#transhausen syndrome by proxy

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

==

If you're going to claim this is a strawman, I refer you to the retracted Boston Children's Hospital promotional videos where one of the "doctors" literally, verbatim says, "refusing to get a haircut" as an indicator of a child being "transgender."

This is child abuse.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

==

It's so weird because I was told this never happens.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Helen Joyce: Something that you may not have thought of is that there's a lot of people who can't move on on this. And because that's the people who've transitioned their own children.

So those people are going to be like you know the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific Islands and didn't know the war was over. They've got to fight forever.

This is why, this is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we ever have experienced. A lot of people have done the worst thing that you could do. Which is to harm their children irrevocably because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they'll still be fighting.

And each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups. Like, I've lost count the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has got turned upside down on this, oh the deputy director has a trans child, or you know, oh the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child, or whatever. The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person, and it may not even be widely known at the organization that they've a trans child. But it will come out. Like people will have sort of said it quietly.

And now you can't talk truth in front of that person, and you know you can't. Because what you're saying is, you as a parent have done a truly, like a human rights abuse level of awful thing to your child. That cannot be fixed.

There are specific individuals who are really actively against women's rights here, and it's not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels that it's because they've transed their child.

And so those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me. Because people like me are a standing reproach to them. I don't want to be. I'm not talking directly to them, I don't spend my time bitching about them. But the fact is that just simply by saying, we will never accept natal males in women's spaces, well it's their son that we're talking about, and they've told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his sexual function, and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don't, there's no way back for them and their child.

They've sold their child a bill of goods that they can't deliver on. And I'm the one who has to be bullied, to try to force me to deliver on it. So those people are going to be the people who will keep this bloody movement going, I'm sorry to say. Because they've everything to lose. And it's a fight to the death as far as they're concerned.

--

Full conversation:

==

Completely explains Susie Green, former CEO of the discredited organization Mermaids, who drugged her own son, leading eventually to taking him out of country to get illegally butchered in Thailand because her husband was afraid he was gay.

https://unherd.com/2022/11/mermaids-useful-idiots/

“As a toddler, Jackie always headed for the dolls in toy shops.” And if a four-year-old looking at dolls weren’t evidence enough that this child should be committed to a lifetime of medicalisation, Green added, “[Jackie] loathed having her hair cut.” Green put Jack — as he was then known — on puberty-blockers and flew him to Thailand for a sex change operation when he was 16, making him the youngest person in the world to undergo that surgery. [..] In her Tedx talk, Green says that as soon as her baby boy “got mobile” — ie, learned to crawl — “he was gravitating to things that you would think are stereotypically female”. Like what, tampons? Was her one-year-old trying to book an appointment for a cervical smear test? Nope, “the Polly Pocket and My Little Pony”, she says, and then quickly adds “that was fine – but not for Dad”. Green’s then husband disapproved of his son playing with My Little Pony toys and therefore banned them from the house. [..] As Green recounts in her talk, “What I had come to the conclusion, up until she was about two, was that I had a very sensitive, quite effeminate little boy who was probably gay.” So when four-year-old Jack told her he should be a girl, Green felt “it explained so many things”.

A homophobic father is one thing - plenty of gay kids have survived that, and some have even had an anti-gay parent come around later.

But a mother who responds to this by mutilating her own child is already mentally ill and ultimately far more dangerous than the father ever was.

There is no coming back from this, for either Jack or Susie. The only way to not mentally self-destruct is to double, triple, quadruple-down, to deny the blatant atrocity you've committed and insist that it's good and righteous, and everyone else needs to play along with that delusion.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"She" is her two year old son.

Mother started socially transitioning her son from 2 years old. Her evidence? He likes to play dress-ups and didn't want to play t-ball.

1950s: "Boys wear blue and are supposed to like trucks. What are you, a girl?"

2020s: "Boys wear blue and are supposed to like trucks. You must be a girl."

I haven't figured out yet whether this is a mother who never wanted a boy and has decided to make one, a mother who would rather trans her son than have him turn out to be gay, or a mother who is so desperate for any kind of attention - positive or negative - that she'd sacrifice her own son.

Or all of the above.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jamie Reed

Published: Feb 9, 2023

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor. 

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 

During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility. 

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.

The Floodgates Open

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl. 

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone. 

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school. 

This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe. 

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t). 

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription. 

That’s all it took. 

When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor. 

Side Effects

Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.” 

There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are. 

Here’s an example. On Friday, May 1, 2020, a colleague emailed me about a 15-year-old male patient: “Oh dear. I am concerned that [the patient] does not understand what Bicalutamide does.” I responded: “I don’t think that we start anything honestly right now.”

Bicalutamide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, and one of its side effects is that it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts. The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and feminizing agent for boys. As with most cancer drugs, bicalutamide has a long list of side effects, and this patient experienced one of them: liver toxicity. He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.

How little patients understood what they were getting into was illustrated by a call we received at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.

We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.

Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, “Wow, we hurt this kid.” 

There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.

Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body. I doubt that any parent who's ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes. 

But sometimes the parents’ understanding of what they had agreed to do to their children came forcefully: 

Neglected and Mentally Ill Patients

Besides teenage girls, another new group was referred to us: young people from the inpatient psychiatric unit, or the emergency department, of St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The mental health of these kids was deeply concerning—there were diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals.

This was tragic, but unsurprising given the profound trauma some had been through. Yet no matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition—even with all the expense and hardship it entailed—as the solution.

Some weeks it felt as though almost our entire caseload was nothing but disturbed young people. 

For example, one teenager came to us in the summer of 2022 when he was 17 years old and living in a lockdown facility because he had been sexually abusing dogs. He’d had an awful childhood: His mother was a drug addict, his father was imprisoned, and he grew up in foster care. Whatever treatment he may have been getting, it wasn’t working. 

During our intake I learned from another caseworker that when he got out, he planned to reoffend because he believed the dogs had willingly submitted.

Somewhere along the way, he expressed a desire to become female, so he ended up being seen at our center. From there, he went to a psychologist at the hospital who was known to approve virtually everyone seeking transition. Then our doctor recommended feminizing hormones. At the time, I wondered if this was being done as a form of chemical castration. 

That same thought came up again with another case. This one was in spring of 2022 and concerned a young man who had intense obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested as a desire to cut off his penis after he masturbated. This patient expressed no gender dysphoria, but he got hormones, too. I asked the doctor what protocol he was following, but I never got a straight answer. 

In Loco Parentis

Another disturbing aspect of the center was its lack of regard for the rights of parents—and the extent to which doctors saw themselves as more informed decision-makers over the fate of these children.

In Missouri, only one parent’s consent is required for treatment of their child. But when there was a dispute between the parents, it seemed the center always took the side of the affirming parent.

My concerns about this approach to dissenting parents grew in 2019 when one of our doctors actually testified in a custody hearing against a father who opposed a mother’s wish to start their 11-year-old daughter on puberty blockers. 

I had done the original intake call, and I found the mother quite disturbing. She and the father were getting divorced, and the mother described the daughter as “kind of a tomboy.” So now the mother was convinced her child was trans. But when I asked if her daughter had adopted a boy’s name, if she was distressed about her body, if she was saying she felt like a boy, the mother said no. I explained the girl just didn’t meet the criteria for an evaluation. 

Then a month later, the mother called back and said her daughter now used a boy’s name, was in distress over her body, and wanted to transition. This time the mom and daughter were given an appointment. Our providers decided the girl was trans and prescribed a puberty blocker to prevent her normal development. 

The father adamantly disagreed, said this was all coming from the mother, and a custody battle ensued. After the hearing where our doctor testified in favor of transition, the judge sided with the mother. 

‘I Want My Breasts Back’

Because I was the main intake person, I had the broadest perspective on our existing and prospective patients. In 2019, a new group of people appeared on my radar: desisters and detransitioners. Desisters choose not to go through with a transition. Detransitioners are transgender people who decide to return to their birth gender. 

The one colleague with whom I was able to share my concerns agreed with me that we should be tracking desistance and detransition. We thought the doctors would want to collect and understand this data in order to figure out what they had missed. 

We were wrong. One doctor wondered aloud why he would spend time on someone who was no longer his patient. 

But we created a document anyway and called it the Red Flag list. It was an Excel spreadsheet that tracked the kind of patients that kept my colleague and me up at night. 

One of the saddest cases of detransition I witnessed was a teenage girl, who, like so many of our patients, came from an unstable family, was in an uncertain living situation, and had a history of drug use. The overwhelming majority of our patients are white, but this girl was black. She was put on hormones at the center when she was around 16. When she was 18, she went in for a double mastectomy, what’s known as “top surgery.” 

Three months later she called the surgeon’s office to say she was going back to her birth name and that her pronouns were “she” and “her.” Heartbreakingly, she told the nurse, “I want my breasts back.” The surgeon’s office contacted our office because they didn’t know what to say to this girl.

