I feel nervous about the idea of my daughter using the men's room. She lives in an area where transgenderism is celebrated so she's fine there, most likely. But any travel out of state seems risky. As for clothes, one of the strangest things is that as a teen she liked shopping for women's clothes and often bought sundresses, along with jewelry. Now she talks about yard work and sits on a bench when she goes shopping with her partner. It's like she's adopting the persona of what she thinks a man should be like. Previously, it was anime, nose rings and the "gay boi" persona but that's given way to the more traditional stereotype as she entered her mid-twenties (though the nose ring remains).
Very insightful. I feel for your difficulties with your delusional and mentally ill son. All you can do is love him and try to proceed forward with your own life and try to find some joy for yourself.
Perhaps if we understood that autogynephilia, as a paraphilia, is a mental illness of sorts, we could be more compassionate. I don't mean the author, but the rest of society. Compassionate in a way that is helpful, however: affirming and going along with a delusion is not compassionate, but enabling. It is a pitiable way of being in the world, that of the autogynephile, for he cannot love, in a sexual-romantic way, another person fully because his own self-as-woman competes with any real-life partner.
Finding out that your son, or grandson, or brother--or your best friend's nephew, [let's call him Z] who you have known all his life and you love as if he were your own nephew--identifies as a transwoman and is probably autogynephilic, is a terrible blow. One always wants one's loved ones to be happy and well. If I had found out that my beloved Z had developed schizophrenia at the age of 24 instead of autogyhephilia (AGP), I would have been equally devastated. I know, because this same best friend, whose family is like my own, since we've been friends since the first grade, has a young cousin who developed schizophrenia at around the age of 18 or 19, and I remember crying when I found out he had been hospitalized because he kept seeing the devil and hearing evil voices.
But nobody thinks of this neurodivergent boy (who is now 25; let's call him Ñ] in the same terms as they do of Z. Z is looked at with disgust by most women who know what AGP is, because they are upset at the idea that they are, unwittingly and unwillingly, participating in his sexual fantasy, while Ñ is regarded with pity, and sometimes fear, because his fantasies, which are not sexual, can lead him to violent reactions, and his tether to reality is somewhat tenuous.
But there are many other fetishes and paraphilic men who make boys, girls, women and other men part of their sexual fantasies in their minds, and we never find out... this aspect of AGP, which is the most disgusting to women, is also the one we have less control over. We can keep men out of women's spaces with clear legislation, clear policies; and we can refer to cross-dressing men, whether they are AGP or not, with their sex-based pronouns when that is how we see them (some do pass, and we don't know what they are and perhaps never do find out we were sharing a bathroom with a trans-identified male) [if this were the general social more, they would not freak out and attack every single individual who did this], but we cannot, and should not, force them to not wear women's clothing. unless it is inappropriate. Or force them to not change their names if they want...
Medicalization, however, is something else. I still do not understand why it is legal and legitimate for people to pay a doctor to harm their healthy bodies, regardless of age. Why should this be legal? Even plastic surgeries that are potentially harmful, why are they legal and normalized?
Thank you for sharing your story. I can't tell you how much stress it caused me to see my son use the women's bathroom while with me. I avoided going to the bathroom when I was with him, or I would try to wait until I knew he had gone. I had to think about what I'd do if he was asked to leave a restaurant if he was kicked out. What would I do if I saw young girls go in after him? I couldn't believe I was having to ask these questions. I pray he sees himself how others really see him. I know how hard it is to see your son, who you dearly love, falling for a lie. It's heartbreaking.
I have long been fascinated by men who cross dress. I absolutely believe Bruce Jenner’s account of his cross dressing as a young boy and how he concealed it. I also had a very temporary roommate who was a cross dresser. His girlfriend showed me the pictures she discovered and after he felt comfortable around me, he would tiptoe into it by putting on women’s short shorts, tank top and sandals while he mowed the lawn in the backyard. One time, a male friend showed up and he ran inside to change clothes.
