Lily Maynard lives with her husband and their family in the UK. Her daughter, Jessie, was 15 when she first began identifying as trans.
In this post, Lily chronicles her grueling journey of self education on trans issues, and her determination to share what she learned with Jessie, who at first utterly dismissed her mother’s efforts. But after 9 months, Jessie, now 16, eventually desisted from trans identification, and, with the support of her mother and another formerly trans-identified friend, came to recognize and embrace herself as a young woman.
Jessie adds her own observations at the end of her mother’s post.
Lily and Jessie are both available to interact with readers in the comments section of this post.
by Lily Maynard
My daughter Jessie was not a ‘girly’ girl. As a small child she was often mistaken for a boy, despite her long hair, because mostly she wore jeans and dinosaur tops. She didn’t care much for the pastel, glitter, hearts and lace that tends to fill the girls’ section of most stores. Growing up, she liked Dora the Explorer and Ben 10; she liked Lego and Bratz dolls. Occasionally, she chose a pink sparkly top, or a crystal ballerina for the Christmas tree.
Once, when she was about 7, a woman in a second-hand shop said to her, “Oh you’re a GIRL! Why are you playing with that dirty old truck? Here’s a nice doll.”
So I bought her the truck to make a point, and on the way home we talked about how silly it was to have different toys for boys and girls. We always applauded the strong women in movies and cartoons. My kids would tell me, “Mum, you’d like this film, there’s a Strong Female Role in it.”
Jessie played with both boys and girls growing up; she had siblings; she was sociable; she had a wide circle of friends. She did ballet for half a term, but tripped over her feet and hated it. She tried football, but tripped over her feet and hated getting up early. She liked jujitsu and roller skating, drawing and writing stories. She hated skirts and dresses and tomatoes.
By age 12, she was spending a lot of time online. She had a Facebook account and loved YouTube, music videos, cat videos; Naruto and Hannah Montana. She hung out mostly with a small group of close girlfriends, but mixed well with anyone. At 13 she had her own iPhone and laptop, and worshipped One Direction. At 14, she began watching videos by lesbian YouTubers Rose and Rosie, and ElloSteph. For the most part, I liked them. These young women were funny, happy and confident, and they gave out good life advice. Their videos were well composed, although there was a bit too much of the obligatory YouTube navel-gazing for my liking.
Jessie, slightly goth, long dyed dark hair and occasional black eyeliner, always in jeans and a band T shirt, Jessie came out as gay just before her 15th birthday . I wasn’t surprised. She’d briefly ‘dated’ a boy she’d known since she was five but it was obviously no great passion, so I had suspected she was going to tell me weeks before she did. Shortly afterwards she made a ‘coming out’ YouTube video and posted it on her Facebook page. She said she was ‘gay’; she didn’t use the word ‘lesbian’. I did think she was quite young to define her sexuality so suddenly and utterly, and declare it to the world before she had even had a relationship. By this time, I was very aware of the part YouTube youth culture played in the decision to ‘go public’ with a video. I told her that, but I wasn’t shocked or discouraging. I had a few girlfriends myself when I was younger. If she was a lesbian, so be it. I just wanted her to be happy and healthy.
Soon thereafter, Jessie began watching ‘transitioning’ videos on YouTube with her friends and siblings: cute boys who became girls and cute girls who became boys; endless slideshows of their stories, entitled, ‘My Transition Timeline’.
The girls all had the same sideways smiles and little bum-fluff beards. “I never liked pink,” they declared, “I never liked dresses, I wasn’t attracted to boys. I wore guy clothing.” The boys twisted their long hair as they spoke through heavily lipsticked lips, leaning forward coyly and peering out from over-mascara’ed lashes. “I always liked pink,” they cooed, “I played with girls’ toys.” I wondered why this generation seemed desperate to put itself into boxes and mark them with labels, but mostly I worried that my kids were spending too much time online.
“Read a book; go outside!” was my mantra. “Turn off the internet and put down your phone.”
Jessie took me to a YouTube convention and we sat at the front during the LGBT discussion. She had a crush on a high-profile teen who identified as a boy. Chris was on hormones and had had a double mastectomy. Chris was kind to Jessie at the ‘meet and greet’ afterwards and posed for a photo. I didn’t see Chris as a boy, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. What I do remember was those eyes, like a frightened rabbit, a frail little thing despite the smiles.
Jessie asked to cut her long hair short. I said, “Of course.” I was surprised how much it suited her. We donated her hair to the Little Princess Trust, to be made into wigs for children with cancer.
Jessie still had her phone 24/7. I ‘trusted’ her, despite knowing that many of her friends were online half the night. I knew some of them self-harmed, or starved themselves, or posted half-naked pictures online. I know now that it isn’t about trust. No one ever thinks their child is doing that stuff. Social media cliques are like a spiral, ever more insular and self-serving. They are more than the sum of the parts of their users. The internet can be a great source of support, but whole online communities have grown up to normalise disturbing behaviours: from the personification of eating disorders with Ana and Mia, through forums where kids discuss who cuts the deepest or most frequently. If my bright, happy child was vulnerable, anybody’s child can be vulnerable. You can’t ‘trust’ your child not to get drawn into a cult, any more than you can trust them not to get run over by a truck.
A month after cutting her hair, Jessie said she had something to tell me. She was distraught, red-faced and bleary-eyed. There was a tiny part of me that knew what she was going to say, although I didn’t realise it until later. After almost an hour of pacing the room she grabbed a pen and wrote on a scrap of paper, ‘I am transgender’.
Despite having half-known what she was going to say, I was shocked. I had heard of people who said they’d always known they were ‘in the wrong body’ but there had never been anything in Jessie’s past to suggest that might be the case with her. She insisted the signs had always been there. She hated wearing dresses, she used male avatars in video games, she didn’t want to flirt with boys. She didn’t ‘feel’ like a girl.
“Do you want to go on hormones?” I asked, at one point during that first conversation. “You’d grow a beard.” I added, pointlessly.
She nodded. She never mentioned surgery, but I saw it looming in her future. The prospect terrified me. I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “It’ll be ok.”
She seemed much happier after telling me and then went to bed, a million miles away, in her room next to mine. I went to bed too, and the darkness screamed at me. I got up again, and spent the night googling ‘transgender’ and crying. I tried to be open-minded. I wanted to support Jessie more than anything; to do the best thing to help her, but I was sure transition wasn’t the answer she needed. I told myself I was open-minded, but was I really? Was I in denial? I slept very little over the following weeks.
I spoke to a lesbian friend, in a panic. “What does he want to do next?” she inquired. I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
One of the first places I looked for information was the National Health Service website, because I presumed there would be impartial advice: something about helping people with the issue of reconciling their bodies with their identity. I thought that thinking you were transgender would be treated as a mental health issue; surely transition would be recommended as a last resort.
I typed ‘NHS transgender’ into Google, and the first article that appeared was the story of a boxing promoter who came out as transgender at age 60; about his ‘dreams, diaries and dress-ups’. A link on that site led to the children’s trans support group, ‘Mermaids’. which is run by parents who believe their children are born in the wrong bodies. Their advice to confused teens, in the section ‘I think I’m trans, what do I do?’ is ‘you can speak to your GP without your parents being able to know if you are not comfortable with coming out to them yet.’ Next, I flipped through the testimonials from parents. Mermaids receives UK lottery funding and is often the first port of call for concerned parents in the UK. As far as I could tell, every single child mentioned on the site has transitioned.
Another link on the NHS transgender page led me to a glossy brochure called ‘Living my Life’, featuring studio photos of good-looking transgender people. It struck me as more of an advert for plastic surgery than an information booklet.
A spikey-haired 20-something plays a guitar and shouts into the camera. ’We’re here for a good time, not a long time.’ A coiffed and manicured blonde wears a low-cut salmon pink top, and a pair of surgically enhanced breasts take up most of the bottom half of the picture. ’I was always me but I just didn’t look like me.’