My colleague and I said that we would reach out. It took a while to track her down, and when we did we made sure that she was in decent mental health, that she was not actively suicidal, that she was not using substances. The last I heard, she was pregnant. Of course, she’ll never be able to breastfeed her child. 

‘Get On Board, Or Get Out’

My concerns about what was going on at the center started to overtake my life. By spring 2020, I felt a medical and moral obligation to do something. So I spoke up in the office, and sent plenty of emails. 

Here’s just one example: On January 6, 2022, I received an email from a staff therapist asking me for help with a case of a 16-year-old transgender male living in another state. “Parents are open to having patient see a therapist but are not supportive of gender and patient does not want parents to be aware of gender identity. I am having a challenging time finding a gender affirming therapist.”

I replied:

“I do not ethically agree with linking a minor patient to a therapist who would be gender affirming with gender as a focus of their work without that being discussed with the parents and the parent agreeing to that kind of care.”

In all my years at the Washington University School of Medicine, I had received solidly positive performance reviews. But in 2021, that changed. I got a below-average mark for my “Judgment” and “Working Relationships/Cooperative Spirit.” Although I was described as “responsible, conscientious, hard-working and productive” the evaluation also noted: “At times Jamie responds poorly to direction from management with defensiveness and hostility.” 

Things came to a head at a half-day retreat in summer of 2022. In front of the team, the doctors said that my colleague and I had to stop questioning the “medicine and the science” as well as their authority. Then an administrator told us we had to “Get on board, or get out.” It became clear that the purpose of the retreat was to deliver these messages to us.

The Washington University system provides a generous college tuition payment program for long-standing employees. I live by my paycheck and have no money to put aside for five college tuitions for my kids. I had to keep my job. I also feel a lot of loyalty to Washington University.

But I decided then and there that I had to get out of the Transgender Center, and to do so, I had to keep my head down and improve my next performance review. 

I managed to get a decent evaluation, and I landed a job conducting research in another part of The Washington University School of Medicine. I gave my notice and left the Transgender Center in November of 2022. 

What I Want to See Happen

For a couple of weeks, I tried to put everything behind me and settled into my new job as a clinical research coordinator, managing studies regarding children undergoing bone marrow transplants. 

Then I came across comments from Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who is a high official at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The article read: “Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, said that clinics are proceeding carefully and that no American children are receiving drugs or hormones for gender dysphoria who shouldn’t.”

I felt stunned and sickened. It wasn’t true. And I know that from deep first-hand experience. 

So I started writing down everything I could about my experience at the Transgender Center. Two weeks ago, I brought my concerns and documents to the attention of Missouri’s attorney general. He is a Republican. I am a progressive. But the safety of children should not be a matter for our culture wars. 

Given the secrecy and lack of rigorous standards that characterize youth gender transition across the country, I believe that to ensure the safety of American children, we need a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria. 

In the past 15 years, according to Reuters, the U.S. has gone from having no pediatric gender clinics to more than 100. A thorough analysis should be undertaken to find out what has been done to their patients and why—and what the long-term consequences are.

There is a clear path for us to follow. Just last year England announced that it would close the Tavistock’s youth gender clinic, then the NHS’s only such clinic in the country, after an investigation revealed shoddy practices and poor patient treatment. Sweden and Finland, too, have investigated pediatric transition and greatly curbed the practice, finding there is insufficient evidence of help, and danger of great harm. 

Some critics describe the kind of treatment offered at places like the Transgender Center where I worked as a kind of national experiment. But that’s wrong. 

Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: “We are building the plane while we are flying it.” No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft.

==

The U.S. gets its Tavistock. It will not be the last.

Fathers may well be some of the unsung heroes at the end of this mess. Whenever one parent is pushing for life-long medicalization of a child, it is invariably a Munchausen-by-Trans (Transhausen) possessed mother, with a father fighting against all odds and the system that favors her.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Hadley Freeman

Published: Nov 29, 2022

It’s incredibly easy to criticise Susie Green, the influential and, as of Friday, ex-CEO of Mermaids. But I’d like to say this in her defence: she never lied about who she was.

From her early interviews in 2012, when her trans daughter, Jackie, then 19, became a Miss England finalist, Green, then an IT-manager, was utterly open about how she first knew her child was trans: “As a toddler, Jackie always headed for the dolls in toy shops.” And if a four-year-old looking at dolls weren’t evidence enough that this child should be committed to a lifetime of medicalisation, Green added, “[Jackie] loathed having her hair cut.” Green put Jack — as he was then known — on puberty-blockers and flew him to Thailand for a sex change operation when he was 16, making him the youngest person in the world to undergo that surgery.

She merrily recalls in a YouTube interview that because Jack’s penis hadn’t developed due to the blockers, “there wasn’t much for the surgeon to work with” when constructing their vagina. “Sorry, Jackie!” she laughs.

During her time at Mermaids, Green has been advising parents, schools, the police, the media and NHS trusts about how to deal with other children who dare to not be gender stereotypes. She was their first staff member — before Mermaids was run by volunteers — and under her leadership, she has transformed the organisation from a quiet, low-key charity to an energetically active lobbying group, and her theories about childhood and gender have been at least as influential as Judith Butler’s. Mermaids has been endorsed by the Be Kind brigade, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jameela Jamil and Emma Watson, accrued a slew of corporate sponsors and been awarded £500,000 by the National Lottery. Progressive newspapers advise readers to contact the service should they have any concerns about their child.

Since 2017, I regularly asked editors at the newspaper where I worked if I could write about Mermaids in general and Green specifically, because it was so obvious that something was very wrong here. The answer, always, was no, but the reasons given were fuzzy: it wouldn’t be right in that section, they couldn’t see the news peg, it felt too niche. A more likely reason was one articulated to me with some passion on social media any time I tweeted anything sceptical about Green or Mermaids: to question either was to wish trans children would die. Doubt the charity, hate the cause, in other words. Weirdly, this attitude seems to hold true only for charities connected to trans issues: no one, as far as I know, screamed that The Times hates starving people when they investigated Oxfam in 2018 about allegations that some of its workers paid for sex.

I do have some sympathy with those who were too scared to question Mermaids. Under Green’s leadership, the organisation has done its utmost to evade scrutiny, trotting out — even in parliamentary committees, even in the 2018 ITV drama Butterfly, starring Anna Friel, and for which Green was the series lead consultant — the claim that 48% of young trans people attempt suicide. A terrifying statistic for any parent of a gender dysphoric child, and almost as scary for any organisation that cares more about being kind than being accurate. Happily, the statistic is bunkum, as the researcher behind the study it’s based on has said, because the study involved 27 self-selecting trans volunteers, and therefore its findings should not be widened out to all gender dysphoric young people, as Mermaids had done.

You would think that discovering attempted suicide is not as common among young gender dysphoric people as previously believed would be greeted with triumphant cheers and celebrations by a charity that claims to support them, and the celebrities who frequently tweet their love for the group routinely described as “the most oppressed people in the world”. And yet, strangely, not so much. As a result, that statistic is still routinely banded around by activists. (Is telling oppressed people that they are likely to try to kill themselves, despite the facts suggesting otherwise, really Being Kind?) It’s the same story with puberty blockers: for years, Green and Mermaids insisted they were fully reversable. Green had given them to her child, as she repeated so often, and she wouldn’t deliberately harm her own child, right? Online obsessives — such as one full-time tweeter, part-time lawyer and occasional fox murderer — parroted these claims, and people went along with the theory that a drug originally licensed to treat prostate cancer would be fine for children. In fact, it is now becoming widely accepted that blockers affect bone development, and may prevent the young person from ever being able to orgasm.

Despite telling Jackie’s story over and over, and always including the detail about the girls’ toys, Green took pains to stress that being trans child went deeper than a desire for dolls. But how else would a four-year-old boy express a wish to be a girl other than through the medium of toys? What else would being a girl mean to them? In her Tedx talk, Green says that as soon as her baby boy “got mobile” — ie, learned to crawl — “he was gravitating to things that you would think are stereotypically female”. Like what, tampons? Was her one-year-old trying to book an appointment for a cervical smear test? Nope, “the Polly Pocket and My Little Pony”, she says, and then quickly adds “that was fine – but not for Dad”. Green’s then husband disapproved of his son playing with My Little Pony toys and therefore banned them from the house. (A macho father who abhors effeminacy in his son is a common feature in the life stories of trans women; Paris Lees’ semi-autobiographical novel, What It Feels Like for a Girl, is a recent example.)

Shortly after that, the child then known as Jack told his mother, “God made a mistake and I should have been a girl.” As Green recounts in her talk, “What I had come to the conclusion, up until she was about two, was that I had a very sensitive, quite effeminate little boy who was probably gay.” So when four-year-old Jack told her he should be a girl, Green felt “it explained so many things”. And to be fair, a trans four-year-old makes about as much sense as a gay two-year-old. No one has ever accused Green of failing to maintain fidelity to her extraordinary version of logic.

