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Merrie's avatar

I, too, was at the Genspect conference as a parent and so much of your experience mirrors my own. I’m guessing there were at least a few of us crying then, but I could have been the woman you heard sobbing during the interview with Chloe Cole. When she spoke about deciding to go back to her birth name when she detransitioned, her explanation of why she did hit me so hard. She said that she actually liked the new name she had chosen for herself and would have liked to have stuck with it, but decided that she would go back to using Chloe as a gift to her mom. That’s when I lost it. For some reason, even though our daughter (who is also 19) has been taking testosterone for about a year and a half, the name change is still one of the harder things for me to contend with. I hope all of our kids come back to us someday and I hope I’ll be as lucky as Chloe’s mom and be able to call my daughter by her name again. Thanks for sharing your story ❤️

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Mama Ain't Playin''s avatar

Solidarity, friend. I too was at Genspect, and felt the same wave of relief you report at being among the sane and rational. It was like being at the Gender Critical Academy Awards, in that we got to see all of these brilliant, hardworking people in the flesh--Stella, Sasha, Michael Shellenberger, Leor Sapir, Jesse Singal, Lisa Selin Davis, Christina Buttons, January Littlejohn, Erin Friday, Heather Heyring, etc.--I even got to meet and hug Josie, the warrior behind PITT.

Here's another fascinating (and sad) detail: I sat at a table with parents who happen to live in the same town that I work in, completely by accident. That's how pervasive and insidious the trans trend is. I literally can't go anywhere without meeting or talking to people whose lives have been damaged, if not destroyed by this nonsense.

At the conference, there were three stickers one could put on one's name tag to identify us as either medical people, parents, or media. I was in the interesting position as the mother of a desister and an academic myself, although trans stuff is not part of my IRL work. I picked the "media" tag, for want of a better description of my interest. Although my daughter desisted more than 5 years ago at age 14, you could say that trans is my "special interest." I'm furious that our culture mindlessly supports this family-destroying cult. That I will never get over.

One consolation: if you've ever wondered what you would have done in the 1690s in Salem when people were being accused, tried, convicted, and hanged for "witchcraft," based on "spectral evidence," or if you've ever wondered what you would have done during the McCarthy era of Communist witch-hunting, now you know. Now we all know.

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