“And as Skrmetti and other lawsuits made their way through federal courts, some of the central medical claims girding the legal case for pediatric gender treatments — that decades of thorough study had found them to be safe and effective — began to unravel amid growing scrutiny by other doctors and experts. Last summer, thousands of emails and other documents released in a case challenging Alabama’s ban raised further questions about medical standards at the heart of the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit against Tennessee….
In most respects, the movement’s day in court felt like a retreat….Pressed on the longstanding claim that gender-affirming care prevented dysphoric teenagers from killing themselves, Strangio conceded the point. ‘There is no evidence,’ he told the court, ‘that this treatment reduces completed suicide,’ adding that ‘completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.’ Engaging with the conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, Strangio even uttered the phrase he considered anathema: ‘born male.’”
“How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost,” by Nicholas Confessore, June 19, 2025, New York Times
When this question came up with our child, I realized after a lot of reflection and prayer that for me, the real question was "would I rather have my daughter hate me NOW for not affirming her, or would I rather have her hate me later, for having affirmed and transitioned her, especially if she came to regret it?"
I chose having my daughter hate me now. It is painful. It is hard. We still have a relationship but there is so much tension there. But I could not live with the possibility of the other alternative - that I would have ANY hand in my daughter not accepting herself or in medically harming her.
Our path - the one all of us here are taking - is not the easy one. It is the hardest one, but it is the only one that is rooted in truth.
Thanks for this important article on the toughest issue there is. I noted the PITT slogan "My child is not your canvas", which resonated with me because puberty blockers effectively create a blank canvas for the artwork of the gender clinic surgeon. I've written about this previously for Genspect:
I never call it "gender-affirming" or "care." I always call it "gender-enforcing" and "medical interventions."
I never use anyone's "professed pronouns." If I get corrected, I just pretend I didn't hear. If someone demands my attention over it, I play dumb. A person can only explain something so mind-numbingly stupid to an innocent bystander for a few seconds, before they simply give up.
And I never argue about whether I'm "kind." I argue about whether THEY'RE kind--to support the destruction of girls' and women's rights, to promote homophobic medical conversion therapy, to lie to innocent children about something so fundamental to themselves and this new world they live in, teach them sexism instead of encouraging them to fully embrace all their likes and dislikes as who they are, and disrupt their natural healthy development to push them into a lifetime of medical dependency.
The jargon used by this lobby was chosen with great care by highly-paid marketers with expertise in selling products to the vulnerable.
I love this post. I think some of this is iatrogenic suicidalty. The children are told by a physician that they will be suicidal if they don’t transition. The non-suicidal untransitioned child then begins to self injure and express suicidal thoughts.
Telling a parent that their child might kill themself if they don't get the medicalisation they think they want is bad enough, but doing in front of said child is evil and should be illegal. Of course this will justify suicide in the child's mind, if it's coming from a therapist. What sort of person decides to become a therapist but then goes along with saying such a thing? It's the opposite of therapy
It would be grossly insensitive if not actual malpractice for any other treatment (e.g. "do you want a dead son who didn't take antidepressants or a live son who did?") but *for some reason* gender affirming care is an exception *and you must agree*
Yes, those things and more. They have to desperately keep up the narrative because as soon as it collapses a lot of people are going to have to explain why they went along with it
Great article, thanks! As it points out so well, there is no data to support the transition or suicide narrative— a fact admitted by the ACLU lawyer during oral arguments in Skirmetti, at the Supreme Court no less. Most therapists couldn’t point to data anyway, as they are just using a script of sorts handed to them by their professional associations, based no doubt, on a bullet list of ‘facts’, perhaps with carefully selected references. I loved the writer’s suggestion for an alternate way of framing the question. Would love to have something short that you could put on a sign? (eg, for puberty blockers, I think Genspect came up with ‘Puberty is not a disease’. ) May the writer and son find escape from this terrible situation. ❤️
Fraud is something that the government could go after...
All these trans healthcare authorities who make claims that they are preventing suicide with "Gender Affirming Care" do not even have real data to support that claim. Many will claim they are just "following orders/directions".
