The job
What went wrong?
“We fully supported from day one,” parent says. “That was never in question. My job is to love and support my child no matter what.”
No it isn’t. To love, yes. To support no matter what, no. It does depend on what the “what” is. If the child tortures animals to death, no, the parent’s job is not to support that. Support the child qua child, get help for the child, do your best to make the child understand, but support the child’s actions, no.
If the child wants to go rock-climbing with no training and no gear, you don’t support that. You veto it.
If the child refuses to eat, you don’t support that. You get help, but you don’t support it.
And that’s how it is with the fad for pretending sex is switchable. Don’t support it. Apply the brakes. Gross the kid out with information about oozing surgery scars and freak the kid out with stories of regret. Do not support the lunatic idea that the kid can switch sex.
The last sentence of that paragraph – “And I will continue to do that while there is a breath in my body” – gives away the fact that she’s exercising her vanity here. “I am a fabulous committed dedicated Parent, and you have to admire me.” No, we really don’t.
Notice how the parent goes on to use the word “support” and its cognates about 90 times, sort of like a godbotherer calling on Jesus or Mo. People are weirdly obsessed with being “supportive” at all times no matter what. Screw that. Some things should not be supported.
IMHO as good a threadstarter as any you have ever written, OB.
These parents have been led seriously astray.
“… the only course of action we could have reasonably taken at the time“??
WT ACTUAL F?
The policy of “affirmation first” is why this kind of thing happens. Social affirmation, followed by puberty blockers, then by opposite-sex hormones and surgery, rather than first talking about it because that’s been smeared as amounting to “conversion therapy”. That’s the fault of a medical establishment that’s been co-opted by lying activists pretending to be medical and psychological experts. I do feel sorry for the parents, who were sold a bill of goods they couldn’t question without being labeled as bigots, but especially for the kid for being sold a fantasy that ended up mutilating them for life.
“…taking the only course of action we could reasonably have taken…”
Get fucked. You could very reasonably have consoled your daughter that her body was not a curse or in any way incorrect for her.
Congratulations, your child, who is a minor, is correct.
If only your daughter had benefitted from the same amount of unquestioning ferocity. You’re the adult; you don’t “follow” the lead of your child. She wasn’t thinking of becoming an astronaut or a surgeon, she was thinking of becoming a MAN, something that is not possible. It was your responsibility to understand that it was impossible before launching her into a course of irreversible,debilitating, and mutiliating experimental procedures. You were certainly betrayed by the “experts” you consulted, but the final decision was yours.
I don’t know how much weight I’d attach to an anonymous story on Reddit.
Sure but it’s the approach I’m objecting to, and we all know the approach is the approved one, and all too ubiquitous. Even if the story is fake it’s a useful paradigm.
It’s also an effective distillation of many things we often see, from deranged parent-child dynamics and narcissism to thought-terminating cliches and responsibility-avoidance mechanisms.
Because this is precisely the nightmare that the entire trans-supporting world cannot allow itself to acknowledge, even though reality can only be denied for so long. But what else are you going to do when the alternative is actually answering your mutilated child’s plaintive, “Mommy, why?”
Ok, but isn’t that just embracing truthiness in a way with a passing similarity to Vance and cats? It’s more believable to be sure, but any story that so neatly fits your priors (particularly when so poorly sourced) should be considered suspect. If I’m coming across as insulting or accusatory I would really rather not. At least Libs of TikTok comes with video (but given deep fakes…).
Or maybe it’s more like the discussion that followed the publication of Cat Person. That discussion wasn’t invalidated by the fact that the story was ostensibly fiction because no one was using any of the events described in it at any kind of gotcha.
Medical fashions change, like everything else. I was born when it was fashionable to circumcise boys asap after birth, because the later the operation, the more the suffering. I only realised it had been done to me when I started nude swimming with my friends in the local creek, at around the time I started kindergarten.
Misery loves company, and conceivably nothing would gladden the heart of some male passing himself off as female but at the same time wanting offspring of his own to achieve just that. The best way of doing so would arguably be, and intentionally or otherwise, to ‘come out’ as transgender after becoming a father, or less often, a mother.
Next, that biological father’s choice would be possibly validated in his own mind by transgenderising his son as well, with or without the boy’s permission. Either way, it would get him into trouble with the law. I would expect also that the necessary surgery (though not the hormone treatment) to be simpler going from ‘male’ to ‘female’ than it would be the other way round.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28212056/
I have empathy for a lot (NOT all) of these parents. They know that their children are in extreme psychological distress. The psychological and medical professionals who are treating their children tell them straight-out: “There are two possible outcomes here. Either you affirm your child on a medical pathway with hormones and surgery, or else your child’s distress will increase until they either take their own life, or run away and never speak to you again.” If all the experts are telling the parents that there is only one course of action for the child to be happy and functional, I cannot blame the parents for following instructions as hard as they can.
But this mother really didn’t seem to be in that situation. Reading between the lines, she seemed rather pleased to have a glamorous exciting “trans son” rather than a miserable “failed girl” daughter.
No. Why? Because nothing is at stake. No one is named. No one knows who this narrator is. This narrator is not comparable to Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio.
If you’d prefer, an agony aunt letter in a sympathetic newspaper…