There was nothing on either of those two links about helping kids to reconcile with their natal sex. Nothing about working through it; nothing about learning to love yourself as you are. I saw nothing stating the obvious: that a healthy natal boy has a penis and testicles and a healthy natal girl has a vulva and vagina, and that both sexes should be able to do all the things they love while wearing whatever damn outfit takes their fancy.
I typed ‘Am I transgender?’ into Google and clicked on the link to amitransgender.com. One word filled the screen: a black YES on a white background.
“I want to change my pronouns,” Jessie announced. “I’m a boy in a girl’s body.”
“How can you know what a boy feels like, when you’re a girl?” I demanded.
She couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.
“You’re a girl,” I insisted. “You can do anything as a girl, achieve anything as a girl that you could if you were a boy, but you can’t just become a boy any more than you can become a cat. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Go away.”
My eyes were opened over the next few weeks. Staying up most of the night, every night, Google led me beyond YouTube, to Reddit, to Tumblr, to Pinterest and Instagram. To posts about pink, clothing, hair and make-up. To seemingly endless pictures and slideshows of men, dressed like pornstars, claiming to be women. Vague explanations about ‘feeling’ different; about ‘being yourself’. It led me to videos of girls in checked shirts with cute quiffs and bound breasts, who genuinely believed they were gay men. They talked of ‘gender identity’ and the sex they’d been ‘assigned at birth’, as if births were attended by a gender fairy who absent-mindedly distributed random gifts of genitalia. A huge amount of importance was attached to public bathroom access and locker rooms of one’s choice. Endless posts claiming, in all seriousness, that ‘misgendering’ transpeople is an act of violence tantamount to trying to kill them, and how the only way to stop the feeling of dysphoria is to embrace transition and start living as your ‘preferred gender’. Immediately. There is no shortage of gender therapists offering to help a child do that, because if you even suspect you might be trans, then you probably are. Type ‘child gender therapist UK’ into Google and you get over 15 million results.
Everywhere I looked, the internet seemed eager to affirm that transition was a simple and marvellous thing, the one and only solution to all the problems of physical and social dysphoria. If you don’t support your child’s transition, parents are warned over and over again, they will probably try to kill themselves.
I learned a lot. I learned that if you don’t believe a man can become a woman; if you are gender critical, you will be called a TERF, transphobic and told to ‘educate yourself’ at best; ‘die in a fire’ at worst. I became familiar with the term ‘die cis scum’ (‘cis’ are non-trans people). I learned that if you are a lesbian who doesn’t want to give fellatio, you are transphobic. You may be called a cisbian and you are responsible for the ‘cotton ceiling’. Men get pregnant and you should say ‘chestfeeding’ not ‘breastfeeding’. Vulva cupcakes are violent. Women who menstruate should be called ‘menstruators’ so as not to trigger transwomen who cannot menstruate, or transmen who don’t wish to be reminded that they do. The term ‘female genital mutilation’ is ‘cis sexist’. Often, middle-aged people with names like Misty or Crystal will be the ones helpfully explaining this to confused ‘non-binary’ youngsters. If your child thinks they’re trans, there are a host of interested adults out there. They’ll help you select underwear, they’ll advise you to start transition as early as you can. Some will advise you to keep your feelings from your parents because they may become ‘crazy, hateful people’ if you come out to them. Worried siblings are told to keep quiet if they don’t want suicide on their hands. A few clicks will get you tips on how to get a binder without your parents knowing; some sites will even post you a second-hand binder for free. Tips on how to get hold of hormones illegally online and how to get ‘top surgery’ quicker by lying to a therapist are just a few clicks away.
I started taking Jessie’s phone away at night.
Here’s the thing – teenagers are dysphoric. Dysphoria is defined as ‘a state of unease or generalised dissatisfaction with life’ and that just about sums up being a teenager for a lot of kids. Many teenagers feel they aren’t in the right place, the right life, the right time. It is not such a huge leap, especially for a lesbian girl, to conclude that she is in the wrong body. Transkids call the name their parents gave them at birth their ‘deadname’. The appeal is clear. Society demands such impossible things from our youth. Our boychildren are expected to be tough, to ‘man up’, to scorn women yet acquire them, to value money and power above everything else. Is it any wonder if they shirk from what they are told is manhood? And if it is hard for them, it is so much worse for our girls. They are faced with endless images of airbrushed physical perfection in a society where women are told they can ‘have it all’ but are everywhere portrayed as constantly sexually available and intellectually and physically inferior. We are raising our girls in a society where women still earn nearly 20% less than men for the same work hours; where online porn is only a click away; where a third of young women age 18-24 report being sexually abused in childhood and only one in twenty reported rapes ends in a conviction. Is it really any wonder when young women want to cut off not just their hair but their breasts and fantasise about emerging, as if from a chrysalis, to join men in their position of power and privilege?
“Gender is a social construct.” I repeated. “You are a biological girl. You can have no idea what it feels like to be a boy, because you aren’t a boy. Being a girl doesn’t have to dictate what you like to do, or wear, or who you love.”
She said, “I’m a boy.”
“No, you are a girl.”
“You can’t tell me how I feel.”
I worried myself sick that, at almost 16, my child was only a few months away from being able to visit a doctor privately and start hormone treatment. In fact, as I later learned, some UK children are receiving cross-sex hormones from private doctors as young as 12.
When I first started my research into transgenderism online, I could find nothing that questioned the trans narrative. Everything said transition was the answer, the only answer. Then I found 4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend and Gender Critical Dad. Those websites were saving lights in the blue glow of my laptop on those sleepless nights. From there I was led to others who questioned Transtopia. I read, with a mixture of relief and dismay, articles showing the huge increase in young people identifying as ‘trans’ and presenting to gender clinics in the last few years. Those most likely to be sucked in seemed to be white, middle class girls who spent compulsive amounts of time on social media. I read blog posts by thissoftspace and crashchaoscats. I watched YouTube videos by the inspirational Peachyoghurt. I read Sheila Jeffreys’ ‘Gender Hurts’. I joined online radical feminist groups and met wonderful women full of love and anger who taught me a lot. I read stories about five year old children transitioning, and about parents discovering their child had ‘changed pronouns’ at school months ago, but the school had a policy not to discuss the issue with parents. I saw picture books encouraging children to question if they were born the ‘right’ sex. I read about a woman who started a fundraiser for ‘top surgery’ for her disabled daughter who was hospitalised in an intensive care unit. I watched videos where young boys donned false eyelashes and lipstick and curled their long hair, and told the world that they were really girls, while their parents held the cameras that broadcast their lives to the world via their own YouTube channels. Trans-identifying Jazz Jennings stars in a reality TV show. I read about MTT (male to trans) boxers hospitalising women in fights, about MTT golfers who suddenly became world champions, about middle-aged MTT playing on girls’ basketball teams. And I read story upon story about women and girls being assaulted in bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons and refuges, by men who identified as women and used the privilege that gave them to invade women’s spaces. In all my internet surfing, I never found a single story about an MTT being attacked in a men’s restroom.
I showed Jessie a graph that registered the sweeping rise in girls identifying as trans over the last decade. She seemed somewhat subdued by that.
“A woman can’t become a man, it’s impossible.” I reasoned. “How can your body be wrong but your brain be right?”
She repeated, “I’m in the wrong body.”
We went round in circles. And then, in my Internet wanderings, I discovered ‘Jake’.
Jessie had created an elaborate online persona as a transboy, as Jake. As the story slowly unravelled, I discovered that Jessie hadn’t met her new girlfriend, Beth, at a party, as she had told me. Instead, they had met online, and as far as Beth was concerned, she had a boyfriend, a transboy called Jake. As far as Beth was concerned, Jessie Maynard didn’t exist.
I was devastated, I was lost, I was furious. We’d had a strict ‘no fake profiles online’ rule and she had broken it, and then had lied to me.
“It’s not a fake profile,” she yelled, as she slammed her bedroom door. “It’s me!”
I changed the internet passwords and I bought her a ‘brick phone’, a phone without internet access. She was not impressed.
