60 Comments

Yesterday I opened a cupboard that held years of old schoolwork and pictures. What to do with these?? He says that person is dead. To me that person was funny and energetic and too smart for his own good. Full of energy and big feels. I don’t know this angry, strange person he has become. This person who has left us behind and won’t speak to us. This person who says he is no longer that person. What to do with 34 years of history? How can he be both alive and dead?

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While we breathe we hope! Somehow it will all make sense one day.

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Oct 14, 2022·edited Oct 14, 2022

Thank you for distilling the durability of hope as a liferaft for parents while their child is lost in a surreal storm. I, too, hope my son wakes up to reality someday, and he and our family can heal. The challenge is to balance hope for tomorrow with living life as fully as I can today -- despite the pain and uncertainty that the trans cult inflicts on parents.

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So beautifully & perfectly written. After several years of hoping that he'd snap out of this "deadname" phase, and finally convincing my only son that I don't hate him (because his "community" said I do), I decided to accept that my son had died. I cried all night, and when I woke up I realised he is not dead. My son too, is still alive. Love & hugs.

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I can totally relate. My son didn't ask for a funeral, but saying I dead name him, his surgeries, saying that I'm upset because I was living vicariously through him before (I had my own professional career before this mess). I still have all his pics up in house, birth through high school. Do I take them down??? I love that person and want him back badly.

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For now I had to remove the pictures as they only made me want to reach out to him, daily. I miss him so much. He won’t speak to us. There was no event that caused this, he just stopped responding. It’s not the trans thing that is the hardest, it is the way he has treated all of his family. We have been there for him through so many difficult things and to be thrown out now is so heartbreaking. I can’t understand what he won’t say.

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So very sorry. We are all going thru Hell with what these kids are doing. Mine turned 25 today -- he's in Arizona, I'm in IL. But I miss the child that was mine.

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Oct 16, 2022·edited Oct 16, 2022

Sending you compassion.Unwanted and unexplained estrangement is incredibly painful. It's cruel and unfair. It speaks to the power of the trans cult to disable even primal prior attachment to parents. With its narcissistic core, the trans cult erodes empathy of those it ensnares.

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Oct 14, 2022·edited Oct 19, 2022

I debated about this, but chose to leave up the photos of my son in the hallway. He may be trying to erase HIMself, but I do not deserve to have my memories deleted. Though I did remove photos in places where I would see his healthy pre-trans-cult self too frequently because it was just too painful. But I have stored them all, so I can still see them from time to time when I can bear the loss while appreciating what was.

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Thank you! I appreciate your feedback. All his pictures are still out. None of his "trans" pics.

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The quest is for finding ways to keep relating positively. In psychology this is called 'rapport'. It seems the cult is fundamentally able to tap into the natural impuls of children in puberty to define their identity independent of family.

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There's so much talk about what's happening to these children and yet very little discussion about the psychological pain parents endure. The idea we do not care is devastating, we question what's happening because we want to protect our children. We know the teenage years are about exploring identity, sexuality, risk taking, challenging convention.

The promise of being someone else for teens experiencing isolation, bullying, neurdiversity issues, earing disorders or other comorbidities has been part of this ideolgical capture. Most of us invisaged teen risks being drawn to rebellion and the wrong crowd . This time the wrong crowd are in some case adults, doctors, teachers, counsellors guided by organisations promoting trans ideology and the drugs being dealt are hormones, surgeries and mental distress.

I recently read a study stating 5-7 post transition there risk of suicide is over 30 percent. We fear for our children's health and futures, not only the threats in the here and now, but in their futures. Being a parent is a lifetime responsibility, yet when our kids are most vulnerable they are encourages to disregard their parents, their lives and their identities.

Health risks associated with puberty blockers and transition need to be part of mainstream education and information, as do the testemonies of detransitioners.

It's not 'kind' to see families torn apart and young, healthy peoply being signed up to a lifetime of medication, before they've had chance to discover who they are.

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do you know the name of that study 30%

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I felt the same. After three plus years of this the grieving is easier but I have a living breathing ghost of a daughter who haunts and taunts me.

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Very beautiful! We stand with you.

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Beautifully written. It is comforting to not feel alone in this battle. However there is great sadness in the number of us going through this. It is a constant worry and heaviness that never leaves.

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Thank you so much for this, it is what i do for my daughter, the light will always be on, and I wait for her return home, even though it kills me physically and mentally, I pray and hope and keep the light burning.

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Thanks for sharing your hope. I plastered many large framed photos of my children growing up in the hallways, a reminder of who my daughter really is, was and will always be, my daughter. That’s a reality she can remember everyday as she walks through the hallways. It helps me remember who she really is under the baggie boy clothes and her ridiculously fake boy walk in public.

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We cast all of our old family photos to our TV screen as a screen saver. I will never take them down. She can dress like a homeless person. Lie to herself. Seek a mastectomy. She will always be a girl, a daughter, a sister. The lights will always be on here.

Beautiful piece.

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Kids talk funny/weird. They always have and always will. Nowhere is it written to translate what they say immediately into law and medicine. "Believe the children" is a slogan, not an injunction.

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I don't like the narrative that the natal gender person is dead/gone that the trans activists promote. It's the same person with hormones and plastic surgery - not a new person.

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I saw n interview about gender dysphoria in which the host said sex is boy ir girl from birth. Gender Ideology is based on feeling. I fully agree

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This is part of what makes it a cult religion.

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