When My Teenager Came Out As Transgender

Reposted, with permission, from the author’s substack.

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“I am NOT a girl. ”

That was the text our 14 year old sent us.  This came after an hour of her being locked in the bathroom, crying and telling us to “go away”, as my wife and I tried to coax her out and talk to her. 

She couldn’t even bring herself to say it, she had to text it to us.  Not because she was embarrassed, but because she was afraid.  Afraid that we would hate her, that we would kick her out of our home.  “You won’t accept me.” “You always say that it’s wrong.” “You don’t want me to be a boy.” “You aren’t going to let me be who I am.” Those are the texts that followed.

My response was one question.  “Can I give you a hug?”  Not because I wanted to celebrate what she had told us, but because she needed it.  My child was scared and hurting, terrified that we hated her, and I needed to give her a hug.  Ok, maybe I needed a hug too. 

The next day, I tested positive for COVID and had to quarantine myself in a bedroom at home.  Being quarantined away from my family during this crucial time was brutal for me.  We were heading into a 4 day holiday weekend, and my office was closed, so there was nothing for me to do.  My teen had just delivered some earth-shattering news that I did not know how to comprehend.  I wasn’t sure what I should do, or how I could help my family, but I knew I needed to do something even though I was separated from them.  So I researched what “being trans” really meant.  I studied.  I read the Bible.  I prayed.

That was a year ago.

The days, weeks, and months that followed were hard. My daughter began to suffer from deep depression and anxiety.  Something as simple and routine as going to a restaurant or church would send her into panic attacks.  I have had to restrain her to keep her from grabbing kitchen knives and hurting herself.  Four police officers showed up at our house on Father’s Day looking for her because she told her friends she was going to kill herself and one of them called the police (thankfully!).  She studied the traits and symptoms of Autism and ADHD, and began mimicking them in an effort to convince her therapist that she had them.  She began starving herself, to the point of becoming anorexic.  At one point her medical doctor, who is very pro-LGBTQ, started discussing having her committed to an in-patient psychiatric facility.  We watched her turn away from everything she loved, and everyone that had ever loved her, including us.

I needed to help my daughter, I needed to “fix this”.  I needed to figure out what was going on, and why, and what I could do about it.  We would come to understand that there was more going on here than we initially realized, and this situation was much more complex.  This was not necessarily a matter of something my wife and I did or did not do in our daughter’s upbringing.  There was something deeper going on. 

There is a lot of confusion out there.

As the year went on, I began to see more and more people start speaking out about this.  Parents. Medical doctors. Even people in the LGBTQ community, many of whom had actually gone through the “transition” process of hormones and surgery and were now “de-transitioning” back to their birth sex and openly speaking out about it.  I learned about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, and how psychologists in Britain reported a 4000% increase in cases in less than a decade, with 800 dysphoric children in England being administered puberty blocking drugs in 2018, including some as young as 10 years old. I learned that an estimated almost 18% of 15- to 17-year-old high school girls (predominantly white middle class) now identify as some form of LGBTQ+. I read where in 2020, half the student body at Evergreen State College was identifying as LGBTQ, and in 2021 nearly 1 in 10 students in over a dozen public high schools in Pittsburgh identified as “gender-diverse” (differing from their actual sex). I exchanged emails and had Zoom calls with professors, psychologists, and researchers from all over the world, some of whom referred to this as “the new anorexia.”  I learned about Affirmation Therapy and Conversion Therapy and the dangers and pitfalls of each one.

And what I learned scared me. Knowing that my daughter willingly wanted to cause herself irreparable damage over something that some are considering a social contagion, and others are calling a cult, was terrifying to me. Everywhere I turned for answers led to more questions, and most everywhere I turned for help seemed to be a dead end. There is so much polarizing hatred and confusion on this topic that it’s hard to find the truth.

You Are Not Alone.

If you are going through this now, know that you are not alone.  At times it may feel like it, but you are not alone.  In fact, there are many, many families going through this every day, but a lot of them are afraid to speak out or don’t know where to turn for help.  As one therapist I spoke to put it, “Because of the current social climate, parents are either waiving the trans banner and shouting from the rooftops, or they are hiding out of fear.”

Whatever your situation, whatever your beliefs, you need to seek the truth.  You need to do what is right for your child, and that may not mean just giving in to whatever they’ve told you. While many people are applauding and championing this transgender movement, there are also those in the medical profession that are speaking out against it, including the former president of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health and president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, both of whom are transgender themselves.

There are therapists out there that believe in addressing a child’s mental health issues first. There are doctors out there that do not agree with a child’s self diagnosis to receive drugs and surgery. You just have to be diligent in finding them.

Our Story Is Not Over. 

We are still in the middle of this, trying to navigate through it and help our child. My faith in God tells me that we will come through this stronger and in a better place as a family. I also know that I will not hide out of fear any longer. I have an obligation to speak out and help other fathers who are going through this, or may be about to. I have started compiling lists of resources that I will be publishing soon, in hopes that others may be able find these to get some answers.