Listening to Dr. Laura one day, a male caller asked her “why can women dress in pants, etc (more male like clothes), and that’s ok, but it’s verboten for men to cross dress in women’s clothes?” I’ll never forget her answer. She asked the caller this question: “because when you have not cross dressed for awhile, you become very anxious, don’t you?” He said yes, that’s true.
My son announced that he was “transgender “ at 19. No indication whatsoever, nor any evidence of cross dressing (we lived in a small house and I was sadly, a helicopter parent).
He did however tell me that prior to this announcement, that he was into some “pretty sick porn” (his words).
He became extremely depressed at first year college and took an LGBTQ class to fulfill a women’s studies requirement, which led him to a friend group who introduced him to the Sacramento Gender Health Center where they immediately affirmed him and prescribed hormones.
So what Dr. Laura was saying is that males cross-dress to fulfill a sexual fetish, while females dress male-like for a variety of reasons, but sexual pleasure is not one of them. Hence the stigma.
In the past, cross-dressing was enjoyed in private, by men who lived typical male lives the rest of the time. Too bad it couldn't stay that way.
Very very few "trans women" (men) can pass as women, very few would fool someone both blind and deaf. With their 5 o'clock shadow, their height, their body shapes, they are less effective than most transvestites.
That a man 6'4" tall thinks he can look like a woman underscores the severity of this delusion.
The only legal treatment for the false malady of gender dysphoria should be psychiatric reconciliation with biological sex. Meanwhile, don't allow them on planes.
That's really the rub. I could learn to live with a situation where the medical interventions worked. But all they are is a date with Mr. Brownstone. A little wouldn't do it, so a little got more and more.
And bones get less dense, cancer gets much more likely, brain function receeds. But the next "treatment" is going to be the magic and fix everything.
Getting a kid to come to realize the online folks who make them yearn for medicalization don't give a crap about them, but want to justify their own decisions is basically impossible. It's the cure to everything to them.
thanks for the apology. I really appreciate that. I agree with you that the reliability of sources matter. I have listened to Jordan Peterson a lot and find the interviews he does, by and large, are great and he digs deep with folks. He has introduced me to many active thinkers from Dr. Chris
Palmer to Canadian lawyer Bruce Pardy to psychiatrist Dr. Ian Gilchrist. Of interest to PITT readers he has featured interviews on transgender ideology with Michael Shellenberger and the Kolstads, a couple who lost their daughter to trans ideology. But I will look into what you say.
I think this discussion of autogynephilia is really oversimplifying what happens to boys and young men who are sucked into gender ideology. You have to ask yourself, where were all these "autogynephile" autistic or otherwise mentally ill boys BEFORE the advent of social media? Many in the gender-critical sphere like to vilify the boys, but why is no one claiming the girls have a paraphilia too? The root for both boys and girls is the same; it's saturation in the media, especially social media, marketing by the gender industry, internet porn and autism/mental illness that combine to create the perfect victim. Please stop blaming the victim.
Gender identity disorder appears in one out of 30,000 boys and one out of 100,000 girls. That's one in 65,000, or about 5000 in the entire USA.
Yet that "trans" cult claims something around one in 65, 1.5% of the population, which is an eerily exact thousand times the reality. This has increased by over 4000% since 2009 and tracks the emergence of social media as precisely as lung cancer tracks adoption of cigarettes, but without the 20 year offset.
I don't dispute the connection to depression, just the direction of causality.
The roots are different for boys and girls when there is a sexual element, because male sexuality is different from female sexuality. But they are also different between boys and girls. As any mental illness, there are many paths into gender dysphoria. And many paths into the desire to change one's sex even without gender dysphoria. The hypersexualization of women; the devaluing of masculine traits and heterosexual men in general (especially white men); the increasing isolation of boys and young men of certain personalities, who socialize only in online worlds; the culture wars that pit not just ethnic/racial groups, but the sexes, against each other; and rampant individualism, are, I think, a lethal sociocultural combination that feeds the phenomenon of autogynephilia.
