarly, that men/fathers are disposable, hence the near-total absence of father figures from the most harrowing stories. And invested, traditional moms like me have been relentlessly shit on as lazy losers by well-heeled career women angry that I don’t reflect their priorities back to them. I have one thing to show for it - a healthy child - and now they’re mad that they can’t have that, too. It’s way too late for moms who are too checked out from their own teenage daughters to notice that she’s wearing a body mutilation device every day, and they do have my pity, because I think by a certain age we’ve all made serious mistakes that didn’t even seem like much of anything at the time. But I’d want to be warned of my own blind spots, especially with such high stakes. So pretending that there was nothing that could have been done differently is not a form of consolation I can honestly offer. It might alert the next person with a child coming up.
Parents are having their kids taken away by the state if they do not support or affirm the kids teans identity. A father in Canada has been jailed for truing to stop his daughter from taking testosterone. So ask again why parents are allowing this in their homes.
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..........
If you haven’t been the parent of child who has been sucked into the cult of believing she’s really a boy, there’s just no way you will understand the complexities. Please let the parents speak from their experience. Clearly they know better than you what’s going on.
I can’t help but doubt the perspicacity of people whose minor children got sucked into a body mutilation cult while still under their roof. It’s just common sense to discern according to results. It doesn’t mean I hate them. If they cling to the comforting belief that it was impossible for them to do anything different and that resistance is futile, they’re in for much more trouble than I could ever bring them. Perish the thought that if I’m not the child who’s been sucked into an online cult, that might have something to do with my parenting choices. BTW, I was a GNC butch girl-loving teenager. Part of the group this is happening to. If I’d been born 20 years later it could have been me getting my breasts chopped off under the loving tutelage of a with-it leftist mom whose highest value is what others think of her. I see you ladies crystal clear and will carry no water for your failure to protect.
E.L., I've read your extensive comment through a few times and remain puzzled. You are making a lot of assumptions about the family here. Re: the absent father, we can't make judgments based on this author's decision to leave him out. The dads I've met are heartbroken and not sure how to intervene. Moms are often on the driver's side in parenting teen girls. I'm not sure what statements here gave you the impression that the mom is more concerned about appearances than the child's well-being. Perhaps you are conflating multiple articles you've read in drawing that conclusion? Yes, there is a preponderance of middle and upper-middle class white girls in this new cohort of trans-identifying teens. That points to social contagion rather than something truly biological (which the science supports as well). But, as you were a "GNC butch girl-loving teenager" who, by her own account, would likely be medicalizing herself as trans were you a teen today, I would think you'd be more alarmed about this new age version of conversion therapy instead of condemning the parents. The enemies are big Pharma, intolerant and bullying trans activists, insidious internet persuaders preying on lonely teens, doctors willfully ignoring science, and therapists jumping onto the leftist social agenda rather than what they should know about good therapy. I wonder if you're a parent, but even non-parent adults can remember the self-sabotaging effects of their mom/dad forbidding them to do x, y, or z. And when today's medical, therapeutic, and educational institutions are putting parents on trial, sometimes literally, and telling them their kids will kill themselves if the parents don't affirm, it's terrifying in a way that would be difficult for non-parents to understand. Regardless, the parents we are discussing here are joining forces and rising up against this outrageous and dangerous scandal. The fact that this newsletter exists is evidence of that. You seem like someone who would be want to advocate with the parents rather than demonize them. I hope you'll think about it.
Yes, I’m a parent. Of a teen. I forbid things that are seriously harmful, simple as. As my parents did to me. This helpless act - from, as you admit, some of the people with the highest levels of agency and privilege in every other area of life - just doesn’t fly with me anymore. And yes, I’ve read about a thousand versions of this story. I find it kind of amusing (albeit bitterly so) that you assumed I wasn’t a parent, then proceeded to talk down to me on the implicit assumption I must be young - it speaks volumes that middle-aged people just assume that everyone their own age will agree actual parenting to be impossible, and subject any criticism of not doing it to the “poor oppressed me” SJW victomology dialect which is such a huge part of transgenderism itself. And of course, if I dared suggest that heartbroken, helpless, and in the back seat in his own home is not an appropriate male gender role, and that re-examining feminism should be part of the solution, you’d almost certainly think I’m a misogynist.
I don’t think “appearances” really sums up the conflicting values here. The 4,000 sq ft home in the 95% white suburb, the yearly trips, the high wage all-consuming career, the prestige universities - those are all substantial values. The question of what the Joneses will think if you sacrifice some of them is just the cherry on top. But people are brainwashed into thinking that only lazy losers dare go without them. To large extent this seems to be a matter of people shocked because they were never informed what the trade-offs would be. Women were told in a million ways that time with children is a nice-to-have, but second fiddle to career - and actually a dishonorable thing if you indulge yourself in too much of. Women believed that childcare is only a concern up to the point where they won’t come to immediate physical harm when left alone - with the result that many adolescents are effectively unparented. Similarly, that men/fathers are disposable, hence the near-total absence of father figures from the most harrowing stories. And invested, traditional moms like me have been relentlessly shit on as lazy losers by well-heeled career women angry that I don’t reflect their priorities back to them. I have one thing to show for it - a healthy child - and now they’re mad that they can’t have that, too. It’s way too late for moms who are too checked out from their own teenage daughters to notice that she’s wearing a body mutilation device every day, and they do have my pity, because I think by a certain age we’ve all made serious mistakes that didn’t even seem like much of anything at the time. But I’d want to be warned of my own blind spots, especially with such high stakes. So pretending that there was nothing that could have been done differently is not a form of consolation I can honestly offer. It might alert the next person with a child coming up.
Parents are having their kids taken away by the state if they do not support or affirm the kids teans identity. A father in Canada has been jailed for truing to stop his daughter from taking testosterone. So ask again why parents are allowing this in their homes.
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."
The binders are frequently given to the kids without the parents' knowledge.