Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans
Parents of trans-identified children started out like the rest of the parent population. Like most everyone in our politically and culturally charged environment, we’d read news articles about transgenderism and grappled with obscure new words (e.g., “menstruators,” “pregnant people,” etc.) and concepts (e.g., “cis gender,” “pansexual,” etc.). Maybe we’d even been subjected to a pronoun announcement ritual at work or in our religious institution. Like most of the general population, we unwitting parents shook our heads and thought it was all harmless, maybe even progressive and kind.
But on the day your child tells you, most likely in a letter or text, that they are trans, all that changes. Your life is irreversibly knocked off kilter, and you enter a strange, dark upside-down world where everything you believed to be objectively true and real about your family, friendships, schools, doctors, and politicians was called into question. It is a world where nothing is as it seemed on that blissfully ignorant day before the grand trans pronouncement.
A parent’s first reaction is invariably shock—after all, the vast majority of trans pronouncements come out of the blue. Most youth in this category showed zero signs of gender dysphoria or dissatisfaction with their biological sex in childhood. Parents describe feeling as though the wind has been knocked out of them, as though the bottom has fallen out of their world. From that second on, you begin to question your entire reality. How is it that this child you raised, who was indisputably and observably male or female from birth, was really the opposite “gender” all along? How could you, a loving parent, have missed such an enormous truth about your child? What the hell is going on?
At first, parents struggle to wrap their minds around what has happened. They research the phenomenon. They explore and test various causal factors, try to understand the risks of medicalization, and dive deep into the philosophy of gender ideology—a cult-like religion and mind-worm—with all of its deep-seated illogic and inconsistencies.
Parents who have never peeked under the hood of gender ideology are immediately confronted by a society that has adopted a true-believer mentality about transgenderism, with neighbors trying to be kind and accepting and with doctors and therapists who either believe in gender ideology wholesale or are too afraid of legal repercussions to speak against it. But when your child is on the line, you are forced to dig deeper and ask the hard questions, such as: How is it that one “just knows” they are trans? How does one know what it feels like to be the opposite sex? How can a doctor tell if someone is trans? Can you prove it one way or the other? Does my child’s premature birth have something to do with this? Are transgender brains the same as those found in the opposite sex (or, worded differently, can you have a male brain in a female body, or vice versa)? It is common during this first phase for parents to frantically seek information and scour the Internet for clues. It can come to entirely dominate your life for months or even years.
Some spend time deconstructing the logic of trans or determining whether there’s an argument to be made that transition will benefit children—particularly because the very first thing a parent in this situation will hear is the standard refrain, “Would you rather have a living [son/daughter] or a dead [daughter/son]?” In other words, to stand in your child’s way—to prevent even medical transition—is to inevitably lead to your child killing him- or herself. Of course, doctors and therapists will always say this directly in front of your child, both adding to the emotional manipulation of the parent by the child and medical or mental health professional and increasing the odds of suicide, which is well known to be highly prone to contagion and suggestion.
Invariably, after weeks or months of research, many parents conclude that their experience is not at all uncommon and that their children are reading and acting from a script. This form of trans is not an organic development or innate, as some might tell you. The trans coming-out ritual is the same across many families—this is unsurprising since they often follow the same online playbook. One day, many parents begin to realize that most medical and mental health professionals will offer no other answers and that this whole transgender thing really is illogical. It’s an eye-opening, eureka-moment experience when you learn you have been duped into believing nonsense. There are no statistically significant studies that back up core claims and no real proof of anything. It’s worse than that, though, because it’s nonsense rife with ideological fervor. You try to articulate these facts, while searching for the real reasons for this sudden change in your child. And, suddenly, unexpectedly, you are very far removed from the glitter, rainbows, and unicorns and in a dark place filled with pornography, groomers, and trans cheerleaders, as well as peer groups and overreaching schools and activist teachers who are telling your children that they can save them from you.