Jackie Green has occasionally spoken up in defence of her mother. In 2018, a journalist tweeted that Green had “castrated” her teenage son when she arranged for the sex change operation in Thailand. Jackie tweeted back that this was untrue: “I was meant to be female and thus had surgery to correct my small defect,” was how she put it. As to how she knew she was meant to be a girl, Jackie said, “For a long time I was told I had to play with action men and other ‘boy toys’, another concept I find rather silly, but I still wanted the Barbies and little mermaids.” And so her mother arranged for the “small defect” to be “corrected” so she could.

No one has said why Green is suddenly no longer the CEO of Mermaids. But the fact that the charity has said they are appointing an interim one for now suggests the decision was quite sudden. The timing was certainly peculiar, coming 10 days after Green gave a rare interview, refuting all recent criticisms of her organisation.

Slowly, it seems, the tide is turning against Mermaids. When it was announced this year that the NHS was going shut down Gids, its gender identity clinic for children, in the spring, attention quickly turned to Mermaids. Former clinicians at Gids have accused the charity of having a “harmful” effect on the clinic by promoting transition as a cure. Mermaids has denied this, but it didn’t help matters by putting itself in the spotlight when it launched an appeal against the Charity Commission’s decision to award charitable status to the LGB Alliance, now the only specifically gay charity in this country which does not include trans people. Witnesses for Mermaids have had to defend gender theories under questioning this autumn, which has led to extraordinary moments such as Mermaids’ chair of trustees, claiming, “I’m not sure that people come out of the womb with a sex.”

A Daily Telegraph investigation in September found that the charity was offering to send breast binders to children against their parents’ wishes, which prompted the Charity Commission to open a regulatory compliance case. Green later defended Mermaids in The Guardian by saying a binder is better than “a young person using duct tape on themselves”. In October, the Times revealed that one of the Mermaids trustees, Jacob Breslow, gave a 2011 presentation for B4U-ACT, an organisation that aims to promote better understanding of paedophiles, in which he criticised the negative ideas about “paedophilic desire”. “We did some general top-level Google and internet searches. We did a social media search [and it] didn’t come up,” Green told The Guardian. Then, 10 days later, she was ousted.

Maybe the Mermaids board belatedly realised that if they want their organisation to endure, they needed to get rid of the wacky front woman. Ultimately, I don’t care why she went, because so much damage has already been done. But what I do want to know is this: how did so many people take Green so seriously for so long? Why did so many people turn off their intelligence when faced with this former IT consultant from Leeds? And how could so many LGBT activists champion and defend a woman who saw effeminacy — and therefore homosexuality — in her two-year-old and feel she had to “correct” this “defect”?

Green kept telling the story of Jackie because, for a long time, it gave her moral authority. No doubt, parents have long been great advocates for the rights of their marginalised children. But an alternative way of looking at Green is she was at least as good an advocate for her own rights: the right to put her child on untested hormone pills, the right to take her child to Thailand for a sex change. There is a fine line between using your parenting experience to help others, and validating your parenting choices by encouraging others to do the same.

I’m not waiting for celebrities such as Emma Watson to own up to their foolishness, mainly because I don’t care what Emma Watson thinks about anything. But all the journalists, teachers, editors and activists who endorsed Green’s obviously ludicrous ideas and shouted down anyone who didn’t, they really need to take a long look at their judgement, their motives and themselves. Because Green never once hid who she was.

==

Like Nancy Kelley, the best thing Susie Green ever did was unashamedly tell everyone what she stood for and what she was up to.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Please stop saying this is not happening. Not only is it happening, but they're proud of what they're doing.

Note: "Reason" is code for the children who are the reason they're in the Facebook group.

"lItErAlLy nO OnE Is gIvInG KiDs dRuGs aNd sUrGeRiEs!!" "iT'S JuSt aBoUt lEtTiNg kIdS Be tHeMsElVeS!" "sO YoU DoN'T WaNt kIdS To kNoW GaY AnD TrAnS PeOpLe eXiSt?!"

Are you even done? Are you?

Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome has a disturbing new outlet. These mothers - and they are all mothers - are dangerously mentally ill and setting their children up for future catastrophe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

David Reimer (born Bruce Peter Reimer; 22 August 1965 – 4 May 2004) was a Canadian man born male but raised as a girl following medical advice and intervention after his penis was severely injured during a botched circumcision in infancy.

The psychologist John Money oversaw the case and reported the reassignment as successful and as evidence that gender identity is primarily learned. The academic sexologist Milton Diamond later reported that Reimer's realization that he was not a girl crystallized between the ages of 9 and 11 years and that he was living as a male by age 15. Well known in medical circles for years anonymously as the "John/Joan" case, Reimer later went public with his story to help discourage similar medical practices. At age 38, he committed suicide after suffering severe depression.

Even if some proportion legitimately turned out to be trans, rather than abused autistic, gay and GNC kids, that's like claiming to have been "right" about the lotto numbers.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Emily Lefroy

Published: Aug 8, 2022

A 4-year-old child has captured hearts — and sparked a heated online debate — after announcing he was a boy via a rainbow-fueled gender reveal at the Vancouver Pride Parade.

Charlie Danger Lloyd of Canada was assigned female at birth — but from a young age expressed he was a boy, his mom said.

Now-viral footage and photos captured the moment young Charlie — with his grandmother by his side — released a confetti canon that filled the area with blue smoke.

“Once they closed the road, Charlie strutted out with Grammy and they faced the sidelines and after a short struggle, the cannon exploded with blue smoke and biodegradable confetti,” his mom Alaina Bourrel, 27, told South West News Service after her little boy ran into her arms. “Charlie jumped with joy as the crowd cheered him on. He couldn’t believe the love and support he was shown from the bystanders.”

Despite Charlie’s happiness, his mom said she has come under attack by vicious trolls online, calling her a “pedophile, groomer and rapist” for her son’s transition.

However, Bourrel said that her child started expressing different gender needs at the age of 2, telling his family he was “growing to look just like daddy” and “I’m a boy” all day every day.

The proud mom said the parade moment was dreamed up after they told Charlie the family held a previous gender reveal before he was born — and the smoke didn’t work properly.

“When we told him the story, he asked for a re-do with his granny at the Vancouver Pride Parade — so we bought him a smoke cannon and tucked it away for this day,” she said.

“He wasn’t your typical little girl. He would play with other boys and the parents would say he was more of a boy than their own children,” Bourrel recalled, saying they didn’t think of anything until the end of 2021, when he didn’t want to shop in the girls section and wanted his hair cut short.

“He refused to shop in the girl’s section, but was too nervous to shop in the boys,” she said. “After lots of expressing his feelings and emotions with me, he decided that he wanted a new wardrobe so we set out to find our new style.”

About a month after buying his new wardrobe, Charlie was ready to get his hair cut.

“We made an appointment with Lia at Big Bros Barbershop, a trans-owned and operated salon in East Vancouver,” his mom said. “After leaving the salon that afternoon, Charlie was a completely new child.”

After changes to his wardrobe and his appearance, his confidence went through the roof.

“We are four months since he began his social transition now,” she said. “He is still a normal kid that does completely normal little kid things like play with Lego[s], uses his creativity and learns to ride his bike.”

Despite online haters who criticize her parenting choices, Bourrel said Charlie’s family and friends have been nothing but supportive of the preschooler.

“His choices were not questioned and he was congratulated and everyone began using new pronouns,” she said, adding it is no different to raising any other child and she appreciates the support from those in their inner circle.

“We are so lucky to have the circle that we do,” she said.

==

Alternate headline: “Parents change daughter to make her conform to sexist stereotypes... Surprise! It’s not how you think!”

Because apparently girls can’t like short hair, Legos or bike riding. If you still don’t think this is entirely about stereotypes and virtue signalling, then you haven’t been paying attention. This ideology pretends to be super-progressive, and yet, it’s honestly sickening how sexist, regressive and backwards it really is.

When she was four years old, one of my nieces announced that she wanted to marry her uncle. You may be surprised to learn that we didn’t rush out and plan the ceremony. She’s 13 now and has no desire to marry him, nor even remember it. We knew at the time that this was her conception of how love works. She loves her uncle and that’s how things work: you get married.

When she was three years old, one of my other nieces drew a picture of herself with her mother. Her mother was depicted as a baby, and my niece as the parent. She had no proper perception of the world prior to her own birth, so that’s how she conceived it. Her mother looked after her as a baby, so she must have looked after her mother as a baby. She’s now about to get her driver’s license and no longer thinks this is how the world works.

When he was four years old, my nephew announced that he wanted to be a fire truck. Not a fireman, a fire truck. Because he felt like the truck did all the exciting parts: making siren noises, racing down the street, pumping out water, etc. Because when you like something, that’s what you want to be when you grow up. At seven, he still likes fire trucks, particularly Heatwave, but he doesn’t want to be one. Good thing we didn’t get him the surgery...

