Lisa, You don't know what a lifeline it is that writers and thought leader like you have been there for shattered parents like me. I dont think I could have survived the ordeal of watching what my daughter is doing to herself without the wisdom and words of people like you and Stella O'Malley. Thank you.
A close friend took her then 11-yo step-daughter — who was suddenly saying she was a boy — to a well-regarded therapist who specializes in trans kids (and happened to be trans as they discovered when they arrived). Exactly this scenario ensued.. My friend and her husband agreed to the daughters desire to go as a boy and change to a boy’s name, but firmly refused hormones or blockers.
After 9 yrs child went back to acknowledging herself as female and is now a 21 year old lesbian. Fully intact healthy body. Developed normally. 🙌
you should encourage your friend to encourage her step-daughter to speak out publicly. This is the exact scenario that all the "affirmative care" proponents deny & indeed make impossible because of how they push medicalization.
I think that — not unlike a lot of the girls drawn to this ideology — this one is still a bit troubled and not a great fit for the public eye. Sort of a conundrum.
“Why are they teaching vulnerable kids to be more fragile, instead of resilient?”
This! The statement summarizes everything wrong with gen Z, not just gender issues.
The old adage, sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me, is now considered false. That phrase was the embodiment of resilience on ignoring others opinions of you! Key for being resilient is not needing others to affirm you!
You've expressed my own experience of the last 3 years very well. It has gone beyond shunning to verbal abuse on a local lesbian Facebook group, to being threatened to be kicked out of my church I've attended for 28 years (UU) for sending a PITT article to my minister and Director of Religious Education that "harmed" them. My world has been turned upside down.
The UUs have had a lot of recent controversy and there is a break-away faction now. This was prompted by a new doctrinaire spirit that has taken over the central governing body. I'm not UU, so I'm fuzzy on the details, but it started with a UU minister in Spokane Washington.
One of the reasons I'm not UU is that I think they tend to confuse politics with spirituality. Recently I've been to a couple UU services and the "look" is religion (altar, church, congregation) but what the people on the altar said was all about politics. I dislike that because I do not approach politics with reverence. Politics needs very lively rational engagement and debate. When politics are preached from a pulpit: that promotes "group think" and religious adherence to political positions. Those types of concerns are underlying the recent schism. So: you are not alone among UUs who are being pushed out for not being "woke" enough.
This would explain our reasonably independent thinking friends’ change in politics since they joined a UU church. We walk by the church every day and there are rainbow ribbons surrounding the signage. We thought we could talk to them about what is going on with our trans identifying daughter but they defended her. We’ve tried to maintain the relationship but the church wins out because they go there every week for more indoctrination. They feel so proud of themselves for being ‘open’. You can sense the smugness. Sigh.
There is a new organization called the N. American Unitarian Association for the UUs who still believe in liberal religion - reason, freedom, and tolerance. There are also dissident Facebook groups
Nancy! Fellow UU here. Thank you for this comment. Would *love* to connect with you, to discuss your experience, my own next steps... Can we connect via Facebook messenger? I just sent you a private message there.
You know, the thing that bothers me most is how little progress we seem to be making this side of the pond. I know we all have experienced the frustration (and worse, for parents directly affected, for example) of trying to explain these issues to friends and neighbors and public officials and being greeted with silence, at best. I have a group of 90 friends to whom I sent carefully worded, explanatory messages much of last year. After a year of intensive effort, I convinced only five of them of some of the problems and was able to get them to write their representatives on an issue I identified to them only once. Most people responded not at all, a few responded politely, but negatively. I have to say, if I had a chance for a do-over, I would not have tried this. It took a huge amount of effort, the net was miniscule, and the process was extremely painful.
I look now for opportunities to take concrete actions, no matter how small, such as writing a public official on a specific legislative proposal--though without a critical mass of people doing the same thing, this is also ineffective.
This brings me to a couple observations related to actions to take:
First, I think the Protect Our Kids initiative in CA is excellent--tightly focused, great messaging, and specific, concrete goals. Erin Friday and the other folks involved are to be commended, and I hope they succeed.
Second, in the area of women’s sports, I think ICONS is offering an excellent model of how to be effective. Again, concrete goals and effective messengers are key.
