Mother of a son in North Carolina
This story initially appeared in PITT – Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (https://pitt.substack.com)
Transcript:
I’m a mother in North Carolina.
My child is a very impressionable, self-conscious, extremely smart 13 year old. He does well in school, has no depression and no visible body dysphoria. He has a couple of close friends, all boys. And then, born of a month-long quarantine-loneliness fuelled binge on the internet, he got the idea in his head that he is trans.
His newfound identity did not emerge from within, like you hear about on the news. Instead, he deduced that he was transgender from other kids and activists online. How do I know? Because that’s what he told me. Desperate for answers to that age-old teenage question, why am I different? He turned to Google. And lo and behold, the Internet was all too happy to provide easy answers.
He was told that his feelings of awkwardness and discomfort with his changing body and his sense of differentness could only mean one thing. He was trans. From there, he plunged down the rabbit hole of Subreddits and Discord servers and learned that there were easy ways to become his “true self” and in the process to find a warm, welcoming community where he felt accepted. For a lonely kid during the pandemic, the appeal was obvious. His diagnosis conveniently came with quick and easy instruction guides on how to come out to his parents, and to start the process of becoming the opposite gender through pronoun changes, hormones, and then surgery. How do I know that’s what happened? Because I’ve seen the scripts and he used them verbatim coming out to me.
I was blindsided by his grand pronouncement. There were no signs. My child and I are extremely close. I was flabbergasted and confounded, with no idea what to do next. My mother’s instinct kicked in. I wanted to help him. So I did the natural thing. I reached out to professionals that I thought were experts in these matters, because I love my child, and I wanted to do what’s best for health.
Here’s what I found.
The medical community has adopted what’s known as the affirmative model. This basically says that since there’s no way to test whether someone is transgender, the best thing to do is just take someone’s word for it. You know how doctors roll their eyes when you tell them what’s wrong with you because you read it on WebMD? Well, affirmative care is exactly the opposite. Patients come to doctors or therapists with their internet stuff diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Unlike any other condition, where doctors would listen but then decide for themselves, with gender identity, the doctor says okay, yep, gender dysphoria, ‘cos you say so. Once that label is applied, what follows logically is discussion of all the possible medical treatment paths, hormones and then later possibly surgery.
Practitioners ask yourselves, is sending my child on a path to lifelong medical care, without vetting, really the best and only option here? Would it have been at least worth a try to do this the old fashioned way? Our current system does not know how to distinguish the kids whose lives might really be improved by medical treatment, from the kids who will not benefit and who will, in fact, be worse off for it.
My son is not sick or suffering. He doesn’t need medical treatment. He doesn’t need mental health care. But he’s being pushed toward all this anyway. By virtue of his internet, medical research, doctors and therapists just agree and move on. And everyone is somehow okay with this.
I’ve now found other parents of kids like mine. There are hundreds of us; probably many 1000s actually. I had no idea of what was under the hood on this transgender issue, and neither did many other parents who have unexpectedly found themselves enmeshed in this bizarre, alternate universe, where people, including kids and very young adults, allowed to take body-modifying, non-FDA approved drugs and are cheered on by adoring crowds.
While I hope you listeners never find yourselves personally embroiled in this gender identity mess, I beg you, please take a few minutes to hear what I and other concerned parents have to say, for the sake of our kids. For now, it’s mostly just parents in the fight – the last defenders at the gate.
We will fight with all of our being to protect our children while we wait for the rest of the world to come to our aid.
We hope reinforcements arrive soon.