“There is no such thing as a Christian transgender child: only a child of Christian Queer Theorist parents. Seize every opportunity to ram it home.”

-- (paraphrased from) Richard Dawkins

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright

Published; Nov 13, 2022

On May 26, 2022, I attended a private online workshop titled “Supporting Your Trans/Non-Binary Youth: A Starter Guide for Parents and Caregivers” which, as the title indicates, is geared toward parents are caregivers of children who have adopted trans and/or nonbinary identities. The workshop was a led by Kyle Weitz (he/they), a trans-identified female who works at the University of Guelph as a “trans/non-binary queer educator and advocate” and with Egale Canada as a “Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ Advocate/Community Worker,” and Jessie Myhill (they/them), who describes herself as a “non-binary queer therapist.”

This workshop proved to be particularly illuminating, as there were several long pauses between sections where the presenters took questions from the audience. This allowed me to ask very specific questions—with follow-ups—regarding gender ideology’s reliance on sex-related stereotypes and how they define “boys” and “girls,” forcing them to struggle in real time to make sense of their ideology’s most absurd and regressive aspects.

As you will see, the presenters conflate sex and “gender identity” throughout the workshop, misrepresent the evidence on puberty blockers, suicide, and transition regret, and claim to be experts on “gender” while openly admitting to being unable to define core concepts like “man” and “woman” or adequately address criticisms without deferring to the central importance of personal experience to avoid resolving issues of philosophical sloppiness. Because these “experts” believe they are speaking to a sympathetic audience, exposing this private workshops provides a rare and useful glimpse into how gender ideology is discussed behind the scenes to likeminded “allies.”

Below is an overview of the workshop’s most troubling aspects. The full 2-hour workshop can be viewed at the end of this article.

*  *  *

The workshop starts off with a land acknowledgement before beginning their “Intro to Gender Diversity,” which provides an overview of common terms and breaks down “four parts of human identity that are pretty relevant within the 2SLGBTQ+ world, and within human identity [and] everybody’s lives.”

Kyle explains that a person’s “gender identity” refers to their “internal sense of self,” or “how you know in your head, in your heart, who you are.” Kyle then immediately conflates sex and gender identity by portraying a doctor saying “It’s a girl!” when someone is born as “assigning” a “sense of self” that may not match with how someone grows up to identify, as opposed to the doctor simply observing and recording an infant’s biological sex.

We then learn that a person’s “gender expression” is “how you show the world who you are,” which is communicated through things like hair, clothing, body language, how you walk or talk, and even how you “take up space.” According to Kyle, this can be thought of in terms of “masculine, feminine, or androgynous.”

A person’s “sex assigned at birth” is explained in terms of “the body parts you have when you’re born” as well as traits like hormonal makeup, chromosomes, and both internal and external reproductive organs. Kyle says that we’ve all “been taught from a pretty young age that sex is very binary,” but that isn’t the case because all these traits have “a lot of fluidity.” Kyle then incorrectly lumps “trans folks” in with intersex people as examples of people who have a “combination of primary and secondary sex characteristics.”

Myhill then chimes in to discuss the acronyms AMAB and AFAB (assigned male/female at birth) and how they are commonly now used to describe that “the gender you were assigned at birth.” Notice that she uses the term “gender assigned at birth” instead of “sex assigned at birth” to describe people who were recorded at birth as “male” or “female,” which are sexes instead of “genders.” This is a constant conflation that is never clarified, seemingly on purpose, in order to blur the distinction between sex and gender identity. If a person’s “gender” refers to their “inner sense of self,” then it’s ludicrous to think that doctors are “assigning genders” at birth. And, if your sex refers to your body parts, then what could it possibly mean for a person to grow up to not “identify” with having certain body parts?

To show the relationships between all these variables, the presenters show an image of the “Gender Galaxy,” which they prefer to other educational tools like the Gender Unicorn because of how it depicts reality as a “blurry blob of existence” instead of “linearly.”

Kyle then pulls up a slide to help visualize the other “nonbinary” gender identities, and then allows Jessie to take it from there. This slide (below) uses the image of an umbrella labelled “nonbinary,” which is defined on the slide as “an umbrella term for a person who identifies with or expresses a gender identity that is neither entirely male or female.” Jessie further explains that “nonbinary” people are “folks who don’t identify as exclusively male or exclusively female,” which can mean they’re “a little bit of both,” neither male nor female, or “a little bit more one than the other.” Notice again the overt conflation of sex (male and female) with “gender identity.”

Beneath the nonbinary umbrella are all the identities subsumed under its label. These identities are listed as “androgynous,” “gender fluid,” “agender,” “genderqueer,” and even “gender non-conforming.” Yes, if you are simply gender non-conforming—such as a tomboy or effeminate boy—you are considered “nonbinary” and thus transgender.

Staying true to the above figure, Kyle then uses the terms “transgender” and “gender non-conforming” as apparent synonyms when he proceeds to the next slide about transitioning: “When we talk about, you know, gender non-conforming folks, we talk about trans people, a lot of times that then comes to this concept of transition and transitioning.”

Jessie then interjects by saying she first wants to address some “misinformation” about transitioning (my emphasis):

When we talk about children, so I’m thinking you know like 10 and under, kind of before the tweens, we’re only ever talking about socially transitioning, right? Little kids are never kind of put on hormones or puberty blockers, or undergoing any kind of medical transition or surgery. And that, I think again, a lot of misinformation out there, and what it looks like for children of 10 is, you know, changing their appearance, maybe changing pronouns, maybe changing name. So when we’re talking about children, we’re talking about social transitioning, and sometimes legal, but we’re not talking about medical transitioning. It’s when people slowly approach puberty that then we’re starting, for some people, where they’re you know, really distressed or need to have other options, then we sometimes start talking about puberty blockers, right? And that’s really when people have just kind of started puberty.

According to Jessie, the term “children” only refers to people “10 and under.” She then uses this preferred definition to falsely claim that medical transition does not ever happen in children.

Kyle then goes on to talk about the differences between “gender dysphoria” and “gender euphoria.”

“Gender dysphoria,” according to Kyle, is “a feeling of disconnection around your body experience,” which encompasses both how you feel about your body and gender expression, as well as “how people read you.” “Gender euphoria,” on the other hand, is “when you’re feeling this connection, comfort, and joy with your body. You’re feeling like ‘Yes!' This is it!’” Kyle says that you can feel dysphoria over one body part and dysphoria over another, and so “access to transition-related supports, whether that’s your name change or that’s medical changes and supports, can really really help with those feelings of dysphoria. It can help you to start feeling like ‘Okay, what I see on the inside when I visualize how I look is now starting to match what I see in the mirror, or how people see me.”

But what person, and especially a child around puberty, isn’t self-conscious about one or more aspects of their body? What Kyle is advocating for is essentially on-demand plastic surgery for any child who is not comfortable with every aspect of their body. Why, for instance, would a girl self-conscious about her flat-chest (a very common feeling) not qualify for breast implants?

The presenters then discuss the importance of pronouns and neopronouns for trans and nonbinary youth.

Jessie says that using correct pronouns is “one of the top things that you can do that makes such a huge difference to trans and nonbinary youth” to communicate respect, love, and understanding. She even says that using a child’s preferred pronouns “is a form of suicide prevention,” despite the link between gender dysphoria and suicide being tenuous at best.

This is the first of two breaks for Q&A.

The first question comes from a mother asking where she can get facts about puberty blockers from a “gender affirming” professional because her child “is very eager to start the process.”

Jessie recommends visiting the Rainbow Health Ontario website, but then decides to offer her own advice on puberty blockers, falsely claiming that “there is no long term health impacts of around taking puberty blockers, because essentially what it does, right, is it pauses puberty, which gives the family and the youth or tween…more time to kind of decide what the right pathway is.” There are, however, no long term studies on the impacts of puberty blockers for treating gender dysphoria. From the limited data we do have, we know that around 98 percent of children placed on puberty blockers continue on to cross-sex hormones, and some of them surgeries, while around 85 percent of children who do not receive puberty blockers eventually desist and accept their natal sex. Far from being a “pause button” for confused children, puberty blockers appear to instead cement for life what would have otherwise been a passing phase.

The mother then asks about whether she can go to their family doctor with questions about this. Jessie says that many family doctors should be able to prescribe puberty blockers, but warns that “many family doctors are not comfortable because of their own biases, transphobia, etc., etc.” According to this framing, the only reason a doctor might not assist in a child’s transition is due to their bigotry toward trans people.

Finally, it was my turn to ask questions.

Question: What is the binary that nonbinary people might be rejecting? Is it the sex binary (male and female), or the binary socially constructed roles associated with males and females?