Third, I look to Sex Matters, which is in the tiny pantheon of high-achieving legal advocacy groups. Sex Matters keeps a tight focus on UK legislation, has superb leadership and spokespeople, chooses its battles strategically, and goes on an all out push to attain its goals. Recently, as one example, Sex Matters put out a petition to force a debate on sex and gender issues onto the Parliament floor. To achieve this required 100,000 signatures. They were relentlessly focused on this and achieved their goal.
Let’s contrast the WHO petition: despite the critical importance of the issues raised and calls for action from several organizations and individuals we all respect, only 11,000+ people worldwide signed that petition. I don’t know who put out the petition, but from what I can glean there was no organizational strategy behind it. This, to me, is the problem we need to solve in 2024--development of stronger organization strength, particularly among those of us who are Democrats--and a critical mass of us who are primed to act when called upon to do so.
Thank you, Susan. While I agree with others that Lisa "nailed it" with this description of the disaffected liberal - and I hope desperately that this description fits more and more people - for some "everything is [still] painful" and "it [may not] be okay". Every day without more research into long-term outcomes for those who transition, with more kids going under the knife, more boys atop the podium at girls' sports, doesn't feel like "everything will be okay". You're right to call us to action, with urgency.
You are so right, Suzanne. You know, one thing I did try to do was connect with a friend who is a close friend of Jerry Nadler. She isn’t in good shape health wise, so it took months before the opportunity arose. When it did, she listened thoughtfully--this was all brand new to her--and expressed concern. Ultimately, though, she felt this was an issue that would have to wait until after the 2024 elections. I let her know the problem was this is going to affect the 2024 elections negatively for the Democrats unless they change course. I sent her the following to send on to Nadler. I haven’t heard from her since, which may just mean her health problems are in the way. But as everything I described was new information to her, I doubt she has sent anything on to Nadler. She is, though, one person where I will do follow-up if I get a chance. Anyway, here’s what I wrote, if you or anyone here wants to use it:
Gender Affirming Care for Minors
Issue: It has been widely noted that the profile of minors presenting to gender clinics, here and abroad, has vastly changed in recent years. This is resulting in many minors with complex psychosocial issues receiving medical and surgical interventions that are not appropriate to their needs.
Proposed Democratic Position: Pause provision of such care (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries) pending completion of a national systematic review, conducted by or through a respected entity such as NIH. Models for such reviews include those that have been done in England (the Cass Review), Finland, and other European countries.
Issue: Biological girls and women are losing opportunities as the result of an increasing number of biological males competing in girls and women’s sports.
Proposed Democratic Position: In all sports where male biology and physiology confer a distinct advantage (this is particularly relevant post-puberty), reserve girls’ and womens’ sports only for biological girls and women (including biological girls and women who self-identify as, eg, non-binary) and offer an “open” category in which anyone at all can compete, no matter how they self-identify.
Resource: Martina Navratilova, who has researched, written, and spoken extensively on this.
K-12 Schools
Issue: Children are being introduced to ideas and concepts within the rubric of gender identity that do not comport with developmental stages and that encourage disassociation from their biology.
Proposed Democratic Position: Put a moratorium on all legislation, regulatory, and public policy efforts that promote gender identity concepts in K-12 school materials, activities, and curriculum. Allow schools and parents, without pressure to conform to any specific model, to ascertain the best way forward for their schools.
Health Care, Public Health, and Other Data Collection
Issue: Differences between the sexes are an important factor for analysis in many areas social and health scientists address. These include, for example, demography, physical and mental health, crime, education, and employment. It is critical to retain biological sex as a data point for all such purposes.
Proposed Democratic Position: Wherever biological sex is pertinent, data collection will include biological sex as a separate and distinct data point.
Resource: “Why Do We Need Data on Sex?”, by Alice Sullivan, Kath Murray, and Lisa Mackenzie, in Sex and Gender, A Contemporary Reader.
Equality Act and Other Similar Legislation and Regulations
Issue: If the federal Equality Act passes as currently written, gender identity (self-identification) will supersede sex for all formerly sex-based rights, without exception.
Proposed Democratic Position: Rather than, as now proposed, redefining sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity (self-identification), amend the Equality Act to protect sexual orientation and gender identity as two new, separate protected classes, alongside sex and other existing protected categories.
