A mother in Pennsylvania describes how her son stepped back from identifying as female, but that things could have been so different if she had taken him to the gender clinic as she had initially planned.
Transcript
I’m a mom in Pennsylvania and my kid is apparently a they/them non-binary person now with a gender-neutral preferred name.
I found this out when I received an email confirming receipt of this gender-neutral named person, their application to a university. We’d been discussing what pronouns and name my son was going to put on his college applications and we told him all the reasons that we saw for, kind of, keeping the status quo of his given name and male pronouns. Though we love him, no matter what his future holds; that he’s young; his family and school call him by his male name, and it can be difficult to come back from this path if you start setting things in stone about your identity at such a young age. And I’m not proud that I blurted out, Do you really think they will see you as a woman? Because really, he does not present as a woman even though he has been saying he is one.
So through all of that conversation, he gave us a deer-in-the-headlights kind of a look, and we left it for him to fill out. So I was more than half expecting to see the female name and she/her pronouns to be reflected in his college applications. So it was kind of a relief, but also a shock, to see this gender-neutral name. When I asked him about it, he said he’s been using this name and the they/them pronouns online and with his friend group, for a while.
We hadn’t really talked about gender in months, it’s the elephant in our house, really. So it’s still very delusional in my mind to be a they/them, non-binary person, but it’s less delusional than thinking a male can be a female on the scale of delusions.
But my biggest takeaway from this event was really shedding a tear for what might have happened, because I was sniffing the Kool-Aid for a few months at the start of this whole thing, about three years ago when he was 14. And my immediate reaction to his declaration was looking into gender clinics, and really seriously thinking that I had a transgender child. This was before I started researching a little bit about autism, and I learned about ROGD, and found my way to Sasha and Stella and all the good information that flows from them.
So, there are two boys at my son’s school who started with the trans thing at about the same time as my kid. And both of these boys are now socially transitioned into girls, thinking they’re girls. They are taking puberty blockers and hormones. They’re regular patients at the gender clinic in Philadelphia. They take voice lessons, they are working on name changes before they apply for their driver’s licences. They’re all in and that could have been my kid. I was so close. I was right on the brink of jumping into the big bowl of Kool-Aid. But we didn’t, we kind of talked ourselves off the ledge, learned a lot about ROGD, social contagion, autistic, black and white thinking and discomfort with puberty. And we decided to just kind of let it lie – not talk about it a lot. Let him do what he wanted with his small friend group and his younger sister, who was very affirming, and we let it lie. And on his totally on his own, he has come to now think that he’s neither male nor female.
And we’ll see what happens from here. I think the roller coaster ride is not over, but I sure am glad that I didn’t follow through with the gender clinic plan.