Facing The Storm

I saw the storm brewing on the horizon, long before it officially blew in.

Changes were showing up in my workplace at the university, ushered in by the newest and youngest staff. Just over 10 years ago—compelled pronoun use, being referred to as a “cis” woman. I was skeptical, but it is also my nature to be curious and to consider others’ perspectives. Perhaps this generation was seeing a way to make gender less important in the long run? I was trying to look at it from multiple angles. At one point, however, in a meeting about reducing sexual assault, I was disdainfully schooled by a 20-year-old woman, who informed me that “cis women” were privileged, because we weren’t trans.

Meanwhile, my son in middle school was starting to talk about peers’ different identities. We would joke around about it.

By high school, he no longer joked with me about his peers’ identities, but instead started to educate me about them, with an air of impatience and superiority when I held on to my skepticism. The first raindrops had started to fall at home.

My younger child, three years behind her brother in school, started telling me about friends who were “pansexual”—this was in elementary school! Where were they learning this?! As they moved into middle school, most of the girls in her friend group identified with “he/him” pronouns. She made pronoun friendship bracelets for a “gender-fluid” friend, so that the girl could notify people which pronouns she was using at a particular moment by wearing the corresponding bracelet. I observed that gender had become a Gen Z hobby.

And then there was the sixth-grade art teacher, a loud and proud trans-identified woman (FTM). My daughter is very creative and she admired this teacher. At the time, I had no concerns about that. Now, however, I am grateful that the pandemic shut down that class.

And then there was her best friend, our neighbor, who had started cutting. Then all the girls started cutting. And then they stopped eating. And then they stopped sleeping. And then everyone was talking about suicidal thoughts. It was competitive dysfunction and the social contagion was clear. And they were all terrified that their friends would die, yet they kept dropping suicide as an attention-seeking bomb.

I kept my eye on my daughter and did my best to coach her through it. Taking the approach of not wanting her to go too far underground where I couldn’t see her activities at all, I tried to coach her online use rather than ban it completely. She was an adolescent after all, and they are wired to rebel. They were communicating on a private Discord server that was originally pitched to me as a way to chat during COVID. I encouraged my daughter to take a leadership position on the server and set boundaries. She followed my guidelines and set the rule “No more posting about self-injury or suicidal thoughts” and she also shared official crisis numbers. This was an important step in promoting some healthier online habits among her friends. I also figured out how to look around on her Discord account, and then back out, covering my tracks.

Meanwhile, I searched for a counselor for her. I knew that the adolescent years were a time when kids pull away from their parents, so I was hopeful the village would provide guidance while parents were viewed as “clueless.” However, when looking for someone to see your daughter and state laws prohibit parental access to records after age 12, do you really want to leave your kid alone with the counselor who advertises that they are “kink-positive”? “Sex worker allied”? One counselor even stated in the same sentence, “I am polyamory friendly and I see clients 13 and older.”

The first full in-person school year post-lockdown was eighth grade. My daughter was 13 years old. She started the year dressing like a middle-aged male philosophy professor and she chose a backpack that said “trans” on it. I asked her if she thought she was a boy. She said no and stated she was a lesbian. I dropped it. Like many parents, I had no problem if she was a lesbian, but I kept watching.

As the year progressed, my daughter developed a swagger and wore baggier clothes. She started borrowing XL shirts from my husband’s closet. She reported her female friends were having problems with sexual harassment from their male peers. I suspected my daughter was covering her changing body to try to stay under the radar.

I installed the phone monitoring app “Bark” on her first smartphone. It started sending me alerts that included her messages to friends about choosing a new name, as well as mentions of embarrassment about her breasts and a mention of “top surgery.”

And then the gray clouds opened and the storm officially hit. She was 14 and the school year was ending. One day, driving home, we had an argument and I asked, “Do you think you are a boy?” As we arrived at the neighborhood mailboxes, her scripted speech began. She expressed that it was normal for me to grieve the idea of a daughter, but she was really my son. I started to sob. She hadn’t planned to come out to me yet, but I had pushed the matter.

