Fighting For My Son

It’s really weird at my house. If an anthropologist were looking through the window and secretly observing my family, he would be very confused. Why does the father use a male name for the son while the mother uses a female name? And everyone in the family goes along with this, like it’s completely normal?

My gender-addled adult son has been trapped in the trans nightmare for about a year and a half now. He’s a textbook case of ROGD, an “on the spectrum” kid who thinks that his discomfort with himself and the rest of the world is because he’s born in the wrong body. What nonsense. Yet his mother and younger sister “support” him in his “journey”. I don’t. I am the father who loves him and wants what’s best for him, so I don’t affirm what he’s doing to himself. I stay close to him - he still lives at home - but I don’t go along with the new name, the new pronouns and language, any of it. Meanwhile he’s not working, not going to school, doesn’t get out much, and just seems to be stuck in the game of life.

How did he get into this? My son has never had an easy path. He’s always been a smart kid, but social interactions were always difficult. When he was a child, we spent time and money on social education, occupational therapy, and other therapies. We worked tirelessly with teachers, counselors, and made some progress. He was fine at home. I still savor all the time I spent with him, building Legos, reading books, and doing all the other things you do with your child. But school and classes were different. He was bored.

He got through high school and into college. I truly thought he was on his way. Little did I realize that he spent virtually all of his time outside of his classes inside his room, online. While visiting home about a year and a half ago, he announced he was “trans”. Really? This issue was never mentioned in his 20+ previous years of life. Whatever he thinks defines a woman, he is not it. His self-diagnosis is about as insightful as saying he identifies as a fish.

So in our household, my wife affirms, and I don’t. It’s a problem and it’s escalating. My wife winces every time I use my son’s birth name. “You’re hurting him.” she yells. “Why can’t you accept him the way he is?” I’m hurting him? I do accept him, as him, she doesn’t. No one can change their sex. My wife should know that. The last few months I’ve been watching the slow transformation of my once-handsome son into something else, I’m not sure what. He’s hurting himself in ways he probably doesn’t yet know. He’s getting sick on cross-sex hormones but won’t acknowledge that those hormones are the cause of his sickness. He occasionally sees the classic “disturbed, close female friend” (a one-time girlfriend who says she’s also trans), and she likes to give him manicures. Really? Does he realize she’s treating him like a damn dress-up doll? Probably not.

Despite the fact that my son could be the poster boy for how a spectrum kid gets seduced by the gender ideology siren song, there’s no textbook “fix” for how to pull him out of this mess. He doesn’t talk about gender. If I bring it up, he shuts down. He’s the type who will dig in if challenged, so what can I do with this kid? “Wait until he decides it’s not working for him,” says one therapist. Really? Is that the best I can do? Stand around and watch this nightmare? It would help if my wife were on my side, but she’s not.

I have to do something. So what do I do? I read. I educate myself. I do normal stuff with my son, as much as I can. And I write, compulsively. The brave, too-big-to-cancel author J. K. Rowling says, “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.” So I attack gender ideology with words. I ridicule gender ideology and all of its supporters. I have special contempt for the doctors who play god and harm our kids. I laugh at gender ideology. I curse it. I expose it as a fraud. To anyone who will listen, and even those who don’t. I don’t merely want to discredit gender ideology; I want to see “gender affirming care” placed in the same category as the “bloodletting” treatments of centuries ago, with gender ideology becoming as desirable and hip as a full-body contagious fungus. I will not stop writing until GAC becomes another one of the failed, damaging medical treatments that have been abandoned and banned. The list of medical failures is long and includes cocaine, heroin, shock treatments, lobotomies, thalidomide (in Europe), fen-phen, and now, “gender affirming care”. Once again, the medical community is failing us and treating our children like lab rats, though honestly, lab rats get better treatment.

Despite the challenges, I insist on being hopeful that I can restore reality to my family and someday pull my son out of this mess. A recent PITT essay talked about the magic of noticing “one good thing about nature” every day. Maybe showing him a little bit of beauty every day is a good start on the path back to reality. And I’m waiting and also preparing for difficult conversations. I don’t want to win debates, I just want him to talk out loud about the concepts underlying his “identity”. The underlying assumptions of gender ideology, when spoken, sound ridiculous.

I will never give up on my son in this battle with gender ideology. And I will never stop writing about it.