Diary of a Worried Mamma

18th May, Tuesday

It’s like I’m scared of her, scared of what she might do. Yes, I’m scared of her.

Does she have any idea how much I love her?

I must stop crying before she gets home.

How to find the joy again? Please show me.

She dreamt that she had a baby.

She was my baby. She still is.

Spoke to D. Great up until the end. He refuses to engage about the trans stuff, won’t even read the article I sent him.

19th May, Wednesday

I had to leave the Spanish group. Mum put this idea into my head of discussing what’s going on at home with the group. Big mistake. I felt exposed. I left the Zoom midway through, texted to say that I had ‘said too much’. They didn’t understand. This is seen as a niche issue and most people have no idea about it. The teacher sent a nice text back – no te preocupes. It’s not group therapy and I should have kept my mouth shut.

Spoke to Mum. She’s going to vote Tory as am I, despite a lifetime of voting on the Left, and we’re writing to Sajid and cc-ing in Labour politicians to tell them why. I referred people in the UK Facebook group to Bayswater. 

H wants Subway tonight. I will let her have it but maybe I can gain some sort of foothold. Like banning her from watching Jammie Dodger. But I’m loath to bring up any trans stuff without her initiating the conversation. This is because it just fans the flames, and these conversations are so fraught. I’ve moved beyond the naive assumption that, just because she hasn’t mentioned it for a few days, it’s not still a current obsession.

I can’t figure out how to monitor YouTube, even how to apply controls to family settings. I feel fucking useless, helpless. I’ve given up for now. 

20th May, Thursday

Difficult, convoluted dreams, stressful. They vanished upon interrogation. Woke up to letter from school about Pride event. Have emailed asking for list of invited speakers. Been on BSG messaging away. 

If I were to write another piece it would be about trans and mental illness, trans as an expression of mental illness. But who knows what DSM6 will bring?

Pathologising identity – an identity (‘fixed’ and ‘fluid’, well which?) which pathologises itself.

Mass delusions, safety in numbers.

Parallels with historic psychiatric ‘treatment’ of homosexuality are spurious.

Spoke to F, who didn’t understand my objections about the planned Pride event at school. Think she thinks I’m a homophobe as well as a transphobe. Feel gaslit and misunderstood. I’ve talked to her about this stuff for over a year, I thought she got it. We’ve agreed to discuss other stuff. Which means denying my lived experience.

D has blocked me on WhatsApp because I told him my voting plans. He accused me of ‘throwing every other minority under a bus.’ I told him this wasn’t about him.

H has put the trans flag up in her room. What the fuck has this day become already and it’s not even lunchtime. I actually have to be really careful. The wider family dismisses me as a crank. My views are seen to be extremist. They pedal a lot of ideological propaganda themselves but they don’t see it as such. 

The thing about Glinner is that he writes the truth but the whole picture gleaned from reading his newsletter to a culture wars newbie would be that trans people as a group are dodgy. And that is not the case. I wish he would just put the odd caveat in, but maybe it doesn’t need pointing out since his focus is on violent TRAs, rapists, paedophiles, criminals. Maybe it goes without saying that the majority of trans people are decent. His targets are the right ones: gender ideology, misogyny, the woeful failure in child protection by the very institutions set up to safeguard children.

Had long friendly chat with H. She started talking about paedophiles. I told her Monica Helms was one. She accused me of misgendering him. Didn’t get into the whole thing about transwomen inflating female crime stats, just apologised and referred to him as ‘her’ to appease her. It might seem heavy, but she needs to know this stuff. She is always looking for evidence when it concerns celebrities. This might make her reappraise things ever so slightly. It was a shame for the conversation to come to a close abruptly with her going cold on me, but then I kept things breezy and asked if she wanted money to go to the shop. She said not yet. 

I’m not interrogating myself about bringing up Monica Helms, I’m justifying myself here. I need to give her some reality as a counterweight to the propaganda. It’s necessary. But it can only be done in a drip-feed way. 

Absolutely brilliant PITT article about the state of play in Australia. Fucking grim. Thankful that we live on Terf Island. 

Dear Graham,

I am the single mum of a very confused, autistic ROGD teen and I feel like I am losing the plot. It's the usual story of being gaslit by the same organisations that are supposed to protect her, being accused of being an 'unsupportive' parent, etc. I actually don't think I can cope with much more of this. Close family members won't speak to me over this issue, they believe I'm an extremist for not wanting my daughter to go to the gender abattoirs and become a lifelong medical patient. I'm at my wits' end.  

On a positive note, thanks to your tireless work and that of others in the GC movement things are changing. But not fast enough. 

Thank you for all that you do to protect kids. This is an emergency.

Warm wishes and solidarity,

Pet

I feel like crying. But I won’t.

21st May, Friday

I’ve only really ever experienced intrusive thoughts about unreal situations. But now I'm getting them about a very frightening real situation. I need healing, mentally. I don’t dare to meditate, the horrors lurking at the fringes of my mind would get an outing in a context where my guard would be down. Relaxation, indeed.

A creepy thing yesterday about a tech utopia, presenting trans identities in a celebratory light, on Radio 4. I didn’t properly listen to it. It was about Elon Musk and Baby X and a ton of other stuff, Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf. The usual postmodern multi-layered shit.

Petition about getting the internet to rural Americans who don’t have it. Lucky them, seriously. 

This woman on Twitter wrote this fantastic analysis of the finance behind the trans cult, claiming the whole thing is Vulture Capitalism. I tried to save it but can’t find it in the bookmarks. I wanted to copy it in here.

Someone needs to peak D. And it ain’t gonna be me.

22nd May, Saturday

Woke up really early with frightening thoughts and visions. I tried looking at the news, ended up on Twitter. Girl with a one track mind, these days. 

I am going to try for half an hour’s sleep but if I’m tortured by horrible thoughts when I close my eyes then I’ll write this instead. It does offer me some solace. 

My brain is all over the place, it’s hard to concentrate. I’m dog-tired yet sleep eludes me. It’s literally torture – the mind is a fragile but material thing and the thoughts that assault me when I let them go into freefall are real, if immaterial. Does that make sense? I don’t care. This meta stuff helps because it removes me from the thoughts themselves. 

I could write and write about my fears but it probably won’t help. I need to shelve them. But then I get sudden flashes of double mastectomy scars and it’s like someone has punched a hole through the drumskin of my mind. I recoil, my body jerks, my hands fly to my chest. These are intrusive thoughts, but as I pointed out before, this time they’re dangerous. 

It's Tullip’s webinar today, I really want to attend. But H is here. And also I know it will be harrowing to hear his story. Just asked this question on BSG: This might seem like a really dumb question, but I want to know whether there's anything anyone could have said or done to dissuade him from transitioning in the first place.

It’s not a dumb question though. It’s the question we’re surely all longing to ask, but maybe unanswerable, and not fair on Tullip to pose such a ‘with hindsight’ type riddle: what are the magic words to stop this nightmare unfolding?