I learned that she had already told her father weeks prior, when I was out of state helping my 90-year-old father. My husband was always the more permissive parent, so of course she told him first, and he had agreed to her request to purchase a breast binder. Then the trans flag arrived in the mail, too. Allegedly, they were waiting to tell me once my eldercare stress lightened. Meanwhile, he had sought advice from his bisexual, nonbinary male coworker who told him to affirm our daughter.

I also learned that her middle school had already socially transitioned her behind our backs.

I told her that I needed time to “educate myself” before I could fully respond to her request that I use a new name and pronouns. I spent the next two weeks making a full-time job out of learning about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and the current state of the gender industry. And then I was truly, truly terrified. I realized that these kids were ACTUALLY MEDICALIZING these identities and that there was an entire system in place to help them do that! Where did society go so wrong that it started encouraging adolescents to make fleeting identity choices permanent? Were these adults ever teens themselves? What happened to understanding the stages of childhood development, especially among educators and healthcare professionals?

My father died three weeks after my daughter made her trans announcement.

I swiftly moved from eldercare crisis mode to teenager crisis mode. I found Sasha Ayad’s parent coaching website, and I was so grateful. She grounded me in the skills I already had, but I had forgotten them in crisis mode. Focus on my relationship with my daughter first. I took her to Kanab, Utah to volunteer at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. The two of us stayed there for two weeks. In Kanab, the only rainbows were real. We cared for parrots, cats, guinea pigs, and bunnies, cleaning their pens, after which we earned playtime with them. We stayed in a cottage and watched lots of “Friends” episodes—recorded before gender ideology had infiltrated our culture. We watched thunderstorms spilling over the red rocks. We visited nearby Zion and the Grand Canyon.

We unexpectedly (but of course!) adopted a kitten and flew home. He became an important anchor for her.

I supported all hobbies that were not gender. As the months went on, I handled conversations surgically. I used my intuition to determine when to state facts such as “We both have XX chromosomes and that will never change.” She sometimes screamed and ran to her room. I distributed just enough truth to shine sunlight on reality without letting it dominate our family’s entire world.

I tried to compromise and use her chosen name occasionally as a nickname but, viscerally, I just couldn’t. I never wavered from feminine pronouns. She was disappointed in my perceived lack of support and wrote class assignments about how my boundaries showed a lack of love for her. I slipped new sports bras in her drawer, which decreased the use of the binder.

I showed up at our family doctor’s office asking for help with insomnia. I told her why—my daughter says she is a boy. This helped me to vet our doctor on this topic. She agreed with me that girls can never be boys and that the healthcare industry was aiding and abetting an illusion. A sigh of relief—I could trust her with my daughter.

I was already seeing my own counselor, who thankfully was safe to talk to as I unpacked my sudden learning curve regarding gender. There, I processed my disillusionment and sense of betrayal with many of the institutions I had trusted—the education system, the Democrats, my blue state, my mainstream media sources, my helping profession, my local community, and even charities I had been donating to. I realized that disillusionment was really a particular flavor of grief. I spent about a year navigating the shock of those losses, in addition to grieving my father.

I found a new wariness with both old friends and new connections. Who could I trust? I found online communities of similarly terrified parents and similarly skeptical professionals, many of them also disaffected Democrats. These became my havens. I became more acquainted with my lifelong feminism. I found a home among radical feminists. Apparently, believing that women don’t have, never have had, and never will have penises is, well, “radical.”

I exempted my daughter from the school’s sex ed. I had been a strong advocate for quality sex ed. However, when I reviewed the curricula and expressed concerns about removing the words “woman,” “man,” “male,” and “female” from the “pregnancy and anatomy” lesson, I was patronized and dismissed. Also, teachers told me about how “helpful” Planned Parenthood was in supplementing the district’s sex ed. At first, months before my daughter’s trans announcement, I naively believed that—until I later did my own research on Planned Parenthood, a major purveyor of both cross-sex hormones and myths about gender research. They omit the fact that many who medically transition are really gay or lesbian. They omit the statistics on desistance and detransition. They grossly overstate the incidence of suicide attempts among adolescents questioning gender.

