A mother in New Zealand fears for the future of her vulnerable, autistic son and the path he has chosen.
Transcript
Hi, I’m a mum from New Zealand.
I had our son at 47 years of age and he was born a high functioning autistic. As a boy, he had all the typical male behaviours and characteristics, playing with cars and masculine type toys. I tried to keep him safe from medical professionals by making sure we never took him to them, unless it was absolutely necessary for things like injuries. I’ve known for many years health professionals cannot be trusted to care for us and that they’re now just extensions of the pharmaceutical companies.
At age 13, my son asked how he would know if he was gay, as he has two siblings who are gay. I told him the thought of kissing a boy or holding his hand would be a pleasurable thought. He then said, Oh, okay, I’m not gay then. Then he entered high school and at age 15, in his second high school year, he told us he was bisexual. We accepted all of this and then he started to become extremely unhappy at age 16. He told us he was suicidal, so we hid all of the knives. He told me there was something he was unhappy and depressed about but wouldn’t tell me what it was. We noticed he had female avatars on his game playing. He called Youthline and told them he was suicidal and that he was being abused by us, so they sent the police around to talk to us. Luckily, we knew how to deal with the police and get them to leave and give our son back to us.
The abuse our son was referring to, was us restricting his internet time and giving him jobs to do in the back yard and taking internet off him as punishment for yelling and arguing with us and kicking doors, also making him leave and going for walks to calm down. We live in a rural area, so it’s healthy to go walking and get some fresh air and exercise.
Our son decided the only way he could be happy was to leave home so we organised for him to live in the next town nearby, next to his high school, so we could still support him in his endeavours and we would be a safety net if it didn’t work out for him. He told us he wanted to stay at school and get all his qualifications before he left, so we were happy to support him in this way.
Behind our backs he enlisted the help of his sister, who was now 18 and living away from home, who we found out later was also agreeing with the trans agenda, so she supported everything he was doing. She secretly bought him a plane ticket to a location which was miles away for us, on the upper North Island of New Zealand – we’re on the lower South Island.
He was now threatening us that he would accuse us of neglect for not taking him to counsellors, and we knew he was determined to make trouble for us if we didn’t help him. So we reasoned he would be around family as my older daughter was also helping him, and we agreed to drive him to the airport. We saw on his plane ticket that he had called himself a girl’s name and the airline made him change it before he could fly.
I tried to warn his sister what she was in for, as he was very challenging to live with due to his autism and stubbornness, but she felt she could rescue him and didn’t listen. After he left to stay with her, he announced to us he was a girl, and that he was going to apply for conversion therapy. We were devastated and we realised that everyone else in our family had been in on it and hadn’t told us what was going on, and we surmised that they believed that they were helping rescue him from, in his words, abusive clutches. So instead of just a teenage boy leaving home to try out life, we realised we had a very vulnerable and deluded child, venturing out without any support from adults that could be a guiding hand for him.
His sister could only handle him for one month then she asked him to either come back to us, or find somewhere else to live. He found a place to board in the same area. I have a gay son in that vicinity and a gay sister. None of my grown children or my sister have children of their own and support him fully in his delusion of being a girl, as does his therapist. After listening to other parents’ stories on here, I realised he must have been groomed online for years because now he has all those markers: the scripts; the terminology; believing we are transphobic, when we are just delusional phobic; believing all his problems will be solved when he magically changes gender. He has cut himself off from us and I see a bleak future ahead for him if he cannot break this delusion. I’m so disappointed that my other children only want to support him and see us as in the wrong for pointing out the truth to him. So there’s not much hope for him at the moment with that kind of support for us to lose him.
I send him links, to an old email address, to things I think might help. But I don’t even know if he uses that email now, but it is all I can think of to do.