But I didn’t try to stop Jessie seeing Beth, or any of her other friends. Beth lived two hours away from us, but I paid Jessie’s train fare to visit her fortnightly, and gave her back her old phone to FaceTime most evenings. I was touched when Jessie wanted me to meet Beth, and I took them out for dinner. I had mixed feelings. On one level I felt the relationship was reinforcing her confusion. On another I felt it might help clear it. Yet I was horrified that Jessie had created this online world, slipped so easily inside and pulled it back into reality with her. There were others calling her Jake now, friends she had met online, and a few ‘IRL’ friends. Even some of her friends’ parents, I discovered, used the new name and pronouns.
“Do you think Beth really sees you as a boy?” I questioned, one afternoon.
“Yes.” Jessie didn’t look up from her book.
“Really?”
“She says if that’s how I identify, that’s how she sees me.” Jessie looked up this time, and seemed a little uncertain. “I have wondered about that,” she admitted.
Sometimes I would sit with her, coaxing her to explain how she felt, trying so hard to understand how she thought she really could be a boy; telling her what a talented and creative person she was and what a great life she had ahead of her.
Sometimes I couldn’t bear it any longer.
“Whatever you do to yourself you will always be a woman,” I shouted, exasperated. “Do you want a life where everyone around you creeps about pretending they think you’re something you’re not? Do you want to spend the rest of your life on hormones? Do you want a half-beard, phantom breasts, a life based on a lie?”
Sometimes she would not speak to me at all. And I didn’t blame her.
As I’ve said, the internet told me repeatedly that my child might kill herself if I questioned this new identity or whether transition was the best response to her feelings. I didn’t believe it. Jessie did not seem suicidal. Angry and confused, yes. There seemed to be no space for question, no one out there to tell these kids they might be ok as they are – that it was society’s expectations of what makes a man or a woman that should change, not them. This self-diagnosed condition seemed to be accepted without question by most therapists and health professionals.
I started a Facebook group just for Jessie and me, where I posted blog links, news articles and reports I found online, and checked if she had read them by bringing them up in conversation.
Sometimes I’d say, “You can have your phone to call Beth after you’ve read that article.”
Or, “I’ll wash up, you go and look at that video.”
Many of the links I shared with her explained gender as a social construct. Some unravelled the myth that our brains are gendered; some discussed what makes a woman a woman. Many linked FTT (female to trans) transgenderism to male domination, some discussed internalised misogyny. I made sure she knew that detransition was ‘a thing’ and that detransitioners were rejected by the community that had encouraged them to transition in the first place. Sometimes we read articles or watched videos together. She rolled her eyes a lot but didn’t seem to mind too much.
I read everything I could get my hands on. I stayed up most of the night, most nights, reading and copying and pasting appropriate links for Jessie to read. It was easier than lying in the dark, thinking about my perfect child removing her breasts a few years down the line. I learned about breast binders and the problems they can cause. I learned that the facial hair produced by testosterone often remains even if hormones are stopped. I googled pictures that I now wish I could unsee. A pre-op torso sporting breasts and chest hair. Photos of badly scarred, crooked chests; of nipples that looked as if they had been glued or badly stitched back on, reports of nipples that had ‘fallen off’. A photo of bloody breast tissue lying in a silver surgeon’s bowl. I saw pictures of constructed penises that looked like ready-rolled pastry and the raw exposed flesh that was cut away from arms or thighs to build them. I learned about how an artificial vagina can be constructed from a scrotal sack, and how, in the words of one MTT, “some of the tissues get starved of nutrients and oxygen (and) tends to die off”. I learned about ‘phantom penis syndrome’ and how it can affect some post-op MTTs when they become aroused.
It was horrific. It was nothing like the ‘My 2 Year Transition Story’ YouTube videos. I did not make an appointment for Jessie to see the doctor. I did not take her to a gender clinic.
“You’re not a straight boy, Jessie. You’re a lesbian.” I reasoned.
She shouted, furious, “I am not a lesbian!”
Her 16th birthday came and went. She had a party and her friends took over the ground floor. I kept one eye out from upstairs. Some cross-looking little goth girls smoked and drank beer at the bottom of the garden.
“Who were those girls?” I asked the next day.
“Those boys were Ryan and Jake.”
I snorted.
I did try to find Jessie a therapist who would help her reconcile with being female. The only openly gender critical therapist a Google search threw up lived in Texas. No use to us, then. I was put in touch with several people by email, but I could find no-one who worked in our area. Those I did communicate with were wonderfully supportive but asked me not to name them, not to give out their email address or talk about them. The message was clear – publicly questioning Transtopia could be professional suicide.
Jessie talked disparagingly of ‘otherkin’, the world of people who seriously ‘identify’ as animals. Cats, mostly, or wolves, and sometimes dragons. She didn’t take them very seriously. I said I couldn’t see a lot of difference between their beliefs and her own. She scowled–but then she laughed.
I showed Jessie photographs of Danielle Muscato and Alex Drummond: both men who consider themselves to be women.
I showed her a picture of an FTT (female to trans), who claimed she was a gay man, breast-feeding her baby.
“Man or woman?” I pestered her. “What makes a woman? What makes a man?”
We watched a video about Paul Wolscht, a man in his late forties who now ‘identifies’ and ‘lives as’ a 7- year old girl. Jessie was horrified. She said it was gross. I said that if gender really is all about identity, then his identity is surely as valid as any other. She looked at me, incredulous. I shrugged. There was a silence.
I showed her Peachyoghurt’s YouTube channel and we watched the videos together. Peachyoghurt made Jessie laugh. Sometimes I felt like we were getting somewhere, but when I asked her, the answer was always the same.
“Nothing’s changed. I’m still a boy.”
“What about Rachel Dolezal?” I asked one day, in the middle of dinner. “She was born white but honestly feels as if she is black. How is that different?”
“It just is.”
“Why?”
“I’m eating my dinner, mum.”
I taught her about how gender is a hierarchy; I gave her articles that showed that ‘transwomen’ are as likely to be arrested for violent crime against women as men; and that wealthy, older men are investing huge amounts of money in the transitioning of children.
Sigh. “I’m still a boy, mum. Nothing has changed.”
When Jessie was due to register at college at 16, she told me she wanted to register as a boy, as Jake. I had seen this coming and I was not keen at all. I felt that the more she indulged Jake; ascribed the good things in her life to being perceived as a male, the less there would be left of Jessie. The deeper she waded in the waters of Transtopia, the harder it would be to turn back. I worried about the effect on her education, and the damage that would be done by people in authority appearing to buy into her delusion. I was determined to at least find her some time and space to think a while longer before stepping into a life in which her ’transness’ was either the elephant in the room or the main focus of her being. She’d been offered a place at an excellent college an hour away from us. I took a gamble.
“You can do what you like when you are 18,” I told her. “But for now, you register as Jessie- as a girl- or you go to the college two blocks away from our flat.”
To say she was not pleased is an understatement. There were tears and there was shouting. But she registered at college as Jessie Maynard.
We know that we are supposed to say that transwomen are real women. We know that it upsets them when we don’t. We also know, although we think about it far less, that we are supposed to believe that teenage girls who think they are boys, are actually men. The reason the cry ‘transwomen are real women’ is so important is that the minute we stop buying into that ‘reality’ the whole house of cards collapses.
I talked with Jessie about the way we treat boys and girls differently and how their brains develop differences because of that. I reminded her that in Victorian times, and well into the 20th century, pink was considered to be a boy’s colour and boys wore dresses until they were as old as eight. Gender expectations are different in different cultures. How could your brain be right but your body wrong? Is Caitlin Jenner really a woman, and is the hardest part of being a woman really deciding what to wear? Can sixty years of male privilege be wiped away with surgery and a lipstick? I talked a lot.
After a while I would always ask, “Do you want me to go away?” Usually she would say, “Yes,” but sometimes she would shake her head. “No, you can stay.”
I told her how angry it made me feel that she had friends whose parents used her ‘preferred pronouns’, because I wouldn’t tell an anorexic girl she looked better thin, or comment on how cool the cutting scars on a boy’s arms looked.