Cross-dressing can only exist in certain types of societies, however. Like anorexia, which does not exist in every culture. If women are not a sexualized object of desire, but simply women, no sexual arousal would be attached to women's clothing, for one thing. In that case, cross-dressing would make no sense. Perhaps there are men in tribal societies in the Amazon who are autogynephiles inside their heads, and never express their desire to be women? Somehow, if that were true, anthropologists or missionaries or visitors or men from those groups who migrate to cities would have spilled the beans...
Same thing goes for gender dysphoria. If a society does not have strict sex stereotypes and is more open about homosexuality and gender non-conformity, there would be few people who cannot tolerate being what they are (male or female): puberty and self-acceptance would lead to a resolution...
I read Blanchard's theories many years ago, esp.his paradigm that divided men into two categories, gay and straight. Would you care to expand on your comment and provide .more context?
From the National Library of Medicine. “Nearly 3% of men in Western countries may experience autogynephilia; its most severe manifestation, MtF transsexualism, is rare but increasing in prevalence.” Why do you think it is “increasing in prevalence..?”
Dear Parent, thank you for your very honest discussion. It was painfully helpful to me. I have two beloved grandsons who are (as far as I know) still pretending to be women. (They have forced alienation on me.) Understanding that autogynephilic thinking may be part and parcel of their makeup is necessary to be able to accept more of the truth. What drives them to present themselves to ridicule in this manner is so very alien to me. How fooled they have been to even try this masquerade. (Levine!) I have been avoiding acknowledging this. What grandma even wants to contemplate such a thing in the dear boys that she helped to raise? My prayers for them and for all of us having to delve into human psychology and sexuality is to see behind all the emotion and the wishing of the impossible. I want my grandsons back so badly, and I want them to be healthy and fulfilled in life, not to be the medical and mental disasters in the making that they are now. My prayers will continue, for your family, for all families sharing our pain and our questions. May God have mercy on us all as truth comes closer every day. Thank you.
My grandsons are 33 and 28 years old. My son is the father of both, they have different mothers. I do not know the extent of medicalization due to our family being completely broken apart and they will not have anything to do with me. t has been 10 years since the youngest one started down his path, a shorter time with the older who started out saying he was homosexual. They are both injured; with childhoods of abandonment, abuse, and mental illness. I pray for them, and wait for truth to come to them, as it will. I yearn so for them, as I know who they really are. Love as taught by Jesus does not die and I will love them forever.
I'm sorry you're going through this. The cult demands that anyone who is not a believer must be cast aside. Many of us parents on here are estranged because we don't use a name or pronouns, we know our sons and they are not trans.
Thank you for sharing your story. I'm sorry for the burden this has created.
Two comments really stood out to me: "when an autogynephilic man demands another person treat him as a woman he is demanding that they participate in his paraphilia. That is wrong." This is so clarifying. And how do we know which "trans" people are autogynephilic and which aren't?
The other comment: "I wish he would find the courage to live a life that is not centered around himself."
They call themselves lesbians. They have a fetish for "lesbians" in porn and want to role play as lesbians. (A woman who has sex with a man, even if he's wearing a dress, is not a lesbian.)
@Gemma - Every time I hear that it reminds me of the silly bar joke, told by a hetero man attracted to a lesbian: "I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body!"
I feel nervous about the idea of my daughter using the men's room. She lives in an area where transgenderism is celebrated so she's fine there, most likely. But any travel out of state seems risky. As for clothes, one of the strangest things is that as a teen she liked shopping for women's clothes and often bought sundresses, along with jewelry. Now she talks about yard work and sits on a bench when she goes shopping with her partner. It's like she's adopting the persona of what she thinks a man should be like. Previously, it was anime, nose rings and the "gay boi" persona but that's given way to the more traditional stereotype as she entered her mid-twenties (though the nose ring remains).
This may be of some comfort or help…. https://www.youtube.com/@UteHeggenTranswidowHeals
"I wish that he would find a life that is not centered around himself".