Yes, I am aware of efforts by the FTC. I think they are going after the practice of giving kids wrong sex hormones for "GAC" and putting down for insurance purposes that the patient has an endocrine disorder.
They need to go hard on taking down the whole thing for all ages as it does not change anyone's sex and is not a "suicide prevention" as it has been billed.
One really concerning aspect to this ideology is the heavy hand of government in states that affirm. Professionals are at risk of losing their license to practice if they don't tow the preferred party line. A parent can lose custody of their children if they don't affirm especially if the other parent is affirming.
Oregon has prevented people from fostering children if they don't affirm before hand for a hypothetical foster child who is trans. It's like a loyalty oath just to prove that you are not going to question the validity or cause of gender confusion.
California and Washington are trans sanctuary states where a child can seek transition medicine against a parents wishes.
It's like every safeguard that was put in place to protect children has been reversed to harm them. The key argument that is utilized to trans abuse a child is if we don't give them what they want without questioning they will die.
Although I completely agree about the risks of transitioning, I wish people stopped citing that 2011 Swedish study. I think we have enough good science and common sense without it. That particular study was not very well designed and is easy to take apart. The matched controls came from the general population. Of course they had lower rate of suicide - a healthy group would always do better than a group with a disease (be it depression, diabetes, or "gender dysphoria"). The years were 1973-2003 so presumably the interventions changed since then and TRAs will argue that modern interventions are much better. 19 times higher suicide risk is still based on "only" 10 total suicides in trans group. So, while I am sure that transitioning increases risk of suicide, this particular study doesn't help much.
This is so very well put. Suicide lies! My friends have been taken in by those and they are both doctors. They take their autistic young adult daughter to a private clinic each month for testosterone shots because they tell me they have read loads of medical journals and reports that categorically say that their is a high risk of suicide among people with GD. They will not believe me when I try to tell them these are lies. They just won't listen. They say I am on a different path and they can't take the risk. Desperate people who have been taken in by lies.
Tragic, utterly tragic when people specifically trained in the scientific method give in to hysterical threats and flawed hypotheses without a shred of quantitative evidence.
Thank you for writing this. These insights can become slogans of our Parental protests that really must start becoming more organized and public than ever before. I need to memorize some of the lines in this essay. They are very effective rebuttals to some of the craziness I am exposed to about this issue. I'll bring this article to my doctor today, who played some kind of part that I am forbidden to inquire about due to "Hepa Laws" whom I know helped facilitate some of this "affirmative care" to my troubled adult child.
The manipulation of language is a prime signature of mental torture. Part of MkUltra Mind Control techniques that are disguised today as "psychology" and "progressive" politics. And vividly descripted in George Orwell's "fiction" book "1984."
This kind of mind control is running 24/7 - and unless we are aware of it and have strong guard rails on our sanity it's easy to become a hostage, and lose our identity, just like our lost children.
Perhaps next time I get a text from a certain family member who thinks they are doing ME a service in understanding REALITY - by referring to my troubled daughter as HE; I'll venture to use one of the lines from this essay. Like - "Telling a child their body is wrong is not kindness, it’s a betrayal of trust. It’s a perversion of science." Or “Affirmation” without truth is not compassion. “Care” that causes sterilization is not medicine. “Love” that agrees with despair is not love. "
I think the phrase "dead son or live daughter" is much worse than emotional blackmail. At a high level, a doctor or psycholgist is saying words and if a specific course of action is not followed, this physical healthy person (often in the room) will die. That sounds like a death threat. In most places, such threats are illegal. Concerning suicide, many states have laws explicitly forbidding aiding, encouraging, or advising a person to commit suicide. Introducing the topic of suicide and suggesting that suicide is inevitable unless a physical healthy patient immediately starts invasive, unproven "treatment" sounds like encouragement of suicide to me. Either way, it seems like uttering this phrase is breaking the law.