I tried to give her support and let her know that I would always love her, but I never wavered for a minute from the idea that a woman cannot ‘become’ a man. Jessie and I went out for walks, to the cinema; out to lunch. I watched her and thought how clever she was, how compassionate, how thoughtful, how beautiful. I couldn’t bear the thought that she might mutilate herself in pursuit of something she could never really have. I wore sunglasses far too often that summer, but it helped to hide my eyes.
Then, at a party, Jessie met up with a friend she hadn’t seen for a year. Hazel had lived as a boy called Harvey for 8 months and then re-identified as a girl. Unbeknownst to me, they talked a lot over the next few weeks.
“What does Hazel say about it all?” I asked, curious, when Jessie told me. She shrugged. “Pretty much the same as you.”
When she asked if she could stay the weekend at Hazel’s house, obviously I said yes. I began crossing my fingers and hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel.
A week later she said “I’m thinking about it all, mum. I’m not sure what I think anymore.”
Jessie started at college and had never seemed so happy. Slowly, she seemed to begin reconciling with her femaleness. Then she told me she wanted to tell me something ‘later’. I thought I knew, I suspected, I hoped and I hoped. I waited and time passed slowly.
One day she texted me on the way to college, “I am a girl. I was never a boy.’
She has told the group of friends that called her Jake the same. Beth has been accepting, saying “Now you’re my preferred gender.” The only friend who is disappointed is a boy.
“You are becoming problematic.” he told her. “You need to educate yourself.”
Jessie saw the irony.
Jessie wrote a respectful but trans-critical post on her Tumblr account, and two of her ‘transboy’ followers messaged her saying they had also been feeling that way for some time and asked her to tell them more. She is currently messaging with several young people who are experiencing gender confusion. I hope she can help them, as her friend Hazel and I helped her, to realise that your potential should not be governed by your genitals; that the problem is gender and the solution is to try to change the system, not yourself.
I realise that it could have all gone horribly wrong: Jessie could have turned her back on our family and bought into the myth that anyone who questions trans ideology is phobic, full of hatred, and should be discarded in the name of liberation and finding yourself. If things had gone that way, I could have lost a child as well as a daughter. Every family is different and I would not presume to tell another parent how to deal with their child’s assertion that they are transgender. It is a minefield. If I had ever felt that Jessie needed to transition to stay alive, I would have acted differently, but I never once felt that she was in danger of taking her own life. Of course, I had never expected my daughter to tell me she was my son, either.
I do not dispute that, for a very small number of people, their gender and body dysmorphia has gone so far that the only comfortable way for them to survive in this culture is to live as the opposite sex. These people should have the same rights as the rest of us, they should not be discriminated against and they should be able to move about their business in safety. Housing and jobs should be open to them, just as they should to any member of society. I don’t want to belittle their suffering and I would not ‘misgender’ someone to their face. But a man is not a woman and a woman is not a man. These are biological differences, and biology is the fundamental basis of female oppression. To claim that being a woman is no more than a feeling is to instigate the erasure of women. The idea that we should buy into the myth that our young people are ‘born in the wrong body’ because they do not want to conform to contemporary gender stereotypes is doublespeak worthy of an Orwellian dystopia. The fact that teenage girls, predominantly young lesbians, are rejecting their womanhood in an attempt to become their oppressors should fill society with horror. Instead we are making ‘being trans’ into the latest fashion and parading these children in newspapers and on reality TV shows. I don’t know where it will end.
What I do know is that if I had let Jessie register at college as a boy and taken her to a gender clinic, we would be looking at a very, very different picture now. My beautiful 16-year-old daughter would have stepped down the road to public transitioning and a lifetime on medication. She would be looking towards a very different future.
Thank you to those of you that gave me support. To the women and men who have written so honestly about their experiences as parents, or as gender questioning young adults. Words cannot describe the strength you gave me when I needed to believe that I was doing the right thing in not supporting Jessie’s immediate transition. One more strong, healthy young woman is growing up a feminist.
Thoughts from Jessie Maynard:
Although at the time I didn’t appreciate it, the constant repetition of “you can’t be a boy” did me good. A lot of good. I had been spending too much time on the internet and I had got it into my head that somehow, biological girls could really be boys, if they “identified” as such (& vice versa).
As someone who’s always had a mostly realistic grip on the world, for some reason I had been pulled into a world where boys could become girls and girls could become boys. I felt that because I said I was a boy, I was a boy.
At the time, I felt that my mum not immediately calling me Jake and using male pronouns was horrible and transphobic. But in the long run, without her resistance, I probably wouldn’t be as happy as I am today, as I would still be thinking I was a boy and trying to “pass” as a boy (which I would never be able to do without body-altering hormones.)
I think that if I had changed my pronouns in September, and registered at my college as a boy I would be a lot more unhappy as I would constantly be trying to “pass” and I wouldn’t be making the friends I wanted to, as I would be trying to fit in with the “male crowd”. When I arrived at my college, making friends wasn’t my primary motive, however the friends I have made are almost all female, and I don’t think I would have those friends if I had been trying to fit in as a boy.
Most of all, understanding gender as a social construct has taken me a long way in my personal life, and in my ideas about feminism and the way women and men are treated, especially women by the trans movement.
I’m glad that I realised before it was too late, as I am now happier in my own body and identity. I think that as a whole, many girls who wouldn’t’ve identified as transgender 10/20 years ago are now thinking they are which is dangerous and harmful to them, and that talking to them maturely and explaining gender as a social construct could really help them.
I think we live in very strange times. I am a dadthink a huge part of the issues facing us and our kids are at least promoted (if not produced) by the media. Reading your article the words “internet” and “media” are always at the centre of the process. I am always checking out the new music and film coming out of America as a personal study. The level of sexualization and paganism in the videos is simply incredible!Pretty much all pop/hip hop music have some very psychologicaly challenging ideas as part of the message (If anyone is curious, the latest Katty Perry video is a great start). The reason why I’ve decided to comment here is that after reading quite a bit on the subject I’ve reached a point where I see this current questioning of gender as a deliberate desire to influence and direct vulnerable young people through pop culture. Why? Why are we forced to accept such radical ideas without long and thorough research? Why aren’t more efforts focused on counselling and talk therapy? And why are we accepting such stereotypical male female identities? A man is a man even if he doesn’t like watching football (like myself). A man can also write poetry, be tender and compasionate. A woman is a woman regardless if she like football, thai boxing and/or flower arrangements. Gender isn’t this binary choice we’re suppose to select from. It is PART of our most basicidentity, different for each one of us and that should be celebrated and encouraged. But we are so much more than our gender or our sexual orientation. Why is there such a strong focus only on what’s inside of our pants?
How can we counteract this immense (American) media influence?
I can’t understand this either. I see from social media that this transthing is running wild in America, but even here in Sweden, a somewhat feminist country, it’s growing by the day. If you want to get an greater insight into what our kids are exposed to look into musically. I haven’t myself but I’ve seen many of the so called stars on instagram. Heaps of “transboys” who’s risen to fame just by being cute and miming to music. Not to hang out a child, but I find “reaganbeast” very interesting. A very pretty Justin bieber look alike, who’s clearly a lesbian, using the opportunity to live as a boy to get girls and be someone popular instead of just a masculine woman.
Wow. Well done. This was an eye opener. Politics as they are, have pretty well scared my wife and I out of wanting children. We’re a so called “butch/femme” couple. Lily-Thank you for your bravery. Jessie well done researching with your mom and putting some trust in her. Suggestion to 4th wave:add direct links to post to FB & Twit.
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I am going through an identity crisis much like Jessie, and I would appreciate some insight on the issue as a whole. If it is alright, I would like to get into contact with Jessie via e-mail.