Here is Kyle’s answer:

So the idea of being nonbinary, it means that you not necessarily are rejecting, I mean for some folks sure, but it’s like that idea of like, okay, like I don’t feel like a man, I don’t feel like a woman—that’s a binary—those are two genders, and you’re like, well, if these don’t fit for me then I suppose I’m nonbinary. And so for some folks that might mean that they fall in between these two genders, or maybe they’re like ‘I feel like I’m a combination,’ or maybe they’re like ‘Nope, I’m neither, I’m none.’ And so it is, yes, this binary of man and woman, that is the gender binary that you are stepping outside of.

I immediately post a follow-up question in the chat about the difference between being nonbinary and simply being gender non-conforming.

Kyle’s response:

And so the difference between being nonbinary and gender non-conforming is like so nuanced [both Kyle and Jessie smile and laugh]. I think I could probably Google it and like you would, um, see it and be like ‘Okay, those sound very similar, I don’t really… uh, I, but I, you know, it’s just these like, little differences. Gender non-conforming, meaning you’re not conforming to gender, but lots of people kind of use it almost like synonymously, but then for some folks it just feels right to use nonbinary instead. What do you think, Jessie?

Jessie then chimes in:

I think it’s, you know, ‘cause some of these definitions they’re so, especially under the nonbinary umbrella, they’re so kind of, um, yeah close together almost, right? So, we want to just really invite conversation around what it means to the person, right? Because sometimes they just really resonate with uh, with like the term nonbinary, or with agender. Like there’s very little difference between those two things. Like agender really is part of the nonbinary umbrella, but maybe they just more closely associate with, say, agender or something. Um, so, I think it’s really about kind of just having the conversation, and getting them to like explain what it means to them, and what is it about that term that kind of resonates for them. You can kind of get a lot more information.

One thing I’ve noticed just in my practice where I work with youth, right, and this is around sexuality too, there’s so much fluidity now with this new, what’s the new generation? There’s Alpha and Gen Z, right? There’s so much just fluidity that a lot of times, you know, I’ve heard nonbinary folks they’re like even rejecting nonbinary and they’re just like ‘I’m just me and this is what I want to look like, and this is how I feel inside.’ Um, and so to just really open up that conversation, because there is a lot of nuance and I think it’s different for everybody.

Got it? All we can take from this word salad of an answer is that we need to have conversations about how people feel, even if those feelings cannot ever be articulated in a way that makes sense. Subjective experience reigns supreme.

Question: Is “man” and “woman” defined by social roles and stereotypes?

Kyle responds:

I think yes and also your internal sense of self, like you know, I think this is getting like quite philosophical I suppose but it’s true that the concept of what is man and what is woman is a social construct as well. Like what makes us a man, what makes us a woman? So often it’s based on your sex, but we’re saying no, like your sex doesn’t define your gender identity, so I think, you know, if the binary is man and woman, um, and that is defined by like social constructs, social roles and stereotypes, but also internal sense of self, like how you feel when and how you identify when you think of who you are and what your gender is. So like, yes, and, um, for that which is very hard to put into words.”

So yes, “man” and “woman” are defined by social roles and stereotypes, and you are a man or a woman if your “internal sense of self” reflects those stereotypes.

Jessie and Kyle then move on to how to offer support to trans youth as well as their family members.

One way for parents to cope with a child who comes out as trans is to learn to “reframe” any fears they might have over their child’s transition. If a parent worries that transitioning will make life much more difficult for their child, we are told that life is even “harder when you’re hiding your authentic self.” If a parent worries that their child is too young to know who they are, we are assured that “most people have a sense of their gender identity as young as 2 years old.” And to quell any fears a parent may have that their child may regret their decision, the presenters suggest that because less than 2 percent of children places on puberty blockers do not continue with medical transition, this means that there is little to worry about.

The possibility that puberty blockers may be solidifying dysphoria isn’t even considered. Instead, they insist that any transition regret is most likely due to “society’s treatment of trans folks.” Kyle says that because we don’t question whether a child is too young to know they’re not trans, we shouldn’t worry about a child being too young to know they are trans!

Next we are instructed to follow the “Listen. Validate. Affirm.” approach to supporting your trans child, which involves questioning absolutely nothing, suppressing your natural parental instincts and fears, and allowing your child to fully dictate the terms of their transition.

Jessie says that children need to know that “it’s okay to be uncertain or scared” or even “terrified” about puberty blockers and hormones, but asserts “that doesn’t mean that you’re not trans.” She says that parents need “to get on board as soon as we can” with their child’s transition, even though “it’s hard, and sometimes it’s confusing, and sometimes it feels like it comes out of nowhere.” Parents are instructed to “accept the new reality of who your child is” and to “let go of you imagined future for them.” And in order to not cause distress to their trans child, parents are told to refrain from sharing their “emotional process” with their child.

The message to parents is clear: suppress all your instincts, emotions, and doubts about transitioning your child.

This is the final Q&A period. Few others had questions, which gave me the opportunity to ask a handful of very specific questions with follow-ups to Jessie and Kyle.

Question: Are certain bits of anatomy really not “matched” with certain gender identities? So why don’t we teach people with any anatomy that they can behave as they wish and that they’re not out of alignment with themselves? I feel like doing otherwise just reinforces stereotypes. Why don’t we teach that men can be feminine, women can be masculine, or whatever is most comfortable for them? What’s wrong with that approach?

Kyle’s response:

That’s the dream. That sounds amazing. That is our goal. When that happens Jessie and I don’t have a job anymore, and we will be happy to retire. I think that that is, you know, why do we teach such strict binaries? And it’s just, like it’s just the way it has been in Western society with colonialism, with this rigid belief of like there is man and woman, and there is a certain way that we live and a way that we will grow up. And to break free of that is really important, and I think that it is more than even just though, like, teaching your kid that at home because you know then they watch TV and they see it reinforced. Then they go to school and it’s reinforced. And then they go into their lives and they’re being told like ‘You gotta man up!’ or you’ve gotta, whatever, all these things, ‘be a good girl’ and that stuff, and so it is like an ongoing unlearning and unbreaking of those binaries.

And I would love if it were taught in school that like, you know, anatomy doesn’t necessarily match with a gender identity. I think that might be the way it’ll go one day, but I think like, what we all learn in school about people who are intersex, or at least I didn’t, and like that is very very valid. People are born intersex, meaning that, as I said, you have a combination of masculine and feminine primary or secondary sex characteristics at the same rate as people who are born with red hair or green eyes, or twins are born. So it’s definitely not uncommon, and yet it’s like something that I have to define when I talk about it because a lot of folks don’t necessarily aren’t familiar with it, and it feels like something and up to a certain point it was something that was ‘dealt with’ through medical intervention.

If the “dream” is indeed to allow people to behave as they please and detach this behavior and expression from sexual anatomy, and allow men to be feminine and women to be masculine, it seems that the best way to ensure this goal is never achieved is to literally define “man” and “woman” according to social roles and stereotypes, and then teach gender non-conforming children that the mismatch between their expression and behavior can be “fixed” and brought into alignment with hormones and surgeries.

Kyle then brings up intersex conditions, which is totally irrelevant to the question, and perpetuates several common myths about about them, such as that they’re as common as red hair, green eyes, or twinning in humans.

Question: Do you need to have gender dysphoria to be trans?

Kyle responds, “Absolutely not, no. Not every person is going to experience dysphoria, or sometimes it might develop, or it might come and go like a little annoying house guest.” Kyle then says “You don’t need to have anything to be trans besides the knowledge or the feeling that you’re trans.”

Question: How are the terms “man” and “woman” and “boy” and “girl” defined?

Kyle: “Oh wow, this question is going to be difficult to answer ‘cause it’s a bit philosophical.”

Jessie then answers:

Well that’s a great question. So I did an undergrad and a masters in Gender Studies, and like, I don‘t know if I could even tell you that, right? Like, because part of it, it’s, you cannot get away from social constructionism and language. So we define these terms based on many different things, but they’re always defined by the current context in which we live, like culture, time, all of these pieces, right? I think, and in that, we also define it by things like hormones, and things like anatomy, right? It’s like, how do we decide, um, you know, when we assign somebody male or female at birth, what is that based on? That’s based on anatomy, right? But there’s actually so many things, um, that are, that we’re not kind of looking at, right? That we also have to take into account. So, I mean, I honestly can’t answer those questions.

Um, you know, it’s, when we talk about gender identity, right, people, uh, say like ‘How do you know you’re trans?’ kind of almost like ‘How do you know you’re gay?’ It’s like, how do you know you’re straight? Right? It’s just kind of like, it’s often times like an internal feeling, but we define these things in terms of like biological factors, social factors, psychological factors, um, and they change from, like, different eras, different centuries, and mean different things at different times. I don’t know, that’s a hard one.

You read that correctly: Jessie did both an undergrad degree and completed a masters degree in Gender Studies, yet cannot even provide definitions for the two “genders” that children are identifying with and away from that serve as the basis for removing and modifying their body parts.

