Turning the Language Around
Stop the Suicide lies
For years, parents like me have been given a terrifying but untrue ultimatum: “Would you rather have a dead son or an alive daughter?” This question, repeated by doctors and therapists, has become a script used to manipulate families into compliance. It is not compassion; it is emotional blackmail and plants the seed of despair.
We were told that if we didn’t “affirm” our child’s new identity, we might cause them to harm themselves, up to and including taking their own lives. No parent can hear those words and think clearly. But the truth is really the opposite. Sweden’s long-term study showed that the suicide risk is 19 times higher for people after medical transition. A study in Finland showed that the risk of suicide was 36% higher after transition. Because transition doesn’t resolve despair; it often deepens it. The promise that it saves lives has never been supported by any credible evidence.
The stories of recovery — young adults who desisted, detransitioned, or simply grew out of their gender distress once they received genuine therapy, compassion, and time — prove that “affirmation” is not the answer. The desire to transition, the feeling that one is “born in the wrong body” is but a symptom of deeper struggles — anxiety, trauma, autism, social pressure, and/or loneliness.
The tragedy is that this manipulation is systemic. It’s not one rogue doctor or one activist group. It’s a coordinated ideology that has taken hold across pediatric medicine, education, research, and mental health. It would seem like good news that a Texas doctor lost her license for prescribing gender transition drugs to minors, but it doesn’t stop her from this practice. She just moves to Oregon and carries on.
Still, the emotional blackmail continues. Children are told their parents don’t love them if they hesitate to affirm. Parents are told their children will die if they don’t affirm. These lies must end. We need to turn the language around. How do we reclaim words like love, compassion, and care from those who have twisted them into tools of compliance with a misguided, unscientific and ultimately evil practice.
Parents who say no to medicalization are not cruel, they are courageous. They are protecting their children from irreversible harm. Telling a child their body is wrong is not kindness, it’s a betrayal of trust. It’s a perversion of science.
We must reclaim the words that have been twisted against us. “Affirmation” without truth is not compassion. “Care” that causes sterilization is not medicine. “Love” that agrees with despair is not love.
The question we should be asking isn’t, “Would you rather have a dead son or an alive daughter?” It’s this: “Would you rather have a healthy child who learns to love themselves as they are, or a damaged one who regrets that adults didn’t protect them and is made a lifelong patient?”
Transition does not save children. Truth does. Compassion does. Real mental health care does. Parents are not the villains in this story — they are the last line of defense between their children and a system that preys on their pain.
It’s time to end the lies, stop the fear, and start telling the truth that there is a greater chance of suicide if one transitions.
No more children should end their life because of these manipulative lies.
When I first heard the “dead son vs living daughter” phrase, it was from my best friend, recounting what her 19-year-old son’s counsellor had blithely asked her. My friend is a devoted, caring, and realistic mother who knew her kid and his lifelong history of emotional challenges. I peaked when I heard her recount this phrase, as it defied all of the wisdom of best medical and counselling practice.
I thought later I’d like to ask the counsellor, “On what schedule do you assume this imminent suicide will occur? Is it immediately after the parent’s refusal to cheerlead the requested chemical interventions? As in: the kid hears no, then jumps out the nearest window head first?
Or is it later that evening after hearing ‘no’— the kid completes suicide with a gun, or lays down on the train tracks?
Or is it a week later, or two weeks later, after hearing ‘no’? If there’s a real risk of such dire, imminent self-harm, then any kid who is told ‘no’ when they demand blockers, suppression, cross-sex hormones or surgery should be immediately sheltered in an inpatient psych ward.
Oh, I see… you aren’t going to do that, you’re going to send the kid home with their ‘transphobic bigot’ parents to continue their suicide threat language to wear those parents down until they support destroying their kid’s health outcomes? Or maybe the kid never has been using that suicide language before, but now you’ve planted the idea in their young mind that they are doomed?
You can’t tell me this ‘care’ is ‘life-saving,’ since a life-or-death medical— or even psychological— situation would require immediate physical intervention.
Let’s say the kid hears ‘no’ and doesn’t kill themselves within two weeks. Would it be within a month? Two months? A year? Ten years? WHEN EXACTLY DOES THIS DEATH BY SUICIDE OCCUR after a kid is told ‘no, you may not avail yourself of loss-of-function elective cosmetic chemical and surgical sex trait modifications?’ And if it’s a year, or a decade later, how can you attribute any person’s suicide to a particular setback, disappointment, or rational medical safeguarding?’”
The “trans suicide” trope was always manipulative nonsense. It is one thing coming from a child or adolescent, but quite another coming from credentialed professionals. I have lost respect for any professional who espoused this destructive, destabilizing nonsense, and those who knew it was insane, but stood silently by watching their fellow professionals destroy kids and families.
That live son/dead daughter should be answered by arrests and lawsuits. It’s raw extortion.
Which would you rather have, a son at home with his physical reality, or a piss-dripping eunuch?