Victimhood Transcends Achievement

When my son was accepted to college, a professor told him that he was a prime candidate for an academic scholarship granted to students demonstrating high achievement. Only after completing the exhaustive application process was he told that the department did away with that merit award. Actually, he wasn’t told. He was ghosted and had to keep prodding various administrators until eventually getting a response. They had no intention of notifying him, even as an afterthought.

This ghosting was just the latest in a long string of institutional failures, whose repetition has normalized a consistent message to my son: There is no place for you.

From a young age, my son struggled to connect socially. He was gregarious, but his atypical prosody, formal language, and aversion to risky physical or rough-and-tumble play combined with an intense interest in and preference for academic subjects made him dissimilar to his peers and a target for bullying. And yet, he had no filter and was unburdened by the self-consciousness that inhibited other kids. Above all, he was comfortable in his own skin and never challenged or doubted his gender. It never occurred to him to be anything other than who he was.

Although he struggled with feelings of not belonging throughout childhood, there was still enough positive in his life to outweigh the negative. Thanks to a few teachers, mentors, parents, and friends, he was able to keep his head above water.

But the scales tipped when he started high school. He was academically advanced, and while his mother and I delayed his radical acceleration as much as possible for social reasons, he eventually exhausted the available curricula and started high school younger than his peers.

Several factors compounded at once, and the things that he was celebrated for and was proud of became social liabilities. Everything about him stood out at a time when he just wanted to blend in. He was bullied. His attraction to girls confused him, and he bore the onset of puberty with no close friends to share the experience with. His sexual maturation very likely felt like a monster was awakening inside him, the same monster he saw in the older, stronger, sometimes aggressive and often celebrated boys, the same boys who bullied him or froze him out. At the time, I saw him growing more withdrawn. What I did not know was that he was adrift and developing a growing self-hatred. He perceived the essence of who he was, who he always was, as the source of his suffering.

Who does a young man who is learning to hate himself look to? Where are the celebrated men who were once like him, a sensitive, quirky, expressive, curious boy?

He did not find his answer, but he did find community and affirmation online among acquaintances anonymized by screen names and avatars. He found certainty in the confidence of self-appointed experts who suggested his pain and confusion was because he had not realized that he was actually trans. The good news was that resolving this confusion just required a self-diagnosis simple enough for a child to be guided through. And the online personas secretly sent him hormones to self-administer without parental consent or medical oversight.

Was this really a solution? It certainly provided an escape. If he identified as trans, he would gain the social capital that eluded him before. So, despite his comfortable and privileged upbringing, his newly claimed membership in a self-righteous community identifying as oppressed became the cheat code to control how others responded to and acknowledged him.

This ideology may not have been explicitly engineered to manipulate boys like my son, but it has proven an effective means of exerting control over the vulnerable, capitalizing on the dopamine surge people get from being conspicuous social justice warriors. Affirming someone is the laziest, lowest risk way for a person to mash the like button for themselves. Respond to the sudden red flags waving in this person I’ve known for their entire life? No thanks. Clapping is so much louder and easier than caring! Did you see my repost? My flag? My yard sign? Mission Accomplished!

When vulnerable kids like mine start expressing doubt, who will show up to help ground them? Who will give a rigid thinker permission to change his mind, letting him know it is a sign of strength and resilience?

It should be the parents, but online trans orthodoxy employs tactics to “de-foo” its initiates, to disengage from one’s “family of origin”. Vilifying parents creates a vacuum of trust and authority that influencers are free to inhabit. I learned this from a video explainer my son incidentally shared with me about online recruitment techniques used by the alt-right, seemingly not realizing that his trans allies ran the same playbook on him.

Exercising critical thinking and applying logic is something neurodivergent kids excel at, and is, in part, one of the reasons my son never felt like he belonged. But when a school, doctor, or peer group is performatively inclusive by affirming, it excludes the kid questioning whether he should be who he is or declare who he is. We’re perpetuating tribalism and calling it empathy.

Last summer, my son applied for aid awarded to scholars in crisis, an assistance program for homeless students cut off by their parents and left with no resources of their own. That was nowhere close to his actual situation, but he started couch surfing with allies regardless, because being invested in a victim narrative made him an attractive project for people seizing opportunities to virtue signal. This extends to institutions as well, since he informed me that he was granted gift aid for tuition, housing, and a stipend for other expenses. For the entire year.

So the lessons he learned from college, which disastrously reinforce the messaging he received in high school, are that your innate intellectual ability is not appreciated, and merit-based achievement has been eliminated. However, if you identify as a constituent of a protected population, you will unlock accommodations and be provided for.

Ever since leaving home to manifest the crisis he manufactured, my son might be cooling on being trans. But if he is privately harboring doubts, the literal, rule-following, logical aspects of his personality will keep him maintaining a trans identity because the school elevates and praises him if he remains the victim he had to convince himself he was in order to belong, while it eliminated the aid and accolades he could have earned honestly. And every patronizing interaction pushes him back into the hole.

Can’t he simply be who he always was, doing what comes naturally and gives gave him confidence and pride? How do we make that path rewarding?