My daughter's therapist told me that if my order hurt herself it was all my fault. And even though she threatened to do this in front of the therapist, He Did nothing to help her
A very popular manipulation seen on trans influencer TikTok is tell children that they need to break the dead family bonds and embrace the glitter family. Children are encouraged to hide their new identities from their parents. The Trans groups use the same techniques as predatory groomer and cults. Love bombing, isolation, covert promises, half truths and redefining the language. It's a mind virus that rots from the inside out. By the time a parent finds out the child has been programmed to resist the truth. It's sickening that every trusted person in a child's life could be programmed to cheer body and mind carnage. The kindergarten teacher could be planting the seeds of gender dysphoria and starts social transition in secret, the pediatrician gives their "professional" opinion that it is very rare but must be affirmed to prevent suicide. The pediatrician not being an expert on Trans sends a referral to a psychologist who should be a neutral party helping a child to clear the confusion others have implanted in the confused child's brain instead rubber stamps the confusion then strong arms the parent into submission.
We were fed lines like that several times in some form by therapists and maybe one school counselor. I doubt it did much, but I did push back and told them I thought it would way more likely they would try to commit suicide if they medicalized and regretted it. I got at least one sheepish look. We did manage to find a couple of non affirming therapists through Therapy First. I like to think they helped but we shall see.
Good writing I have never met a psychologist who was compassionate. All these professionals, so-called professionals are just looking at their pocketbook and whatever will make the most money. Most people don’t care about other people unfortunately our kids were pushed into this psychology game through this. I have no respect for Psychologists at all. To me, they are heart of problem they need to all repent for harming other people, especially children, and young adult adults.
“And as Skrmetti and other lawsuits made their way through federal courts, some of the central medical claims girding the legal case for pediatric gender treatments — that decades of thorough study had found them to be safe and effective — began to unravel amid growing scrutiny by other doctors and experts. Last summer, thousands of emails and other documents released in a case challenging Alabama’s ban raised further questions about medical standards at the heart of the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit against Tennessee….
In most respects, the movement’s day in court felt like a retreat….Pressed on the longstanding claim that gender-affirming care prevented dysphoric teenagers from killing themselves, Strangio conceded the point. ‘There is no evidence,’ he told the court, ‘that this treatment reduces completed suicide,’ adding that ‘completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.’ Engaging with the conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, Strangio even uttered the phrase he considered anathema: ‘born male.’”
“How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost,” by Nicholas Confessore, June 19, 2025, New York Times
When this question came up with our child, I realized after a lot of reflection and prayer that for me, the real question was "would I rather have my daughter hate me NOW for not affirming her, or would I rather have her hate me later, for having affirmed and transitioned her, especially if she came to regret it?"
I chose having my daughter hate me now. It is painful. It is hard. We still have a relationship but there is so much tension there. But I could not live with the possibility of the other alternative - that I would have ANY hand in my daughter not accepting herself or in medically harming her.
Our path - the one all of us here are taking - is not the easy one. It is the hardest one, but it is the only one that is rooted in truth.
Thanks for this important article on the toughest issue there is. I noted the PITT slogan "My child is not your canvas", which resonated with me because puberty blockers effectively create a blank canvas for the artwork of the gender clinic surgeon. I've written about this previously for Genspect:
https://genspect.substack.com/p/puberty-blockers-creating-a-blank
I never call it "gender-affirming" or "care." I always call it "gender-enforcing" and "medical interventions."
I never use anyone's "professed pronouns." If I get corrected, I just pretend I didn't hear. If someone demands my attention over it, I play dumb. A person can only explain something so mind-numbingly stupid to an innocent bystander for a few seconds, before they simply give up.
And I never argue about whether I'm "kind." I argue about whether THEY'RE kind--to support the destruction of girls' and women's rights, to promote homophobic medical conversion therapy, to lie to innocent children about something so fundamental to themselves and this new world they live in, teach them sexism instead of encouraging them to fully embrace all their likes and dislikes as who they are, and disrupt their natural healthy development to push them into a lifetime of medical dependency.