Kyle then adds:

We spoke a bit earlier about this idea of like labels and alphabet soup, and sometimes I think like yeah, these ideas of what is man and what is woman, what is boy what is girl? They’re just like arbitrary words to describe, you know, experiences and labels to put on people. And like who really knows what it means to be man, to be woman, to be masculine, to be feminine? I think it is what you say it is.

If “man” and “woman” and “boy” and “girl” are indeed only “arbitrary words to describe experiences,” then how can we possibly justify any medical interventions for children describing themselves in these terms? This concern leads to my next question.

Question: If we can’t understand these concepts, why do we think children can grasp them?

Kyle responds that’s because the real experts are the children themselves!

I think that we need to give way more credit like, when I’m, as I said when I’ve run these workshops it’s like students who are the ones being like “We don’t care that you’re trans and telling your story because, like, that’s fine, you be you.” I get asked so many times “Why were people ever mean to you for being trans? Like, it’s just you.” And it’s like, yeah, they get it way more, like I think it’s the unraveling that we are doing presently, the peeling of the onion, has already happened for them. They’re there with this fresh onion already, like crying away and being like “Cool,” like this radical acceptance of like this is how things are, and it is like an unlearning that has already been happening, um, and so we’re catching up, I think.

Jessie echoes Kyle’s sentiment about how children are the true experts because they’ve yet to be corrupted by socialization, whereas adults are perpetually engaged in a “process of unlearning” their biases, phobias, and preconceptions about what it means to be a man or woman.

These are challenging ideas, and we can get into philosophy and all these things, but you have to remember the way that we were all socially kind of, like, you know, taught about these concepts, and so we’re very much in a process of unlearning, where you know, there’s almost like a simplicity to kids, right? Like around, um, just being who they are, and being accepting, and loving of themselves and other people, and then, you know, and then bias kind of comes into play, and a lot of hat is taught, actually.

A mother from the audience then interjects—“My child is the one who’s constantly educating me and their classmates!”

*  *  *

This workshop represents the standard introduction into transgender issues. It is not an outlier in terms of content and ideology. The only thing that makes this workshop somewhat unique is the fact that I was there asking the questions that your standard believer never does in order to force the presenters to grapple with fundamental issues with gender ideology.

Are gender identities based on stereotypes? How are “man” and “woman” defined? How can we expect children to understand concepts that people with masters degrees claim is beyond their capacity to understand? These questions should not be viewed as aggressive or out of bounds. These are fundamental questions that any gender “expert” should be able to easily answer, but they can’t. Yet they somehow remain so sure of the truth of what they believe that they’re willing to shuttle children down the path to irreversible hormone and surgical treatments to conform to identities they readily admit are “arbitrary words to describe experiences.”

Children are not the paragons of wisdom and self-knowing that gender “experts” claim they are. Children lack the life experience and perspective to make radical permanent decisions about extreme body modification. It is the duty of parents to apply their real life experience and perspective in order to ensure their children make it through childhood with healthy bodies and minds.

Gender ideology indoctrination does the exact opposite.

==

“You don’t need to have anything to be trans besides the knowledge or the feeling that you’re trans.”

“The bible is true because the bible says the bible is true.”

“You don’t need to have anything to be a bicycle besides the knowledge or the feeling that you’re a bicycle.”

If trans doesn’t require dysphoria, then what does trans “feel” like? Without gender identity disorder, what is the distinguishing feature of trans vs not-trans?

These are the same people who will argue that there is no single feature of “female” that determines whether someone is female; they’ll argue infertility, menopause, chromosomal abnormalities, intersex conditions, etc, etc, to “prove” that “female” is just a guess (”assigned at birth”). Yet their... “definition”... of “trans” is just someone who says/feels so, without explaining what that even means. (Hint: it means stereotype non-conformant.)

This circular, contradictory, incoherent lunacy is then used as the basis for scolding society that it’s a moral imperative to mutilate, medicalize and sterilize healthy children without dysphoria, who have simply self-IDed as trans and are not to be challenged at the threat of suicide. (”Do you want a trans X or a dead Y?”)

Some people may be surprised by this, but dysphoria and gender identity disorder - existing, known conditions (see: Buck Angel, Blaire White) - have been absent from the definition of “trans” on every major organization’s website for a long time. They will still use it as a cudgel if you question their activism, though.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Christina Buttons and Colin Wright

Published: Aug 3, 2022

Last month, a mother of three young children made a post in a Facebook group for parents of “transgender kids” asking members when they began to notice their “trans child” (or themselves, for the adult trans members) exhibiting discomfort at being addressed according to “their assigned at birth gender.” She is curious because she claims to have noticed her “almost 2 year old” son getting “upset” when she refers to him using the word “boy.”

Because her son has apparently shown interest in stereotypically feminine things “from birth” like “long hair and pretty dresses and pink,” she decides that she “will no longer say terms with boy in it to him.”

In a public post on her personal page, the mother makes the extraordinary claim that she and all three of her children have Autism Spectrum Disorder.

While she doesn’t yet refer to her son as “trans,” she says a friend “mentioned it as a possibility,” and so she is asking whether anyone in the group had “experienced this from this young of an age.”

To back up her claim that her 1-year-old son “gets upset when I call him ‘baby boy,’” she shared a video of herself asking her son “are you my boy?” In the video, her son starts out smiling, but after his mother asks “are you my boy?” the child opens his mouth and his expression appears somewhat neutral.

Whether the boy changed his expression in response to the term “boy,” the mother’s tone, or for completely unrelated reasons is impossible to parse. Does the child, who the mother revealed in earlier posts is “autistic” and “doesn’t speak,” even understand what his mother is asking?

The mother’s posting history in the group begins in January 2021, when her son is only 4 months old. Throughout 2021, she posts about her infant “autistic” son’s gentle nature, his gravity towards baby dolls, his dislike for trucks, his long hair, and his apparent happiness at wearing dresses and girls’ accessories. None of this would be that strange, but since the mother is posting to a group for parents of “transgender kids,” it appears that she is searching for signs that her son might be transgender.

Her first post in the group describes her 4 month old son’s “gentle” play with a soft plastic toy baby doll.

Several days later, the mother posts again about her son’s preference for a plastic toy baby that he puts in his mouth, as infants tend to do with any soft plastic object when they are teething between 4 and 7 months old. The mother, however, describes this as “kissing his baby!”

She dresses her son in a bow and comments on how much he “loves” it and how he starts smiling when she puts it on him, as babies often do when their mothers show them attention and affection. She appears to be, once again, searching for reasons to believe her 4-month-old son might be transgender.

The mother then shared a story about something that happened at her son’s 6-month doctor visit. While in the doctor’s office, her son was given a book about trucks. The mother claims that she “sighed a bit after they left the room” because her son “has no interest in trucks and prefers babies,” and that she “felt a bit weirded out” that someone would simply assume her son would like trucks “because he’s a boy.” She also fishes for compliments on her “son’s beautiful hair!”

A commenter on her post then questions whether a 6-month-old can even have “gender preferences” in toys, adding that “At 6 months the only question is if it goes in your mouth or not.” The mother then confirms her son’s tendency for putting random toys in his mouth.

Several days later, she posts 17 photos to the group of a collection of new clothing items she bought from both the boys’ and girls’ sections intended for her son to wear.

A month later she shares a photo of her son in the “blue unicorn dress” she bought him. Although she claims to want to raise him as “gender fluid/neutral,” the clothing options she celebrates are those typically worn by girls.

“Look at the satisfied and happy look on my son’s face,” she remarks.

“People act like kids this age can’t have preferences on the things they like but they can and do!” she says about her 8 month old baby.

In August 2021, her son is now 1 year old. She shares with the group that her son likes to take clothes out of his drawers and that one day he “picked out a rainbow skirt” that she immediately put on him and took pictures to share with the group. She then explained her parenting philosophy of raising her children in a “gender free environment.”

Usually, “gender free” parenting consists of choosing colors like yellow, green, orange, white and brown, but this mother appears to think that “gender free” parenting involves encouraging her son to dress up in clothes typically worn by girls so that his boyness gets neutralized.

Again, none of this would be that unusual for an infant boy to play with dolls or dress up in a skirt had the mother not been posting about these things in a Facebook group for parents of “transgender kids” with the intent to seek advice and praise from other parents of “trans kids.”

In addition to sharing updates on her children’s gender journeys, she shares other transgender-related content she finds to the group. Interestingly, in a post from March of last year (2021), the mother actually makes an effort to discuss different viewpoints with the group by sharing a YouTube video from Blaire White, a well-known trans woman and critic of modern gender ideology. She points out that Blaire “doesn’t agree with theybies, child transitioning, etc.”

Moderators asked her to repost with a the link to the video in the comments so that it would not be as visible and easily playable for those scrolling the group’s timeline. They also insisted she add a “trigger warning” to avoid upsetting anyone who doesn’t want to be exposed to alternative viewpoints on trans issues.

