This article is reposted with permission. I’m the mother of a “trans” identified teenage daughter. My daughter has been confused in this way since she was twelve-and-a-half, after an epiphany from an internet search at a friend’s house. She informed me of this when she was just thirteen. She’s now 16. It has been a real roller-coaster ride, filled with arguments and heartache, and years of research on my part. I’ve been struggling to figure out how to put out my first Sub-stack article on the topic of Gender and Transition.
..."they are being fed so much misinformation, by their schools and universities, by the Government, by large corporations, by the medical community and therapists, by both social media and mainstream media, and by their friends and neighbors,"...
Yes, that is the same situation in Japan in these days.
Japan is a little behind in transgenderism. But certainly a similar situation is beginning to occur.
They are giving misinformation to people, especially children in unstable times of distress, without any qualms. What a horrible time we live in.
I give up trying to make any sense of all this transgender stuff. I am starting the year feeling depressed after having covid. I just had a Skype call with my 23 year old male identifying daughter. We never talk about anything related to this insane gender change nonsense. I feel really alone. I am not allowed to say what I think as most people now are hooked on the gender lies. This feels like persecution. I am not allowed to say anything bad about testosterone as it is a prescription drug on which my daughter depends. I am supposed to talk about her as though she were my son. I can not deny my integrity and embrace lies just because everybody else around does. It is a lonely path being a parent and there is no hope of her bringing a child into the world. We parents lose our children plus hope of grandchildren.
Lovely well written thoughts. As the mother of a now 19yr old "identifying as trans" I am finding the journry so loney. Only recently found this site. The volume of youngsters especially girls that are now trans is so alarming. I am in Australia where we also have schools socially transitioning children without parental consent. My grief for the loss of my daughter is over powering. I feel there is no one here for me, therapists make it about her & ask why wouldnt I except this ???
I have been thinking about "consent" very much in the context of gender identity ideology but also in the broader contexts of feminis. Three things, specifically, perhaps all of them are related to women's sex-based oppression: (1) the normalization/celebration/resignification of prostitution/porn as "sex work" and/or liberating/empowering/sexy; (2) women's reproductive exploitation (egg donations; the renting of wombs and the purchase of babies); and (3) the "sexual revolution" that posits that male and female sexuality are the same, that is, naturally tending towards partner diversity and pleasure-based sexual encounters that presume no emotional connection. All of these things are based on "consent" as legitimating factor: a woman consents to having her body used to please another's sexual desire; a woman consents to renting her body for somebody else's reproductive desire; a woman consents to adopting sexual behaviors that allow her to belong to her friend group/cohort, where "hook-up" culture is what normal, sexually healthy and cool girls do (and the rejection of such a culture is what prudish, unattractive, traditional, uncool, boring girls do)... Consent and personal desires have become the cornerstone of society today, which is itself ordered by the market: bodies are bought and sold, body parts or the access to alter/modify body parts are bought and sold; babies are bought and sold; womanhood and manhood themselves are bought and sold. The market is the freest and freeing of institutions because everybody who participates in it consents to do so, does so because they either desire to sell or desire to buy... it just so happens that everything related to humanity is itself bought or sold, based on the absurdly low standard of self-declared consent.
There are many, many problems with making consent and desire the cornerstones of life--not only because consent and desire are formed unconsciously by how society informs us, but also because they are never truly "informed", a person cannot truly understand the effects of desiring or consenting to certain things, until the consequences are in fact, experienced. It's an act of imagination, not knowledge. But because we are not individuals: every decision we make, we consent to, based on what we individually desire for ourselves, affects others. And is affected, influenced, by others. So the idea is flawed: no individual consents to or desires as an isolated, autonomous, independent individual, because we are always part of communities (families, and others), and we cannot truly live in a society in which each individual absolutely disregards others in their community/family/circle, and looks only to satisfy his or her desires. As social animals, we cannot survive such a selfish, dog-eat-dog world. It would be horrible.
