Enough!

“Trans” stories are so similarly tragic, echoing accounts of mental pain, anguish, and physical suffering from both children and parents. How did I not see this coming and protect my child from it? I raised my son in the world I knew and grew up in. Little did I know that the corruption of morals, fanaticism, and demagoguery of gender ideology, and the utter callousness of a complicit medical community, all coupled with the great influence of the electronic age, would turn the world I knew on its head.

A couple of years ago my then 22-year-old son moved out on his own to the Midwest from our home in California. About a year later he sent me and a group of other friends and relatives an email on “coming out day” as instructed by the cult he has now fully embraced, announcing that he was a female. This is the transgender cult that many of us know all too well. It is a cult because it shares several characteristics of cults: isolating the person from family and support, censoring contact with other sources, playing on fears and weaknesses, providing a false hope for happiness, having no tolerance for questions, and punishing people who leave the cult, to name a few.

To say I was shocked and devastated would not begin to describe my state of anguish. How could this possibly happen? How could my son accept such a biological absurdity and outlandishly politically motivated movement? When we declined to call him by his newly chosen name or to use his “preferred” pronouns he cut us off, just like almost everyone else in this cult does.

My son lost his mom to breast cancer when he was four years old. Our loss was horrific, but unlike me, he was not old enough to be able to grieve like an adult, which I believe resulted in unresolved trauma. Although we tried several counselors he never worked through this tragedy, and to this day has never inquired deeply about his mom. As he entered school, he displayed remarkable intelligence but also a host of other behavioral and social issues. He was eventually diagnosed with high-functioning autism (formerly known as Asperger Syndrome).

You have read enough of these stories to know where this is going. My question is this: How does a medical professional of any competence or integrity meet a person with this background and decide to affirm their “gender dysphoria” within weeks of seeing them, then put them on a path of permanent medicalization to ‘treat’ this condition? Are these so-called ‘professionals’ greedy or just incompetent ideologues? How can this possibly be legal? Lobotomies were once legal, and over time I have no doubt this current medical practice will be proven to be in the same category. Unfortunately, this will only occur after a path of destruction, both physically and emotionally, is torn through many loving families. The Hippocratic Oath, “first do no harm,” is dead, and the world I grew up in died with it.

The emotional and physical damage is obvious. My son has isolated himself. Only God knows who he connects with and depends on for support. He was a very kind, sensitive, caring young man who has been turned into a callous, self-centered person, not able to face the ones who love him and want to guide him back to sanity. Over the past year he lost a grandfather and a grandmother who loved him very much. Against her core beliefs his grandmother even called him by his newly chosen name, but both grandparents went to the grave without so much as a phone call to say goodbye. Physically he has put on a tremendous amount of weight and lives out his fantasy of femininity, but in reality he is a guy wearing a dress.

A sick society is to blame for this. Aspiring autocrats grab power by destroying societal foundations: tradition, family, and language. The trans movement attacks all three. The attack on tradition and family is obvious, but the assault on language is just as extreme. Words such as kindness and tolerance have come to mean that we must agree with any outlandish and offensive idea, or risk our career and reputation by being labeled as a bigot, homophobe, or some “right-wing” extremist baboon. By not pushing back and permitting these abominable ideas to flood into every institution in society, we have unwittily allowed Pandora’s box to be opened, unleashing untold misery on even the most stable families.

And yet, there is hope. This movement is beginning to be exposed for the danger that it is. Several European countrieshave significantly restricted access to so-called gender affirming “care” for minors, often citing insufficient evidence regarding long term-effects. (See the Cass Review). Although I am glad to see the pendulum start to swing in the other direction, the reality is that there is no lack of evidence regarding health concerns: cognitive impairment, brain damage, autoimmune disease, diabetes, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, - the list goes on. Is it necessary to have a medical degree to understand that giving a person the wrong hormones for their biological sex will be harmful to their body? And yes, the lawsuits have begun against gender affirming “care”providers for both physical and psychological damage.

As a devout Catholic, at Mass a few weeks ago I heard the reading of Jesus healing a mute, deaf man in the Decapolis and I was struck by not only the literal truth of the reading, but what it may mean to me in this situation.

And looking up to heaven, Jesus sighed and said to him, 
“Ephphatha,” 
that is “Be opened.” And his ears were opened, his tongue 
was released, 
and he spoke plainly.

Mark 7:34-36

This is the miracle we need for all of us: To be able to open our ears to hear and understand the clear and present danger this transgender movement represents and more importantly, to speak the truth plainly to others without fear of repercussions. I, for one have had enough. How about you?