Our sons weren't actually trans. I had led my child into it.

Page 1 of 1 [ 15 posts ] 

Mikah
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 23 Oct 2015
Age: 36
Posts: 3,201
Location: England

07 Feb 2023, 10:24 am

A mother regrets almost leading her son into medical transition and compares trans ideology to a cult in an interview (amusingly her identity is obscured as though she were giving evidence against the Mafia).



And an essay she wrote:
https://pitt.substack.com/p/true-believer

I was a true believer.

I was a social justice organizer and facilitator before social justice overtook the world. I was on the forefront, introducing the concept of intersectionality to progressive organizations, and having people share their pronouns. My friends and I felt we were the cool kids, the vanguard of revolutionary work to change the world, to achieve what people in the social justice movement call "collective liberation." I was deeply committed to the work of creating another world that was possible.

Within this context, I came out as a lesbian, and identified as queer. And then I fell in love, entered a committed relationship with my spouse, and gave birth to our first son. Two years later, my partner gave birth to our second son. Having children, and experiencing the absolutely life changing love and devotion to them, was a game changer for me. And it was when, to quote Helen Joyce's subtitle, ideology began to meet reality.

I immediately began to feel the tensions inside of me between what I felt intuitively and instinctively as a mother, and what I "should" be doing as a white anti-racist social justice parent. Because of my own experiences of perceived victimhood with my own parents' rejection of my sexuality, I wanted to make sure I would honor my children's "authentic selves." I was primed to look for any clues that might suggest they could be transgender.

We raised both our sons as gender neutral as possible, with gender neutral clothes, toys, and language. While we did use he/him pronouns and others in their life called them boys, we did not call them boys, or even tell them that they were boys. We made all language gender neutral. In everyday reading of books or descriptions of people in our lives, we did not say "man" or "woman," we said "people." We thought we were doing the right and best thing, both for them and for the world.

...


_________________
Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!


klanka
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 31 Mar 2022
Age: 46
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,888
Location: Cardiff, Wales

07 Feb 2023, 10:50 am

I can imagine it being easy to convince a child they are trans.
If they dont fit into the male stereotypes and have difficulties socialising.
Remember all the male artists and musicians who wore women's makeup in the 80's, a lot of them could've gone that way.



Mikah
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 23 Oct 2015
Age: 36
Posts: 3,201
Location: England

07 Feb 2023, 12:25 pm

klanka wrote:
I can imagine it being easy to convince a child they are trans.


Yes. I can imagine it is.



More from her essay:

At around four years old, my son began to ask me if he was a boy or a girl. Instead of telling him he was a boy, I told him he could choose. I didn't use those words—I thought I could be more sophisticated than that. I told him, "When babies are born with a penis, they are called boys, and when babies are born with a vagina, they are called girls. But some babies who are born with a penis can be girls, and some babies born with a vagina can be boys. It all depends on what you feel deep inside." He continued to ask me what he was, and I continued to repeat these lines. I resolved my inner conflict by "leading" my son with this framework—you can be born with a penis, but still be a girl inside. I thought I was doing the right thing, for him, and for the world.

His question, and my response to it, would come back to haunt me for years, and continues to haunt me now. What I know now is that I was "leading"—I was leading my innocent, sensitive child down a path of lies that were a direct on-ramp to psychological damage and life-long irreversible medical intervention. All in the name of love, acceptance, and liberation.

About six months after my son began to ask me if he was a boy or a girl, he told my spouse that he was a girl, and wanted to be called sister, and she/her. I received a text message about this at work. On the way home that night, I resolved I would have to put all my own feelings away, and support my transgender child. And that is what I did.

With this one declaration, after months of refusing to tell our son he was a boy, we changed his entire world. We told him he could be a girl. He jumped up and down on the bed, happy, saying, "I'm a girl, I'm a girl!" (What a relief it must have been to him to actually have an identity to hold on to!). We, not him, initiated changing his name. We socially transitioned him, and enforced this transition with his younger brother, who was only two years old at the time and who could barely pronounce his older brother's real name.

When I look back at this, it is almost too much to write about. The grief and the shock of what we did is so deep, so wide, so sharp and penetrating. How could a mother do this to her child? To her children? I truly believed that what I was doing was pure, right and good, only to later realize with horror what it could have lead to for my child. This horror still shakes me to my core.


_________________
Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!


PenPen
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

User avatar

Joined: 2 Apr 2022
Age: 29
Gender: Male
Posts: 71

07 Feb 2023, 12:40 pm

"Collective liberation" = working as a group to avoid responsibilities to the group. Like crocodiles who live solitary lives, but temporarily group together for the hunt. Negotiation is impossible because any attempt to establish responsibility will be perceived as inherently oppressive; ie fascist, by the selfish. Why should I risk social standing for people who don't want to be saved? People need to suffer the consequences of their mistakes.



