We must love confused people. Their confusions are real. And should be understood compassionately. But we won’t be loving them if we agree with their confusions.
Benjamin Boyce does another long form “calmversation” with a mother and daughter who received a visit from Child Protective Services of Illinois after transactivist internet trolls called CPS and claimed the mother was abusing her child.
Last week Brette celebrated her daughter Anna's desistance from a trans identity. Brette's tweet went viral & was picked up by radical activists who sent her abuse, death threats, & even called Child Services. Brette and Anna share their story about pandemic depression, internet contagion, and self acceptance.
I’m glad my mother didn’t let me mutilate my body.
Anna
Well worth your time. Parents, don’t give in, if your child hates his or her body. Hold fast to the reality of embodied existence.
When her biological daughter Alex* came out as transgender at the age of 12, Anna* offered her support instantly — but she also had concerns. The New York City-based mom knew her child also suffered from autism, severe depression and self-harm, and hoped that any psychologist exploring a transition with her child would consider all those conditions as part of the treatment.
Instead, she says her child was offered puberty blockers after a 10-minute evaluation at “the best possible clinic” for transgender care in New York. “My child’s autism was completely overlooked,” Anna told The Post.
“There was no real exploration as to what does it mean to be trans,” Anna said. “What does she mean she feels like a boy? Why do you think you’re not a girl? Tell me more. How does that feel? How do you know? And what does that mean to you? There was no exploration of that.”
Quoting Keira Bell from the U.K. who is suing the now shuttered Gender Identity Service called Tavistock for failing to properly address the root causes of her mental health conditions:
One young patient, Keira Bell, a biological female who medically transitioned to a male at GIDS, went so far as to sue the clinic, writing in a post, “The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.”
