Disclaimer: I’m a parent with two kids under ten and neither is trans-identified, so I haven’t gone through what you’ve experienced.
“I thought this would be over by now. I really did. You're smart. Really smart. And a staunch feminist—like I raised you to be.”
Reading the beginning of this piece, I thought it was going to be about an adult child, mid-twenties at the youngest. I don’t think we can reasonably expect teenagers to see through a social contagion simply because they’re intelligent. All throughout history, very intelligent people, even adults, have believed in things that seem ridiculous to many of us. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical doctor and the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He believed two girls in Cottingley, England had captured real fairies on film. The fairies were paper cutouts.
Re: your daughter’s psychiatrist, they always want to know if patients have been sexually abused. Unless there’s more here you haven’t told us, I wouldn’t necessarily read that question as parent-blaming. Any day of the year, you can Google “mother’s boyfriend” and find a bunch of stories about crimes against children.
Lots of teenagers rebel against their parents’ beliefs or ideology. It’s just your bad luck that you happen to live in a time when one of the common alternative ideologies is trans ideology in its current form.
Disclaimer: I’m a parent with two kids under ten and neither is trans-identified, so I haven’t gone through what you’ve experienced.
“I thought this would be over by now. I really did. You're smart. Really smart. And a staunch feminist—like I raised you to be.”
Reading the beginning of this piece, I thought it was going to be about an adult child, mid-twenties at the youngest. I don’t think we can reasonably expect teenagers to see through a social contagion simply because they’re intelligent. All throughout history, very intelligent people, even adults, have believed in things that seem ridiculous to many of us. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical doctor and the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He believed two girls in Cottingley, England had captured real fairies on film. The fairies were paper cutouts.
Re: your daughter’s psychiatrist, they always want to know if patients have been sexually abused. Unless there’s more here you haven’t told us, I wouldn’t necessarily read that question as parent-blaming. Any day of the year, you can Google “mother’s boyfriend” and find a bunch of stories about crimes against children.
Lots of teenagers rebel against their parents’ beliefs or ideology. It’s just your bad luck that you happen to live in a time when one of the common alternative ideologies is trans ideology in its current form.