Resource: “Sex, Gender, and Equality in the United States: Confusion, Conflict, and Consequences,” by Callie H. Burt, in Sex and Gender, A Contemporary Reader.
I’d be happy to supply additional information, if it would be helpful.
Yes, there are reams of material out there to which to point people. I have reams of it filed away, it informs what I say to others, and I have passed along things that I think might get read and considered. It is very labor intensive, and the net has been next to nil. And believe me, I have long experience as a persuader and mediator, so that is not what’s at issue here. Here is an example of a response I received from a friend with whom, after several exchanges, I had an in person conversation to address these issues. It’s not atypical, though she was more forthright than most. The conversation was amicable, but the divide was a gulf. “You know,” she said, “I just deleted the things you sent me.”
So, while others may feel differently, and I respect that, I am not spending any more time on this type of one-on-one conversation. I will look for organizations and initiatives I can support, and when a call for action to which I have the capacity to respond arises, I will act.
Susan, good for you for trying! I don't even try. Not even with my closest friends. An entire segment of my family (a sister and all her children) have shunned me because of this controversy about GD medicalization. I've lost contact with a huge circle of friends because of it. So I don't even try to have one-on-one conversations. I do sign petitions and write op-eds (always rejected but I figure at least the editorial staff sees the letter) and contact law makers. Anyway, just saying, good for you for making the effort!!!
My peaking process was excruciating. Irreversible Damage and the JK Rowling pile on sent me down the rabbit hole, and mixed in with the shock and anger at what I was learning was an inexplicable sense of dread. I mean, I literally lost sleep. (Okay, I sleep like crap anyway, but still. It was profoundly stressful.) I now see that the dread was a primal reaction to feeling so suddenly and completely alienated from my tribe. I tried to have discussions with friends and was met with blank stares, condescension, dismissal, and outright hostility. It felt very "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
Then we got vaccinated and I started running into people at the grocery store again. It seemed that every other mom of a girl was now referring to their daughter with they/them pronouns. (At least two of these girls are now on hormones, and one that I know of has had a mastectomy. All still in high school.)
I still try to have good faith conversations with a certain few friends, but there are times when I feel as alienated from my lefty peers as I do at Thanksgiving with my evangelical relatives. It really sucks.
Most uttered phrase in the past 5 years of this liberals life:
"Wait, that cant be right..."
It would be funny/not funny if someone did one of those 365 self help calendars with a daily blurb describing the moment a person lost their innocence. For me it would be...
"I was driving my 16yo daughter home from her friends house, trying to 'lean in' with open ended questions about her day to keep her off her phone. Somewhere along the way she mentioned that her friend's two older brothers, whom I had heard about but hadn't yet met, both transitioned from female to male. The friend, was herself in the process of transitioning, eagerly awaiting the day her blockers would turn into T.
I remember a literal sense of panic and dread washing over me. I went white and pulled over the car. She looked at me in silence with wide eyes like 'oh shit this is serious.' I turned to her and said "That is statistically impossible. You know that right? 3 trans siblings. Thats not a thing! Something must be very VERY wrong in that family. Is there anything you want to share?"
She then told me about the decades of abuse by the homeschooling father which the mother finally left 5 years prior. Ever since that moment I have been trying to figure out how our mental health system could treat child rape and incest with gender transition."
this family you mention should be written up in a medical-legal case history. I would do that if you can supply me with more details. I know there are issues of privacy and I respect that, but documenting this type of occurence is absolutely crucial for our side to win.
Sry it took so long to reply. I have a lot going in locally at the moment trying to help parents caught in the gender craze.
I am very interested in finding out what happened with that family. But its complicated and I probably have to sit on that for a short while longer. My daughter spent the past 5 years in dire straits in and out of hospitals for her disgnosed BPD (borderline). She was incredibly fragile but really turned it around recently.
The one line I dont cross (yet) is bringing up this trans family. Because while she was at wilderness therapy in 2018 supposedly the friend was trying to socially detransition, not sure if she (natal sex) figured out how to procure the hormones or not. My guess is yes. Anyway, when my daughter got back from wilderness she heard the friend had killed herself. Supposedly had a bad acid trip, stabbed herselfn and bled out in the hospital.
Obviously that seems like a fantastical tale. But when you've had a kid at the MA youth state mental facility for 9 months as I have, you see some shit! And nothing shocks me anymore. NOTHING!
