I have to respectfully disagree, because calling my child “trans” would imply that I believe there is such a thing as trans. She does “identify as” a boy, which means that this is a state that exists in her mind, not in reality, and allows me to describe the situation without implying that I agree with it or affirm it. If I can’t say that, you’ve taken away my ability to even discuss this situation with other parents. Just like woke ideology tries to tell people that they can’t use phrases like “biological woman”. And yet sweeping it under the rug doesn’t make the concepts of either biological sex, or the fact that some people believe they can identify out of it, go away.
Thank you for sharing these resources. So helpful and needed. I wish I'd had any idea this was happening before my daughter was in college and fell into the ideology. I know this will be helpful to so many.
None of us hate people who believe they are trans, many of us have children who had trauma in their lives, learned about trans ideology and mistakenly jumped on the idea because they are hurting or confused or feel lonely or different. There have always been movements for teens and young adults from rock and roll to punk to goth. Some of those lifestyles could lead to poor choices like using drugs, getting tattooed or pierced, etc. But this ideology inexcusably makes the claim that the ONLY option is to medicalize and use dangerous irreversible hormones and mutilating surgeries. It’s been proven now that WPATH covered up important scientific findings including that there is a HIGHER likelihood of suicide after transition than if a child or young adult is not affirmed. In front of the Supreme Court an LGBTQ attorney had to admit there was NO greater incidence of suicide risk if children/young adults were not affirmed and/or did not receive the prescribed “trans affirming care” it is exactly the opposite! WPATH lied to the public regarding the “safety” of “Trans affirming care” due to their own agenda of creating cash cows of young innocent kids and adults who were willing to become medical patients for life which has also been proven to cause premature death due to medical complications if they don’t commit suicide when they wake up to what they did to themselves because they were tricked by lying doctors and dishonest society. So we are trying to teach truth to our kids and young adults that we love so much, so they don’t destroy their bodies and minds and become controllable (new study found that trans treatment causes patients to infantilize and lose their ability to make good decisions) by powers that don’t have their best interests at heart. If you believe you are trans, please open your mind to considering different information than what is being fed to you by the trans community who have collectively been lied to and deceived by evil elites who don’t care about you, your health, or your future. Look up Transition Justice on YouTube. They have a whistle blower testimonial that is unbelievable!
ACLU lawyer Kate "Chase" Strangio is not LGBT. There's no such thing, as transgenderism is anti-LGB conversion therapy. She is a mentally-unwell transgenderist. She does NOT represent the LGB in any way, shape, or form.
This is great, but what happens when your child loved JoJo Rabbit, knows all about the Holocaust, knows all about brain-washing and cults, and medical scandals, but simply refuses to contemplate that what is happening with "gender ideology" and "gender affirming care" is a huge medical scandal and a series of brain-washing techniques designed to make people believe extreme chemical or surgical modification of the body along with body-hatred/rejection and reality rejection are the real science, and those who question it are the ones who have been brainwashed or who are doing the brainwashing? (I believe this is a form of DARVO.)
When this happens, it seems that there is nothing that can be done to wake the person up to reality. Every attempt to educate is seen as an attempt to brainwash, and so forth.
This sounds like an issue between parent and child. This child is choosing between parent and peers and choosing their peers--*as is totally normal for all teens*.
If your child wants to be a social justice warrior like their peers, there is PLENTY of material to work with.
Instead of trying to argue directly about the gender ideology lobby, I would focus instead on bonding over other issues, especially women's rights, opposition to homophobic conversion therapy, child safeguarding, disabled rights, and the reality of how BIWOC women make up a disproportionate percentage of the poverty-level vulnerable in our society: users of women's shelters, rehabs, and unfortunately prisons.
I'd research all of that stuff together. Really get into the injustices of these issues and what can be done to correct them. Don't mention the gender ideology lobby.
Just focus on that work.
Eventually, that child's brain will mature, and they'll be able to revisit the issue of the gender ideology lobby from a completely different perspective, which they didn't know they were building. By that time, their brain will have a better ability to grasp paradoxical contradictions and analyze logical inconsistences.
There's an anecdote of a mental patient who believed he was dead.
No matter how much his doctor explained to him he was alive, the patient insisted he was dead.
So the doctor tried a strategy. Do dead mean bleed? The patient agreed that dead men do not bleed. And they repeated that several times.
The doctor took a pin and gave the patient a prick and together they watched as he bled a few drops of blood. "You see?" said the doctor. "You bleed. So what does that mean?"
The patient stares at the blood dripping out of his own hand. "It means we were wrong doctor," he said. "Dead men DO bleed!"