I dodged taking my daughter to a counselor for as long as I could. While I had tried to avoid indulging the Gen Z rush to diagnoses, I decided that identifying as anxious, depressed, or ADHD was healthier than identifying as a boy. I took her to a competent psychologist just long enough for an ADHD assessment and accompanied her in those sessions, remaining alert to the risk of the psychologist trying to rescue my daughter from a non-affirming parent. Yes, my daughter had mild ADHD, like many gender-questioning teens.

Somehow, restorying her troubles and validating them with a label helped her to see herself differently. She said, “I’m not just lazy!” She started taking responsibility for compensating for ADHD in an impressive way. I advocated for her to receive accommodations at school. I strategically communicated with school staff, always afraid to be seen as the non-affirming and, therefore, “abusive” parent which might leave my daughter vulnerable to “rescue” by a glitter family.

I showed our family of four a podcast with middle-aged trans-identified women (FTM) honestly discussing their choices to medicalize. I knew that indoctrinated kids had been instructed to avoid detransitioners’ stories, but how could she call trans-identified people transphobic? (She tried!) She clearly saw the lack of glamour in women who looked like bald, bearded, middle-aged men with bellies. She angrily stormed out, calling them “four sweaty men in a basement!”

One week later, however, the clouds started to part. I took her to the mall. Assuming she wouldn’t set foot in Victoria’s Secret, I said I needed some underwear and could find her later. She chose to join me and soon was oohing and ahhing over frilly bras! I pulled out my credit card, asking no questions. I would pay for it, no matter the cost.

She wore the binder once more—it had always been used when among peers, which told me it was really a social comfort, almost like swaddling. And then the false identity was shed. She announced one night, in the dark, that she decided she was a girl again—but she planned to keep her chosen name longer. In the coming months, she moved from “he/him” to “they/them” and by the next school year “she/her.” She kept her chosen name for a year-and-a-half after declaring desistance—take-backs are embarrassing—only giving it up this fall when she made a clean break to attend community college in our state’s “Running Start” program.

She is now 17 years old. She exudes a peaceful comfort in her female form. A month ago, she started dating her first boyfriend. They are enthralled with each other. He is a sweet, highly motivated young man. He adores her. They share an innocent first-love relationship that I cynically did not think even existed in these times. Sometimes, it is great to be wrong. She has grown from an awkward duckling into an elegant swan.

In brief moments, my daughter has shared, “I went through that phase because I didn’t like how big my breasts were.” She also said that she thinks it was important in helping her to appreciate being a girl, and that she wishes I had affirmed her while she figured it out. I bite my tongue and just let her talk it through. Someday, she will understand just what was at stake and why I couldn’t humor this delusion.

My husband? While he supported my interventions, usually silently, he recently admitted that if the parenting had been left solely up to him, our daughter, tragically, would now have a beard and amputated breasts.

As for her older brother, early on I told him that I did not expect him to choose sides because the quality of their sibling relationship was more important. He chose to use her preferred name at the high school they both attended and her given name at home. He learned some important reality from the podcast with the “four sweaty men in a basement” and he offered friendship when his sister’s “trans” friends eventually rejected her.

For me, I feel more secure within myself knowing I am capable of challenging my beliefs in long-cherished institutions and that I will set them aside if they no longer work. I remain precariously politically identified—suspended between today’s blue and red camps in a way that makes most people uncomfortable. Some have cut me off for questioning the emperor’s new clothes. However, because I know that other families are still facing the deluge of the gender storms, I continue to try to shed light on the dangers of this cultural movement.

Some friends hear my story about my daughter and sympathetically view it as my narrow experience and personal interest which does not affect them. I know, however, that our family’s experience is a symptom of a larger problem that jeopardizes all women and children.

Fight for your kids.