I agree with you 100%. Our children have been victims for years. Seems we’re getting worse, not better. Now we are medically transitioning our children into eunuchs. EUNUCHS!! It’s VERY disturbing! And WRONG.
And where are our breast cancer survivors!!?? Will they please stand up with me and fight for these CHILDREN? As the daughter of a mother who lost her life to cancer, my heart breaks. We are cutting off perfectly healthy breasts of CHILDREN??!! Help us protest! Do we have nobody on our side willing to call out society on these atrocities being committed on CHILDREN!?? And brainwashing CHILDREN that they will be happy and loved eunuchs? By who? By the broken parents picking up the broken pieces of our once whole children. Tragic.
Once these professionals have collected their money for mutilating our CHILDREN, they will sail away on their fancy yachts. Paid for by the now deformed bodies of these CHILDREN. Are these professionals convincing their CHILDREN to have the surgeries? Of course not! They look forward to having grandchildren some day.
Well, guess what parents? It’s time to stand up and be heard! Before it’s too late for your CHILDREN. Sadly, it’s already too late for so many of our CHILDREN. Tragic.
One doesn't need to go to ancient China or Africa today to find body mutilations forced upon children. America has a 2-billion-dollar a year industry performing genital mutilation (foreskin amputation) of baby boys. There is a huge financial motivation to continue this. A large part of the money made from this is trying to fix botched circumcisions.
Cutting the genitals of children has a long history in the US, used as a punishment for boys and girls caught masturbating in the Victorian age, and falsely touted as a cure-all for every disease for over 140 years. Until 1996 Blue Cross paid for clitoridectomies of little girls.
Many will balk at this information because they have subjected their baby boys to these unwarranted surgical reductions of their genitals, but there is no justification whatsoever for cutting the healthy genitals of any child.
This issue (cutting children) is intimately connected with gender surgeries. David Reimer famously lost his penis to a routine circumcision forced upon him as a baby, and that prompted the sex reassignment at Johns Hopkins that paved the way for much of the current gender ideology. In the archives of the Journal of Plastic Surgery is an article from the 1960's on "feminizing genitoplasty" of FIVE baby boys, all victims of severely botched circumcisions.
Our culture needs to own up to the damage caused to children, not just point a finger at other cultures, but to recognize how we are complicit. The current gender ideology, and operating on children's bodies, rests upon a system that routinely cuts baby boys and children with intersex conditions.
Okay. There is a clip going off on 4chan. Which... is not a website I tend to go to, but once in a while, something comes up that is either very insightful and/or funny.
This guy claims he de-transed his daughter in one day.
Is this real? I don't know. It could be. Or it could be a joke.
Let me transcribe it.
Quote.
Daughter says she's trans (9th grade)
What do we do?
Confess I'm trans too.
She's confused.
Dad, no, you're not.
Stop being a bigot, Charlotte. Let's do this together.
Wear dress and makeup next morning.
Daughter is angry, tells me to stop faking.
No, I'm trans honey. No get in the car and let's go to school.
She's horrified. Asks to be dropped off a block away.
Nope, walk her in, wave to front desk.
She's fuming.
Wife can't stop laughing.
Pick up daughter, in skirt and heels, (bleep) makeup, glitter on cheeks, skip over to her and her friends.
DAD STOP ITS NOT FUNNY
Demand she use my pronouns, call her a bigot.
Next morning she's done with the whole trans thing. Begs me to stop.
Great article, thank you. As a parent of a trans-identified young adult I’m very familiar with such a take on gender ideology and unfortunately you are probably right, on this Substack you’ll mostly be preaching to the choir. How, as parents of kids caught up in the madness of gender ideology, can we get this message out to the wider world?
This is great, says everything pretty much that I believe and feel. In the case of my son, I think that he is terrified of the ramifications of being a male - sex, etc. He once answered my question 'why do you think you're trans' by saying 'I don't want to be male'. It's not the same thing as saying, ' I want to be a woman'. One small thing - as a pedant I'd like to point out that the word is 'vile' - v i le - not 'vial'. Sorry!