Parents in this stage often discover the real reason or trigger why their child began to feel he or she is “trans.” They might find it happened at school. Without their permission or knowledge, the school might have encouraged their child to adopt an alternate identity or name and has purposely concealed this from them, the “dangerous” parents by definition, since the prevailing view is that parents who do not support immediate social and medical transition are abusive. More often, parents will find that the trans identity emerged from the Internet—particularly from social media, peer-group echo chambers, and TikTok videos. Some parents inevitably make harrowing discoveries related to porn and grooming.
While searching for the root cause of this rapidly emerging trans identity, parents frequently delve into academic and medical research, questioning the “scientific” underpinnings of transgenderism. When they find that the evidence is shaky at best, some are inspired to bring this awareness to other parents—often through the Substack the two of us launched in June 2021, Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT).
Some parents choose to write about their confusion, fear, and disbelief over their child’s sudden personality shift. Some delve into their frustration and terror after realizing that the medical and therapeutic communities that they had once trusted as “experts” are no help and only encourage medical pathways. Others explore the philosophy and logical fallacies of trans ideology to point these issues out to readers, to try to understand how their children fell into the trans logic trap (often through schools, online forums, and peer groups), and to see if they can map a route out of it. Still others try to understand the science—or lack thereof—underpinning the idea of trans and the medical risks of transition that remain willfully unstudied. Parent writers have also used the forum provided by PITT to rail against the institutions that prop up the trans regime—Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, medical associations, prominent newspapers, and even governments. And still others imagine what comes next—a future when everyone will see this immense scandal as we do.
Josie’s Story
My son became trans-identified back in 2019 at the age of fifteen. He was a typical boy, and I didn’t believe he was trans. I knew something else was going on. I started researching and joined groups of parents and realized how many other parents were going through the same thing or had the same story. I couldn’t believe how indoctrinated my son was in his belief and that I couldn’t talk him out of it no matter how hard
I tried. He is my only child, and I refused to let trans ideology destroy my son and my family. I couldn’t just wait around for the inevitable to happen. It was like watching a slow-moving train coming right at me. I had to do something. I was listening to a podcast by two therapists with expertise in this subject, Stella O’Malley and Lisa Marchiano, and they said the only way to stop trans ideology was for parents to organize. I heard this cry, and I decided I had to fight.
Abigail Shrier had just published Irreversible Damage. Then Keira Bell, who had been prescribed puberty-blocking drugs at the age of fifteen, won her case against Tavistock in the United Kingdom. Things seemed to be moving in the right direction, but I realized much of the discussion centered around girls. Lost in the emerging discussion was any mention of boys.
I became an accidental activist after my story titled “My Son Doesn’t Want to Be a Man,” which I wrote together with Angus Fox, got published and noticed. Eventually, my writing, along with essays written by others in an online group I’d joined, was relocated to PITT. We put out the word to other parents in our internal networks that we would publish their original essays if they had something to say about their experiences in the world of transgenderism. I always thought that even if I couldn’t save my own son, I could help other parents and call attention to what was really going on with gender ideology. That was and always has been the driving force behind my founding of and involvement with PITT. Writing and developing PITT has been very cathartic for me.
It gives me a great deal of satisfaction to help other parents. I do not want them to experience the pain that trans ideology has inflicted on my family and me. My story continues to evolve, and my son is still trans-identified. I would do anything to save him. Even if I can’t, he can never say I didn’t try everything to keep him from harm. I wish I had been able to read about stories such as mine when gender ideology first hit my family, and I wonder, if I had, would my family’s story be any different today? Regardless of the outcome in my family’s case, I’m glad we are now here to help others until this entire medical scandal ends.
Dina’s Story
My son announced he identified as “trans” in July 2020 at the age of thirteen. From that moment on, my life was forever changed. I spent countless hours down the Internet rabbit hole learning (or so I thought) everything I could about trans, and why my son thought this applied to him, a typical, nonfeminine boy who had never exhibited any signs of dysphoria or stereotypical cross-sex interests or behaviors. There were no signs of hope on the Internet back then, just story after story of how affirmation and transition were the only options for my son. His sudden announcement was to be considered permanent and irrevocable.
