Love, forgiveness and boundaries

A mother explains how she protects her daughters from the harm of gender medicalisation and seizure by the trans-activist state

Photo by Ivan Lapyrin on Unsplash

Tara

When my eldest daughter, Grace, told me in tears that she was trans, I was confused. When she later told me in a hollow robotic voice with glassy eyes that she needed to have “top surgery”¹ and start taking testosterone to live an authentic life, I was terrified. Terrified of failing in my most sacred duty as a mother. To protect my children from harm.

My fears are well founded. And our family’s situation is far from unique. Both my daughters have fallen victim to the modern mania of transgenderism. The last three years have been a plodding kind of hell lit by spotlights of hope.

Not long after Grace told me she thought she was trans, my younger daughter, Claire, told me she was convinced she was trapped in the wrong body. And only a gender transition could set her free. Tens of thousands of young women just like Grace and Claire are identifying as trans, usually as part of an online or school-based friendship group. They are at great risk of harm. Harm disguised as help. But how did this happen? And what can we do?

Through careful listening, open-minded research and trusting my gut, I’ve worked some of it out.

On 26 January 2020—Australia Day—my family (myself, my husband, and our two daughters) attended a barbeque at the beach. We were celebrating our baby nephew’s first birthday. It is a lovely memory. A time from a lost world. A world before Grace changed. A time before Covid.

We enjoyed the day very much, eating sausages, drinking wine, chatting with relatives and laughing as the baby continued the family tradition of putting his fist into his birthday cake and then consuming it with gusto after smearing it around as widely as possible.

My dear first-born daughter, Grace, was sixteen, and she was so beautiful. She wore her brand-new gingham one-piece swimsuit. Her long blonde hair slid over her milky white shoulders as she relaxed in the sun. I fretted on her perfect pale skin burning and on the admiring glances she was receiving from young men passing by.

She stretched and yawned like a cat, enjoying her slender young frame, her body. Grace had become a woman. How I envied her. I was once that lovely too. I felt the first pangs of loss then. Realising that Grace was growing up and would soon want to leave home.

The weight of time

Oh, I had no idea of the storm that was brewing! A dangerous new virus had been detected in Wuhan. Little did we realise at that lovely sunshiney family barbeque that our lives were about to change irreparably. I am still astonished at how blasé I was.

Who knew that Australia’s borders would remain shut for twenty long months as the virus burned a deadly path around the world? In our public health arsenal, the greatest weapon against Covid was lockdowns. If you could stay at home, you had to stay at home. Some paced in their cages like panthers at the zoo.

And our kids suddenly had too much time and too much internet on their hands. During the lockdowns, Grace started self-diagnosing her anxieties on the internet. She used them as labels in her social media profile.

These diagnoses, real or imaginary, soothed her anxieties with certainties. They gave her excuses for her more difficult behaviours. They gave her a point of commonality with others and helped her to form her own online tribe.

They also planted flags that would attract “Pam.” Grace met Pam on a Discord server. Grace poured out her heart about how bad her life was, how uncertain she felt in her own body, and how bleak the future seemed. Pam responded with, “That’s how I felt before I realised I was trans.” And my poor daughter fell down a digital rabbit hole.

In April 2020, Grace declared that she knew what was “wrong” with her. She announced that she was a man and intended to transition.

Scared and confused though we were, my husband and I did our best to keep our heads and to be supportive. In the privacy of our bedroom, we held each other and whispered our confused theories. What was happening to Grace? A lovely young girl who had been luxuriating in the sun in a gingham one-piece bathing suit only a few months earlier.

Grace shaved off her long blonde hair and adopted a skater-boi style. She tore everything out of her room and threw away almost all records of herself as a child. She sought to lay a fresh path in the future by destroying evidence of her past. She declared her birth name to be a “dead” name. She threw out all her clothes and replaced them with men’s clothes. She adopted a deep voice and would swagger about. She would manspread when she sat down.

A puzzled psychologist

Even in the early days of the pandemic, the strain on mental health services was acute and growing. I talked to our doctor, and she referred Grace to a psychologist under a mental health care plan.