If you email me at lilymaynard@mail.com I will ask Jessie to email you.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Thank you Lily for sharing your amazing story! I can relate to it very well. My 16 year old daughter is having Gender Dysphoria. I feel devastated and I am going through the same thoughts and fears that you were going through. I shared yours and Jessie’s stories with my daughter and encourage her to get some insights from Jessie. She put a lot of thoughts into it and wished to have contact with Jessie for some insight questions. She really appreciates your offer of the email address. She is anxious to get the answers from Jessie. I’m praying that she will finally come to recognize her real physical sex and appreciate it. Thanks again for everything!
this was EXACTLY my experience as a young lesbian being bombarded by social media and the weird new trend of being as different as possible and erasing gender nonconformity in favour of being transgender. now i’m an adamant feminist and slowly getting more comfortable to be butchier again and know that it doesn’t invalidate my womanhood. i’m growing more comfortable with being a lesbian too, even though in a lot of lgbt settings were shunted off to the side or even actively disliked. my heart is with jessie and we are kindred spirits who were both lucky enough to have amazing feminist mums who were there to support us and get us actual help without pressuring us either way! so happy to read an experience just like mine, i’m tearing up. jessie and lily are so strong and i wish them both the best lives
I’m so glad you didn’t get swallowed up by the cult. Stories and support like yours are inspiring.
Wow, this is exactly what I needed to read. What a great write up. Lily, I am a mother of a 14 year old daughter who feels she is a boy. Deep in my deepest heart I know that she is not. You said so many things on here that I resonate with and I appreciate that. My daughter is glued to her phone. IT’s constant. I refuse to her call her by her “boy” name and I refuse to use her “preferred pronouns”. I feel like I have been all alone in this. We are told to “go with the flow” and let them feel how they are supposed to feel, etc. She dresses like a boy, has short hair, has stopped shaving. I have told her I was fine with that, but that doesn’t make her a boy, she will always have female DNA, that will never change. Do you have a website or links to these articles? I would love to show my daughter, she needs to see the other side of all of this. Please help! Thank you so much!
A commenter here created this forum: http://genderskeptics.freeforums.net
There’s no activity yet, but I think it could become a great place to discuss concerns like yours. Just have to get the word out there.
I’m a member but haven’t posted anything since I don’t have a trans kid myself. I’m just interested because I “suffered” from milder gender dysphoria myself when I was younger. But that was slightly before the trans thing happened, so I just dealt with it and got over it on my own.
Hi Jill (And others reading this reply)
My daughter was in this same exact situation. A “normal” girl until the internet got its hands on her. Suddenly, she was a boy telling us she had body dysphoria, etc…come on…wtf…a 15 year old should not know such words…
It was a year from hell!!! We too allowed her to cut her hair and wear boys clothing. My husband and I just used the first letter of her name and NEVER said he. We told her we did not agree with her self diagnosis, and that the media had brainwashed her.
Our solution: We kept tight reigns on her. Got all of her passwords. GOT HER OUT OF HER ROOM AND VOLUNTEERING. Kept reminding her how much we loved her but didn’t agree. After an idiot Sex Therapist validated her, we decided never again. Stay away from Sex Therapists!!!!!
It has been about 10 months that she is back. A weight lifted off my chest that only all of you can understand. She told me, only recently, that she realized that she was being told wrong info from the internet. That it is impossible to be born into the wrong body. You are who you are. That being male or female has nothing to do with liking pink or blue.
I hope this helped. I am due for writing a proper article about our experience. We personally know too many kids going through this same situation and it is only recently that our daughter said she wants to help.
Take care!!!
I am so excited to hear Lorenzo’s oil!! You just have written what I have wanted to write on here
I am hoping to write our journey down when I get a chance as I want others to hear and see what we had gone through.
For us, it was a year from hell!! But listening to those on here (thank you all for your encouragement and advice) my daughter is back!! She’s even in bras!!! She’s happy and excited about life again. She had so much picking out a dress for her first dance. But boy did I not think we would ever see the day.
We too did not allow her to change her name. I avoided calling her anything at all. No she. But also no He. She had cut her hair. Wore binders. We had therapist validate her. One even called child services on us because we would not let her be he. Beware the doctors!!! Reign your child in closer. Do not let them on the computer or locked in their rooms. Don’t force them to dress or wear their hair any way… but don’t encourage it. The more you keep them talking with you the better. I encouraged how much a guy is different then a girl. Because they are!! It was like reteaching a child’s thinking. I also brought her back and closer to church. It took us a whole entire year.
I wish I could share pictures to prove!! I can’t say I’m not afraid of these people and movement. That they would hunt us down. Claim I forced her (which is far from it). She even had a boyfriend now. But it terrifies me.
Lorenzo’s Oil, I discovered 4thwave last December and I remember your story very well. It was shortly after I joined this forum that you wrote of your daughter’s desistance. I have been hoping that you would write again. It is stories like your’s and Lily’s that give people like me going and gives me hope. I think the only experts in this area are parents like you, I want to second your admonition against gender therapists. That was the biggest mistake that I made.
We are going on three years now and I am hoping the damage can be undone, Would love to know more about your daughter’s situation. My daughter is very intelligent and on the autism spectrum. That, and the fact that I affirmed and supported her social transition for an entire year, makes her situation all the more challenging.
Anything more you can share would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you so much for writing this. My 15 daughter came home from 2 weeks with friends thinking she is a boy. She had facebook messaged her grandmother that she was trans. Told me she had come out to her friends over a year ago. But at the same time she is always asking me to take her to Victoria Secret to get her a padded bra to make her boobs look good, she wants to wear a thong because he butt looks better in the pants. She buys pants that are butt shapers to make it look better.
Knowing that there is a good chance she will figure out that she is not a ‘boy’ is helping me to not lock her in her room until she is 18.
My beautiful daughter who decided she was gender fluid about 2 years ago,who now has long hair wears makeup and jewelry and girls clothing, looks just like a girl,not interested in testosterone,but wears a binder.She is 21 and a legal adult.She informed me yesterday that she is going to see if our insurance covers a top surgery. I live in San Francisco and wondered if anyone knows how hard it is for a gender fluid child to get an operation approved,we have Kaiser.
http://genderskeptics.freeforums.net
No activity yet, but could become a great place for support and help with these kind of questions. I’m a member who haven’t posted yet, but would love to see some more people there ☺
Tomorrow I am going to spend all day researching with Kaiser insurance to see if they cover my daughters top surgery and what the process is,how easy it is for her to do this.I can post what I find out I am just hoping that that the plan I have will not cover this surgery and if it does I will see 8f there is anyway to block it,as my daughter is not mature enough to make such an irreversible decision.I have been worried sick ever since she told me she wants this surgery,and gets so angry if I try speaking to her about it.
I want to have a top surgery to get my breasts very small, because they’re uncomfortable and they’re the only part of my body that I don’t need, but I still identify as a woman. Not wanting breasts doesn’t necessarily make me a man 🙂 I just don’t care if other people find me attractive, I’m not typically “feminine”, but it’s the stupid stereotypes that make some people think they’re trans.
I felt the same way about my breasts as a teenager and as a young woman. I never thought that I would have children. But hey! things changed. I have a two year old now — the best decision I ever made. I am still nursing her. I never thought my boobs defined my womanhood and I never viewed them as sexual objects; and I was right — they are made exclusively for feeding babies.
Give your boobs a chance. You might want them some day.
Maybe it’s a good thing that kids are able to stay on their parent’s insurance policies until age 26 as the brain continues developing through age 25. I had thought that was absurd but now I see that could be one more hurdle for this trans movement.
For anyone wondering if insurance companies will cover top durgery and the process this is what I found out. I have Kaiser and they will fully cover my daughters top surgery,much to my dismay.They also would require her to meet with a gender therapist a few times to make sure it is a “necesdity”. Then she would have consultations with the surgeons and hear alternatives. The good thing is that they would also cover breast reduction which is a much better option,and it is much easier to reverse the process if she wanted to later on.. With top Surgery because all the breast tissue is removed, so are the nerves and mammary glands, which means no option of breast feeding in the future or having any feeling in your breast even after reconstructive surgery. Also making it much harder for reconstructive surgery option later on, plus a lot of scarr8ng as they would have to stretch the small amount of breast tissue remaining, in stages.
.I just hope she goes for breast reduction instead. The process to get approved would take a few months and there is a waiting list into next year for surgery.I am hoping she changes her mind by then.