Very insightful. I feel for your difficulties with your delusional and mentally ill son. All you can do is love him and try to proceed forward with your own life and try to find some joy for yourself.
Perhaps if we understood that autogynephilia, as a paraphilia, is a mental illness of sorts, we could be more compassionate. I don't mean the author, but the rest of society. Compassionate in a way that is helpful, however: affirming and going along with a delusion is not compassionate, but enabling. It is a pitiable way of being in the world, that of the autogynephile, for he cannot love, in a sexual-romantic way, another person fully because his own self-as-woman competes with any real-life partner.
Finding out that your son, or grandson, or brother--or your best friend's nephew, [let's call him Z] who you have known all his life and you love as if he were your own nephew--identifies as a transwoman and is probably autogynephilic, is a terrible blow. One always wants one's loved ones to be happy and well. If I had found out that my beloved Z had developed schizophrenia at the age of 24 instead of autogyhephilia (AGP), I would have been equally devastated. I know, because this same best friend, whose family is like my own, since we've been friends since the first grade, has a young cousin who developed schizophrenia at around the age of 18 or 19, and I remember crying when I found out he had been hospitalized because he kept seeing the devil and hearing evil voices.
But nobody thinks of this neurodivergent boy (who is now 25; let's call him Ñ] in the same terms as they do of Z. Z is looked at with disgust by most women who know what AGP is, because they are upset at the idea that they are, unwittingly and unwillingly, participating in his sexual fantasy, while Ñ is regarded with pity, and sometimes fear, because his fantasies, which are not sexual, can lead him to violent reactions, and his tether to reality is somewhat tenuous.
But there are many other fetishes and paraphilic men who make boys, girls, women and other men part of their sexual fantasies in their minds, and we never find out... this aspect of AGP, which is the most disgusting to women, is also the one we have less control over. We can keep men out of women's spaces with clear legislation, clear policies; and we can refer to cross-dressing men, whether they are AGP or not, with their sex-based pronouns when that is how we see them (some do pass, and we don't know what they are and perhaps never do find out we were sharing a bathroom with a trans-identified male) [if this were the general social more, they would not freak out and attack every single individual who did this], but we cannot, and should not, force them to not wear women's clothing. unless it is inappropriate. Or force them to not change their names if they want...
Medicalization, however, is something else. I still do not understand why it is legal and legitimate for people to pay a doctor to harm their healthy bodies, regardless of age. Why should this be legal? Even plastic surgeries that are potentially harmful, why are they legal and normalized?
Thank you for sharing your story. I can't tell you how much stress it caused me to see my son use the women's bathroom while with me. I avoided going to the bathroom when I was with him, or I would try to wait until I knew he had gone. I had to think about what I'd do if he was asked to leave a restaurant if he was kicked out. What would I do if I saw young girls go in after him? I couldn't believe I was having to ask these questions. I pray he sees himself how others really see him. I know how hard it is to see your son, who you dearly love, falling for a lie. It's heartbreaking.
Just my thoughts.
I have long been fascinated by men who cross dress. I absolutely believe Bruce Jenner’s account of his cross dressing as a young boy and how he concealed it. I also had a very temporary roommate who was a cross dresser. His girlfriend showed me the pictures she discovered and after he felt comfortable around me, he would tiptoe into it by putting on women’s short shorts, tank top and sandals while he mowed the lawn in the backyard. One time, a male friend showed up and he ran inside to change clothes.
Listening to Dr. Laura one day, a male caller asked her “why can women dress in pants, etc (more male like clothes), and that’s ok, but it’s verboten for men to cross dress in women’s clothes?” I’ll never forget her answer. She asked the caller this question: “because when you have not cross dressed for awhile, you become very anxious, don’t you?” He said yes, that’s true.
My son announced that he was “transgender “ at 19. No indication whatsoever, nor any evidence of cross dressing (we lived in a small house and I was sadly, a helicopter parent).
He did however tell me that prior to this announcement, that he was into some “pretty sick porn” (his words).