So I have yet to officially corroborate that story. I asked a couple of my daughters friends and it seems to be true but i dare not press it with my kid just yet. I tried early on and she asked me to drop it so I did.
I will say though, if I could magic wand one policy into existence it would be tracking data. Every person under 24 (adolescent brain development age) who goes for trans treatment of any kind should be tracked. Anonymously by number is good enough. We just need some data! Because what I see on the ground, the sheer number of kids socially transitioning, the mastectomies, the ASD and other underlying conditions, the Asian adoptees (!!! Is anyone noticing that phenomenon? Disproportionately non-binary in my area), all of it is disturbing but i have no frame of reference to quantify what im seeing and therefore to qualify it in context. In otherwords, my perception may be biased. I am cognizant of that. But with no data being collected how is one ever going to know? I think thats one reason people may be afraid to speak out. The stories are so insane you really think you're crazy and that it cant be happening at scale.
Anywayn Im going to keep your comment in my hat! And will perhaps reach out when I can get any more details. I never got a real name for this kid so thats a thing 🤦♀️
Gender is the one topic that I have lost friends over for dissenting from their beliefs. They will tolerate questioning dominant narratives on many things other than gender. Women have been the ones to ostracize me over this, and gender non-conforming men. Women who push this have nothing but utter contempt for gender conforming men as though there is something pathologically wrong with masculinity as a whole, which is suspect has something to do with the increased number of trans women I see out in the world and those I know who have transitioned, but I can’t prove this.
This same contempt for gender conformance and a desire to escape the burden of being a regular white person I suspect is also behind the increasing number of teenage girls who think they’re boys. White kids have been taught that it’s no longer ok to be a heterosexual white person, so if you claim a queer identity, you can also claim oppression and feel special. This is just a conjecture, but I see these various strands of identity leftism as woven together.
You hit that nail square on the head, Lisa. Again. If only my kid had started this nonsense after 2020, instead of 2018! I wouldn’t have tried to be the good liberal as long as I did.
This is one example of the internet being helpful. (I might say "life-saving," but I know better than to exaggerate like that.) While my immediately family - with the glaring exception of my trans-identified teenage daughter - all agree with me on this issue, I am continually shocked, disappointed and horrified at the erroneous, harmful ideas that so many people and institutions that I once admired are promoting. Thanks to you, and all the other wonderful advocates and writers on this subject that I follow, and thanks to Substack, that provides an avenue for me to post my own words on this issue, along with my personal support system, I can stay sane and avoid constantly barraging my daughter with my thoughts and feelings. Because of all the people who are fighting against the harm to our vulnerable youth, I have hope that it will be okay.
I think the true benefit of going through this insanity is exactly what you call this Substack, Lisa, BROADVIEW. We need to be comfortable about not being certain. Uncertainty is needed right now. It will allow us to open our minds to other perspectives and outcomes that might actually be ... better. The problem with America is we are an outcome driven society. We must have an answer for everything. I think this is why we are lagging behind the rest of Europe starting to wake up to this. We’ve lost our capacity for critical thinking, because it’s been replaced with sex Ed class where they bring in a trans man for show and tell (seriously, this happened to my daughter). I love pondering now, wondering, reading etc. It’s gotten so boring being at dinner parties because friends in my liberal bubble only spew talking points that they heard on MSNBC or CNN. And when I question or dig deeper, they sigh and change the subject. Their brains just can’t go further than a shallow talking point. They need a solution.
Thank-you! This piece helps me feel so much less alone. I too have begun to see the world in a new way... and it's a good thing. I feel like blinders have been taken off my eyes, I used to believe I thought critically before this experience down the rabbit hole of gender. What a fool I was!
Lisa, You don't know what a lifeline it is that writers and thought leader like you have been there for shattered parents like me. I dont think I could have survived the ordeal of watching what my daughter is doing to herself without the wisdom and words of people like you and Stella O'Malley. Thank you.
A close friend took her then 11-yo step-daughter — who was suddenly saying she was a boy — to a well-regarded therapist who specializes in trans kids (and happened to be trans as they discovered when they arrived). Exactly this scenario ensued.. My friend and her husband agreed to the daughters desire to go as a boy and change to a boy’s name, but firmly refused hormones or blockers.
