Thoughts on Mental Health, Gender Dysphoria, and Mothers

I am the father of a socially awkward young woman who is very sensitive, highly gifted, magnificently creative, and prone to magical thinking. She also has a powerful rational and linear processing mind, loves binaries, adores systems and formulas, and can read at a staggering speed with high mental absorption. And like most of her generation, she spends a lot of time on-line. She displays what we used to call Asperger’s syndrome traits, as do so many young women who have been swept up into the transgender movement. She was quite a tomboy as a child but also loved dresses and dress-up. She is a very loving and beautiful person, and was a comely young lady, until she went on testosterone, got a tat, grew a beard, bound her breasts, started losing her hair, and so forth.

She did not mix well at primary school and used to sit at the back of the class and read. We did not know she was short sighted and could not see the blackboard. When she was 10 years old, we discovered just how much she read, and that her eyes were a problem, and that she was not socializing with the other children. At that time, our circumstances made it possible for me to take her out of school for six months, and my daughter and I used to ride our bicycles the 20 kilometre return trip to uni where I lectured. I taught her Latin, German, Greek, philosophy, literature and so forth in my office, which she loved. We would walk down to the local coffee shop for lunch and talk about everything she had been reading on the way there and back. One late, balmy afternoon as we were peddling home, there was a huge golden moon rising over the horizon. She said to me “Daddy, these are my golden years.” They were my golden years too. We had such a grand time together.

I could not keep home schooling up, due to my work situation. I had to do builder’s labouring to supplement my untenured contract teaching at uni during the half calendar year when there was no need for surplus knowledge workers like me. So, she went back to school. School never really worked for her, alas.

In Australia it has become mandatory that if any child or young person wonders if they are trans, then everyone, and particularly psychologists and health workers, must immediately affirm their gender identity as being trans and get them into gender affirming treatment pathways as soon as possible. The official reason for this is that trans kids are very vulnerable to suicide because the mental trauma of gender dysphoria is so severe, and the social stigmatization is so terrible, that if you do not immediately “transition” them, you are almost sentencing them to death. Never mind that a suicide inducing mind-set where you reject your actual body is firmly held by these very same therapists to not be a mental illness, and never mind that every institution and authority is affirming one’s supposed queerness, and becoming trans actually makes you rather special and some sort of queer justice warrior, even if you do hate your body. But let us just look at the claim that any gender dysphoric young person will be in a catastrophic state of suicide peril if they are not affirmed and “transitioned” with as much speed and irrevocable thoroughness as is practically possible.

Observing my daughter as a young adult decide to do trans, it did not look to me that she was in any serious risk of self-harm. Rather, going trans was a very attractive option for her, as her ASD difficulties in accepting her naturally maturing body was finding an appealing way of simply not adjusting to her womanly self. She was also gaining a community of people who did not care how non-standard a person she was, as a great many of them were also ASD and also had reality denying body image issues, so they were all one big happy family (or cult, depending on how you look at it). And the trans community loves the idea that bigoted and phobic people – particularly non-affirming parents – hate them, and that trans people are making a courageous moral stand against prejudice and injustice. All these things were very appealing to my daughter, even if it really was the case that she found her female body disturbing, even revolting. But here is the question, should we encourage self-misogyny and bodily mutilation in perfectly physically healthy ASD young women? Should we be blind to the social and imaginative attractions of being trans, or only look at the so-called mental trauma of being gender dysphoric?

As far as my daughter’s mental health is concerned, yes, she was a person prone to self-judgement, prone to loneliness, and prone to being a bit blue. All of which is pretty normal for most young people growing up. But I saw no evidence that she was suicidal before she transitioned or would have become suicidal had she not transitioned. And this is a huge incoherence in this entire sorry matter. Self-body-hatred to the supposed serious risk of suicide is not considered to be a mental illness (bizarrely, it is considered to be a physical illness that can be treated by physical means, though there is nothing physically wrong with their bodies), and yet we must transition them. This imperative is because they have such fragile mental health that they will not survive if we do not transition them. This is all totally incoherent.

But transgenderism indeed does put parents under enormous mental strain, mothers in particular.

Fathers do not get off lightly either.

As a father I have found a paralysing sense of powerlessness in wanting to protect my daughter from a dangerous, delusional, and disabling cult-like phenomena that enjoys the promotion and protection of the state. All educational, legal, medical, and psychological authorities now consider me a transphobic peril to the wellbeing of my daughter. They must protect her from me.

To be unable to protect one’s own daughter in something as basic as the physical integrity and safety of her bodily sexuality, is about as de-authorizing and emasculating of a father as can be achieved. The grief and anger I have experienced over this has taken a serious toll on my physical health (high blood pressure) and mental health (anxiety, anger, depression). My daughter whom I was very close to, has cut me off. She willingly rejects me because I will not “affirm” that she is a man. I will not “affirm” that as my daughter she is dead. I will not “affirm” that it is good for her to reject her female body, irreparably damage her reproductive integrity, and pretend to become a man. But if I did “affirm” these destructive lies (which I simply cannot), I would be putting my need not to be rejected by her above my fatherly commitment to her actual wellbeing. I would be failing her as a father if I so “affirmed” her self-harming and state supported misogyny. I am punished by her and by my government for caring about her actual and real interests, and for not mildly playing along with harmful delusions. I am being punished because I love her. And, for goodness sake, I am a philosopher: I know Gender Theory is bullshit and I can explain why it is wrong and destructive if anyone would listen to me. But I am silenced and cut off from my daughter. Frankly, this does your head in as a father.

But it is worse for mothers.

My wife is the most beautiful and sincere Christian woman you will ever meet. She chose not to have a career so that she could give her love to her children, full time, as their mother. She has given of her very body, and she has given the best years of her life to our six children, and she has chosen the high – though socially despised – things in so doing. Her life has meaning because she loves. She understands how meaning really works. But because she loves more, she suffers more when the ones she loves hurt themselves needlessly, and when they reject her. But she does not think of herself, she thinks of the wellbeing of her children. She fasts, she prays hours on end, she weeps, she hopes, she cries, every day for our daughter. She is an incredibly strong women – as women who deeply love always are – but this is really damaging her, and I am worried sick about her sometimes. And she gets worried sick about me too. We are both so damaged, so distraught, so without emotional resilience, all thanks to trans. For we simply cannot pretend that trans is anything other than a catastrophic harm to our beautiful daughter who we brought into the world, and love with all our hearts. We just want her to flourish and love herself for who she really is.

There is a misattribution of mental harm going on here. Gender confused children and young people are not in a catastrophic state of mental distress, they are just confused. If you tell them their delusions are a reality, you will make their confusion orders of magnitude worse. If you then lock that confusion into their very bodies by attacking their reproductive integrity, you are giving them permanent physical damage where they would most likely simply grow out of their mental confusion if you just gently encouraged them to come to terms with their actual and natural bodily reality. Gender Affirming Care is unconscionable psychological and medical malpractice. And it has made a delusion into a genuine physical disability, and it has inflicted savage mental suffering on my wife and myself, and my daughter’s sisters. And my daughter of course.

When this cultic fad finally cracks, may the legal and criminal redress begin. These heinous therapists, doctors, and legislators have inflicted terrible suffering on so many families. This should never happen again. And it should stop now.

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