He became extremely depressed at first year college and took an LGBTQ class to fulfill a women’s studies requirement, which led him to a friend group who introduced him to the Sacramento Gender Health Center where they immediately affirmed him and prescribed hormones.
So what Dr. Laura was saying is that males cross-dress to fulfill a sexual fetish, while females dress male-like for a variety of reasons, but sexual pleasure is not one of them. Hence the stigma.
In the past, cross-dressing was enjoyed in private, by men who lived typical male lives the rest of the time. Too bad it couldn't stay that way.
According to my wife, women wear "men's" clothing to have pockets.
"He says he has to have medical interventions so he can “pass” as a woman."
He never will.
Very very few "trans women" (men) can pass as women, very few would fool someone both blind and deaf. With their 5 o'clock shadow, their height, their body shapes, they are less effective than most transvestites.
That a man 6'4" tall thinks he can look like a woman underscores the severity of this delusion.
The only legal treatment for the false malady of gender dysphoria should be psychiatric reconciliation with biological sex. Meanwhile, don't allow them on planes.
That's really the rub. I could learn to live with a situation where the medical interventions worked. But all they are is a date with Mr. Brownstone. A little wouldn't do it, so a little got more and more.
And bones get less dense, cancer gets much more likely, brain function receeds. But the next "treatment" is going to be the magic and fix everything.
Getting a kid to come to realize the online folks who make them yearn for medicalization don't give a crap about them, but want to justify their own decisions is basically impossible. It's the cure to everything to them.
"If we cut off your genitalia, your whole life will be one long smile"
"which would you rather have, a live son or a dead daughter?"
"it doesn't cost you anything to Be Kind and use their 'preferred pronouns'"
Imprison these people.
Well you are absolutely wrong about that! Catholicism doesn’t advocate for changing one’s body to fit one’s feelings
thanks for the apology. I really appreciate that. I agree with you that the reliability of sources matter. I have listened to Jordan Peterson a lot and find the interviews he does, by and large, are great and he digs deep with folks. He has introduced me to many active thinkers from Dr. Chris
Palmer to Canadian lawyer Bruce Pardy to psychiatrist Dr. Ian Gilchrist. Of interest to PITT readers he has featured interviews on transgender ideology with Michael Shellenberger and the Kolstads, a couple who lost their daughter to trans ideology. But I will look into what you say.
He also has an older one with Stephanie Davies-Arie. If you haven't listened to that one, they have great insights with children development.
I think this discussion of autogynephilia is really oversimplifying what happens to boys and young men who are sucked into gender ideology. You have to ask yourself, where were all these "autogynephile" autistic or otherwise mentally ill boys BEFORE the advent of social media? Many in the gender-critical sphere like to vilify the boys, but why is no one claiming the girls have a paraphilia too? The root for both boys and girls is the same; it's saturation in the media, especially social media, marketing by the gender industry, internet porn and autism/mental illness that combine to create the perfect victim. Please stop blaming the victim.
Hmm, what about the other 99% who don't fall for it?
The only alternative is blaming is affirming, and affirming is out of the question.
Hospitalize them.
No, it's 99.9%.
Gender identity disorder appears in one out of 30,000 boys and one out of 100,000 girls. That's one in 65,000, or about 5000 in the entire USA.
Yet that "trans" cult claims something around one in 65, 1.5% of the population, which is an eerily exact thousand times the reality. This has increased by over 4000% since 2009 and tracks the emergence of social media as precisely as lung cancer tracks adoption of cigarettes, but without the 20 year offset.
I don't dispute the connection to depression, just the direction of causality.
If you don't know how to use a search engine, find an eight-year-old to show you
I'll spot you the first two paragraphs: Black's Medical Dictionary, 2017 edition.
The rest, you can do exactly as I did.