After 9 yrs child went back to acknowledging herself as female and is now a 21 year old lesbian. Fully intact healthy body. Developed normally. 🙌
you should encourage your friend to encourage her step-daughter to speak out publicly. This is the exact scenario that all the "affirmative care" proponents deny & indeed make impossible because of how they push medicalization.
I think that — not unlike a lot of the girls drawn to this ideology — this one is still a bit troubled and not a great fit for the public eye. Sort of a conundrum.
“Why are they teaching vulnerable kids to be more fragile, instead of resilient?”
This! The statement summarizes everything wrong with gen Z, not just gender issues.
The old adage, sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me, is now considered false. That phrase was the embodiment of resilience on ignoring others opinions of you! Key for being resilient is not needing others to affirm you!
You've expressed my own experience of the last 3 years very well. It has gone beyond shunning to verbal abuse on a local lesbian Facebook group, to being threatened to be kicked out of my church I've attended for 28 years (UU) for sending a PITT article to my minister and Director of Religious Education that "harmed" them. My world has been turned upside down.
The UUs have had a lot of recent controversy and there is a break-away faction now. This was prompted by a new doctrinaire spirit that has taken over the central governing body. I'm not UU, so I'm fuzzy on the details, but it started with a UU minister in Spokane Washington.
One of the reasons I'm not UU is that I think they tend to confuse politics with spirituality. Recently I've been to a couple UU services and the "look" is religion (altar, church, congregation) but what the people on the altar said was all about politics. I dislike that because I do not approach politics with reverence. Politics needs very lively rational engagement and debate. When politics are preached from a pulpit: that promotes "group think" and religious adherence to political positions. Those types of concerns are underlying the recent schism. So: you are not alone among UUs who are being pushed out for not being "woke" enough.
This would explain our reasonably independent thinking friends’ change in politics since they joined a UU church. We walk by the church every day and there are rainbow ribbons surrounding the signage. We thought we could talk to them about what is going on with our trans identifying daughter but they defended her. We’ve tried to maintain the relationship but the church wins out because they go there every week for more indoctrination. They feel so proud of themselves for being ‘open’. You can sense the smugness. Sigh.
There is a new organization called the N. American Unitarian Association for the UUs who still believe in liberal religion - reason, freedom, and tolerance. There are also dissident Facebook groups
Nancy! Fellow UU here. Thank you for this comment. Would *love* to connect with you, to discuss your experience, my own next steps... Can we connect via Facebook messenger? I just sent you a private message there.
You know, the thing that bothers me most is how little progress we seem to be making this side of the pond. I know we all have experienced the frustration (and worse, for parents directly affected, for example) of trying to explain these issues to friends and neighbors and public officials and being greeted with silence, at best. I have a group of 90 friends to whom I sent carefully worded, explanatory messages much of last year. After a year of intensive effort, I convinced only five of them of some of the problems and was able to get them to write their representatives on an issue I identified to them only once. Most people responded not at all, a few responded politely, but negatively. I have to say, if I had a chance for a do-over, I would not have tried this. It took a huge amount of effort, the net was miniscule, and the process was extremely painful.
I look now for opportunities to take concrete actions, no matter how small, such as writing a public official on a specific legislative proposal--though without a critical mass of people doing the same thing, this is also ineffective.
This brings me to a couple observations related to actions to take:
First, I think the Protect Our Kids initiative in CA is excellent--tightly focused, great messaging, and specific, concrete goals. Erin Friday and the other folks involved are to be commended, and I hope they succeed.
Second, in the area of women’s sports, I think ICONS is offering an excellent model of how to be effective. Again, concrete goals and effective messengers are key.
Third, I look to Sex Matters, which is in the tiny pantheon of high-achieving legal advocacy groups. Sex Matters keeps a tight focus on UK legislation, has superb leadership and spokespeople, chooses its battles strategically, and goes on an all out push to attain its goals. Recently, as one example, Sex Matters put out a petition to force a debate on sex and gender issues onto the Parliament floor. To achieve this required 100,000 signatures. They were relentlessly focused on this and achieved their goal.