A lot of life is like that. You can lead the person as far as you go, but it is incumbent on them to take that important step themselves.
Or as the other saying goes.... you can lead the horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
Thank you so much, your advice has been incredibly useful! Out of instinct and despair, when I realized that direct confrontation wasn’t working with my 16-year-old son, I started trying something similar in my mind: to strengthen our emotional bond while planting small seeds about how easily people can be manipulated and led to believe in things that make no sense. I also avoid talking about gender directly.
So far, I’ve managed to do that only in casual moments, usually when he brings up topics that already make him question things — like neo-Nazism or Scientology. I hope I planted many seeds during those conversations.
Reading your post gave me much more confidence that I’m on the right track. Now I feel encouraged to organize this strategy more deliberately, and I’ll be eagerly waiting for your next updates to learn how to move forward from the “seed stage.”
The After Skool series is also great for teens. They take complex topics & discussions and present them with really striking and beautiful imagery. They're like mini docs.
This one is about mass psychosis and how an entire population becomes mentally ill.
This is the documentary originally mentioned: https://youtu.be/buWdabKKVYY?si=-bWpVTC3PfZAEFVm but there are many good ones. The link in the article will be edited soon (*already edited!) Thank you for bringing my attention to this!
It is the role of every mom and dad to teach their children that people who love each other can disagree, challenge each other, question each other and even argue and none of this means hate. Love means that we can disagree and argue and then make up. Love means that mom and dad will not lie to their children. Love means helping your child love themselves and preventing self harm. Love means that mom and dad are always their for their children.
You are operating on the assumption that being “trans” is an inborn trait. Many of us here also used to believe that. And if you believe that a lot of the beliefs that trans activists are for follow - of course you should accommodate these poor people with a medical condition. Of course the sooner you identify that your child has a medical condition and get them medical treatment the better. Of course if parents refuse to do this they’re abusive and kids need to be helped. But if you question the premise that it’s an innate trait, then you start to realize that all the conclusions that followed could be false. And there is a lot of evidence that it isn’t an innate trait. The rate young people seeking medical transition has increased by 4000% over a ten year period, and shifted from being almost entirely natal males to about 80% natal females. Inborn traits don’t behave that way. And if you say it’s just due to greater social acceptance, where are all the women of my generation who have been walking around believing they were women their whole lives who are somehow “actually” men? Why aren’t they transitioning in large numbers now that it is socially acceptable? Did they all commit suicide? If so, why have suicide rates gone up, not down, in the past decade? Speaking of suicide, why are suicide rates actually higher post-medical transition than before it? What about the experiences of detransitioners who believe they were brainwashed on social media or by peer groups?
I believed it once too, but after watching my very feminine, dress-wearing doll-loving happy intelligent daughter get bullied at school, sink into an internet hole, identify as a boy and become a depressed, friendless, fail in school, cut herself, and become a shadow of the person she used to be, I realized that narrative was not true. The situation I was seeing before my eyes just didn’t compute.
Autism is a medically-diagnosed condition. Autism is not self-diagnosed by a patient, much less a child. No actual medical or psychological conditions are.
Do you think it's loving to tell a child who claims to be a dinosaur that they ARE a dinosaur?
To take them to the doctor for cosmetic drugs that will roughen their skin and distort the proper development of their limbs, telling the child, "This will MAKE you a dinosaur"--even though you and the doctors all know perfectly well that's a shameless lie and that nothing can make a child a dinosaur--a lie that the innocent child will sincerely believe?
To have the child's body permanently surgically damaged to bear some vague resemblance to a dinosaur body--damage that the child doesn't have the mental maturity to foresee, understand, or consent to, damage that causes excruciatingly painful, unprecedented medical complications, which they will be forced to survive for the rest of their lives?
To insist that everyone in society agree that the child IS a dinosaur, to call them a dinosaur, even to refer to them in third-person as a dinosaur?
To demand that the child be allowed to act out THEIR IMAGINARY INTERPRETATION of a dinosaur they are not, wherever they go, no matter how much other children who are inconvenienced, frightened, or even injured by it object?
To cut off contact between the child and loving grandparents and other family if they say gently, "This is not a dinosaur, this is a human child"?
To permanently destroy a child's body for life, all because that child, in their normal innocent childish exploration of identity, at one period in their childhood once said, "I know for a fact that I'm a dinosaur"?
