A mom from South Carolina describes the impact of pre-adoption trauma on her daughter, and recommends parents read ‘Hold on to Your Kids’ by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté.
Transcript
I’m a mom from South Carolina.
We adopted our daughter in 2005 from one of the worst orphanages in China, at 13 months. She weighed only 15 pounds, couldn’t crawl or hold a bottle and didn’t cry. Her toddler years were filled with night terrors, vivid flashbacks, and a palpable sense of abandonment.
When she turned eight she said, There’s a piece of my heart missing and I need to know who I am. We assured her we were here to help her find herself. For the next year, she fixated on her adoptee status, but still seem socially engaged – and boy crazy. We were close, too.
In April 2019, we shopped for bikinis. At the time, one of her new friends was gender non conforming and seem to have captivated my child, and my child developed an unhealthy attachment to her. In June 2019, my child declared she was bisexual. She wore bikinis until early August, when she began covering up at the pool and then announced she was gay. Two weeks later, she announced she was a boy. Within days she suffered from panic attacks and anxiety.
I found a therapist but on the fourth visit she demanded I take my child to the ER for suicidal ideation. They kept her overnight and discharged her the next day. The psychiatrist said it was related to her adoptee status. She became combative and contemptuous and began lying about many things, something she’d never done before. I fired the therapist and found another one. After three months with her, things were no better.
My daughter’s circle of friends consisted entirely of five natal females who identified as male; one was already on testosterone. In January 2020, I hacked into my child’s phone and was shocked to see that the friends she attached to exposed her to lesbian porn and sexual terminology, Tumblr and DeviantArt. My child told friends that I forced her to wear dresses, corsets and pink – not true. Her friend said that I was a gaslighter, trauma bonder, textbook abusive and my husband should divorce me.
I was sickened by all of this and felt like I had been stabbed in the heart. The second therapist admitted she could not help her. We hired a third and fired her after the first session, when we learned that she affirmed our daughter’s male persona. For six months I researched how my daughter got here and finally found that Lisa Littman’s study and, Bingo, I realised this is ROGD.
By then I found a psychologist who diagnosed our child with pre-adoption trauma, anxiety and depression. She’s been treating her for 18 months and says she’s not transgender, but is still entrenched in gender ideology. She says my child has a fear of growing up and with no sense of where she comes from or who she looks or sounds like, she can’t see her future.
I’ve run interference with school administrators, teachers and a guidance counsellor, all of whom, thankfully, have been cooperative in not affirming the male persona, name or pronouns. My child is barely five feet tall and almost 18. She dresses like a boy, wears her hair short and looks like a sixth-grade boy. I have to ask restaurants not to give her a child’s menu.
This transgender cult, which seeks to brainwash and turn our child against us has also wreaked havoc on our 12-year-old, also from China, who is much like the little kid screaming, The Emperor is naked!. Every night I took her into bed she says, Mom, this needs to stop, she’s not a boy.
I really believe that the primal wound of abandonment at birth is responsible for this extraordinary identity crisis. And that we need to help her find that missing piece of her heart before she harms herself with drugs and surgeries.
What I’ve learned from all of this is that parental controls on social media are a frontline defence. The best advice I’ve received, and give, is to keep your child close. Read Hold on to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld – explains a lot. My only hope for the future is that in the end, love wins. That our child finds and accepts herself for who she truly is: a beautiful young woman worthy of joy, love and happiness.