There’s Always Hope - Part 1

An essay in 3 parts

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My son sat us down at the kitchen table - me, his two younger brothers, his stepfather - with the kind of nervous energy that told me something big was coming. He had been dropping hints about “causing chaos” for weeks. He was fourteen. He pulled out a flag and waved it at us.

We stared. It was clearly one of the pride flags, but which one? We had no idea. We were supposed to know immediately, supposed to have the right response ready. When we didn’t, the air went cold, and he ran back to his room. We were already the villains in a script we didn’t know we were performing.

This was my Minecraft-loving, LEGO-obsessed, gifted, deeply autistic kid. The last possibility I would have considered was standing in front of me, waiting for us to say something, and I had nothing.

That silence was the beginning of everything - the research, the fear, the battles I couldn’t win with logic, and eventually, the complete restructuring of our lives that I didn’t know was even possible. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably in that same silence right now. Perhaps your kid just announced something that makes no sense given everything you know about them. You’re terrified. You feel like you’re losing them. Everyone around you is telling you that affirming is the only loving option, that any hesitation makes you unsafe.

I’m here to tell you something no one told me: You have choices. Real ones. Hard ones. But you are not a victim of the culture or the systems around you.

Let me show you what I mean.

I did what any terrified parent does - I started researching. Late nights, every article I could find, every parent forum, every expert opinion. I learned about ROGD - Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. I learned about social contagion. I learned about the gaming communities, the anime forums, the Discord servers where autistic boys were being told that their discomfort with puberty, their social awkwardness, their literal black-and-white thinking meant they were actually girls.

It all clicked into place with sickening clarity. Of course this was targeting him. He spent hours in these online spaces where everyone had pronouns in their bio, where the loudest voices were the ones talking about gender, where not having a gender identity made you the weird one. For a kid who desperately wanted to belong somewhere, who struggled to read social cues in person but could follow the explicit rules of online communities, this made perfect sense.

What I didn’t yet understand was that my son couldn’t imagine a world where gender identity wasn’t the main thing. He’d never lived in one.

The dread grew when I realized what was happening at the schools. We’d already tried switching schools once, hoping for better. But the gender clubs, the medicalized students, the affirming adults - it was everywhere in the public system. He was excelling academically - honor roll, advanced classes, the kind of student teachers loved. But there were multiple medicalized students. There were adults ready to affirm and guide him down a path that would take him further and further from me. I watched him get recruited. I watched the social reward system kick in.

And I did what seemed logical at the time: I tried to talk him out of it.

I presented evidence. I explained autistic thinking patterns. I showed him detransitioner stories. I laid out the medical risks. I was calm, I was rational, I had facts on my side.

He shut down completely and buried himself in his head.

During this time real life continued to happen. My mom died. My marriage to his stepfather ended. Loss after loss.

Then came the sibling blowups. One morning after a screaming match with his brother, he went mute. He stopped speaking entirely to me or his siblings. Five weeks. He would text occasionally or point, but he would not speak. He was taking back his control by refusing to communicate.

I had to face something I didn’t want to face: You cannot logic your way out of a trans identification. And this was not going to just go away on its own.

Especially not with an autistic kid who thinks you’re going to present a logical argument and he’s going to counter with his logical argument and the most logical person wins. That’s not what this is. This is identity, belonging, an entire worldview about what’s real and what matters. This is his whole social universe telling him one thing, and his mom telling him another.

I realized that I did not approach this correctly in the beginning. Every argument I made pushed him further away. Every article I shared made me more “unsafe.” I was losing him, and my strategy was actively making it worse.

I had to stop. Completely stop.

The stopping was harder than the arguing. Silence felt like surrender - but not the kind that would come later. This felt like giving up.

But I didn’t have a choice. He wasn’t speaking to me. I was watching him slip away in real time.

So, I started showing up differently. Not with articles. Not with concerns. Not with questions about his identity. I just... showed up.

I sat next to him while he played video games. Didn’t talk, didn’t ask questions, just sat there.

I took him out to breakfast. He still wouldn’t talk to me, but he’d come. We’d sit across from each other, and I’d talk about nothing important - the weather, something I saw on the drive, a funny thing his brother said. He’d give me nothing back, but he was there.

I started paying attention to what mattered to him. Not what I thought should matter, not academics or his future or any of the big-picture stuff I was terrified about. What mattered to him right then. His games. His interests. The YouTube videos he was watching.

It took weeks. Slowly, gradually, he started responding. A sentence here. A comment there. Eye contact that lasted more than a second.

Connection before anything else. That’s the second lesson, and it’s the hardest one because it requires you to completely put down your agenda. You have to get back on the same team before you can steer the ship anywhere. You have to rebuild trust before you have any influence at all.

And here’s what I realized during those weeks of sitting silently next to my son: I couldn’t connect with him if I was trying to control him. I had spent so much of my life trying to control everything - my own teenage chaos, my path forward as a single parent for the second time, every variable I could manage. I was terrified that if I wasn’t actively fixing this, it would spiral out of control.

But control was the thing breaking our connection. He could feel my agenda every time I walked in the room. He knew I wasn’t just sitting with him - I was sitting with him in order to get him back. And kids, especially autistic kids, can smell that from a mile away.

I had to genuinely let go and just be his mom. Present, available, on his side no matter what.

That’s when things started to shift. Not all at once, but enough that he eventually started talking again. Enough that he trusted me again, at least a little.