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Keeping the communication going. It is your child’s lifeline to you and the reality you want them to embrace.
“My son hadn’t socially transitioned, he still looked like a boy. By midsummer, his exploratory therapist said that he had a breakthrough. The therapist wasn’t worried about him wanting to medicalize, but he was also not sufficiently aware of the immensity of the ideological brainwashing. He thought my son was too smart to be captured. I was aware though—and I was worried. I knew how many smart kids were captured. But my son seemed happy, entirely unconcerned about being called “sir” on occasion. He was growing into a handsome young man. We didn’t talk about gender ideology. On Sasha Ayad’s advice, gender topics were for him and his therapist to discuss.
Then the too familiar punch in the gut came in the Fall, when he started a part time job and was adored and praised by everyone there—he was still thinking of himself as transgender, and this was not going to change. Ever. He was impatient to socially transition and start taking hormones at 18. On the outside nothing changed. I still saw a happy teen. I had less than 6 months left.
I tried to calm myself with thoughts that this was the often-mentioned Boomerang Effect. My little home-grown, intuition-based “theory”, which I wrote about for PITT, was that The Boomerang Phase was actually The Uncertainty Phase, where teens double down on gender ideology to combat fading conviction and a growing sense of cognitive dissonance. It is a difficult, emotional phase, and probably the phase when they are most easily influenced.
I didn’t know whether my “theory” was correct, but I also felt I had little choice but to push back during this phase. I wasn’t going to stand idly by, watching him being led deeper into the cult by trans influencers. I started to integrate information on the trans ideology into our homeschooling via different podcasts and documentaries by figures including Helen Joyce, Stephanie Davies-Arai, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Barry Wall, John Uhler, Chloe Cole, Kellie-Jay Keen, etc. It was scary at first, as I was worried about his reaction and our relationship. Some days he would pull his hood over his head, but I saw that he was still listening, and he would perk up within minutes after a podcast or a documentary was over. We watched What is a Woman, and he lived, but we skipped the intro and the ending. Whatever bad mood they caused, it didn’t linger. I never made it personal and never asked him where he was at with his own gender identity.
We watched hours of podcasts and the manner of how he was sitting at the table started to change. He didn’t cover his face anymore, he sat straighter.
His 18th birthday came and went, with no big announcement, but the uncertainty was still overwhelming. By February I was telling myself that I should stop with the gender critical stuff and we should focus on something else, but then The Affirmation Generation came out, and I just had to show it to him. When I asked what he thought about it, he said there was nothing there that he didn’t already know. I was still too anxious to ask what it all meant for him. If he was still thinking of himself as transgender, I didn’t want him to verbalize these thoughts to me, thus potentially making them something he needed to defend.
Then at some point in early spring he laughed at a gender critical meme I sent him. Then he made a couple of gender critical jokes. But when I casually said that gender was just a modern and ideological term for personality, he rejected the idea. This made me doubt everything yet again. A month or two later he made fun of the idea that biological sex was nonbinary, and I felt in my bones that this was over. The curse was lifted. I exhaled.
Are we there yet? I wish I knew. From what I’ve read, some never leave the cult entirely and come back to it in the times of stress. But for now, I won’t think about that. I too need a break. In retrospect, he has been incrementally desisting for the last nine months—there were little signs all along, but how do you trust them when you are on a rollercoaster? I’m sure that if I were to ask him about his desistance a year from now, he’d say that he made up his mind entirely on his own and that all the podcasts we listened to didn’t matter. Maybe he’d say that he simply grew up, and he would be right. But I would not have been able to live with myself if I didn’t make the information about the ideology and biological reality available to him.
The last year went by too slowly and yet too fast. I’m grateful, humbled, empowered, still not entirely back to normal. I know how lucky we are, how, in retrospect, comparatively easy it has been—a mere 21 months, and he hasn’t even worn a skirt or a bra. And now it is over, almost like it never happened, like a bad dream you’d rather forget.”
