A mother in the UK describes her experience of having a son who removed himself from his family and changed beyond recognition in his quest to find his place in the world.
Transcript
I am a mum from the UK.
Unfortunately, like many other loving parents I have met, our 19 year old son doesn’t want to see his family anymore. My son was my best friend, we’d always got on really well, but he’s recently turned into someone that I don’t recognise anymore.
Five and a half years ago, my sweet, loving, intelligent boy, announced he was actually transgender. When he was younger, he loved Bob the Builder, Thomas the Tank Engine and Pokemon. However, he refused to play with the dolls and the kitchen that his little brother had asked for. He loved his brothers, they would spend hours together, playing in the garden; snowball fights in the winter, water fights in the summer. Our son had always been a little boy.
Three months before his announcement, he had had a lesson at school with a case study about a little boy who felt like he didn’t fit in with the other children at school. The little boy had read a news article online about a celebrity that was non-binary, and started to research the internet. And that’s when he realised that he was non-binary, too.
My son, had always been a bit quirky, awkward even. He never really enjoyed long cuddles, despite me giving them to him anyway. He hated getting new clothes, especially the itchy Christmas jumpers that I would buy every year. All the tags had to be removed from all his clothing. Despite having lots of friends at primary school, instinctively, I remember asking his Year Five teacher if he thought my son was okay. The teacher reassured me that he was very intelligent, and that I had absolutely nothing to worry about. At the time, I had no idea that there was such a thing as high functioning autism back then.
When he told us that he was transgender, we gave him a hug and told him that we loved him no matter what. Then I questioned him on whether he wanted to dress differently, or use a new name. He didn’t. Shortly after, he told us that he was just confused and wanted things to go back to normal. I tried to question him gently, but he just completely closed off. And he just said that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and he just wanted to forget it.
He was nearly 18 years old when the country locked down, due to the pandemic. As a family, we tried to stay as active as possible, taking walks and spending lots of time in the garden. But my son refused to leave his room. Every time I would go in to try and persuade him to come on a family walk, he refused. He was sleeping in his clothes, wouldn’t get changed out of his hoodie despite it being hot, and was binge-watching animé. He started to become really argumentative, and then one day made another announcement that he wants to be a girl and take hormones as soon as he turned 18. From then on, he wouldn’t speak to us. Instead, he started to tell his Sixth Form College teacher and friends that we were abusive.
As a family, we were in an absolute state of shock; traumatised, in fact. I installed a new router that tracked what websites were being visited and subsequently found out that he was staying up all night talking to strangers on a website called Reddit. I attempted to have conversations about hormones, their side effects and the long term risks of surgeries. But any alternative point of view was criticised and batted down. He didn’t care about the rising number of detransitioners, they were only 1% of regretters, he’d say. The studies I’d sought out for him to consider, were from transphobes and TERFs.
His language had changed entirely. It was like he was talking from a script. He became obsessed with political movements and expressed mistrust of the media and the government. It felt like our son had been indoctrinated, almost. I researched Reddit and found subreddits full of other young children and young adults doing the same. They were all obsessed with political issues and animé and there was also an extreme culture of cutting parents out if they didn’t support their new identity.
Our son’s mental health had gotten worse since his transgender announcement; his eyes had become dull and there were no signs of emotion at all. It’s not that we didn’t support his new identity, we were just highly concerned about the risks of medicalization and surgery; he would be sterile, lose sexual function and have irreversible bodily changes. It’s not unreasonable for a parent to fear these things.
We told him that we would always love him no matter what. Our son left anyway – the internet, his friends, the school had turned him against us. He doesn’t want to spend time with his family at Christmas, open gifts together, watch his brothers open theirs. Neither does he want to see the rest of the family, which absolutely breaks my heart as a mother. Despite the turbulent time we had before he left, our family misses him terribly. We miss the sweet loving person that we used to know.
A part of my family is missing and as a mother that makes my life unbearable. And sadly, we’re not the only ones.