Let’s contrast the WHO petition: despite the critical importance of the issues raised and calls for action from several organizations and individuals we all respect, only 11,000+ people worldwide signed that petition. I don’t know who put out the petition, but from what I can glean there was no organizational strategy behind it. This, to me, is the problem we need to solve in 2024--development of stronger organization strength, particularly among those of us who are Democrats--and a critical mass of us who are primed to act when called upon to do so.
Thank you, Susan. While I agree with others that Lisa "nailed it" with this description of the disaffected liberal - and I hope desperately that this description fits more and more people - for some "everything is [still] painful" and "it [may not] be okay". Every day without more research into long-term outcomes for those who transition, with more kids going under the knife, more boys atop the podium at girls' sports, doesn't feel like "everything will be okay". You're right to call us to action, with urgency.
You are so right, Suzanne. You know, one thing I did try to do was connect with a friend who is a close friend of Jerry Nadler. She isn’t in good shape health wise, so it took months before the opportunity arose. When it did, she listened thoughtfully--this was all brand new to her--and expressed concern. Ultimately, though, she felt this was an issue that would have to wait until after the 2024 elections. I let her know the problem was this is going to affect the 2024 elections negatively for the Democrats unless they change course. I sent her the following to send on to Nadler. I haven’t heard from her since, which may just mean her health problems are in the way. But as everything I described was new information to her, I doubt she has sent anything on to Nadler. She is, though, one person where I will do follow-up if I get a chance. Anyway, here’s what I wrote, if you or anyone here wants to use it:
Gender Affirming Care for Minors
Issue: It has been widely noted that the profile of minors presenting to gender clinics, here and abroad, has vastly changed in recent years. This is resulting in many minors with complex psychosocial issues receiving medical and surgical interventions that are not appropriate to their needs.
Proposed Democratic Position: Pause provision of such care (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries) pending completion of a national systematic review, conducted by or through a respected entity such as NIH. Models for such reviews include those that have been done in England (the Cass Review), Finland, and other European countries.
Resource: Time to Think, by Hannah Barnes; The Cass Review, https://cass.independent-review.uk/publications/interim-report/
Title IX Athletics
Issue: Biological girls and women are losing opportunities as the result of an increasing number of biological males competing in girls and women’s sports.
Proposed Democratic Position: In all sports where male biology and physiology confer a distinct advantage (this is particularly relevant post-puberty), reserve girls’ and womens’ sports only for biological girls and women (including biological girls and women who self-identify as, eg, non-binary) and offer an “open” category in which anyone at all can compete, no matter how they self-identify.
Resource: Martina Navratilova, who has researched, written, and spoken extensively on this.
K-12 Schools
Issue: Children are being introduced to ideas and concepts within the rubric of gender identity that do not comport with developmental stages and that encourage disassociation from their biology.
Proposed Democratic Position: Put a moratorium on all legislation, regulatory, and public policy efforts that promote gender identity concepts in K-12 school materials, activities, and curriculum. Allow schools and parents, without pressure to conform to any specific model, to ascertain the best way forward for their schools.
Resource: Josie Holford: https://www.josieholford.com/
Health Care, Public Health, and Other Data Collection
Issue: Differences between the sexes are an important factor for analysis in many areas social and health scientists address. These include, for example, demography, physical and mental health, crime, education, and employment. It is critical to retain biological sex as a data point for all such purposes.
Proposed Democratic Position: Wherever biological sex is pertinent, data collection will include biological sex as a separate and distinct data point.
Resource: “Why Do We Need Data on Sex?”, by Alice Sullivan, Kath Murray, and Lisa Mackenzie, in Sex and Gender, A Contemporary Reader.
Equality Act and Other Similar Legislation and Regulations
Issue: If the federal Equality Act passes as currently written, gender identity (self-identification) will supersede sex for all formerly sex-based rights, without exception.
Proposed Democratic Position: Rather than, as now proposed, redefining sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity (self-identification), amend the Equality Act to protect sexual orientation and gender identity as two new, separate protected classes, alongside sex and other existing protected categories.
Resource: “Sex, Gender, and Equality in the United States: Confusion, Conflict, and Consequences,” by Callie H. Burt, in Sex and Gender, A Contemporary Reader.
I’d be happy to supply additional information, if it would be helpful.
Susan,
thank-you for posting this. I will keep it at hand & draw from it when I reach out to various power-brokers.