The jargon used by this lobby was chosen with great care by highly-paid marketers with expertise in selling products to the vulnerable.
We can't use it.
In the USA, they can't make us.
I love this post. I think some of this is iatrogenic suicidalty. The children are told by a physician that they will be suicidal if they don’t transition. The non-suicidal untransitioned child then begins to self injure and express suicidal thoughts.
Telling a parent that their child might kill themself if they don't get the medicalisation they think they want is bad enough, but doing in front of said child is evil and should be illegal. Of course this will justify suicide in the child's mind, if it's coming from a therapist. What sort of person decides to become a therapist but then goes along with saying such a thing? It's the opposite of therapy
It would be grossly insensitive if not actual malpractice for any other treatment (e.g. "do you want a dead son who didn't take antidepressants or a live son who did?") but *for some reason* gender affirming care is an exception *and you must agree*
It does sound like malpractice (lawsuits anyone?) and maybe even outright fraud.
Yes, those things and more. They have to desperately keep up the narrative because as soon as it collapses a lot of people are going to have to explain why they went along with it
Absolutely. There are parallels:
"Echoes of Eugenics: What the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg Means for Us in the US
On the 75th anniversary of the trial of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg we examine Nazi medicine and gender-affirming care
Aug 30, 2022"
https://www.pittparents.com/p/echoes-of-eugenics-what-the-doctors?utm_source=publication-search
Great article, thanks! As it points out so well, there is no data to support the transition or suicide narrative— a fact admitted by the ACLU lawyer during oral arguments in Skirmetti, at the Supreme Court no less. Most therapists couldn’t point to data anyway, as they are just using a script of sorts handed to them by their professional associations, based no doubt, on a bullet list of ‘facts’, perhaps with carefully selected references. I loved the writer’s suggestion for an alternate way of framing the question. Would love to have something short that you could put on a sign? (eg, for puberty blockers, I think Genspect came up with ‘Puberty is not a disease’. ) May the writer and son find escape from this terrible situation. ❤️
Fraud is something that the government could go after...
All these trans healthcare authorities who make claims that they are preventing suicide with "Gender Affirming Care" do not even have real data to support that claim. Many will claim they are just "following orders/directions".
Maybe it is an issue for the FTC?
Fraud is something the government IS going after.
The FTC is requesting reports from anyone who has personal experience with this. They are going to prosecute this fraud and end it.
Yes, I am aware of efforts by the FTC. I think they are going after the practice of giving kids wrong sex hormones for "GAC" and putting down for insurance purposes that the patient has an endocrine disorder.
They need to go hard on taking down the whole thing for all ages as it does not change anyone's sex and is not a "suicide prevention" as it has been billed.
One really concerning aspect to this ideology is the heavy hand of government in states that affirm. Professionals are at risk of losing their license to practice if they don't tow the preferred party line. A parent can lose custody of their children if they don't affirm especially if the other parent is affirming.
Oregon has prevented people from fostering children if they don't affirm before hand for a hypothetical foster child who is trans. It's like a loyalty oath just to prove that you are not going to question the validity or cause of gender confusion.
California and Washington are trans sanctuary states where a child can seek transition medicine against a parents wishes.
It's like every safeguard that was put in place to protect children has been reversed to harm them. The key argument that is utilized to trans abuse a child is if we don't give them what they want without questioning they will die.
Same thing in British Columbia, Canada. A loyalty oath.
Although I completely agree about the risks of transitioning, I wish people stopped citing that 2011 Swedish study. I think we have enough good science and common sense without it. That particular study was not very well designed and is easy to take apart. The matched controls came from the general population. Of course they had lower rate of suicide - a healthy group would always do better than a group with a disease (be it depression, diabetes, or "gender dysphoria"). The years were 1973-2003 so presumably the interventions changed since then and TRAs will argue that modern interventions are much better. 19 times higher suicide risk is still based on "only" 10 total suicides in trans group. So, while I am sure that transitioning increases risk of suicide, this particular study doesn't help much.
