This is a remarkable list of ‘tips’ for parents of gender-questioning kids for New York Magazine to recirculate this summer, just two months after the Final Cass Report dropped. Think of it as a time capsule of sorts: take it offline and bury it in the front yard, to dig up in a hundred years when all of this will make exactly as much sense as any of it would have made 15 years ago (no sense at all).
The article starts off by conflating a lot of things activists like to pretend they don’t conflate:
You’re walking to the bus stop, and your child tells you they want to wear a dress to school. Or they want a buzz cut. Or to paint their nails. Or maybe they tell you they’re transgender, or gender-queer, or trying to figure out if they’re a girl, a boy, or somewhere in between.
Wearing a dress, buzzing your hair, and painting your nails are nbd, and activists are always assuring everybody that these things have nothing to do with what makes someone trans—and yet nobody can describe a ‘trans child’ without recourse to clothes, hairstyles, accessories, and playthings.
There is plenty of rhetoric out there that might encourage a parent to question their child in this moment that’s designed to scare them into inaction or, worse, outright rejection. There is less guidance for those who choose to believe their children.
“Choose to believe their children” is not loaded at all. When your child wants to stay up all night or subsist on a diet of gummy bears or cut off their big toe or put on a cape and jump off of the garage roof, the parents’ job is not to “believe” the child’s truth, but gender is different. Somehow.
So what does that look like? Supporting your child’s transition might feel confusing, insurmountable even, full of high-stakes decisions and opaque systems to navigate. We’ll start with the good news: In more than 100 conversations with transgender children and adults, their parents, and health-care providers, we found that many big-picture questions have pretty straightforward answers. That includes the hard stuff, too, like how they weighed medical decisions and dealt with bullying.
No comment.
Let’s see… what else?
Don’t worry about the fact that your child might change his mind later. This possibility shouldn’t in any way change your behavior now.
Self-indoctrinate via sources like Gender Spectrum.
Spend more time with fellow cult members, via parent groups like PFLAG and the Facebook group Parents of Transgender Children.
“Anything with Diane Ehrensaft’s name on it will be good.” (0__o.)
Help your child change her name.
… and her passport. (Sink costs, in other words.)
Erase the evidence of your child’s natal sex by removing old family photos from display.
Twist your family’s words: “I invite you to not think graphically about my daughter’s sex life any more than you are thinking graphically about any of your children or people you know.”
Cut out ‘unsupportive’ family members whose expressions of concern (“it’s stupid — these kids don’t know what they’re doing”) make you uncomfortable.
Dump your old faith community so you can practice your new religion full-time.
Teach your children how to tuck and bind. Screw the health risks!
Hijack an entire class period to indoctrinate other children the way your child has been indoctrinated.
Help your son rehearse ways to gaslight girls in single-sex spaces.
Pretend puberty blockers are totally safe and reversible—as long as you don’t take them for too long (whatever that means!).
Distract your child from the pain of elective injections.
Pretend 98% of teenage patients will persist in their trans identities into adulthood and that detransition and regret are rare.
Game the health insurance system by claiming your child has an “endocrine disorder.”
This list is full of evidence that affirming parents do—on some level, at early stages in the process—know better. For example:
When You’re Weighing the Medical Risks, Remember That Waiting Is Also Risky
Christina and Erik were considering whether their daughter should move forward with treatment, and the potential side effects gave them pause. “I was like, ‘Lower bone density and difficulty with fertility later on? Oh my God, what am I doing?’” Christina says. She felt overwhelmed weighing which choices were worth the possible risks. Then she talked to a genderqueer friend her age who reminded her that “every decision is going to have side effects. There is no decision that you can make as a parent that’s gonna keep your kid perfectly safe forever.” Christina’s friend pointed out that the decision not to use hormones could also have profound side effects. (Untreated gender dysphoria is associated with increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide.) “It would force her to go through a puberty cycle that is going to alienate her from herself. And yes, maybe when she is 50, she will have some bone-density problems. But next year she might have mental-health problems if you don’t do it.”