"Being born in the wrong body" is not innate. Both experience and research show this very clearly. It is a coping strategy and because it requires altering one's physical and emotional development it is not a very good coping strategy, no matter how great the initial distress. It is always best (and more kind) to explore other coping strategies. At the very least, the most loving approach is not to rush to any intervention which is irreversible and life altering. I'm not sure how old you are, but the older you get, the clearer you realise to what extent we change from 14 to 16, from 16 to 18, from 18 to 21. By the time we are 25 or 26 we all think that at 16 we were very little and rather naive, if not stupid. However at 16 we all feel that we are mature and responsible adults. Adolescence is defined by identity searching. Loving and caring parents guide their children through this challenging, often distressing period of identity search, by guiding their children away from any permanent consequences. I am pretty sure that you know that autism is very different. However, if autism leads to self harm and maladaptive coping, there are ways to gently challenge these behaviours and guide the child towards strategies that work best for this child. We all want our children to grow up healthy and productive adults, even if they are unhappy as adolescents.
Masculine women and tomboys and effeminate men have always existed. Gays and lesbians have always existed. Women who dressed as men have existed when it provided them with certain societal benefits. Men who dressed as women have existed as it is a fetish. Being really stressed, struggling and traumatized during adolescence has always existed and is probably exacerbated nowadays. "Born in the wrong body" has not existed because it is biologically impossible.
As for your second question...The suicide rate of teens who identify as transgender is higher than the general population, but the same as in children who have mental health issues. This is because most teens who identify as transgender also have depression and anxiety and many have experienced serious trauma. However the suicide rate is the highest after medical transitioning. Medical transitioning also doesn't improve depression or anxiety. In short, transitioning doesn't improve mental health, it makes things worse because side effects are brutal. Any mom or dad who cares about their child's wellbeing would do anything in their power to help their child to explore other coping strategies and help their child wait until they are 25 years old before they commit to medical transitioning.
Minimizing suicide risk means making sure young, traumatized, unhappy, often autistic kids don't cut off their breasts before they can understand what informed consent actually means.
I hope you have someone in your life who loves you very, very much.
Great ideas! Thank you. I think anyone would benefit from looking at these sources.
Please, let us banish forever the phrase "identify as". It has no real-world use, and only serves to reinforce transgenderism.
I have to respectfully disagree, because calling my child “trans” would imply that I believe there is such a thing as trans. She does “identify as” a boy, which means that this is a state that exists in her mind, not in reality, and allows me to describe the situation without implying that I agree with it or affirm it. If I can’t say that, you’ve taken away my ability to even discuss this situation with other parents. Just like woke ideology tries to tell people that they can’t use phrases like “biological woman”. And yet sweeping it under the rug doesn’t make the concepts of either biological sex, or the fact that some people believe they can identify out of it, go away.
Thank you for sharing these resources. So helpful and needed. I wish I'd had any idea this was happening before my daughter was in college and fell into the ideology. I know this will be helpful to so many.
None of us hate people who believe they are trans, many of us have children who had trauma in their lives, learned about trans ideology and mistakenly jumped on the idea because they are hurting or confused or feel lonely or different. There have always been movements for teens and young adults from rock and roll to punk to goth. Some of those lifestyles could lead to poor choices like using drugs, getting tattooed or pierced, etc. But this ideology inexcusably makes the claim that the ONLY option is to medicalize and use dangerous irreversible hormones and mutilating surgeries. It’s been proven now that WPATH covered up important scientific findings including that there is a HIGHER likelihood of suicide after transition than if a child or young adult is not affirmed. In front of the Supreme Court an LGBTQ attorney had to admit there was NO greater incidence of suicide risk if children/young adults were not affirmed and/or did not receive the prescribed “trans affirming care” it is exactly the opposite! WPATH lied to the public regarding the “safety” of “Trans affirming care” due to their own agenda of creating cash cows of young innocent kids and adults who were willing to become medical patients for life which has also been proven to cause premature death due to medical complications if they don’t commit suicide when they wake up to what they did to themselves because they were tricked by lying doctors and dishonest society. So we are trying to teach truth to our kids and young adults that we love so much, so they don’t destroy their bodies and minds and become controllable (new study found that trans treatment causes patients to infantilize and lose their ability to make good decisions) by powers that don’t have their best interests at heart. If you believe you are trans, please open your mind to considering different information than what is being fed to you by the trans community who have collectively been lied to and deceived by evil elites who don’t care about you, your health, or your future. Look up Transition Justice on YouTube. They have a whistle blower testimonial that is unbelievable!
ACLU lawyer Kate "Chase" Strangio is not LGBT. There's no such thing, as transgenderism is anti-LGB conversion therapy. She is a mentally-unwell transgenderist. She does NOT represent the LGB in any way, shape, or form.