I hope this information helps others a little,I was unaware breast reduction was an option that would be covered as well
Where I work, a young (30’s) woman came in who was about one week post-op from a full mastectomy for breast cancer. She had come to my workplace because a close friend was celebrating a very special day, otherwise I am sure she would not have forced herself to go out. The poor thing was in incredible pain, moving very slowly and gingerly, and had to call her mother to come and get her, she wasn’t even capable of driving home. I just kept thinking the whole time, that women actually do this voluntarily, when they don’t have to. That’s hard to wrap my head around, to be honest.
I am incredibly grateful that you posted this. My beautiful, smart, accomplished 14 y.o daughter is in the throes of this. So much of what you have written has resonated with me. There is no reasoning with her. It’s truly like she’s been sucked into a cult and I don’t know how to get her out. Her best friend is doing the same thing….which further complicates the matter. I like your approach. It makes sense to me. I have to save my daughter.
I wish you luck, I know how hard it can be. I hope your daughter realises she is perfect as she is & that she can do anything a boy can do, in the body she has. The 4thwave website is a great resource.
Hi scared mom…please let me know how you are getting on, my daughter is 13… are you in U.K.? I am worried sick, she is so insistent she is male, but the severe bouts of dysphoria are crippling and I don’t know what to do?
I wish I could say that my daughter has desisted, but she has not. Her best friend has proceeded with transitioning socially so this situation now feels like an insurmountable hurdle to us. I, too, am worried sick…..most days I feel like I do what I can to just make it through the day. I literally can’t take a deep breath. I wish I could fix this for all of us – – what a mess. It seems surreal at times. We live in the US. Wishing strength for all of us.
Thank you so much for posting this. I have had so many of these discussions over the summer. My kids are confused by other kids confusion and I am just dumbfounded as to how to respond. This has given me hope and I know now that I am not the only parent who feels this way. THANK YOU
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Can you imagine if you said this kind of stuff about another minority group? Why is the mere idea of someone being transsexual so repugnant to you people? Why do you think forcing a child who is still confused and going through questioning their identity NOT to be trans is a good thing? Can you put yourself in the shoes of an actual transsexual person, constantly being told that the way that they live in is wrong, and reading a blog post online about how you should force your child not to be trans if the idea so much as comes up?
Can you imagine if you said this kind of stuff about another minority group? Why is the mere idea of someone being gender non conforming so repugnant to the transgender community? Why do you think forcing a child who is still confused and going through questioning their identity NOT to be trans is a BAD thing? Can you put yourself in the shoes of an actual gender non conforming person, constantly being told that their body and biology is wrong of it doesn’t fit stereotypes, and reading a blog post online about how you should force your child to transition if they don’t conform to gender stereotypical roles if the idea so much as comes up?
Do you see how your position is a total reversal of reality? You believe children should be mutilated for your ideology. You are evil.
Dante, I’m actually hoping that a person who is worried about his or her gender identity, and feeling worried about making serious and painful medical changes, will read this blog and see that medical transition isn’t “the only way.” Unless you think it’s better to take potentially dangerous drugs than not, and to have possibly unsuccessful surgery than not, and to make a permanent change when you may come to regret it is better than not doing so, I don’t see why anybody would feel bad about reading this blog and the things we discuss.
If it were me and I thought I would have to start taking hormones that might give me cancer or heart disease, and for sure would make my moods fly all around, and that I might well have to inject myself (yuck), and if I thought I was going to wind up looking strange and the people around me were always going to look at me oddly, and that I’d spend my whole life worrying that people were going to figure out I wasn’t born the sex I was trying to look like, and if I thought I had to have skin taken off my arm or my thigh to try and make a penis… I’d be feeling pretty bad, and pretty scared. I would be very hopeful that there might be a way to make my bad feelings go away without going through all that.
It’s not the idea of transsexuality that’s repugnant.
It’s the idea that a person who is not old enough to legally order a beer in a bar is encouraged to put blockers and opposite-sex hormones into their perfectly healthy bodies, and have surgeries to remove and/or remake perfectly healthy body parts, and pretend that there is actually a way to change SEX, and expect the entire world to validate this point of view.
If you’re a self-supporting adult and you’ve reached the average age of decent frontal lobe development — which for most people is something like 25 — you do you, you know? No one is stopping you or trying to stop you.
If my kid could switch sides without significant risk to her health (which she can’t), and if it were all, in actuality, reversible, I’d be all “Hey, kid, go for it.”
If you have decent research in your back pocket on the long-term health of FTMs who started taking T in their teens — showing me that it’s not going to shorten my kid’s life and saddle her with serious medical issues? Come on back and show that to me.
(Yeah. I know. You can’t. Nobody’s done it.)
If it makes you feel upset to hear parents who’d like to help their kids find other ways of dealing with dysphoria — not irreversible measures for non-adults — then go hang out in one of the millions of places where people will share your views. There’s no need to upset yourself.
Surely if a trans identity is innate it wouldn’t be possible to ‘force someone not to be trans’? Anyway, there was no force involved. I refused to affirm the idea that my daughter was not a ‘proper’ girl; that somehow she ‘did girl’ so badly she needed to try to become a boy. Trans people are not repugnant to me. What is repugnant to me is the idea that a young person should hate their body and its perceived social role so much that they would medicate and mutilate it to try to conform to society’s expectations of how body, presentation and personality should ‘match’. Girls do not need to perform ‘girly’ in order to be girls, and most grow to realise that if they aren’t transitioned in a flurry of preferred pronouns and specialness. But now, instead, we tell GNC young people that they’ll attempt suicide if they don’t transition. I did what I thought was best for my child at that point in her life. Jessie is happy in her skin and confident, and for that I am thankful.
Thank you, I love this voice of sanity. I have had and still continue to have much difficulty accepting being a woman. I am 46! I decided not to transition when I realised I would never actually be a man. It is impossible. Appearing as a man to strangers, removing my breasts (God I wish they were smaller!), not having periods! Bliss! But that could not make me someone who was born a boy. I realised I had to grieve for not having been born a boy – and to recognise that a lot of how I felt was a product of the misogyny I was raised with and amongst. It’s a hard road. But I thank you for sharing your experience and I admire how strong you were in fighting for your child. Jessie – thanks for sharing your experience too. I stand in solidarity with you both in challenging the ‘transtopia’ and this dominant discourse around gender identity.
Thank you so much x
Great essay, great writing! Wonderful job with your daughter!
Great piece, thanks. I’ve been struggling with the ideas behind the transgender issue for some time, as although I’m very much ‘live and let live’ I simply do not understand it, although I’m aware that’s possibly due to my own limitations. I think about whether (as a cis woman) I ‘identify’ as a male, and don’t really understand the question. I actually think if I’d been born in a male body I wouldn’t be much different, (obviously different socialisation plays a part in general likes/dislikes) perhaps I’d fancy women and perhaps not? But I can’t think of any reason I’d feel desperately like I *need* my female body, and I don’t particularly ‘identify’ as a female either. I don’t particularly identify as ‘right-handed’ – I just am. I’m really interested into why people *do* feel that way and unfortunately very recently it seems to be largely due to this particular ‘trend’.
All the stuff that usually gets trotted out about liking dresses or not should really, really not be an issue as it is entirely irrelevant.
Reblogged this on Desvaríos y tinta.
So so grateful to have found this piece, my 13 year old daughter is exactly the same! I am so desperate it’s incredible…I know in my heart it’s not the right pathway for life, a very sad life to follow due to the misery it will bring. Did your daughter suffer from extreme bouts of dysphoria? My daughter does, telling me she hates herself so much she wishes to harm herself, hating her body because it’s so feminine, it is heartbreaking …. any comment gratefully received? If anyone reading this has anything to offer on what we can do to elivate the dysphoria…I would be so grateful, it’s such a concern, I can’t function properly due to the worrying….
I’m in the same boat with my 14 year old daughter. I’m supportive of her feelings, but I also remind her when she’s having a bout that the dysphoria doesn’t go away with surgery. She won’t watch the videos I found of people who detransitioned, but I still tell her about them. I hope this phenomenon doesn’t claim my daughter in the long run.