“Oh my God, what am I doing?” is a great question for mom to be asking at that moment. Christina then turns to a “genderqueer” friend—that is, someone already up to their earlobes in the cult—who says, basically, “every decision is going to have side effects.” Therefore, override your intuition and sign your kid up for bone-density issues (and pretend it will take until he’s 50 for these to manifest). The “reminder” that “waiting is also risky” is pure emotional blackmail—and it works.
Elsewhere in the piece, a mom goes through an intensive process of seeking “expert permission” to abdicate her common sense. Ultimately, she is so successful at undermining her instincts and reservations that she blows past the need for experts altogether “because I trusted the person in front of me”:
I was now receiving expert permission to trust my child on their own gender and presentation. Bam. Away we went with new pronouns, new clothes, and even a new name. It felt both freeing and nerve-racking, and I needed to regularly reassure myself that I was doing what experts say to do. There were so many people to inform, and each conversation tested my trust anew. Most shocking was when our family pediatrician, of all people, expressed surprise. So I went back to the experts, the books, and my support groups. Despite all the processing I was doing internally, outwardly I didn’t waver. A shift was happening in my relationship with my daughter. She breathed easier, smiled more, and would spontaneously burst out with “I love you, Mommy!” Soon trust started coming more easily. The questions and judgments of outsiders fizzled. The idea that I wouldn’t have affirmed my daughter’s identity began to seem absurd. I didn’t need the experts anymore because I trusted the person in front of me.
The one and only suggestion out of 144 that I would endorse is to visit Reddit communities like r/asktransgender, r/ftm, and r/mtf. Spend five minutes in any of those communities and you will find it very difficult to take the platitudes and virtuous inanities that surround trans identity seriously. If there’s an authentic self in there, these people haven’t found it.
What's so strange to me is how anyone can look at this and think "sure, this checks out." The first stage of my peaking was when I first heard about the concept of non-binary. Having been somewhat sympathetic to (and interested in!) a more traditional view of transexualism, going as far back as my teen years in the 90s, "non-binary" did not strike me as an extension of that at all, but as something else entirely. Something so obviously ridiculous.
While I've become increasingly skeptical that transistion really helps anyone, you can at least make a case for it if it's rare (because humans are a weird species, so why not). It makes no sense at all that any of this would be common, nor that everyone's "true" gender (sex) would exist separetely from their sexed bodies. There exists a version of trans that makes sense (as a treatment for *something*, though certainly not literally being born in the wrong body) , but this is not it.
And I don't understand how really anyone of average intelligence could come to believe that we would be so different from every other mammal on the planet. This is no better than creationism. And while I fear it may take a solid decade for this to leave the mainstream, I have never in my life been more certain of anything than the falsehoods of this belief system.
This makes me so angry. The distortion of reality, the insidious messaging that a good parent would "believe" their child - it's so pseudo-religious, the only difference being that this particular religion, unlike most religions (and this is coming from someone who actively rejects all religion) is only about one's sense of self and has no broader application to the world, connecting individuals to each other - it's evil in disguise. It reminds me of Umbridge in Harry Potter, who would smile broadly and wear pink suits while she tortured her students.
As a parent who did not affirm and received nothing but hatred and vitriol from my daughter - but who believes I did the right thing and at least prevented her from destroying her body for 5 years until she reached 18 - I can state that this messaging is used by children like mine to support the notion that their non-affirming parents are evil, deserving of zero respect, and not to be listened to. So I have lots of reasons to be angry at the messaging.
As I was writing this comment, the news was on the background, and they just announced that "It may become illegal for transgender women to play sports in Nassau County." This is yet another distortion. They could have announced "it may soon become illegal for males to play on sports teams for females" - which was the law pretty much everywhere until about 5 or 6 years ago. This is the state of unreality we are living in.