This is great, but what happens when your child loved JoJo Rabbit, knows all about the Holocaust, knows all about brain-washing and cults, and medical scandals, but simply refuses to contemplate that what is happening with "gender ideology" and "gender affirming care" is a huge medical scandal and a series of brain-washing techniques designed to make people believe extreme chemical or surgical modification of the body along with body-hatred/rejection and reality rejection are the real science, and those who question it are the ones who have been brainwashed or who are doing the brainwashing? (I believe this is a form of DARVO.)
When this happens, it seems that there is nothing that can be done to wake the person up to reality. Every attempt to educate is seen as an attempt to brainwash, and so forth.
This sounds like an issue between parent and child. This child is choosing between parent and peers and choosing their peers--*as is totally normal for all teens*.
If your child wants to be a social justice warrior like their peers, there is PLENTY of material to work with.
Instead of trying to argue directly about the gender ideology lobby, I would focus instead on bonding over other issues, especially women's rights, opposition to homophobic conversion therapy, child safeguarding, disabled rights, and the reality of how BIWOC women make up a disproportionate percentage of the poverty-level vulnerable in our society: users of women's shelters, rehabs, and unfortunately prisons.
I'd research all of that stuff together. Really get into the injustices of these issues and what can be done to correct them. Don't mention the gender ideology lobby.
Just focus on that work.
Eventually, that child's brain will mature, and they'll be able to revisit the issue of the gender ideology lobby from a completely different perspective, which they didn't know they were building. By that time, their brain will have a better ability to grasp paradoxical contradictions and analyze logical inconsistences.
THEN things will look different to them.
There's an anecdote of a mental patient who believed he was dead.
No matter how much his doctor explained to him he was alive, the patient insisted he was dead.
So the doctor tried a strategy. Do dead mean bleed? The patient agreed that dead men do not bleed. And they repeated that several times.
The doctor took a pin and gave the patient a prick and together they watched as he bled a few drops of blood. "You see?" said the doctor. "You bleed. So what does that mean?"
The patient stares at the blood dripping out of his own hand. "It means we were wrong doctor," he said. "Dead men DO bleed!"
A lot of life is like that. You can lead the person as far as you go, but it is incumbent on them to take that important step themselves.
Or as the other saying goes.... you can lead the horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
Sometimes we don't know when the seeds will sprout. All we can do is plant them and wait. Hugs.
Thank you so much, your advice has been incredibly useful! Out of instinct and despair, when I realized that direct confrontation wasn’t working with my 16-year-old son, I started trying something similar in my mind: to strengthen our emotional bond while planting small seeds about how easily people can be manipulated and led to believe in things that make no sense. I also avoid talking about gender directly.
So far, I’ve managed to do that only in casual moments, usually when he brings up topics that already make him question things — like neo-Nazism or Scientology. I hope I planted many seeds during those conversations.
Reading your post gave me much more confidence that I’m on the right track. Now I feel encouraged to organize this strategy more deliberately, and I’ll be eagerly waiting for your next updates to learn how to move forward from the “seed stage.”
Thank you again, your posts give me so much hope!
You are doing great! Keep it up. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
WOW! Feel like I need to print this and check them off as I watch!!
The After Skool series is also great for teens. They take complex topics & discussions and present them with really striking and beautiful imagery. They're like mini docs.
This one is about mass psychosis and how an entire population becomes mentally ill.
https://youtu.be/09maaUaRT4M?si=a_UCAkTacRZcfkmp
Love After Skool. 👌🏼 Must have missed this episode, thank you.
The link says that the documentary on the Soviet Gulag is private. Do you have any way of reaching the owner and have it changed to unlisted?
This is the documentary originally mentioned: https://youtu.be/buWdabKKVYY?si=-bWpVTC3PfZAEFVm but there are many good ones. The link in the article will be edited soon (*already edited!) Thank you for bringing my attention to this!
Thank you very much, this is very helpful.
It is the role of every mom and dad to teach their children that people who love each other can disagree, challenge each other, question each other and even argue and none of this means hate. Love means that we can disagree and argue and then make up. Love means that mom and dad will not lie to their children. Love means helping your child love themselves and preventing self harm. Love means that mom and dad are always their for their children.
You are operating on the assumption that being “trans” is an inborn trait. Many of us here also used to believe that. And if you believe that a lot of the beliefs that trans activists are for follow - of course you should accommodate these poor people with a medical condition. Of course the sooner you identify that your child has a medical condition and get them medical treatment the better. Of course if parents refuse to do this they’re abusive and kids need to be helped. But if you question the premise that it’s an innate trait, then you start to realize that all the conclusions that followed could be false. And there is a lot of evidence that it isn’t an innate trait. The rate young people seeking medical transition has increased by 4000% over a ten year period, and shifted from being almost entirely natal males to about 80% natal females. Inborn traits don’t behave that way. And if you say it’s just due to greater social acceptance, where are all the women of my generation who have been walking around believing they were women their whole lives who are somehow “actually” men? Why aren’t they transitioning in large numbers now that it is socially acceptable? Did they all commit suicide? If so, why have suicide rates gone up, not down, in the past decade? Speaking of suicide, why are suicide rates actually higher post-medical transition than before it? What about the experiences of detransitioners who believe they were brainwashed on social media or by peer groups?