After several disastrous brushes with affirmative therapists, our family decided to take the “watchful-waiting” approach and to let our son experience his childhood without the complications of social transition. At the same time, we blocked all outside trans influences, redirected our son to real-life activities, and cracked down on Internet and game usage to give him space to grow up without toxic interference.
I vowed that, if my child and family came through this crisis intact, I would share my story with others. I could not stomach the thought of a single other parent going through the hell that I had been through. Eventually, with Josie and others, I was able to find my voice through PITT. A year and a half later, my son desisted. In a gradual process that extended over months, he grew into his body and mind and found a new confidence in himself. With my own desistance story, I’m now able to make good on my promise to help others who are navigating their own crises and to embolden those who want to help fight the institutionalized evil and corrupt force that is gender ideology.
Why We Write about Gender Ideology
There are three types of people that are threatening and, therefore, absolutely intolerable to the trans ideology narrative: desisters (people who thought they were trans but then stopped thinking that way), detransitioners (people who “transitioned” to the other sex and are now reverting back), and parents who question.
We are part of the third group. We are parents who do not go along with the affirmative model, whereby children who say they are a different sex than their biology indicates must be agreed with, celebrated, and then physically and socially modified to support their delusion—making them lucrative medical patients for life. This model, against all reason, remains the currently accepted way of thinking in many liberal Western societies, including the United States and Canada.
The hundreds of essays published to date on PITT are by moms and dads of all different political and religious persuasions who found each other through underground support groups across the world. We have just one thing in common—we all have children who, suddenly, out of the blue, announced they were “trans.” After learning more, we came to realize that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, and some of us decided to work together to consolidate our voices and speak our minds in a forum where we could speak as directly and bluntly as necessary.
We are not writers. We are not activists by profession. We’re your neighbors—regular people with regular jobs who have found ourselves secretly whispering into phones to journalists and penning emotional essays and first-person accounts as we fight for our children’s mental and physical well-being in the shadows. Most of us use pseudonyms because we need to protect our identities not only for fear of social and professional backlash but also to protect our children and other family members from public scrutiny.
Why are we doing this all anonymously and in secret? Simple—we are scared that you will take away our kids, dox us, and destroy our livelihoods and, much more importantly, our families. Think we’re being overly dramatic? Just ask anyone who’s dared to publicly question trans ideology. This is exactly what is happening as our so-called liberal societies become increasingly illiberal, anti-free speech, and anti-family.
The easy thing to do would be to go along. But we’ve been inspired by vocal detransitioners like Sinead Watson, Grace, Garrett, Tullip, Helena, and more, who have been bravely speaking out about how they were let down by the medical community. We’ve decided that we are not going to stand silently by while our children are experimented on and misled by a quasi-religious cult ideology. We’re not going to let our children down, like our society has let detransitioners down. We are the adults in the room, and we’re not going away.
It’s way past time for the world to understand that all three of these counter-ideology groups exist, that parents have been silenced for years, emotionally blackmailed and held hostage by threats to take away our kids, and that today’s narrative of trans as a biological fact has gone unquestioned by too many and has been permitted to run amok, with unfettered access to our schools, government, and media for far too long.
So, what do we hope to accomplish with our writing?
We write so that you know we are here. For every glitter/rainbow mom you see on the news repeating harmful stereotypes about girl and boy behaviors, gushing about how their little girl is a boy (or vice versa), and rejecting any fair-minded questions as cruelties that deny their child’s very existence, there are ten, twenty—maybe even hundreds of us—unable to speak publicly but working hard behind the scenes to expose the complete lack of evidence and science behind trans.
We write so that you can see that the things people say never happen, do happen, and we can prove it because they happened to us.