Consent was a great place to start. From a few things I've heard and read lately, legal action against gender medicine will defend itself on the basis of consent. But it seems so obvious the argument against consent after reading your piece. How in the heavens can a judge and jury think that a minor has the development and cognizance to give consent to these medical procedures? When my daughter (FtM) got her nose pierced at 16, she had to have me (parent) with her and a notarized document stating permission. 🙄
I would love to see the legal world begin their dissent on the gender medical establishment. Another argument: the comorbitites that exist in our young people prior to and present during ANY TYPE OF MEDICALIZING. Again, how in the heavens is it ok to not mentallly assess this HUGE decision before MEDICALIZING? What in the absolute hell???? I told my daughter yesterday if she dares start medicalizing, I promise I will sue the clinic, Dr, university etc on the grounds of her mental instability. She's been in therapy since 13. (17 now) It's all documented. BPD, anorexia, suicidal ideation, anxiety, depression, Lexapro, Zoloff, 2 psychiatrists, 7 psychologists, etc....
Mother, you've done a fine job writing this first piece. And don't worry about saying things that've been said before. They bear saying again and they come out in different ways so as to make it possible for others to take in information when they perhaps couldn't before.
As for the comment on the only answer lying in condemning same sex attraction, I take issue with that. Trans ideology is totally different and separate from being gay or lesbian or bi and it is harmful to conflate. Same sex attraction is a fact, and is as legitimate as opposite sex attraction. Let's stick with the topic of addressing harms of trans ideology, which have in this piece of writing been well articulated. Mother, wishing you and others all the best in coping with your situations until a better understanding has been reached, and we as a culture can find ways of accepting differences without resorting to regressive stereotypes and harmful techno fixes. Thank you for keeping at working on this.
Thank you for this. My daughter is also in the same boat as yours. It's been a year since she came out as trans aged 13. She still is feeling the same way. This article sums up how I feel. I'm in the UK. Thank you
..."they are being fed so much misinformation, by their schools and universities, by the Government, by large corporations, by the medical community and therapists, by both social media and mainstream media, and by their friends and neighbors,"...
Yes, that is the same situation in Japan in these days.
Japan is a little behind in transgenderism. But certainly a similar situation is beginning to occur.
They are giving misinformation to people, especially children in unstable times of distress, without any qualms. What a horrible time we live in.
Interesting, thanks.
I give up trying to make any sense of all this transgender stuff. I am starting the year feeling depressed after having covid. I just had a Skype call with my 23 year old male identifying daughter. We never talk about anything related to this insane gender change nonsense. I feel really alone. I am not allowed to say what I think as most people now are hooked on the gender lies. This feels like persecution. I am not allowed to say anything bad about testosterone as it is a prescription drug on which my daughter depends. I am supposed to talk about her as though she were my son. I can not deny my integrity and embrace lies just because everybody else around does. It is a lonely path being a parent and there is no hope of her bringing a child into the world. We parents lose our children plus hope of grandchildren.
Lovely well written thoughts. As the mother of a now 19yr old "identifying as trans" I am finding the journry so loney. Only recently found this site. The volume of youngsters especially girls that are now trans is so alarming. I am in Australia where we also have schools socially transitioning children without parental consent. My grief for the loss of my daughter is over powering. I feel there is no one here for me, therapists make it about her & ask why wouldnt I except this ???