Grace was initially willing to engage with the only psychologist we could access. The psychologist confessed to me that she was stumped. Grace was ticking a lot of boxes across a lot of checklists but could not be definitively diagnosed with any known mental disorder.

The psychologist recommended that Grace see a psychiatrist. Things got worse and worse. Grace dropped out of high school. Always a smart but lazy kid content to skive along on her good memory, she never studied much but did okay.

Suddenly it was all too much. Her temper worsened. She made false accusations of abuse against us to her psychologist. She would shout at me that I was a terrible mother and responsible for her “trauma.” She threatened to kill herself if I didn’t agree to put her on testosterone and arrange top surgery.

After much patience, persistence and luck we finally found a psychiatrist that Grace could work with. He prescribed anti-anxiety medication. It started to work. He also addressed the elephant in the room. Grace has autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Many trans-identifying teenagers do.

Grace spent most of 2021 in a sad cycle of excitement at finding a new job and then despair at losing the job in the next lockdown. It put her deeper into a depression.

Even so, with the help of her psychiatrist, Grace slowly got better and weathered these storms. She returned to her first love of art. She drew and drew and drew. She created characters and a fantasy world and shared it with online friends. Things were getting better, slowly.

Until her younger sister Claire decided that she was trans too. Like Grace, Claire is also mildly autistic. I do not like the term autism spectrum disorder. The word “disorder” sets my teeth on edge. I prefer “neurodiverse.”

Neurodiverse females are vastly overrepresented in presentations of gender dysphoria. These girls already feel like aliens in human skin. They don’t fit in anywhere. The assertion that ASD is a disorder to be fixed, not a difference to be accepted, has a direct parallel with the assertion that femininity is a flaw to be corrected, not a quiet power to be asserted.

Neurodiverse kids are prone to hyper-fixations. Grace was hyper-fixated on a gender transition. She believed it to be the cure to all her woes. Hyper-fixations take a while to pass, but pass they do. It is my heart-felt belief that my dear daughter Grace is not actually trans. She is just gay and has applied the binary logic so inherent to her genetic makeup—“I like women, therefore I am a man.”

And Claire idolises her older sister. This is peer contagion at its most pernicious. Covid placed impossible stresses on our healthcare system and our communities. Covid damaged businesses, supply lines, and our children’s sense of security.

Grace’s mental health crisis had been brewing for years. When she turned thirteen, we had taken her to a few psychologists who all nodded and listened and reassured me that there was nothing terribly wrong with her. She was just a sensitive child who lacked resilience. The psychologists never consider autism as a possible cause of her anxiety.

Some progress

When Grace was finally able to see a psychiatrist, he was at pains to explain that he was not a gender specialist and repeatedly tried to refer me to a gender clinic. I refused to be palmed off, and he started unravelling the riddle that is Grace. She has been doing so much better under his generalised, not specialised, psychiatric care. He has helped me understand the many layers of transgenderism.

Exposure to porn at a young age is a common trigger for a deep fear of sexual assault. When Grace was growing up, I did not install porn blockers or other parental software controls. I took a permissive attitude, thinking that being the canny little kid she was, she would work out how to bypass the controls soon enough and resent me heavily for them. I kept the computers in the lounge room and maintained as close an eye as I could while respecting her privacy.

More fool me. What I did not understand was the step up in the availability and perversity of porn that is available.

One of Grace’s underlying motivations to seek a gender transition was not wanting to be on the receiving end of “that.” Another layer is anxiety. “I can’t see myself being nineteen,” said Grace just after her eighteenth birthday. She could not see a future for herself, for the world. The world outside her door looked so bad to her. This is the same anxiety that previous generations have faced. But for Grace, everything was worsened by fears that Covid would trigger an apocalypse.

The most distressing element of Grace’s mental health journey was when she made a false accusation of abuse against my husband to her psychiatrist. I know this accusation is false because I was in the room at the time. Grace was about eleven and I honestly cannot remember what started it all. She was hysterical and my husband picked her up, put her in a chair, held her there and maintained direct eye contact while shouting at her. A distressing childhood memory but hardly abuse.