Dengashinobi
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 15 Dec 2022
Age: 33
Gender: Male
Posts: 598

07 Feb 2023, 12:41 pm

I've come accross countless stories like this one. Intersectionality and all the rest of woke crap are a weird cult. Those people are cult survivors.



Nades
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 8 Jan 2017
Age: 1933
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,771
Location: wales

07 Feb 2023, 1:20 pm

Parents of autistics need to be kept an eye on when it comes to transitioning. I noticed a lot of parents with autisitc offspring are very overbearing with them.

It's not surprising many parents (along with many autistics themselves) assume an inability of their kids to connect with their same sexed peers = underlying trans tendancies when in reality, it might just be run of the mill autism causing it.

I didn't read the article, but I already strongly suspect the child was autistic. I can't envision a parent of a non autistic child doing this.

A sizable minority of adults with autistic kids are genuinely unpleasant people who see behaviour like this as extra social brownie points and nothing more.



PenPen
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

User avatar

Joined: 2 Apr 2022
Age: 29
Gender: Male
Posts: 71

07 Feb 2023, 1:38 pm

Nades wrote:
Parents of autistics need to be kept an eye on when it comes to transitioning. I noticed a lot of parents with autisitc offspring are very overbearing with them.

It's not surprising many parents (along with many autistics themselves) assume an inability of their kids to connect with their same sexed peers = underlying trans tendancies when in reality, it might just be run of the mill autism causing it.

I didn't read the article, but I already strongly suspect the child was autistic. I can't envision a parent of a non autistic child doing this.

A sizable minority of adults with autistic kids are genuinely unpleasant people who see behaviour like this as extra social brownie points and nothing more.


I also believe autistic people are more likely to suffer gender issues, partially due to their nonconformity, partially because of neurological wiring. However, just because they are suffering these issues doesn't mean a full transition is warranted.



r00tb33r
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 28 May 2016
Age: 36
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,778

07 Feb 2023, 1:56 pm

That's messed up.


_________________
Enjoy the silence.


Nades
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 8 Jan 2017
Age: 1933
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,771
Location: wales

07 Feb 2023, 2:03 pm

PenPen wrote:
Nades wrote:
Parents of autistics need to be kept an eye on when it comes to transitioning. I noticed a lot of parents with autisitc offspring are very overbearing with them.

It's not surprising many parents (along with many autistics themselves) assume an inability of their kids to connect with their same sexed peers = underlying trans tendancies when in reality, it might just be run of the mill autism causing it.

I didn't read the article, but I already strongly suspect the child was autistic. I can't envision a parent of a non autistic child doing this.

A sizable minority of adults with autistic kids are genuinely unpleasant people who see behaviour like this as extra social brownie points and nothing more.


I also believe autistic people are more likely to suffer gender issues, partially due to their nonconformity, partially because of neurological wiring. However, just because they are suffering these issues doesn't mean a full transition is warranted.


Depends on how well any issues are addressed. I think as people get older, they become more concrete in their sexuality and gender.

When it comes to kids though, I think almost all of them who transition (or in many cases, nudged onto that path by parents) are autistic and I mean almost all of them. That's just what I personally believe.

I would bet my life savings on this parents kid being autistic. Such confusion over gender can't happen with an NT childs parents it seems.



Mikah
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 23 Oct 2015
Age: 36
Posts: 3,201
Location: England

07 Feb 2023, 2:56 pm

Nades wrote:
I didn't read the article, but I already strongly suspect the child was autistic. I can't envision a parent of a non autistic child doing this.

Nades wrote:
I would bet my life savings on this parents kid being autistic. Such confusion over gender can't happen with an NT childs parents it seems.


Too lazy to Ctrl-F as well as read? The older boy in the article is indeed suspected of being autistic.

After all, our son showed no signs of actual gender dysphoria—was he actually transgender? At these support groups we were told what good parents we were. How kids on the autism spectrum (which he likely is), simply "know" they are transgender earlier than other kids.

...

Everything we thought we knew or believed that had led us to socially transition our older son began to unravel. I continued to study the attachment-based developmental approach, and learned more about autism and hypersensitivity.

...

Somehow, my partner and I came to clarity that the deeper truth for our son was that he was not actually a transgender girl, but rather a highly sensitive, likely autistic boy who was born into this world without a skin, and for whom the structure of certainty the girl identity provided him was a type of protection, or defense. It also provided him a way of attaching to me through sameness, a primal need for his security in the world. We decided that since we were the ones who led him on this path, we were the ones that needed to lead him off if it.


_________________
Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!


ToughDiamond
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Sep 2008
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 11,138

07 Feb 2023, 3:05 pm

It always seems odd to me that so many parents try to push their kids into a mould that they've made in their own image, as if kids were their personal property with no minds of their own. So kids get shoved into sexual orientations, career paths, religious orientations, ideologies, dress codes, you name it. It's probably less like that than it used to be, but the situation isn't improving quickly enough for my liking.