The roots are different for boys and girls when there is a sexual element, because male sexuality is different from female sexuality. But they are also different between boys and girls. As any mental illness, there are many paths into gender dysphoria. And many paths into the desire to change one's sex even without gender dysphoria. The hypersexualization of women; the devaluing of masculine traits and heterosexual men in general (especially white men); the increasing isolation of boys and young men of certain personalities, who socialize only in online worlds; the culture wars that pit not just ethnic/racial groups, but the sexes, against each other; and rampant individualism, are, I think, a lethal sociocultural combination that feeds the phenomenon of autogynephilia.
Cross-dressing can only exist in certain types of societies, however. Like anorexia, which does not exist in every culture. If women are not a sexualized object of desire, but simply women, no sexual arousal would be attached to women's clothing, for one thing. In that case, cross-dressing would make no sense. Perhaps there are men in tribal societies in the Amazon who are autogynephiles inside their heads, and never express their desire to be women? Somehow, if that were true, anthropologists or missionaries or visitors or men from those groups who migrate to cities would have spilled the beans...
Same thing goes for gender dysphoria. If a society does not have strict sex stereotypes and is more open about homosexuality and gender non-conformity, there would be few people who cannot tolerate being what they are (male or female): puberty and self-acceptance would lead to a resolution...
Charles Moser has some research on this.
I read Blanchard's theories many years ago, esp.his paradigm that divided men into two categories, gay and straight. Would you care to expand on your comment and provide .more context?
You said "None of them could explain why they felt they were a woman:"
So how do they know they want to live like a woman??? Who is selling them that it's better than what they are now?
From the National Library of Medicine. “Nearly 3% of men in Western countries may experience autogynephilia; its most severe manifestation, MtF transsexualism, is rare but increasing in prevalence.” Why do you think it is “increasing in prevalence..?”
Dear Parent, thank you for your very honest discussion. It was painfully helpful to me. I have two beloved grandsons who are (as far as I know) still pretending to be women. (They have forced alienation on me.) Understanding that autogynephilic thinking may be part and parcel of their makeup is necessary to be able to accept more of the truth. What drives them to present themselves to ridicule in this manner is so very alien to me. How fooled they have been to even try this masquerade. (Levine!) I have been avoiding acknowledging this. What grandma even wants to contemplate such a thing in the dear boys that she helped to raise? My prayers for them and for all of us having to delve into human psychology and sexuality is to see behind all the emotion and the wishing of the impossible. I want my grandsons back so badly, and I want them to be healthy and fulfilled in life, not to be the medical and mental disasters in the making that they are now. My prayers will continue, for your family, for all families sharing our pain and our questions. May God have mercy on us all as truth comes closer every day. Thank you.
Love, Indio
2?? In the same family?! what ages are they & are they medicalized?
My grandsons are 33 and 28 years old. My son is the father of both, they have different mothers. I do not know the extent of medicalization due to our family being completely broken apart and they will not have anything to do with me. t has been 10 years since the youngest one started down his path, a shorter time with the older who started out saying he was homosexual. They are both injured; with childhoods of abandonment, abuse, and mental illness. I pray for them, and wait for truth to come to them, as it will. I yearn so for them, as I know who they really are. Love as taught by Jesus does not die and I will love them forever.
Gracious. Such a long time & so much pain 🩷
I'm sorry you're going through this. The cult demands that anyone who is not a believer must be cast aside. Many of us parents on here are estranged because we don't use a name or pronouns, we know our sons and they are not trans.
Thank you for sharing your story. I'm sorry for the burden this has created.
Two comments really stood out to me: "when an autogynephilic man demands another person treat him as a woman he is demanding that they participate in his paraphilia. That is wrong." This is so clarifying. And how do we know which "trans" people are autogynephilic and which aren't?
The other comment: "I wish he would find the courage to live a life that is not centered around himself."
They call themselves lesbians. They have a fetish for "lesbians" in porn and want to role play as lesbians. (A woman who has sex with a man, even if he's wearing a dress, is not a lesbian.)
@Gemma - Every time I hear that it reminds me of the silly bar joke, told by a hetero man attracted to a lesbian: "I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body!"
although having sex with someone who is wearing a full dress is pretty impressive, I must admit!
I love it when there's a card in the comments deck . . .