ren who are often taught to treat them as if they are the toxic ones. Parents tell their trans declared children that they are worried about them, that they don’t think they should make life-altering decisions, that they’re young and they should explore slowly. In return, trans children will recite what they’ve learned to parrot from internet influencers and activists. They will call these parents transphobes. They treat parents like the enemy. They will demand total buy-in or the gig is over.
Worst of all, parents find that some therapists are the ones who are accelerating the tear in the familial fabric. There is much testimony among parents of trans kids who have been told by therapists that lack of support for these children is the same as harming them.
Ultimately, particularly as children enter their late teens or early 20s, they are more emboldened to leave behind their families, to disconnect from parents who’ve wanted nothing more than to make their children happy and whole. There are many exceptions to this, of course; some trans children have suffered abuses at the hands of their families. But trans kids have also co-opted the “I was abused” phrase to describe a home life where their gender choice was not embraced, either in part or at all. Equipped with the fevered feeling to transition, the scripted language they study online, and the sense that there’s a “glitter family” out there waiting to make their world a perfect utopia, teens are more empowered than ever to walk down the lane and shut the garden gate, maintaining the belief their parents don’t love them. In many, many cases, they are very wrong.
As I've noted before, this whole gender dysphoria business parallels the child abuse scandals of the 1980s and 90s – with the way that troubled and unhappy young people are encouraged to blame their wicked parents, and with the role of irresponsible therapists. Now, as an added bonus, we have the powerful and toxic role of social media to help spread the word.
Back then it was just your mind they messed with. Now it's your body as well.
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