For people who will only read mainstream articles:
Reuters youth in transition-terhune, respaut, conlin....
Boston globe about gender treatment being a hall of mirrors. by block.
Then point them here :).
Yes, there are reams of material out there to which to point people. I have reams of it filed away, it informs what I say to others, and I have passed along things that I think might get read and considered. It is very labor intensive, and the net has been next to nil. And believe me, I have long experience as a persuader and mediator, so that is not what’s at issue here. Here is an example of a response I received from a friend with whom, after several exchanges, I had an in person conversation to address these issues. It’s not atypical, though she was more forthright than most. The conversation was amicable, but the divide was a gulf. “You know,” she said, “I just deleted the things you sent me.”
So, while others may feel differently, and I respect that, I am not spending any more time on this type of one-on-one conversation. I will look for organizations and initiatives I can support, and when a call for action to which I have the capacity to respond arises, I will act.
Susan, good for you for trying! I don't even try. Not even with my closest friends. An entire segment of my family (a sister and all her children) have shunned me because of this controversy about GD medicalization. I've lost contact with a huge circle of friends because of it. So I don't even try to have one-on-one conversations. I do sign petitions and write op-eds (always rejected but I figure at least the editorial staff sees the letter) and contact law makers. Anyway, just saying, good for you for making the effort!!!
My peaking process was excruciating. Irreversible Damage and the JK Rowling pile on sent me down the rabbit hole, and mixed in with the shock and anger at what I was learning was an inexplicable sense of dread. I mean, I literally lost sleep. (Okay, I sleep like crap anyway, but still. It was profoundly stressful.) I now see that the dread was a primal reaction to feeling so suddenly and completely alienated from my tribe. I tried to have discussions with friends and was met with blank stares, condescension, dismissal, and outright hostility. It felt very "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
Then we got vaccinated and I started running into people at the grocery store again. It seemed that every other mom of a girl was now referring to their daughter with they/them pronouns. (At least two of these girls are now on hormones, and one that I know of has had a mastectomy. All still in high school.)
I still try to have good faith conversations with a certain few friends, but there are times when I feel as alienated from my lefty peers as I do at Thanksgiving with my evangelical relatives. It really sucks.
Always on point Lisa!
Most uttered phrase in the past 5 years of this liberals life:
"Wait, that cant be right..."
It would be funny/not funny if someone did one of those 365 self help calendars with a daily blurb describing the moment a person lost their innocence. For me it would be...
"I was driving my 16yo daughter home from her friends house, trying to 'lean in' with open ended questions about her day to keep her off her phone. Somewhere along the way she mentioned that her friend's two older brothers, whom I had heard about but hadn't yet met, both transitioned from female to male. The friend, was herself in the process of transitioning, eagerly awaiting the day her blockers would turn into T.
I remember a literal sense of panic and dread washing over me. I went white and pulled over the car. She looked at me in silence with wide eyes like 'oh shit this is serious.' I turned to her and said "That is statistically impossible. You know that right? 3 trans siblings. Thats not a thing! Something must be very VERY wrong in that family. Is there anything you want to share?"
She then told me about the decades of abuse by the homeschooling father which the mother finally left 5 years prior. Ever since that moment I have been trying to figure out how our mental health system could treat child rape and incest with gender transition."
Im certainly awake now!
this family you mention should be written up in a medical-legal case history. I would do that if you can supply me with more details. I know there are issues of privacy and I respect that, but documenting this type of occurence is absolutely crucial for our side to win.
Sry it took so long to reply. I have a lot going in locally at the moment trying to help parents caught in the gender craze.
I am very interested in finding out what happened with that family. But its complicated and I probably have to sit on that for a short while longer. My daughter spent the past 5 years in dire straits in and out of hospitals for her disgnosed BPD (borderline). She was incredibly fragile but really turned it around recently.
The one line I dont cross (yet) is bringing up this trans family. Because while she was at wilderness therapy in 2018 supposedly the friend was trying to socially detransition, not sure if she (natal sex) figured out how to procure the hormones or not. My guess is yes. Anyway, when my daughter got back from wilderness she heard the friend had killed herself. Supposedly had a bad acid trip, stabbed herselfn and bled out in the hospital.
Obviously that seems like a fantastical tale. But when you've had a kid at the MA youth state mental facility for 9 months as I have, you see some shit! And nothing shocks me anymore. NOTHING!