I have been thinking about "consent" very much in the context of gender identity ideology but also in the broader contexts of feminis. Three things, specifically, perhaps all of them are related to women's sex-based oppression: (1) the normalization/celebration/resignification of prostitution/porn as "sex work" and/or liberating/empowering/sexy; (2) women's reproductive exploitation (egg donations; the renting of wombs and the purchase of babies); and (3) the "sexual revolution" that posits that male and female sexuality are the same, that is, naturally tending towards partner diversity and pleasure-based sexual encounters that presume no emotional connection. All of these things are based on "consent" as legitimating factor: a woman consents to having her body used to please another's sexual desire; a woman consents to renting her body for somebody else's reproductive desire; a woman consents to adopting sexual behaviors that allow her to belong to her friend group/cohort, where "hook-up" culture is what normal, sexually healthy and cool girls do (and the rejection of such a culture is what prudish, unattractive, traditional, uncool, boring girls do)... Consent and personal desires have become the cornerstone of society today, which is itself ordered by the market: bodies are bought and sold, body parts or the access to alter/modify body parts are bought and sold; babies are bought and sold; womanhood and manhood themselves are bought and sold. The market is the freest and freeing of institutions because everybody who participates in it consents to do so, does so because they either desire to sell or desire to buy... it just so happens that everything related to humanity is itself bought or sold, based on the absurdly low standard of self-declared consent.
There are many, many problems with making consent and desire the cornerstones of life--not only because consent and desire are formed unconsciously by how society informs us, but also because they are never truly "informed", a person cannot truly understand the effects of desiring or consenting to certain things, until the consequences are in fact, experienced. It's an act of imagination, not knowledge. But because we are not individuals: every decision we make, we consent to, based on what we individually desire for ourselves, affects others. And is affected, influenced, by others. So the idea is flawed: no individual consents to or desires as an isolated, autonomous, independent individual, because we are always part of communities (families, and others), and we cannot truly live in a society in which each individual absolutely disregards others in their community/family/circle, and looks only to satisfy his or her desires. As social animals, we cannot survive such a selfish, dog-eat-dog world. It would be horrible.
I agree with you 100%. Our children have been victims for years. Seems we’re getting worse, not better. Now we are medically transitioning our children into eunuchs. EUNUCHS!! It’s VERY disturbing! And WRONG.
And where are our breast cancer survivors!!?? Will they please stand up with me and fight for these CHILDREN? As the daughter of a mother who lost her life to cancer, my heart breaks. We are cutting off perfectly healthy breasts of CHILDREN??!! Help us protest! Do we have nobody on our side willing to call out society on these atrocities being committed on CHILDREN!?? And brainwashing CHILDREN that they will be happy and loved eunuchs? By who? By the broken parents picking up the broken pieces of our once whole children. Tragic.
Once these professionals have collected their money for mutilating our CHILDREN, they will sail away on their fancy yachts. Paid for by the now deformed bodies of these CHILDREN. Are these professionals convincing their CHILDREN to have the surgeries? Of course not! They look forward to having grandchildren some day.
Well, guess what parents? It’s time to stand up and be heard! Before it’s too late for your CHILDREN. Sadly, it’s already too late for so many of our CHILDREN. Tragic.
Thank you for that Jonah
One doesn't need to go to ancient China or Africa today to find body mutilations forced upon children. America has a 2-billion-dollar a year industry performing genital mutilation (foreskin amputation) of baby boys. There is a huge financial motivation to continue this. A large part of the money made from this is trying to fix botched circumcisions.
Cutting the genitals of children has a long history in the US, used as a punishment for boys and girls caught masturbating in the Victorian age, and falsely touted as a cure-all for every disease for over 140 years. Until 1996 Blue Cross paid for clitoridectomies of little girls.
Many will balk at this information because they have subjected their baby boys to these unwarranted surgical reductions of their genitals, but there is no justification whatsoever for cutting the healthy genitals of any child.
This issue (cutting children) is intimately connected with gender surgeries. David Reimer famously lost his penis to a routine circumcision forced upon him as a baby, and that prompted the sex reassignment at Johns Hopkins that paved the way for much of the current gender ideology. In the archives of the Journal of Plastic Surgery is an article from the 1960's on "feminizing genitoplasty" of FIVE baby boys, all victims of severely botched circumcisions.
Our culture needs to own up to the damage caused to children, not just point a finger at other cultures, but to recognize how we are complicit. The current gender ideology, and operating on children's bodies, rests upon a system that routinely cuts baby boys and children with intersex conditions.