I believed it once too, but after watching my very feminine, dress-wearing doll-loving happy intelligent daughter get bullied at school, sink into an internet hole, identify as a boy and become a depressed, friendless, fail in school, cut herself, and become a shadow of the person she used to be, I realized that narrative was not true. The situation I was seeing before my eyes just didn’t compute.
Autism is a medically-diagnosed condition. Autism is not self-diagnosed by a patient, much less a child. No actual medical or psychological conditions are.
Do you think it's loving to tell a child who claims to be a dinosaur that they ARE a dinosaur?
To take them to the doctor for cosmetic drugs that will roughen their skin and distort the proper development of their limbs, telling the child, "This will MAKE you a dinosaur"--even though you and the doctors all know perfectly well that's a shameless lie and that nothing can make a child a dinosaur--a lie that the innocent child will sincerely believe?
To have the child's body permanently surgically damaged to bear some vague resemblance to a dinosaur body--damage that the child doesn't have the mental maturity to foresee, understand, or consent to, damage that causes excruciatingly painful, unprecedented medical complications, which they will be forced to survive for the rest of their lives?
To insist that everyone in society agree that the child IS a dinosaur, to call them a dinosaur, even to refer to them in third-person as a dinosaur?
To demand that the child be allowed to act out THEIR IMAGINARY INTERPRETATION of a dinosaur they are not, wherever they go, no matter how much other children who are inconvenienced, frightened, or even injured by it object?
To cut off contact between the child and loving grandparents and other family if they say gently, "This is not a dinosaur, this is a human child"?
To permanently destroy a child's body for life, all because that child, in their normal innocent childish exploration of identity, at one period in their childhood once said, "I know for a fact that I'm a dinosaur"?
Is that your definition of "loving"?
😬
"Being born in the wrong body" is not innate. Both experience and research show this very clearly. It is a coping strategy and because it requires altering one's physical and emotional development it is not a very good coping strategy, no matter how great the initial distress. It is always best (and more kind) to explore other coping strategies. At the very least, the most loving approach is not to rush to any intervention which is irreversible and life altering. I'm not sure how old you are, but the older you get, the clearer you realise to what extent we change from 14 to 16, from 16 to 18, from 18 to 21. By the time we are 25 or 26 we all think that at 16 we were very little and rather naive, if not stupid. However at 16 we all feel that we are mature and responsible adults. Adolescence is defined by identity searching. Loving and caring parents guide their children through this challenging, often distressing period of identity search, by guiding their children away from any permanent consequences. I am pretty sure that you know that autism is very different. However, if autism leads to self harm and maladaptive coping, there are ways to gently challenge these behaviours and guide the child towards strategies that work best for this child. We all want our children to grow up healthy and productive adults, even if they are unhappy as adolescents.
Gender ideology drugging and surgeries CAUSE suicide ideation. Studies show that they result in as much as a 1900% INCREASE in suicide ideation.
https://www.pittparents.com/p/what-are-the-facts-about-the-relationship
No one in their right mind would do that to a child.
Only a sadist.
Masculine women and tomboys and effeminate men have always existed. Gays and lesbians have always existed. Women who dressed as men have existed when it provided them with certain societal benefits. Men who dressed as women have existed as it is a fetish. Being really stressed, struggling and traumatized during adolescence has always existed and is probably exacerbated nowadays. "Born in the wrong body" has not existed because it is biologically impossible.
As for your second question...The suicide rate of teens who identify as transgender is higher than the general population, but the same as in children who have mental health issues. This is because most teens who identify as transgender also have depression and anxiety and many have experienced serious trauma. However the suicide rate is the highest after medical transitioning. Medical transitioning also doesn't improve depression or anxiety. In short, transitioning doesn't improve mental health, it makes things worse because side effects are brutal. Any mom or dad who cares about their child's wellbeing would do anything in their power to help their child to explore other coping strategies and help their child wait until they are 25 years old before they commit to medical transitioning.
Minimizing suicide risk means making sure young, traumatized, unhappy, often autistic kids don't cut off their breasts before they can understand what informed consent actually means.
I hope you have someone in your life who loves you very, very much.