The Perfect Candidate

My beautiful daughter was 26 years old when she told me she was trans. This was September of 2022. Given she was the ultimate Pink Princess, before and after puberty, NEVER showing a desire to do anything masculine, I couldn’t comprehend this at all.

My subsequent journey was no different than that of many PITT readers. The initial surprise and incomprehension, and then confusion (gender dysphoria? you?) and then the unimaginable and indescribable horror after doing The Big Deep Dive. I did it all - begged, pleaded in person, emailed (many times) with link after link warning of the harm ahead, until, in January 2023, she blocked me permanently.

Predictably, her endocrinologist gave her a prescription for testosterone with no enquiry whatsoever into what might be driving this gender dysphoria or any possible underlying causes. She started taking it shortly after blocking me.

I hear about her through my other children. Her voice has dropped, she has acne, and, around October 2023, a surgeon sliced off her healthy breasts.

As to her mental state, it is hard to know. She seems happy enough as I think the testosterone gives her a mood boost. But the delusion certainly continues. She has blocked more members of our family. For instance, her 83-year-old grandmother, who was using her male name, made the fatal mistake of expressing concern at the experimental nature of a female taking such high doses of testosterone.

My daughter has now changed her surname and is calling my husband and I homophobic and transphobic. She is also questioning her happy childhood. Our other children are mystified by this, as it is all untrue. But I guess she has to justify this somehow.

Her new name is a massive mental health red flag. It is something out of a fantasy PlayStation game, with no masculinity about it. Anyone with a brain can see that she doesn’t want to be a man - she just does not want to be herself. Escaping to a fantasy world is the objective.

I see clearly now that she is the perfect candidate for indoctrination into the gender ideology cult - white, privileged, Asperger’s with discomfort in herself, very gifted academically but astonishingly naive, mental health issues for the previous five years, bad sexual experience when younger (but, fyi, 18 years old and not rape), an avid gamer and Dungeons and Dragons lover, and some narcissism, particularly wanting an easy way to live life.

I don’t have to tell you all out there about the crushing, debilitating anxiety and depression all this has caused. I have been actively Doing My Little Bit by writing and speaking to all our politicians, at both the State and Federal levels. I involve myself in helping organisations to fight gender ideology in Australia. I even became an X warrior. It didn’t make my mental state worse but it didn’t make it better either.

But it was my rage that was ever present, indescribable and unrelenting. Whilst rage at the institutions that are allowing this to happen is understandable, I was completely overcome and overwhelmed by rage against my daughter. How could she do this nonsensical, idiotic and harmful thing?! How could she not listen to me given how close we were?! HOW COULD SHE BE SO STUPID?! I would watch old videos of her singing with her stunningly beautiful voice and just cry. I wanted to scream and shake her to her senses. It was visceral and unbearable! Sometimes I wondered how anyone could go on with such despair.

Then a close friend of mine, with a difficult past, told me about her experience overcoming anxiety in a situation that seemed beyond her control. She had discovered the Aaronic Prayer. She said she memorised it and said it to all the parts of her body. She was astonished to see that the anxiety left her. The Aaronic Prayer (Numbers 6:24-26) goes like this:

May the Lord bless you and keep you.

May his face shine on you and be gracious to you.

May the Lord show you his favour and give you his peace.

Whilst they are lovely words, it didn’t resonate until she looked at the prayer in a historical context. She was taken with the imagery of it. I was intrigued so I researched the ancient Hebrew to see how it might apply to my daughter and myself. A summary as to how such imagery connected with me follows:

May the Lord bless you

She is worthy, because you kneel before her to honour and respect her.

and keep you

She is surrounded and protected by you and you watch over her, guarding her against all evil.

May his face shine on you

She feels you turn to her and shine on her, giving her relief and order to her existence.

and be gracious to you.

She feels your compassion and kindness towards her, just because she is her.

May the Lord show you his favour

She is not lonely as she is lifted up by you, in joy and delight.

and give you his peace

And you give her all that she needs to be whole and complete.