Grace declared that this event was the “trauma” that had triggered her and caused her to become trans. Teenage girls are famous for self-absorption. Most of them mature through it. Their self-perception is slowly tempered by reality. They come to realise that much of what has gone wrong in their lives is the consequence of their own actions, and their need for validation settles down as their surety of self improves.

There are layers to this phenomenon of huge numbers of teenagers identifying as trans. Peer contagion, self-loathing, neurodiversity, fear of sexual assault, anxiety, body issues, online toxicity, hero worship and narcissism are just the elements that I have been able to discern from my own two daughters.

But there is hope. Grace is now nearly 21. She has come full circle and is now identifying as “genderfluid.” And quite frankly, I can live with that. Claire is 17, and still deeply captured by trans ideology.

I nearly lost her when her school guidance officer and school nurse, following official advice from their respective state government departments, encouraged Claire’s brand-new gender identity. They told her that because we do not “affirm” her, we are being abusive.

They further goaded her into declaring herself a “mature minor,” so the school nurse could give her a referral to a gender clinic. Again, they were following advice from radical activists who have infiltrated the state education and health departments. Luckily, we got wind of the situation from Grace and we intervened before social services got involved. Today, my daughters both still live at home and our truce has mellowed into a fragile peace.

How has this happened? I’ve had lots of time to think this through, and I put it down to love, forgiveness and boundaries. A child targeted by activists spreading radical gender theory is fed many lies—

“You were born in the wrong body. That’s why you feel so wrong, weird, and out of place.”

“You need to take testosterone and have top surgery to live an authentic life.”

“Don’t tell your parents about this. They won’t understand. They will be angry and ashamed of you. They will throw you out of the house.”

And on and on it goes. An inescapable cycle of exploiting the turmoil of adolescence to create a false divide between loving parents and despairing children. An insidious mantra of estrangement that paints parents as cruel monsters who refuse to understand. On social media, in friendship groups, and even in the classroom.

They cannot escape this idea that the reason for all their many woes is that they are trans. And the “cure” is puberty blockers, testosterone injections and top surgery.

I have come to firmly believe that love is the only cure. Reassure your daughter that you love her and that you are her ally in this fight. Spend dedicated time with her. Grace and I have committed to a movie date once a week. We have seen some gems and some bombs and love dissecting the plots and characterisation. This time spent together is slowly repairing our mother-daughter relationship.

I take Claire out to have sushi together once a week, creating a safe space where she can tell me anything that is on her mind. We still have a long way to go. I am confident that we can get there—but not without forgiveness.

A child in the grips of an induced gender identity crisis is in acute psychic distress. She has been convinced that there is a cure for her many woes, but that you, her mother, are withholding it. I don’t deserve the horrible words that have been flung at me by both my daughters. My husband does not deserve the false accusations of abuse.

I forgive them. Because I understand the omnipresence of radical gender theory in their lives. And I remember enough of my teenage self to realise that I would have fallen for it too. Forgiveness for these coached insults and horrible lies is the only way forward. Anxiety adds a distinct tone to a distressed child’s voice. I learned to listen for it and tempered my reaction, even though I know I was coming across as a stone-cold bitch.

The trifecta of this puzzle is boundaries. Activists are pushing a narrative that failing to affirm a child’s brand-new gender identity constitutes child abuse. This narrative is being used as grounds by trans activists (who have infiltrated social services) to seize confused children from loving homes. And so, unfortunately, you must minimally affirm your daughter lest you lose her entirely.

I use my daughters’ chosen names when addressing them and do my best with the linguistic gymnastics that are their chosen pronouns. In return, my daughters have agreed not to pursue chemical or surgical gender transition while living at home.

These boundaries take away the grounds for the state government to seize them. They concede enough ground to my daughters to keep them safe and give them time to think.

Remember, self-appointed experts working for the state are deeming mothers unfit and seizing their children. Please help us keep our kids safe from harm. Radical gender theory confers no benefits on vulnerable children and poses huge risks to their mental health.

This is an edited extract from the book Devastated: How gender ideology is tearing Australian families apart, published by Binary Australia and edited by Kirralie Smith. The book was launched last November at Parliament House, Canberra.

1. A transgender term for a double mastectomy.