I don't know what numbers you'd get if you added up all the cases of parental pressure to be heterosexual and compared it to those where the opposite happens. I've seen a certain amount of "my kid mustn't be gay" but never "my kid mustn't be straight," though my anecdotal evidence probably doesn't prove anything. Not that it matters much to me. In my view the problem is that there's pressure at all, not the direction it happens to take in individual cases.



Joe90
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 23 Feb 2010
Gender: Female
Posts: 26,492
Location: UK

07 Feb 2023, 3:35 pm

I'm liberal about this. I don't believe gender norms should be pressured on to kids ("you have to wear dresses even if you don't like it, because you're a girl"), but I don't believe parents should hide gender from kids either.

I was born a baby girl. My mum put me in dresses as a baby and toddler. My room was pink. I was a she. Then when I got to about 7 years old I realised for myself that I didn't like wearing dresses, so my mum no longer made me wear dresses. Then I started wearing trousers to school instead of a school dress/skirt, and I kicked off when a teacher told me off for wearing trousers. My mum didn't become a karen over it like some parents seem to do these days, but she went to the principal and asked her if it was a uniform policy that girls had to wear dresses/skirts, and the principal said no. So that teacher must have just been old-fashioned.

But anyway, my mum respected my boyish tendencies and didn't force me to be a girly girl, but she also didn't confuse me by saying there's no such thing as gender and that I wasn't a boy or a girl or whatever. I believe children should know what their gender is, because by the time they reach puberty they are going to know. I knew all about breasts and periods way before puberty began, so when I did start puberty I was ready and knew exactly what to expect.

TL;DR So the point is, if a child really isn't comfortable in their gender, they'll soon say. Children do have minds of their own. And it's OK to respect that, but I don't believe it's OK to enforce the genderless ideology upon them the moment they are born. That's my opinion and probably the opinion of most people.


_________________
Female


Nades
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 8 Jan 2017
Age: 1933
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,771
Location: wales

07 Feb 2023, 3:46 pm

Mikah wrote:
Nades wrote:
I didn't read the article, but I already strongly suspect the child was autistic. I can't envision a parent of a non autistic child doing this.

Nades wrote:
I would bet my life savings on this parents kid being autistic. Such confusion over gender can't happen with an NT childs parents it seems.


Too lazy to Ctrl-F as well as read? The older boy in the article is indeed suspected of being autistic.

After all, our son showed no signs of actual gender dysphoria—was he actually transgender? At these support groups we were told what good parents we were. How kids on the autism spectrum (which he likely is), simply "know" they are transgender earlier than other kids.

...

Everything we thought we knew or believed that had led us to socially transition our older son began to unravel. I continued to study the attachment-based developmental approach, and learned more about autism and hypersensitivity.

...

Somehow, my partner and I came to clarity that the deeper truth for our son was that he was not actually a transgender girl, but rather a highly sensitive, likely autistic boy who was born into this world without a skin, and for whom the structure of certainty the girl identity provided him was a type of protection, or defense. It also provided him a way of attaching to me through sameness, a primal need for his security in the world. We decided that since we were the ones who led him on this path, we were the ones that needed to lead him off if it.


No surprise there then. Once you read one story like this you've read them all.

Always involves a helicopter mother or father and an autistic child. Pretty much without fail.



Dengashinobi
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 15 Dec 2022
Age: 33
Gender: Male
Posts: 598

07 Feb 2023, 3:57 pm

ToughDiamond wrote:
It always seems odd to me that so many parents try to push their kids into a mould that they've made in their own image, as if kids were their personal property with no minds of their own. So kids get shoved into sexual orientations, career paths, religious orientations, ideologies, dress codes, you name it. It's probably less like that than it used to be, but the situation isn't improving quickly enough for my liking.

I don't know what numbers you'd get if you added up all the cases of parental pressure to be heterosexual and compared it to those where the opposite happens. I've seen a certain amount of "my kid mustn't be gay" but never "my kid mustn't be straight," though my anecdotal evidence probably doesn't prove anything. Not that it matters much to me. In my view the problem is that there's pressure at all, not the direction it happens to take in individual cases.


This case is not about the good old parents trying to shape their children a certain way. This is about parents believing irrational things to the point that they are dangerous to the children. Dismissing a child's homosexuality (which manifests at a later age by the way, not at the age of four) is one thing and getting your child on puberty blockers is another thing. We are talking about child abuse.



The_Walrus
Forum Moderator
Forum Moderator

User avatar

Joined: 27 Jan 2010
Age: 29
Gender: Male
Posts: 8,789
Location: London

07 Feb 2023, 4:10 pm

Transphobia is against WrongPlanet rules. As both the OP and most of the responses are transphobic (comparing being trans to being in a cult, advocating that parents should tell their kids that nobody is trans, suggesting that autistic people shouldn't be allowed to explore their gender identity, calling this "child abuse"), thread locked.

You want to scaremonger about kids being turned trans, do it somewhere else.