So I have yet to officially corroborate that story. I asked a couple of my daughters friends and it seems to be true but i dare not press it with my kid just yet. I tried early on and she asked me to drop it so I did.
I will say though, if I could magic wand one policy into existence it would be tracking data. Every person under 24 (adolescent brain development age) who goes for trans treatment of any kind should be tracked. Anonymously by number is good enough. We just need some data! Because what I see on the ground, the sheer number of kids socially transitioning, the mastectomies, the ASD and other underlying conditions, the Asian adoptees (!!! Is anyone noticing that phenomenon? Disproportionately non-binary in my area), all of it is disturbing but i have no frame of reference to quantify what im seeing and therefore to qualify it in context. In otherwords, my perception may be biased. I am cognizant of that. But with no data being collected how is one ever going to know? I think thats one reason people may be afraid to speak out. The stories are so insane you really think you're crazy and that it cant be happening at scale.
Anywayn Im going to keep your comment in my hat! And will perhaps reach out when I can get any more details. I never got a real name for this kid so thats a thing 🤦♀️
Gender is the one topic that I have lost friends over for dissenting from their beliefs. They will tolerate questioning dominant narratives on many things other than gender. Women have been the ones to ostracize me over this, and gender non-conforming men. Women who push this have nothing but utter contempt for gender conforming men as though there is something pathologically wrong with masculinity as a whole, which is suspect has something to do with the increased number of trans women I see out in the world and those I know who have transitioned, but I can’t prove this.
This same contempt for gender conformance and a desire to escape the burden of being a regular white person I suspect is also behind the increasing number of teenage girls who think they’re boys. White kids have been taught that it’s no longer ok to be a heterosexual white person, so if you claim a queer identity, you can also claim oppression and feel special. This is just a conjecture, but I see these various strands of identity leftism as woven together.
I tried to kill myself at 14. I was so gender dysphoria and autistic I am sure they would have transed me. Keep up the fight
You hit that nail square on the head, Lisa. Again. If only my kid had started this nonsense after 2020, instead of 2018! I wouldn’t have tried to be the good liberal as long as I did.
Great piece.
One typo in first paragraph: should be “demur,” not “demure.”
I learned something else new today!
Also, 5th paragraph, last sentence, “anyone”!instead of “anymore”.
That exclamation point is my typo. Not supposed to be there 😊
This is one example of the internet being helpful. (I might say "life-saving," but I know better than to exaggerate like that.) While my immediately family - with the glaring exception of my trans-identified teenage daughter - all agree with me on this issue, I am continually shocked, disappointed and horrified at the erroneous, harmful ideas that so many people and institutions that I once admired are promoting. Thanks to you, and all the other wonderful advocates and writers on this subject that I follow, and thanks to Substack, that provides an avenue for me to post my own words on this issue, along with my personal support system, I can stay sane and avoid constantly barraging my daughter with my thoughts and feelings. Because of all the people who are fighting against the harm to our vulnerable youth, I have hope that it will be okay.
So if so much in the ‘progressive’ sphere on these issues is such crap, what else can you believe from those sources?
Exactly.
I think the true benefit of going through this insanity is exactly what you call this Substack, Lisa, BROADVIEW. We need to be comfortable about not being certain. Uncertainty is needed right now. It will allow us to open our minds to other perspectives and outcomes that might actually be ... better. The problem with America is we are an outcome driven society. We must have an answer for everything. I think this is why we are lagging behind the rest of Europe starting to wake up to this. We’ve lost our capacity for critical thinking, because it’s been replaced with sex Ed class where they bring in a trans man for show and tell (seriously, this happened to my daughter). I love pondering now, wondering, reading etc. It’s gotten so boring being at dinner parties because friends in my liberal bubble only spew talking points that they heard on MSNBC or CNN. And when I question or dig deeper, they sigh and change the subject. Their brains just can’t go further than a shallow talking point. They need a solution.
Thank-you! This piece helps me feel so much less alone. I too have begun to see the world in a new way... and it's a good thing. I feel like blinders have been taken off my eyes, I used to believe I thought critically before this experience down the rabbit hole of gender. What a fool I was!
That last paragraph. So simple yet so meaningful. Thank you Lisa.