Only one person replies to say he would rather listen to “trans folx” instead of “giving clicks to hatred.”

In addition to her “theyby,” she also has two other young girls who at the time of posting are 3 and 5. She asks the group for book and video recommendations on pronouns that are “easy to understand.”

Commenters recommend their favorite transgender children’s books about pronouns, and she buys them all.

Several days later—SURPRISE!—her eldest daughter, who is 5, has requested to be addressed using “they/them” pronouns. According to the mother, her daughter “still say[s] they’re a girl,” and is therefore still her daughter “for now.” The mother also admits she “wasn’t sure” her daughter “understood what it meant” to go by they/them pronouns, and so she “check[s] in occasionally to see if they still want to go by they/them,” adding that “it’s been solid ever since.”

She says her “husband wasn’t thrilled about it,” but that she knew she was “making the right decision” after conferring with the group. So, full steam ahead on her autistic 5-year-old daughter’s social transition.

What could be the motivation for all this?

On her personal page, she shares a public post of a screenshot from one of her TikTok videos showing her excitement at reaching “1000 likes.” It seems she may be using her children’s “trans” and “nonbinary” identities for clicks and to bring attention to her business selling social justice themed t-shirts.

Some of the t-shirts her children model for on TikTok feature statements like “Regulate Your Dick,” and include a woman’s hand giving you the middle finger. Another t-shirt displays the trans activist mantra “trans women are women.”

In a recent post she excitedly proclaims her TikTok channel has reached “10.5K likes!!” Her profile displays her intersectional bonifides: “They/them | Agender | Actually autistic | BLM.”

Another series of posts made 14 months apart reveal that the mother has been on a bit of a “gender journey” herself. In a post on January 15, 2021, she claims that she’s “a cis gender/bisexual woman so although I fall under the LGBTQ+ spectrum for sexuality, I don’t for gender,” (emphasis added). But in a post on March 18, 2022, she claims “I’m agender (a form of non binary),” and her TikTok profile in the image above indicates that she now uses they/them pronouns.

It’s difficult not to ponder whether this is a marketing strategy for her business.

This is the current end to the ongoing saga of an “agender” mom and her three autistic children she seems intent on guiding into transgender identities.

While this is only one case study, this is by no means rare. Every day, countless parents arrive in these private Facebook Groups seeking guidance from strangers. As we have reported elsewhere, these groups act as indoctrination centers for scared and confused parents—mostly mothers—looking for help and advice for their equally confused children who have succumbed to gender ideology. But instead of help, Group members guilt trip and shame parents into fast-tracking their children to hormones and surgeries.

We hope that by bringing these stories to light, we can help the public better understand the cult-like nature of these groups, and the true extent of the harm being brought upon vulnerable children in the name of “Social Justice” and “acceptance.”

==

“iT'S JuSt aBoUt tRaNs rIgHtS!!1!” What about the child’s right not to be screwed up by a fanatical mother?

Try to tell me this isn’t a cult. Try to tell me this isn’t entirely about stupid stereotypes. Try to tell me this is just the natural result of increasing acceptance. Try to tell me this isn’t Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and entirely about the mother.

I dare you.

This is simultaneously very disturbing and no longer at all surprising. The only thing that is actually surprising is that some people still think this whole ideology is just some kind of natural evolution of the Civil Rights/Gay Rights movements, and some continue to insist that none of this is actually happening.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright and Christina Buttons

Published: May 14, 2022

Last month, while searching through various transgender-themed Facebook Groups, we came across an advertisement for a virtual panel titled “Creating and Sustaining GSAs in Elementary Schools,” taking place on April 26th. A “GSA” is an acronym that many understand to mean “Gay–Straight Alliance,” but in recent years it has changed to “Gender and Sexuality Alliance.”

The panel was hosted by Katy Butler, a second grade teacher who is a co-creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms, a website “dedicated to equipping educators with the tools they need to foster safe, welcoming gender-inclusive classrooms.” The panelists include Kieran Slattery, a fifth grade teacher who is the other co-creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms, Daniel Alonso, who is listed as a fifth grade bilingual teacher, and Heather Eig, a school counselor.

We registered for the virtual panel to see for ourselves what kind of topics are discussed in these meetings, and how they are discussed. This was the first webinar of its kind that we have ever attended, and we viewed it as an opportunity to bridge the gap between our potentially exaggerated perception of panels like these, and reality. But when the day arrived and we began listening, we quickly realized just how extreme the views being expressed were.

The first of many red flags arose during a discussion about building GSAs/Rainbow Clubs at elementary schools.

In this audio clip, Slattery explains how building a GSA starts before the club even exists by creating “gender inclusive curricula.” This is done by making sure the school has a “welcoming culture,” which is achieved by using “lots of vocabulary that has to do with gender and sexuality.” Slattery then explains that for many children this will be the first time they will have been “exposed to anything outside of the heteronormative dominant culture,” but for other children it will be the first time their gender identity, gender expression, or sexuality has been “validated” at school.

Slattery then discussed methods of recruiting children into GSAs and Rainbow Clubs. This starts with reading books “about all different genders, or watching little videos that represent people of all backgrounds.” By doing this, Slattery says questions will begin to “come up organically,” which can be used as a recruitment opportunity by responding with “I’d love to explore that more in our Rainbow Club.”

Slattery then notes the “potential for pushback” from adults (i.e. parents) saying “that’s not an appropriate topic to talk about with young kids.” He says that these adults are confused and falsely “equating sexuality and gender.” When responding to concerned parents, Slattery intentionally avoids mention of sexuality and says they are “exploring a lot of gender, gender expression, and gender identity, and different ways that you can be a boy, or lots of different ways to be a girl, or lots of different ways to be both or neither” (my emphasis). But he then reveals to us (not the parents) that this is all in addition to “talking really explicitly and seriously about sexuality and gender.”

To summarize, Slattery is instructing teachers on how to recruit elementary school children into clubs that talk “really explicitly and seriously about sexuality and gender” by adopting curricula so saturated with “vocabulary that has to do with gender and sexuality” that it will spur children to “organically” ask questions about it. These clubs then introduce radical gender ideology, which teaches children that being a boy or a girl is rooted in one’s gender identity instead of their biology, and that a child can be a boy, girl, both, or neither.

During another segment, the panel discusses whether permission slips are necessary for children attending GSAs and Rainbow Clubs.

The discussion starts off with panelist Heather Eig saying that her school does not require permission slips because the club meets during school hours. Daniel Alonso then explains that his school district in San Francisco, CA, also does not require permission slips, but that families must be “alerted” about their children participating in clubs that discuss “gender, families, and diversity.” He apparently achieved this by sending students home with a flyer vaguely stating that “kids were being invited to a club about inclusivity.” There is no guarantee that these flyers ever made it out of the children’s backpacks.

At 4:07 in the above video, Alonso says that the only formal communication sent home regarding GSA/Rainbow Club was with 4th and 5th grade students, but it was not a permission slip and so children were not required to show their parents. But he then reveals that they “intentionally left it broad in that it was a club about acceptance, tolerance, diversity, and identity,” instead of honestly and accurately describing it as a club about gender and sexuality.

There is a very clear sense that these teachers view parents as obstacles to students attending GSA/Rainbow Club. Clubs are held during school hours so they don’t require permission slips. And when any sort of permission or notification is required of parents, the language is left intentionally broad in order to hide or obscure the true nature of the topics being explored and trick parents into giving consent. This would be like Christian teachers notifying parents that students were going to receive lessons about “love and forgiveness” when in reality they were attending Bible class.

At the end of the virtual event, the panelists invited questions from the audience. Though we had originally intended to only observe, we decided this was a good opportunity to ask a very clear question about how they would respond to a parent explicitly requesting they use their child’s legal name and sex-based pronouns instead of their child’s chosen name and preferred pronouns.

Slattery was the first to respond, and described an instance of a parent personally confronting him saying, “I noticed that you were using a different name than my child’s given name at birth and the pronouns that we gave them, and I am respectfully asking that you use the name and the pronouns that we gave them.”

Slattery claimed he “chose his words carefully” and said “I hear you, I hear what you’re saying,” adding that he “tried to really affirm what the caregiver was asking me, like in terms of, ‘I hear you saying that you’re feeling uncomfortable with me using the child’s preferred name and pronouns; I hear that you’re using different ones at home,’” but said that “here at school, the expectation is that all of my students feel comfortable and welcome in my classroom. So in my classroom, I will refer to your child by whatever name and pronouns that they’ve told me they feel most comfortable with.” “I just told them no,” Slattery said, and because he had the support of his principal and superintendent, he added that “there wasn’t much they could do, and they eventually found another topic to squawk about.”