“No teen would ever receive ‘wrong-sex’ hormones on their first visit without exhaustive exploration!” Not true. Some of our kids have easily obtained wrong-sex hormones on their very first visit to a clinic. Doctors and clinics even readily give hormones to kids with well-documented physical and mental health conditions that should make them ineligible. How do we know this? This has happened to our own kids, many of whom have other serious physical and mental health conditions.
“No one would ever be censored for writing about their experiences in a country like the United States—free speech is alive and well, and reports to the contrary must be hoaxes!” Not true. A number of us have been censored on Medium and other platforms when writing about trans topics—us included.
“Trans kids just know who they are!” Not true. Some of our kids thought they were trans, passionately and vocally, and have since changed their minds. And we know first-hand that our teens are no different than the average teen—immature, impulsive, changeable, risk-taking, and prone to making decisions and acting in a way they later regret.
“No one would ever take away your child just because you disagree about ideology!” Oh yes, frighteningly, they would, and that, too, has happened within our parent group. In many locations, schools, government bureaucrats, and courts currently exercise free rein to usurp parental prerogative and safeguarding when it comes to trans.
We write in the hopes that our stories open your eyes. We hope that our stories will lead you to think critically about the prevailing narrative in too many countries and raise questions in your mind that you seek to answer. When you seek those answers, we hope you will see the vast multitudes of people and communities that are pushing back against trans ideology. Once your eyes are open, you will see them everywhere. Feminists, the LGB community, medical professionals who know their profession has been overrun by politics and ideology and is now causing harm instead of helping. Detransitioners who were irreparably harmed after going down an “affirmation” track. Journalists, academics, and writers who speak out with reasonable concerns and questions and who risk cancellation for so doing. And other parents, like those of us from PITT.
We write so that you might see that when parents do not agree that their kid is trans, it is not abusive, neglectful, or evil. There are thousands of parents like us who saw their child’s trans identity emerge suddenly, after immersion in porn, Internet chat groups, and anime or following strong influence from peers who had already taken on a trans identity.
We are nothing like the “horrible” unaffirming parents described in mainstream media. We love our kids. We don’t beat them or throw them out of the house. Quite the opposite. We protect and shield them and give them the space to be kids as they work through their kid issues in a world trying with all its might to thrust them into adult situations with adult problems.
We lovingly support our children while holding the line against “affirmation” because, unlike other modes of teen expression like emo and goth, trans comes at a much higher cost—drugs and surgeries are a central part of this fad. We know that elective cosmetic surgeries on sex organs for no physical reason, with myriad known side effects and a lifetime of required medication, are not good for our children’s longterm health. Helping your kid grow up healthy in body and mind and comfortable in their own skin is good parenting, not child abuse.
We write because maybe, just maybe, our stories will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for you. That it brings about that peak moment where you say, “Okay, now this gender thing has gone too far, and I don’t want any part of it anymore—maybe my blind faith in the idea of trans as noble and inclusive was misplaced.” Maybe we can help you see that there are other viewpoints and that disagreeing with or being skeptical of trans ideology is not synonymous with bigotry and that that one-sided attitude has stigmatized even having a conversation about these very real and serious concerns.
We write so you have the courage to join us and speak up, knowing that you are not alone. Trans ideology falls apart like a house of cards under even the most superficial scrutiny. If you see us—with our children and families at stake—speaking out, maybe you will feel brave enough to speak up too—after all, your child may very well be the next kid captured by this new ideological fad.
We write because we believe that, with our voices and our writing, we can do our part to change how the public sees trans ideology and its associated corrupt medical practices before our children’s lives are forever damaged.
This essay is excerpted from Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans: Tales from the Homefront in the Fight to Save Our Kids, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Josie A. is a mother who lives on the West Coast of the United States. Dina S. is a mother who lives on the East Coast. Both are co-founders of the Substack Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans.
August 2024