Joy After Desistance

The state of Minnesota used Child Protective Services to take my child away from me and place her in foster care - all because we wouldn’t affirm her trans identity.

I refused to use a false name or wrong sex pronouns and it was always going to be over my dead body that any harm came to her physical body.

It was only when we got unentangled from the abusive state that my daughter desisted and we were finally able to reclaim her mental health, as I always knew would be the case.

I have spent the years since then trying to wake people up to the dangers of gender ideology, largely to no avail.

People don’t want to hear it. People assume I’m a bigot just for talking about it.

People called me abusive and right wing and a transphobe.

The Minnesota Department of Health Service was warned about this years ago, as were Amy Klobuchar, Tim Walz, Tina Smith, several Democratic and Republican state representatives.

I tried to file reports against the CPS workers who affirmed my daughter and wasn’t taken seriously. They all knew and they all ignored me.

After the recent shooting, they are all scrambling trying to cover their asses on what their political ideology has caused, fighting online and via the news about who is to blame and whether it’s the guns or the mental illness. Meanwhile, my daughter, who is now very comfortable in her female body and is coming to terms with her same sex attraction, knows she is a girl, just a girl who likes other girls, and she has let go of the trans delusion entirely.

We spent yesterday having the best day with friends at the state fair. We had such a blast. We made good memories just living. We were able to do that because her father and I parented her through the identity crisis. We didn’t give in and let her be in control. She was a kid. What adult in their right mind lets kids run the show?

We told her no. We set limits and boundaries and expectations. We told her we loved her but we would not continue the lie that her teachers and therapists and everyone else told. We told her she was born a girl and will always be a girl. We affirmed her in reality. Don’t get me wrong, she was angry as hell at the time. But now she is thankful and she understands we were trying to protect her.

I want parents in Minnesota to know how badly they are being lied to. Teachers and social workers do not know your child better than you. It is not healthy to affirm mental illness as identity. Doctors don’t know what the hell they are talking about when it comes to gender affirming care. The one thing they do know that they are not telling you is that it is impossible for your child to change sex. We are mammals. Please use your brains.

Not affirming is really, really hard at first, and you will feel like a failure as your child rails against you. But then, something clicks, and they settle down. And then before you know it, they are happy and comfortable in their bodies again. And then you have wonderful days full of fun and making memories while the rest of the world obsesses about the worst aspects of the cult you just managed to save each other from.

The past few days have been surreal on many levels. Knowing I saved my daughter from a death cult and that we can still find so much joy together, while the rest of the world falls apart…this is what I want other parents to know.

You can parent your child through this, you don’t have to give in to the lie, you don’t have to feed the beast.

Be a parent, not a friend.

Say no.

And if/when the state comes knocking, fight back. They also don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.

There is joy and happiness after desistance, after the state attempts to destroy your family. It’s not always easy to find, but it’s there.

You don’t have to go along with any of it. Step up and start parenting again. It’s not your job to be their friend.

My daughter identified as nonbinary, chose a couple different names at a couple different times that I would never use, and wanted various pronouns that I just wouldn’t use.

A lot of people might say “she wasn’t ever trans if she only identified as nonbinary”, or “she never had gender dysphoria” and I would say that you are correct.

I don’t even know that she was ever even a ‘true believer’.

I know that she was a kid who was struggling socially after lockdown and with her own demons that she shouldn’t have had to deal with in the first place.

She said she was nonbinary and she got affirmation from teachers and therapists and friends and felt special.

She was experimenting or going back and forth with calling herself lesbian and bisexual and I could tell she was confused and really just tried to both encourage her to give herself space to figure it out and avoid adopting any labels or putting herself into a box while she was figuring it out.

And then as things progressed and she started sinking to darker places with her mental health, the identity almost became a tool to derail her family therapy sessions away from the hard issues. We would talk about something she didn’t want to confront and all of a sudden the conversation would turn to how we wouldn’t call her by her chosen name and wouldn’t use her chosen pronouns and that meant we didn’t accept her or didn’t love her.

It became a hammer that just stopped everything and turned the whole room upside down. If she could get the therapist or social worker on her side about the gender issue, she could get them to agree that we were harming her by not affirming.

And it didn’t help that so many of the other kids she did therapy with in the inpatient setting had gender identity issues and they were all feeding off each other.

They had us attend a family CRT program and they started it off by introductions with pronouns, for everyone, all parents included.

It was the first time I ever looked dead at that zoom camera and said, “no thank you” and immediately muted myself again.

Please explain to me what I am going to take from that on a therapeutic level. You just shut down all lines of communication with that ridiculousness and now I can’t take any of this seriously. That was my response, internally of course.

What I want people to take away from our story is that this is what gender affirming care is doing to kids and families who seek mental health care. It is taking the kids who don’t even view themselves as the opposite sex, the ones who wouldn’t even necessarily be obsessing over gender identity, and it is turning the entire focus of their so-called therapy onto identity and external validation. It felt like they were attempting to brainwash us as parents into going along.

The first residential treatment facility my daughter was placed in, we were met by staff members, one of whom introduced herself and the first thing anyone would see about her was the giant rainbow shoelaces on her tennis shoes. This was her primary therapist at this facility and one who would go on to try to talk us into affirming.

The second place my daughter ended up was small and it had a one room classroom and a main lounge area for visiting,

When you walked in you were greeted with the typical “all are welcome here” signage and there was leftist messaging on the walls. Black Lives Matter, the in this house we believe… signs, the progress pride flag, rainbow flag. All of it. In the lounge the walls were covered with paper flags of various gender identities made by the girls. It was everywhere.

There was nothing neutral about either of these places. And these were mental health facilities where so many kids are struggling with identity and this is what they are bombarded with from all angles.

This is part of “gender affirming care” that nobody is talking about. Kids who seek help for ED’s and grief and trauma are ending up with this.