Alonso then chimed in, saying that his school district has a Bill of Rights for “LGBTQ+” students that includes “the right to be referred to by their gender pronouns and name that fits their gender identity.” He then told a similar story to Slattery’s of a parent confronting his school with the same issue, and Alonso said, “I don’t even know if we were respectful about it, we were just like no, sorry, our district-wide rule is that the student determines that, not you, even though you are the parent.”

So not only will teachers indoctrinate your children into gender ideology at school, they will also participate in your child’s social transition without your knowledge and even against your wishes, regardless of whether your child has actually been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. This is far from innocuous, as social transition is a form of psychosocial treatment, and there are reasons to believe that such interventions will “increase dramatically the rate of gender dysphoria persistence.”

Our investigation revealed that some teachers really are keeping secrets from parents. Clubs that are “talking really explicitly and seriously about sexuality and gender” are being held during school hours in order to not require permission slips. And, when they are required to alert parents, it is in the form of intentionally broad and vague flyers that have no guarantee of ever making it out of a child’s backpack. When parents voice concerns they are gaslit or lied to about the explicit nature of the discussion topics. And, most of all, school staff will ignore and even flagrantly mock a parent’s request to not perform psychosocial interventions on their children and to refer to their child by their legal name and sex-based pronouns.

We did not expect to have all of our preconceptions regarding activist teachers confirmed, but confirmed they were.

==

A new class of predatory priests has captured and taken over what was once a worthwhile group.

The first thing a cult does is tries to separate the mark from their family.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Christina Buttons and Colin Wright

Published: July 15, 2022

On October 13, 2021, in a private Facebook group with nearly 13 thousand members called “Parents Supporting Parents of Trans Children,” a mother made a post about her daughter’s long history of mental health issues that has ultimately resulted in her pursuing a transition from a girl to a boy. In the post, the mother tells the group to “follow your child’s lead,” “even if you think it’s crazy.”

She goes on to describe the intense struggles her daughter—who she now refers to as her “son”—has experienced for many years before finally coming out as transgender. She reveals that seven years ago they began family therapy due to her daughter’s “emotional disturbance and psych diagnoses,” and says the daughter has been going to individual therapy sessions ever since.

The mother lists her daughter’s timeline of mental health issues, which include:

Age 7: inappropriate internet searches

Age 9: suicidal ideation

Age 10: ADHD and anxiety

Age 12: cutting

At age 13, however, the daughter came out to her mother as transgender, and only a year later met with a plastic surgeon, where her daughter informed the surgeon that she “wants them (breasts) just gone, because I want to be a boy.”

The mother says, seemingly with trepidation, that “at this point I realize my kiddo is trying desperately to tell me something he doesn’t yet fully understand himself, and he needs my help to navigate the murky waters” (our emphasis). The says she began educating herself about transgender issues, and started “being more vocal with my support of him as a person, even if I don’t fully believe his reasons” (our emphasis).

A month into the school year, the mother says her daughter is now “fully socially transitioned” as a boy at school. Classmates and even upperclassmen say they “have his back,” including the school Principal.

Eight months later, on June 8, 2022, the mother returned to the group to describe her “rollercoaster” week of getting insurance to approve her daughter’s “top surgery” (a euphemism for an elective double mastectomy) and “talking through last minute jitters” before checking her daughter into the hospital. To calm these jitters, the daughter brought a “comfort item”—a stuffed animal cat—demonstrating that she is still very much an emotionally immature and vulnerable child. It may as well have been a teddy bear.

But despite the comfort animal, the reality of the situation began to weigh heavily on the child, and the mother reported that “By the time the surgeon came back for a last minute consult, [her daughter] was nearly in tears and voiced that [she] was having second thoughts and didn’t feel [she] was emotionally ready.” So they called off the surgery, and went home.

The tears continued at home, and the mother says her daughter’s “mood tanked” out of regret for not going through with the surgery. But instead of reassuring her daughter that they would be supportive of any decision, including not going through with the procedure, she tells her daughter that “when he IS ready” she and the daughter’s stepdad would “do everything in [their] power to make it happen.”

Responding to a commenter, the mother coveys some regret in not pressuring her daughter more to have the surgery—”part of me feels like I should have nudged him just a little harder…”

In an earlier post on March 1, 2022, we discover that mother would like to have her daughter’s surgery over with soon while they are covered by Medicaid in order to avoid paying the deductibles and copay for treatments that will kick in once she re-marries and her and her daughter join the new husband’s health insurance.

She explains that her 14-year old daughter is already “*very* large chested,” which is a source for her dysphoria. But having a large chest at such a young age can make any girl feel self-conscious, and a hallmark of adolescence is to feel uncomfortable and anxiety toward your changing body. In every post, there is no convincing indication that her daughter actually suffers from true gender dysphoria instead of simply being an average teenage girl insecure with her body, who also happens to be suffering from a multitude of mental health issues.

The mother also says that “there’s a niggling urgency in the back of my head that we should schedule the surgery sooner rather than later,” given the uncertainty regarding the future legality of performing elective double mastectomies on minors in Texas.

Commenters are unanimously in favor of getting her daughter on the operating table as soon as possible. “Your son’s mental health can’t wait,” “do the surgery sooner rather than later,” “postpone your elopement” they say, displaying the sense of urgency that echoes the commonly stated false dichotomy of parents needing to choose between having a “trans child or a dead child.”

Another commenter tells the mother to “Move it forward as quickly as possible,” and to “Push it through.” The commenter also guilt trips the mother by telling her, condescendingly, “It’s not about you.”

Leading up to the May 11 surgery date, the mother reveals that she is having difficulty getting an “affirming” letter of support from her daughter’s former therapist, which is needed to authorize the surgery: “The information that she [sic] providing isn’t exactly affirming, at least not enough to sway Medicaid’s decision I don’t think.” Because the surgery is only a few weeks away, the mother stresses that “time is absolutely of the essence.”

In a comment, we then learn that the reluctant therapist has been her daughter’s therapist for the last four years, and the mother even states that the therapist “is well aware of his other mental health issues.” The therapist is also aware the daughter has claimed to be transgender for over a year.

The mother then reveals that the therapist’s original letter of support had included a quote from her daughter saying that she “‘wants to try out’ male pronouns and his chosen name.” The mother is worried that this is “not the most affirmative information,” and so she is going to provide the therapist with a letter template from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and “ask her to redraft” the letter.

One commenter directs the mother to “tell that therapist exactly what you need.”

The mother and group members appear to view doctors and therapists not as professionals whose advice they should heed and respect, but as obstacles in their way or people to order around to fulfill their every demand to obtain hormones and surgery for their children as quickly as possible.

Fast forward to “pre-op day,” the mother still does not have approval from the insurance company for the surgery because the daughter’s former therapist “has been hedging on writing a letter of support.” Rather than trust the expertise of the therapist most familiar with her daughter’s long history of mental health issues, the mother says she has been persistently “nagging her” for the letter.

However, it now appears the mother does not need the therapist to write a letter of support because—”GOOD NEWS!”—the surgeon told her that she can simply have an endocrinologist, who they’ve met with only a small number of times, write the support letter and it will be “completed in one business day.” The mother is ecstatic, and types in all caps, “THIS IS GONNA HAPPEN!”

Unfortunately the story ends abruptly here, as the mother has not posted any updates on the Parents Supporting Parents of Trans Children Facebook Group.

One thing to note about gender-affirming care is how quickly an entire history of mental health problems is immediately explained away and ignored the moment any child “comes out” as transgender. Instead of viewing the sudden emergence of a trans identity as yet another manifestation of underlying mental issues, “gender dysphoria” is immediately taken to be the root cause underlying all of it, with transition viewed as a panacea.

While this is only one case study, this is by no means rare. Every day, countless parents arrive in these private Facebook Groups seeking guidance from strangers. As we have reported elsewhere, these groups act as indoctrination centers for scared and confused parents—mostly mothers—looking for help and advice for their equally confused children who have succumbed to gender ideology. But instead of help, Group members guilt trip and shame parents into fast-tracking their children to hormones and surgeries.

We hope that by bringing these stories to light, we can help the public better understand the cult-like nature of these groups, and the true extent of the harm being brought upon vulnerable children in the name of “Social Justice” and “acceptance.”

==

“It’s not about you.”

Sure it is. It’s the Binding of Isaac all over again. Show God that you’re so virtuous you’re willing to sacrifice your own child in the name of your faith. The only difference is that they won’t stop you. It’s Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

This isn’t just a mental health crisis and social contagion for the children. It’s also a mental health crisis and social contagion for these parents, mostly mothers, many of whom seem like they could have been swept up in it themselves at the same age.

Her daughter is probably a lesbian - or maybe just a girl who isn’t a stereotype - while also going through the difficult stages we all went through as far as our hormones, the development of our brains and the maturation of our bodies. But these fanatics have convinced her it’s more virtuous to have a mutilated, sterile, heterosexual “son” than a gay daughter or a cliche.