As for me, I was a progressive mom who purposefully avoided pushing traditional gender roles on my child. I didn’t know her sex until she was born. I didn’t care—I only wanted a healthy baby. I bought her comfortable, fairly gender-neutral clothes, and I adamantly avoided anything related to Barbie. I had grown up immersed in the unrealistic feminine beauty standards of the 80s, and I wanted my child to have the best chance possible of feeling whole and complete in her natural female body, however she chose to express it. As she grew up, I let her choose her clothes and hairstyles, as well as the toys she played with. I considered myself progressive, feminist, open-minded, and very much an LGBT+ ally. Her friends thought I was a pretty fun mom.
My child was 13 when she told me she thought she was trans. She had already been experimenting with male names and pronouns with her friends and therapist, who had advised her not to tell me until she was ready to fully come out of the trans closet. She was among the last of her small group of biologically female friends to socially transition. It was mid-pandemic, and she spent most of her time with her best friend, who had, unbeknownst to me, shown her hours upon end of transgender entertainment on You Tube and TikTok.
By 8th grade, here’s what her friends (and their TikTok feeds) were saying about me:
“Your mom is transphobic”. “She doesn’t want a son. She wants a daughter.” “She won’t let you be who you are.” “MY mom is so progressive, she buys my binders from a BIPOC trans company.” “Your mom doesn’t really know you.”
And even worse, a succession of therapists:
“You may not know your child as well as you think you do.” “Your son just needs your support.” “Your child doesn’t share your values.” “Your child is at risk of suicide if you don’t affirm.” “You just need some education on having a transgender child.”
So much for being the fun mom.
This child. I had nursed her, read to her, fed her healthfully, sang her to sleep, held her when she cried, played with her. I taught her to read, to count, to make brownies, to brush her own teeth, and to be kind to animals and elders. I had read parenting books and joined library play groups, studied her learning styles and tailored her education to them. My Christmas gift was always her favorite, because I knew exactly what toy she wanted the most. When she was little and woke up feeling sick, I had already woken moments in advance knowing something was wrong.
And now, expert strangers were telling me I didn’t really know her.
I affirmed her change in gender identity, at first. I thought it was an antipatriarchal movement, a rebellious play on artificial standards of attractiveness, a principled game of pronouns, clothing and hairstyles. I was an out-of-the-box, feminist Gen X-er. I was cool with that.
But I quickly learned this wasn’t about self-empowerment. It was about self -rejection. Self-loathing. Self-erasure.
Her friends considered natural breasts disgusting, so binding became a rite of passage. The whole body became a thing of shame, covered by thick, baggy clothes that would betray no feminine curves. A swimsuit was unthinkable, even to swim in the ocean, which we traveled thousands of miles to visit. The new trans-boi posture was rounded forward, with the attitude of a sad thug, black COVID mask firmly in place under a black beanie, so only the eyes were visible. Their given names – many chosen with great care and meaning by thoughtful parents – were proclaimed “dead” and replaced with the names of fandom and cartoon characters.
My daughter’s best friend (now an ftm trans child with two gender affirming parents) started calling her mother by her first name, and demanded the removal of all childhood photos from their home—to escape her past as a girl. Soon thereafter, she was admitted to a treatment program for suicidal ideation. My daughter started cutting her forearms, and her demeanor became dark and secretive. Her beautiful art became morbid and even cruel.
I drew the line at breast binding and said no. I could not rationalize the compression of a child’s developing breast tissue and rib cage. It made no medical sense to encourage a practice that would restrict the respiratory, circulatory, and lymphatic systems during a crucial physical development stage.
And, of course, the experts told me I was wrong. They said if I didn’t buy her a proper binder, she would use duct tape and ace bandages, which would be even worse. They said she would harm herself more. They said she would be at risk of suicide.