There are so many comments on here now, some hopeful, some desperate: one thing is for sure, we are not alone in having/had trans-identified children. For my blog I compiled a list of some of the most moving comments posted here by parents. It’s very far from conclusive & I left many out. I wish I could hug you all. https://lilymaynard.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/my-mother-heart-bleeds/
Bless you Lily
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The author’s refusal to refer to her son with his preferred pronouns is gross. There is a trend of people, especially teens, *coming out* as trans, but there is absolutely no trend of people *being* trans. Queerness is becoming more socially acceptable, allowing more people to feel comfortable enough to be themselves. The difference between the past and the present is that, in the past, there were many more miserable people intimidated (whether directly or not) into hiding their true natures.
Their “true nature” is gender non-conformity because gender is a social construct that imposes unnatural rules on people based on their sex. This is called a sex caste and it is the source of female oppression. “Queerness” doesn’t change your biological sex and the fact that you are either male, female (or very rarely intersex) which is determined by chromosomes. You people are science deniers. You think mutilating children for your ideology is perfectly acceptable. You are in a cult, plain and simple, and the vast majority of people are aware of this. Erasing definitions of sex won’t change this oppression but will merely amplify it. If we can’t point to the objective factors that cause this oppression, we can’t stop it. Calling us “gross” won’t silence us. That’s simply an appeal to emotion.
Jaden, if you didn’t even take the time to read through the article, to discover that the teen involved desisted and does not identify as trans (and therefore your complaint about pronouns is a complete non-issue), why should we listen to the rest of your lecture? What do you have to contribute here, when you can’t even be bothered to read the piece you’re complaining about? And FWIW, it does seem a little crazy to me that you think you can discern this person’s “true nature” over the internet…
Wow have never read so much bullshit in my life, Your daughter will find her true self at Uni, and then you will have some questions to answer, You did everything to persuade her that she was not trans in fact you showed articles with no real relevance,
I hope when she is at uni she breaks all ties from you as you have virtually brainwashed her, I hope she becomes a he, and is very happy with his life as it will happen, Then you wont be so smug,
Hi Louise. I did indeed do everything I could to make my daughter see that she was not ‘trans’; that she could be happy in the body she was born with and that there is nothing to be ashamed of in being female. You seem to think that it would be possible for me to brainwash my child, but not for things she read on the internet to brainwash her. This shows a degree of cognitive dissonance that seems to be widespread among trans-identified people. Perhaps you should ask yourself why you feel the need to call our lived experience ‘bullshit’ and why you are so desperate for my daughter to be trans-identified? Your desire for my family to break up and for my daughter to become a lifelong medical patient, estranged from her mother- presumably to validate your own feelings – is noted. I would add that Jessie is now nearly 18, bright, happy and confident. She has been ‘out of the woods’ so to speak, for over 18 months. Our relationship is stronger than ever. In an interview for the Times a few months ago, Jessie said “I don’t see why there should be a male box and a female box. Just people who happen to have a penis or a vagina.” When asked what would have happened if I’d taken her to a gender clinic she replied, “I would have been Jake now. No question. But I wouldn’t have been happier at all.” I am thankful every day that my daughter was able to step off the trans-train. I hope you find peace.
I can never quite figure out the dissonance between the frequently heard statement “being trans is such an awful life no one would voluntarily choose it” (ergo, the insistence that this is an innate state of being) — and the lack of support when someone actually decides they had wrongly self-identified as trans.
Surely if trans people are truly so oppressed, they would be happy when a person decides they can live with reasonable happiness without transitioning? And surely they don’t want “non-true-trans” people to be transitioning?
But that’s never the case. Instead, it appears that every transitioned/transitioning transkid and adolescent is seen as some kind of win for the team, and the only good outcome possible once someone self-identifies as trans.
What’s wrong with names like Misty or Crystal? Both are strong female characters in Pokemon, the best franchise ever. I’ve been a Pokemon fanatic since the very beginning (the mid to late 90s all the way to the present), by the way, and I therefore happened to be flummoxed by the whole Pokemon Go craze. I mean, folks act as if Pokemon is a brand new thing. You know what? I am OBSESSED with Pokemon. The creator Satoshi Tajiri is even Aspie/Autistic just like myself! There was a trans character in Pokemon X/Y, as well, though she (MtF) was a very minor character.
To the parents here: So if your child confides in you that they’re trans, your solution is to take the Internet away? And it must be ROGD if your AFAB child wasn’t “masculine” enough during their childhood, even though feminists are supposed to be about abolishing gender stereotypes? Don’t “feminine” transmen exist, anyway? Many of the criticisms here don’t make sense and expose that even feminists don’t always live up to the ideals of gender equality. I’m not saying that trans folks are above criticism. Gender dysphoria itself though is a condition that exists regardless of one’s opinion. You can say that anyone is “brainwashed” by anything. Some trans might say that you’re all brainwashed by radical feminism. Taking the Internet away is like punishing your child for being trans. And why take it away? So you can brainwash your child to believe what you do? Maybe your child considers all different perspectives, including the critical ones, and still feels the way that they do. Young folks ask questions, and can easily receive answers to their doubts by searching on Google. Maybe they’ll come across 4thwavenow in their search. And if the sites they visit are an echo chamber, maybe they just want to be around those who affirm them, for the sake of comfort, just like pretty much anyone would want at the end of the day. And maybe no one has all the answers, including those who contribute to and maintain this 4thwavenow website.
“You should be making your child as comfortable as possible, not taking things from them. Build their self-confidence and tell them they’re special and they won’t be so influenced by social contagion and peer pressure. ”
Telling children that they are special and must never suffer discomfort is a large part of the problem – and actually makes them far more likely to be affected by peer pressure, social contagion and to be generally influenced by cult-like movements such as the current trans activism.
They need to learn resilience, respect, boundaries, the complete opposite of this ridiculous pandering where not only teens but supposedly grown adults are throwing tantrums about “misgendering” and “hate”.
They need to learn that they are not the centre of the universe, that every little whim will not be catered to, that reality exists, that they don’t know everything, that they cannot make good decisions about many life-changing things – and if they are suffering from serious mental health issues, trauma etc then they need professional, evidence-based, reality-based help.
jerrymanca, I have no idea who you are or how old you are, but … this is starting to feel like an argument you might prefer to be having with your parent(s).
The notion that the folks here enjoy “lording it over” their kids speaks volumes. You think we are having FUN out here, jerrymanca? You think having responsibility for nurturing a kid to adulthood is a fun thing, especially if the kid has numerous psych issues that predated the gender announcement? Yeah. Right. (And you can argue, we asked to be parents. We signed up for it. Fair enough. But your idea about the nature of the relationship being power-based and not love-based raises some eyebrows here.)
You are concerned w/immediate comfort. Responsible parents have to be concerned with the long-term health, physical and psychological, of their kids. Sometimes that means decisions that interfere with your kid’s immediate desires/happiness. That is what being a parent is ABOUT. Keeping their kids from doing unduly risky stuff before their brains are old enough to judge risk. It’s clear science that the adolescent brain is not great at judging risk. That’s why there are rules about tats, voting, alcohol, marriage, sex, renting a damned car. That’s also why unlimited Internet use is not a good thing. Plastic brains, addictive software, pretty soon your kid only wants to be in the basement playing Fortnite and the grades are in the tank.
I refuse to believe that it’s more risky to rent a car than it is to inject yourself with T, though that’s currently the state of the legal environment in the U.S.
But we’re getting nowhere, here.
A parent’s job is to love and guide their child. I would add that my daughter (Jessie, in the original post) is now a young adult, happily established at university and enjoying life. We have an excellent relationship. She herself says that had I affirmed her she would have gone down the path of hormones – who knows where she would be now, but it’s likely she’d be set up for a lifetime as a medical patient, obsessed with other people’s perception of her. Kids don’t always know what’s best for them!
Do you know how difficult it is for a young person to confide in an adult about ANYTHING? A young person doesn’t need your permission to be trans, but they’re trusting you enough to confide in you anyway. Love is based on trust, and you would betray their trust by taking their Internet away? You should be making your child as comfortable as possible, not taking things from them. Build their self-confidence and tell them they’re special and they won’t be so influenced by social contagion and peer pressure. You may be concerned about your child being trans, but this is the wrong way to handle it. You have to be calm and reasonable. They won’t just stop being trans if you yell at them and take their computers away.
