Californian parents speak of online and real-life influencers and clusters of children having the same experiences.
Transcript
Hi, my name is Avery and my husband’s name is Scott.
We are happy to have a couple of minutes to share a little bit about our family life.
We have a daughter who’s 16, who has always been a happy well-adjusted child. She had a lot of friends, always seemed very secure with herself. And though we never said it out loud, we think she liked girls and boys.
Fast forward a little bit and our daughter was about to go out for major surgery in eighth grade. And we subsequently found out that her school had done a sex-ed class that included someone who was transgender who talked about the fact that, If you don’t feel like you fit in? Maybe you’re transgender. You don’t like boys or you don’t like girls? Maybe you’re transgender. You don’t like your body? You’re definitely transgender.
So not long after that, our daughter went for major surgery. And when she came back, she spent four weeks in bed, recovering and spending a lot of time on the internet. We didn’t realise at the time that the internet was full of influencers, trans influencers, who taught kids how to talk to their parents and friends about being transgender. There’s nearly a script for these kids to pick up and to say things like, I’m born in the wrong body, I think I’ll commit suicide if I don’t get out of the wrong body. You need to take me to see somebody immediately. That’s a shortened version of the message.
Anyway, a couple of days after graduation from high school, our very girly daughter told us that she was non-binary. We scratched our heads a little bit because we didn’t know what that meant. But it really didn’t matter because two months later, she told us that she’s actually a guy, and she’s trapped in the wrong body. And she did think that she might commit suicide.
We subsequently took her to a psychiatrist. We were there for 15 minutes and the psychiatrist told me in front of her to take her to Children’s Hospital, and that likely we would start hormones, and there would be top surgery for her chest soon after. When I started to ask questions, she became very agitated. She, the psychiatrist, became very agitated and told me that if I didn’t do this, then it was clear that my husband and I didn’t love our daughter and that we would probably lose her.
We were scared.
We reached out to another therapist who told us the same thing. And then we found a group of parents, who had wisdom from all of the groups of parents who started to show that their kids had the very same story.
Our daughter socially became male, and started to insist on getting hormones and surgery. During that time, we did a lot of reading and we realised that there’s really a trend toward kids moving in this direction. Maybe kids who like the same sex, maybe kids who are feeling awkward. We started to look around and there are 17 kids in our friends and family group who are going through this too. And what we realised is that between school and between the internet, there’s a real push to get kids to this place. And there’s a lot of push from the hospitals to create gender clinics.
So we’re at a point where we’re still scratching our heads, but at least we understand now that we’re only one of many, many families.