I cried for days. I meditated, I prayed, I consulted wise friends who knew my child well. I told her dad everything I knew, and spoke with her stepmom, who works as a child therapist. Everyone who ACTUALLY knew my child confirmed what I knew all along—this didn’t make any sense. And being trans wasn’t making her better. It was making her worse.
I still wanted my child to have the best chance possible of feeling whole and complete in her natural female body, however she chose to express it. If gender exploration necessitated my complicity in her self hatred, I wouldn’t participate.
So I stopped listening to the experts and took back my authority as my child’s first and primary parent.
I set new boundaries. I profoundly restricted online access, took long breaks from overzealous trans friends, checked daily to make sure she wasn’t binding. Her dad, stepmom, and my partner all concurred, and she was pretty mad at all of us for awhile.
So perhaps even more importantly, I added a lot of things that I realized were missing during the pandemic. I facilitated friendships with healthier teens, and had frank conversations with their parents to ensure we were all on the same page. I enrolled her in a music performance program and aerial silks classes. Over the summer, she went to camp and volunteered at a nature center. We took interesting trips, went to live music shows, and watched diverse movies about all kinds of people. We planted raspberries and went camping and brewed herbal moon tea to ease her menstrual cramps. I wanted to show her that the world was much bigger than her friend group.
It’s now been a year since she first announced her new identity. My work seems to have paid off. She has developed an identity outside of trans—she’s an aerialist, a musician, a good writer, an artist, a traveler, and she believes in a spiritual side to life. Consistent aerial silks practice has made her physically strong and flexible, and she likes what her body can do and how it looks. She’s phased out of the ultra-baggy clothes, and regularly shows her arms and collarbones. Sometimes she wears dresses or braids her hair. She doesn’t appear to have engaged in self-harm in months, and her art is brighter and even humorous. She stands taller, laughs easily, and speaks confidently with adults. She has new friends with similarly unique interests. She’s still quirky, artistic, and alternative in her style. She may be bisexual, and that’s fine by me.
I really do want my daughter to be her authentic self, and I know that she has to find that path on her own eventually. I will always support her in all her ups and downs. I’ll even love and support her if she decides, as an adult, to identify as a boy. But until she is actually an adult, I’m still the parent. I am a mature, educated, mentally healthy adult woman with many life experiences and learning under my belt. Many of my interactions with the mental health community undermined my legitimate questions, my knowledge of my child, the wisdom I’ve gained over nearly 48 years on planet Earth. I didn’t go to psychology school, but I do know many things. And I do, actually, know my kid. I’m reclaiming that.
I’m a much better parent for it.
I hope Ms.Bartosch is right. The loonery that is gender ideology needs to be stripped of its untouchable status and relegated to the back burner with the rest of religious cock-a-doodle.
Before getting back into, well, the usual. Let’s go all future bright best possible case land for the New Year.
There is always hope.
Sometimes we forget that despite all the bullshit, all the division, all the scorn, human beings can come together and create beautiful acts that fly in the face of all the shite we put up with in our regular day to day existence. I recently had the great privilege of participating in a choir that performed Carl Jenkins Adiemus.
The piece is simple, but powerful. You find a way to move through each phrase with energy and the intent to infuse your sound into Jenkins work. Adiemus sounds great from the audience, but the experience pales compared to being inside the choir singing it.
Find your community chorus, get involved, be with people and make music.
So Say We All.
It is talent night for my choir this evening and gee-wilkers, I’m excited. I’ve been practising my solo piece and my part for the group ensemble we’re doing. Things went/and are going pretty well actually. But then I got to thinking(cue foreboding music), we need something to end our night with a bash. What is gonna be easy enough to put together so it doesn’t implode, involves the audience (our choir) aaaaaand makes everyone smile on the way home.
I let those thoughts stew of the week letting other things take precedence, little things like getting married and such. :) Then I remembered a song from one of my favourite movies…its catchy, easy to pick up and most people already know it… it goes like this:
I’m hoping we can pull this off. If we can, it is going to be great!
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…