Okay. There is a clip going off on 4chan. Which... is not a website I tend to go to, but once in a while, something comes up that is either very insightful and/or funny.
This guy claims he de-transed his daughter in one day.
Is this real? I don't know. It could be. Or it could be a joke.
Let me transcribe it.
Quote.
Daughter says she's trans (9th grade)
What do we do?
Confess I'm trans too.
She's confused.
Dad, no, you're not.
Stop being a bigot, Charlotte. Let's do this together.
Wear dress and makeup next morning.
Daughter is angry, tells me to stop faking.
No, I'm trans honey. No get in the car and let's go to school.
She's horrified. Asks to be dropped off a block away.
Nope, walk her in, wave to front desk.
She's fuming.
Wife can't stop laughing.
Pick up daughter, in skirt and heels, (bleep) makeup, glitter on cheeks, skip over to her and her friends.
DAD STOP ITS NOT FUNNY
Demand she use my pronouns, call her a bigot.
Next morning she's done with the whole trans thing. Begs me to stop.
End Quote.
Great article, thank you. As a parent of a trans-identified young adult I’m very familiar with such a take on gender ideology and unfortunately you are probably right, on this Substack you’ll mostly be preaching to the choir. How, as parents of kids caught up in the madness of gender ideology, can we get this message out to the wider world?
What if WE spent hours just listening, sympathizing with and love-bombing our dysphoric kids?
I'll guarantee you that her groomers didn't argue with her, didn't tell her she was too immature. And look how they succeeded in their agenda!
This war will not be won with facts or arguments or logic. It'll be won with love.
This is great, says everything pretty much that I believe and feel. In the case of my son, I think that he is terrified of the ramifications of being a male - sex, etc. He once answered my question 'why do you think you're trans' by saying 'I don't want to be male'. It's not the same thing as saying, ' I want to be a woman'. One small thing - as a pedant I'd like to point out that the word is 'vile' - v i le - not 'vial'. Sorry!
This is wonderfully and sympathetically written. Thank you.
Consent was a great place to start. From a few things I've heard and read lately, legal action against gender medicine will defend itself on the basis of consent. But it seems so obvious the argument against consent after reading your piece. How in the heavens can a judge and jury think that a minor has the development and cognizance to give consent to these medical procedures? When my daughter (FtM) got her nose pierced at 16, she had to have me (parent) with her and a notarized document stating permission. 🙄
I would love to see the legal world begin their dissent on the gender medical establishment. Another argument: the comorbitites that exist in our young people prior to and present during ANY TYPE OF MEDICALIZING. Again, how in the heavens is it ok to not mentallly assess this HUGE decision before MEDICALIZING? What in the absolute hell???? I told my daughter yesterday if she dares start medicalizing, I promise I will sue the clinic, Dr, university etc on the grounds of her mental instability. She's been in therapy since 13. (17 now) It's all documented. BPD, anorexia, suicidal ideation, anxiety, depression, Lexapro, Zoloff, 2 psychiatrists, 7 psychologists, etc....
Congrats on your first submission.
I loved it!!
Mother, you've done a fine job writing this first piece. And don't worry about saying things that've been said before. They bear saying again and they come out in different ways so as to make it possible for others to take in information when they perhaps couldn't before.
As for the comment on the only answer lying in condemning same sex attraction, I take issue with that. Trans ideology is totally different and separate from being gay or lesbian or bi and it is harmful to conflate. Same sex attraction is a fact, and is as legitimate as opposite sex attraction. Let's stick with the topic of addressing harms of trans ideology, which have in this piece of writing been well articulated. Mother, wishing you and others all the best in coping with your situations until a better understanding has been reached, and we as a culture can find ways of accepting differences without resorting to regressive stereotypes and harmful techno fixes. Thank you for keeping at working on this.
Amen
Thank you for this. My daughter is also in the same boat as yours. It's been a year since she came out as trans aged 13. She still is feeling the same way. This article sums up how I feel. I'm in the UK. Thank you