Whilst I had a Christian upbringing, I am not religious and would probably describe myself as agnostic. Nevertheless, I had nothing to lose. One morning I tried to memorise it (quite a hard task due to the brain scramble going on). I kept saying the blessing in my mind to my daughter and thinking about the imagery. After a few hours I felt a wave of emotion rush up and out of my body. Along with tears, I then experienced intense love and compassion for her. And most importantly, The Rage left me. I once again wanted to hold and love my daughter as I always had.

Momentarily, this was wonderful! However, it became very apparent that The Rage can mask all kinds of deeply depressing emotions. And they came forth in abundance, flattening me daily, particularly after hearing about the double mastectomy. I was starting to wish for The Rage again!

I thought to myself, well, if the Aaronic Blessing helped, what else can I find? I had a vague memory about “the peace of god that passes all understanding”. This sounded on point, because how else was I to feel peace unless the peace was unexplainable? You can never find rational peace whilst watching your child slowly destroy themself.

So I googled and found the verse (Phillipians 4:6,7):

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

I felt it was a code that I needed to unlock in order to activate the peace I so desperately wanted. After some internet reading, I thought that there were three things I needed to do:

1. Tell God what your problems are. For example, “I am depressed/anxious/losing my mind about my daughter”. Do NOT ask for a happy ending or a miracle. It doesn’t work. I felt this was easy enough.

2. Be thankful for everything good in your life. List as many things as you can, even if “air to breathe” is the only thing you can think of at that time. I figured I can easily do this too.

3. Agree to live aligned with good and not evil. This was tricky. It felt like yet another of those Bible platitudes that I remember from my childhood and could make no sense of. So I had to Deep Dive this one. And I had to analyse what “good” or “God” actually meant to me. In other words, how did this represent itself? And I came to the conclusion that it meant “beauty”. Whatever was “good” or came from “God” was beautiful or had a beauty about it. So every time I made a decision, it had to be a step towards beauty, and not away from it.

This turned out to be quite life changing because you make decisions every second of every day. Everything I did and said had to be a step towards beauty. The main issues I faced were procrastination and resentment. But there were other lifestyle choices that needed addressing too.

Let me give you a few examples:

a. ​When I woke up in the morning and saw the mess on the table in my otherwise beautiful living room, I had to tidy it up before catching up on X. Leaving the mess there when I had nothing pressing to stop me cleaning it up was definitely a step away from beauty.

b.​ Are three Chardonnays and a hamburger and chips on a Friday night a step towards beauty? Not for me! Three chardonnays meant domestic disharmony and hamburger and chips meant indigestion and fat. But a lovely grilled fish with one glass of Chardonnay was very beautiful.

c. When my husband asked me to do something, I had to stop feeling annoyed at being disturbed and be grateful that I have a good, loyal, faithful husband who was working towards a better life for us.

Of course, common sense plays into all of this (you can’t clean up your table if you have an appointment), but you get the idea.

After about a day and a half, I felt a barrier start to surround me, like a force field. The depression, despair and anxiety seemed to be pushed away from me by this barrier. I can feel it buzzing about outside but I am protected from it.  And it dawned on me what the last words of the verse were - “guard your heart and mind”. And that is exactly how it feels – it is there but I am being guarded from it.

I can now think about my daughter without feeling like dying. I can think about her with love, compassion and concern. I have an overwhelming feeling of patience. I think about her all the time and continue Doing My Little Bit to fight gender ideology. I don’t know what will happen to her or whether I will see her again but I feel peaceful. It is quite astonishing!

I am a practical person so I want to share with you how I keep the force field up. Every day I send my worries up to God/the universe and I thank God/the universe for all the good things I have. I plan what I will be doing that day and make sure they are all, in manner and execution, a step towards beauty. On the rare occasion I don’t do this, I have felt the heavy fog descending. I then drop everything and start being thankful for everything I can think of. And it lifts.

I hope this helps you find some relief from the unrelenting trauma of this. It is so incredibly evil and soul destroying. For those of you who have published their stories – thank you from the bottom of my heart. You have helped me in more ways than you know.

I think I will now try and find something that will reach through the evil that is surrounding my daughter. There has to be something there that can open her mind. If I have success, I will be sure to let you know.