There’s Always Hope - Part 2

Part 1 here.

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Once the connection was rebuilt, I could finally have the conversation I couldn’t have before. I sat down with him and said, “Okay. This is what you want. Here’s what this really means.” And because trust was there, he could hear me. That’s when I shared more of the medical information - not as an argument to win, but as a reality to understand together, and to prepare for. I shared how women are treated differently in the workforce, make less money, and are held to a very different beauty standard. Throughout these conversations he admitted something crucial: he had zero desire to actually medicalize. He just wanted to be seen, to matter, and for now that meant to him, he had to be a woman. We were making progress.

Even with this new information, here’s what still terrified me: staying attached to this identity meant the pressure to medicalize would only grow. The world wouldn’t affirm him unless he “committed.” He was already exhausted by the constant focus on gender. Slowly he was becoming less engaged in our weekly conversations.

I decided to see if I could give him a way out. I told him we were having these conversations because it had been so important to him, but if he was tired of talking about it and gender identity was actually stupid, he needed to tell me ‘so.’ His response? “So.” One word - that said everything.

Then he agreed to cut his hair. For kids in this identity, long hair is everything - it’s the most visible marker, the thing that signals who they are to the world. He hated brushing it, yes, but agreeing to cut it meant he was ready to let go of that signal. That willingness was monumental.

But I knew if we stayed in this environment, even these shifts wouldn’t be enough. The pull toward transition would eventually become unbearable.

Because here’s what I could finally see clearly: my son didn’t just have an idea in his head that I needed to talk him out of. He was living in an entire environment that reinforced this identity every single day.

His school, the online communities, his peer group, the state we lived in - everything was telling him the same story. And I was one voice saying something different.

I couldn’t win that battle by being louder. I had to change the environment itself.

This is the third lesson: You need to audit your sphere of influence and be willing to use it.

I made a list. Everything I actually had control over:

• The home environment

• The school he attended

• His access to devices and online spaces

• The friends he spent time with

• The state we lived in

That last one terrified me. I live in Oregon - a progressive state where 15-year-olds can access cross-sex hormones without parental consent. My son could walk into a clinic, and I wouldn’t even know unless he told me.

I applied for jobs in other states. I ran the numbers on what it would take to move. I needed it to be an option, even if it wasn’t the option I chose.

Even more than our state policies, I had to address the biggest influence: school.

Everyone would have told you my son was thriving. Honor roll, advanced classes, excelling academically. The kind of kid any parent would be proud of.

But I started asking him different questions. Not “how are your grades?” but “what did you actually learn today?”

And the truth came out: he was bored. The work was easy. He was spending six hours a day there, and maybe an hour of that was actual learning. The rest was social time - social time that was absolutely destroying him.

Why was I sending him into an environment where he spent six hours getting socially influenced in ways that were harmful, just to learn things he could master in a fraction of the time?

It seemed so obvious once I saw it clearly. But it took stepping back from “he’s succeeding” to ask, “what is he actually getting from this, and what is it costing him?”

Now I knew I couldn’t just pull him out without further alienating him, so I had to approach this strategically. We took a trip during the week so that I could interview for a job that would move us. I set up the possibility without making it about my choices. When it took him an hour to complete all his schoolwork for the week, I commented on how little it seemed was actually happening at school and suggested maybe going in person wasn’t something he needed. He already hated waking up early, so I stopped waking him up.

The next week he did a month of math assignments one morning in under an hour. Again, I said, “What are you in school for?” He couldn’t argue with that logic - he stopped going.

So, what was next? Homeschool or something else? Were we moving? I still hadn’t heard back from the job. The job never materialized - though by then I’d stopped pursuing it once I saw another path forward.

I knew I wasn’t sending him to school to collect credentials for a future I hoped would work out. I was trying to keep my son from disappearing into an identity that would take him away from reality, from his body, from me.

The credentials didn’t matter if I lost him in the process.

I also had an advantage a lot of parents don’t: I never bought into the college-degree-as-requirement story. I didn’t go to college myself. I’ve built a successful life without it. So I wasn’t operating from a place of fear that pulling him from traditional school would ruin his future.

But I was a full-time single parent. I needed school to work. I needed structure for my kids that I didn’t have to manage every moment of every day in order for me to be able to work, to function, to keep our lives running.

So, I wasn’t homeschooling from some ideological position. I was doing cost-benefit math: Is this environment serving him, or harming him? Is he actually learning, or just performing? What is he being exposed to during those six hours, and is it worth it?

The math wasn’t working.

I kept searching. I looked at online schools. I looked at alternative programs. I looked at homeschool co-ops.

And then something happened that I still can’t fully explain.

I had done everything I knew how to do. I had adjusted every variable I had control over. I had rebuilt my connection with my son. I had pulled him from harmful environments. I had evaluated moving states. I had researched every possible educational option.

And I was exhausted. Still not sure any of it was working. I still had no clear direction.

I had to face something about myself that I’d been avoiding my whole life.

I’ve always been someone who figures it out. Single parent, three kids, building businesses, solving problems - I handle it. I have to. There’s no one else.

But underneath that capability was something I didn’t want to look at: a deep resistance to any kind of masculine authority. A wound around fatherhood that went back to my own adolescence.

I had my own identity crisis as a 14-year-old. Mine showed up as promiscuity, as searching for male attention in all the wrong places because I didn’t have a father who saw me, who loved me, who said “I’ve got you, and we’re not doing that.”

And here was my son, living out the same wound in a different form. No father figure. No masculine role model to look him in the eye and say, “I see you, I love you, but we’re not doing this.”

The parallel was devastating.

I had spent my whole adult life rejecting structure, rejecting authority, rejecting anything that felt like someone else telling me what to do. I was going to figure it out myself. I was going to be in control.

And that very thing - that insistence on control, that resistance to surrendering to anything outside myself - was the wall I kept hitting.

I couldn’t control my son. I couldn’t force him to see reality differently. I couldn’t argue him into a different identity. I had done everything in my sphere of influence, and it still wasn’t enough.

I had to do the thing I’d been avoiding my entire life.

I had to surrender to God.

Not the distant, vague spirituality I’d always been comfortable with. God as Father. The masculine divine authority I’d spent decades pushing against because of my own wounding.

I went for a sensory deprivation float - my one self-care practice and the only place I can get quiet enough to hear clearly. I spent the entire hour repeating, “I’ve done everything I know how to do. I’m giving this to You. I need You to do what I can’t. I surrender, God. I surrender.”

And that’s when everything changed.