Parents taking things away? When did that become a thing again? When did that become a crime? When did the Internet rise to the same need status of food and shelter and clothing and love?
Please. You really do need to try harder than THAT.
What you’re saying is so beyond the point I’m trying to make that it’s just utter nonsense and drivel. So is that all you want in your life? Basic needs? Give me a break. You’d better get off of the big bad Internet and start doing something productive like listening to what your child is saying instead of being brainwashed by paranoid lesbians.
“Paranoid lesbians.”
“paranoid lesbians.”
Well, I do listen to lesbians because that’s what my daughter IS.
What else you got?
Look, I’m not against lesbians. There’s no doubt that lesbians have important things to say and should be listened to. You notice that I didn’t just say “lesbians.” I used an adjective describing a small number of lesbians. And I know that it’s not only lesbians that post on this website. I understand that many here are supporters of their lesbian children or family members. I, too, support lesbians. So your daughter is a lesbian — that’s actually very cool. Diversity is amazing to me and should be preserved and protected. I mean no harm to anyone on the basis of their sexual orientation.
Backpedal all you like.
Jerrymanaca, I’m sorry you find it so hard to confide in adults. Not all kids do. As I said above, my daughter (Jessie, in the original post) is now a young adult, happily established at university and enjoying life. She’s also, like so many girls who go through trans-identification, a lesbian. We have an excellent relationship. She herself says that had I affirmed her she would have gone down the path of hormones – who knows where she would be now, but it’s likely she’d be set up for a lifetime as a medical patient, obsessed with other people’s perception of her. Transgenderism is inherently sexist. Our bodies aren’t right or wrong, they just ARE. Society puts absurd expectations of gendered behaviour onto both girls and boys. THAT is what we should be fighting, not sculpting the bodies of youngsters to fit some sort of absurd stereotype.
We’ve been making kids “as comfortable as possible” and telling them they’re special for quite some time now.
We haven’t, apparently, taught them much about critical thinking, or the linkage between working and a satisfying life. Ergo a generation of fragile people who can’t bear to be confronted by any opposing opinions, whatsoever.
But hey, yeah, unlimited Internet use is great.
That’s why the inventors of the addictive apps that our kids love let their own kids have unlimited use, right?
Oh, wait….
https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-parents-raising-their-kids-tech-free-red-flag-2018-2
I guess I would ask you, Jerry, to focus a little bit more on some of the struggles and difficult questions facing parents, separate and apart from the apparent gut reaction you have about a teen’s potentially losing internet use.
If you had a child in any other context, who came to you at a young age, and told you that s/he wanted extremely serious body mods, to treat a previously-undisclosed psychiatric condition, wouldn’t you be at least a little bit cautious? Especially if you knew that nobody apparently cares enough about these kids even to study what happens to them in the long run with these medical procedures? Suppose it didn’t have anything to do with gender, but dealt with some other characteristic? And suppose this sudden wish for extreme body mods came about, you as a parent suspect, because of peer pressure, or because of unfiltered “advice” on the internet? Would you just continue to permit your child to interact with any old stranger on the internet, just trust anybody and whatever they have to say? Would you just blithely assume they had your child’s best interests at heart, and decide, well, what do *I* know? Of course some random guy on the internet knows better than me! I mean, it’s just never happened in the history of the world, that an older person with a twisted agenda has taken advantage of a confused young person, by pretending to be their friend and siding with them against their evil parents!
Of course no responsible parent acts this way, and you wouldn’t either. “Back in the day,” if some creepy-looking guy came up to a playground, every mother and father in the area went on red alert. Or was hanging around the school, or seemed a little too interested in being a Scout leader when they didn’t have kids of their own, or was taking pictures of kids. Parents instinctively protect their children, that’s what they do. That’s where the whole “jump in front of a speeding car” thing comes from… if you want to talk biology, that’s REALLY biology.
Not every parent makes the perfect decision every time. We find out when we’re parents ourselves that our own parents didn’t do nearly the horrible job we thought they did at the time. As parents of kids in this “brave new world” of transgenderism, we’re struggling mightily to do the right thing, and I’m sure some of us don’t always make perfect decisions in this context, either. But do understand… if you’re going to come onto a parents’ board, and tell parents they don’t have the right and the duty to protect their own kids … that argument is not going to be well-received.
I’m not thrilled with my comment being considered a “gut reaction,” because it just seems a bit dismissive. I hope that wasn’t your intent. I understand and I sympathize with the way young folks think and feel. Is there really anything wrong with that?
Well, I support body modifications. I respect, support, and honor how someone identifies. However, of course I’d be cautious about rushing into treatment for a condition that was previously undisclosed. I’m not entirely against what the parents here are saying. I don’t follow some rigid ideology. It’s a matter of whatever works.
I like to hope I’m contributing in some way. Even if that means challenging others and making myself into an obstacle when the need arises. I like how you admitted that parents can make wrong decisions. Young folks aren’t there to have authority lorded over them, but it seems that this is mostly their lot in life. Have discussions with your children, don’t take their Internet away.
I thought I dignified your response with a fairly detailed explanation and rationale for why some parents would in fact wish to limit their children’s internet use. If you want to respond in any way to that, rather than simply repeating “don’t take the[] internet away,” I’ll engage, but otherwise, it doesn’t seem worth the bother.
What gives you ANY say in what parents do or do not do with regard to their own children? I don’t give my kids unlimited access to SUGAR. I didn’t let any of them have a cell phone until they were in high school.
When my daughter was refusing to go to school and was hitting everyone in the family, we sent her to treatment and to a boarding school and she had ZERO ACCESS TO THE INTERNET, as did every other student. She didn’t die, and, in fact, the lack of access meant she had to focus on her mental health and her behaviors and what she wanted her life to be.
She was failing high school while staring into a cellphone screen and feeding her anxiety. Now, she has a diploma and a full-time job, and money, and a future.
No one really cares what you think. No one knows who you are. If you want to stand in the way of someone or control who has internet, have a kid and be a parent. Otherwise, it’s really none of your concern.
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My parents did this to me, and now they haven’t seen me in years. I am far happier now that I am living away from them and as my preferred gender. Jessie: I am so sorry that your mother has put you through so much. I am so deeply sorry for the trauma this experience has caused you. One day, you will be safe to live as your preferred gender. Stay strong and don’t lose sight of the future. I know the pain of having to put on a smile and pretend to be someone you’re not for years. You can get through this, I promise.
Hi Calvin, I appreciate your concern for my daughter’s welfare. Jessie desisted 3 years ago now & gets a bit fed up with those who are convinced she still secretly thinks she’s a boy. She’s a young woman of independent means who has come home for the lockdown (her choice). I asked her what she would say to your comment and she sent me a photo of her sticking two fingers up, captioned ‘this is what I have to say to them’.
Lily,
Creative and dead on…….As well as this: if things went awry for your daughter, due to either the medical cocktail or elective surgeries, the odds are much much better than even money, that those who cheer those items on, will run away, like bugs when the lights are on.
One also has to wonder if those said same parents, who are encouraging all if this, if they will be around to pick up the pieces, when they realize the abuse that was heaped on their child, in the name of [shudders]….’affirmation’.
I sympathise with this. I see a lot of myself in Jessie, I have been identifying as male since I was 15, knew since I was 13. I’m 20 now. Unlike some of my peers I don’t think that you’re malicious at all. Some folks with your beliefs have a certain hostility towards trans folks which doesn’t help anyone and left me with a sour taste. But I agree with a lot of points. Gender is a social construct. I will never be a cis male. Still, my feelings of body and social dysphoria persist even after knowing all this. Even after making sure I wasn’t conflating my distaste to some inner misogyny I might have. My family certainly don’t approve and I know that it’s been difficult for my mother. I’m not sure how to maintain my relationship with her and it’s distressing me. I just want to live my life without disappointing her
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Thankyou for sharing your story. I am so happy things worked out for you both in the end and the evil devils didnt get to her first.