This is so very well put. Suicide lies! My friends have been taken in by those and they are both doctors. They take their autistic young adult daughter to a private clinic each month for testosterone shots because they tell me they have read loads of medical journals and reports that categorically say that their is a high risk of suicide among people with GD. They will not believe me when I try to tell them these are lies. They just won't listen. They say I am on a different path and they can't take the risk. Desperate people who have been taken in by lies.
They are in the cult.
You can't argue people out of a cult. You have to work to end the cult itself, and then they will walk themselves out on their own.
Tragic, utterly tragic when people specifically trained in the scientific method give in to hysterical threats and flawed hypotheses without a shred of quantitative evidence.
Thank you for writing this. These insights can become slogans of our Parental protests that really must start becoming more organized and public than ever before. I need to memorize some of the lines in this essay. They are very effective rebuttals to some of the craziness I am exposed to about this issue. I'll bring this article to my doctor today, who played some kind of part that I am forbidden to inquire about due to "Hepa Laws" whom I know helped facilitate some of this "affirmative care" to my troubled adult child.
The manipulation of language is a prime signature of mental torture. Part of MkUltra Mind Control techniques that are disguised today as "psychology" and "progressive" politics. And vividly descripted in George Orwell's "fiction" book "1984."
This kind of mind control is running 24/7 - and unless we are aware of it and have strong guard rails on our sanity it's easy to become a hostage, and lose our identity, just like our lost children.
Perhaps next time I get a text from a certain family member who thinks they are doing ME a service in understanding REALITY - by referring to my troubled daughter as HE; I'll venture to use one of the lines from this essay. Like - "Telling a child their body is wrong is not kindness, it’s a betrayal of trust. It’s a perversion of science." Or “Affirmation” without truth is not compassion. “Care” that causes sterilization is not medicine. “Love” that agrees with despair is not love. "
I think the phrase "dead son or live daughter" is much worse than emotional blackmail. At a high level, a doctor or psycholgist is saying words and if a specific course of action is not followed, this physical healthy person (often in the room) will die. That sounds like a death threat. In most places, such threats are illegal. Concerning suicide, many states have laws explicitly forbidding aiding, encouraging, or advising a person to commit suicide. Introducing the topic of suicide and suggesting that suicide is inevitable unless a physical healthy patient immediately starts invasive, unproven "treatment" sounds like encouragement of suicide to me. Either way, it seems like uttering this phrase is breaking the law.
My daughter's therapist told me that if my order hurt herself it was all my fault. And even though she threatened to do this in front of the therapist, He Did nothing to help her
A very popular manipulation seen on trans influencer TikTok is tell children that they need to break the dead family bonds and embrace the glitter family. Children are encouraged to hide their new identities from their parents. The Trans groups use the same techniques as predatory groomer and cults. Love bombing, isolation, covert promises, half truths and redefining the language. It's a mind virus that rots from the inside out. By the time a parent finds out the child has been programmed to resist the truth. It's sickening that every trusted person in a child's life could be programmed to cheer body and mind carnage. The kindergarten teacher could be planting the seeds of gender dysphoria and starts social transition in secret, the pediatrician gives their "professional" opinion that it is very rare but must be affirmed to prevent suicide. The pediatrician not being an expert on Trans sends a referral to a psychologist who should be a neutral party helping a child to clear the confusion others have implanted in the confused child's brain instead rubber stamps the confusion then strong arms the parent into submission.
We were fed lines like that several times in some form by therapists and maybe one school counselor. I doubt it did much, but I did push back and told them I thought it would way more likely they would try to commit suicide if they medicalized and regretted it. I got at least one sheepish look. We did manage to find a couple of non affirming therapists through Therapy First. I like to think they helped but we shall see.
Good writing I have never met a psychologist who was compassionate. All these professionals, so-called professionals are just looking at their pocketbook and whatever will make the most money. Most people don’t care about other people unfortunately our kids were pushed into this psychology game through this. I have no respect for Psychologists at all. To me, they are heart of problem they need to all repent for harming other people, especially children, and young adult adults.