Mugged by reality

An American mother had dismissed warnings about the trans cult as right-wing nonsense ... until it came for her 14-year-old son

Photo by Gabriel Meinert on Unsplash

This is an extract from Anita Bartholomew’s new book Sacrificial Lambs: A Liberal Reporter Exposes How the Progressive Left Harms Children in the Name of Gender Ideology.

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Anita Bartholomew

Ellie* used to think that parents who didn’t affirm their gender-confused kids were on the far-right fringe, or were misinformed, or fire-and-brimstone evangelicals—or all of the above. Definitely not enlightened liberals¹ like herself. To the extent she thought of it at all, she’d have assumed that only conservatives questioned their kids wanting to “transition.”

Then the cult came for her kid.

“I love Jon Stewart and John Oliver and Stephen Colbert,” says Ellie. “And my son was right next to me watching these guys.² And I didn’t get it. I didn’t get the damage that was being done. I don’t think that they were wrong on everything. But I think what they created was a disaster everybody, for our kids, for the adults who don’t see it, you know—to create such a polarizing environment, where people honestly believe that anybody who has an opposing viewpoint is either stupid or corrupt, is horrible.”

The old Ellie would have counted anyone who warned against transgender ideology among those stupid, corrupt people until her 14-year-old son Carter* sent her and her husband Horst* a text that said: I don’t feel like a girl, but I feel more like a girl than a boy.

The year prior, 2019, Carter had attempted suicide by overdosing on his ADHD medicine. It had been apparent for some time that he was not doing well emotionally, and in 2020, adding to the stress of Covid lockdowns, remote school and isolation, his mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She’d begun chemo. That might have been Carter’s tipping point.

And in a less chaotic time, despite her own indoctrination, Ellie might have questioned whether his pronouncement made any sense. Although he was no jock,³ Carter was a very masculine boy, attracted to girls, and with no earlier signs of a gender disorder. But when Carter insisted that his family call him by a new name and pronouns, and said he wasn’t going to engage with anybody who didn’t, Ellie and Horst offered no resistance.

“As I look back on it, I’m pretty amazed how primed for this we were because, already on NPR,⁴ they were already really pushing the stories of these transgender kids, normalizing it, making it seem like a medical condition,” recalls Ellie. “So, we knew that kids could go on medication. We knew that you had to affirm. It was crucial that you affirm. You know, the name and the pronoun were really important for their mental health. And so we said, ‘Yeah, you know, of course we’re going to call you by the new name and we’re going to respect your pronouns.’”

Ellie consulted with the pediatrician who’d cared for Carter since he was born, a woman she thought of as a friend. The doctor quickly referred the family to a gender clinic. Ellie and Horst told the clinic’s social worker they didn’t want Carter on medication and the social worker said she understood. But immediately after the clinic visit, Carter started badgering his parents for puberty blockers.⁵ He wouldn’t let up, screaming and crying and demanding. At first, Ellie held the line. But his behavior kept getting more extreme.

Carter had always worn his hair long. One day, on a dare from his new internet friends, he decided to chop it all off.

“I went for a walk, and I came home to find him running barefoot in the street with his hair all hacked,” says Ellie. “He looked like somebody from, you know, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.⁶ And I came in the house and there were piles of hair all over the house.” Ellie worried what he might do next.

In the back of her mind was Carter’s earlier suicide attempt, and the constant drumbeat from media that children who aren’t affirmed kill themselves. She and Horst asked the social worker for information on the blockers Carter had been demanding, hoping this medication might calm his increasing distress.

“She said, perfectly safe and reversible. You know, absolutely no side effects ... there’s some concern about bone density problems, but that’s all.’”

It didn’t feel right, yet Ellie felt she had to agree.

“But the minute I consented to it, I just knew something was wrong,” she says. “This was after my surgery where I could finally start to think straight again. I just felt like, this doesn’t seem right. I started researching.”

Meanwhile, Horst took Carter for his first shot. It would block the effects of puberty for the next three months.

Ellie had worked in public health for thirty years. Unlike the average parent, she knew how to search for and find relevant studies, and she knew how to read them. Were these drugs truly “perfectly safe and reversible”? She needed to see the evidence for herself.

She read everything she could find. None of the available research supported the clinic social worker’s assertions that puberty blockers were safe or reversible.

Now, truly worried, she asked the social worker: where’s the data?

“She sent me this document, this email that had maybe fifty links in it. Every single one of them was very positive, there was nothing mentioned about any controversy whatsoever. Nothing.”

One of the links was to a document published by a respected university called “What we know about gender-affirming care.” It included dozens more links to research papers and articles. But none of those links led to any data showing puberty blockers were safe or reversible.

“I started looking at these things and seeing that none of them applied to this cohort. Some of them were completely irrelevant. And I thought, did the clinicians, like, did the social worker even read this stuff?”

False reassurance

Meanwhile, Carter’s emotional state was worsening rather than improving on the blockers. He was angrier than before, more erratic, more oppositional. And now he was demanding cross-sex hormones.

When Ellie called with her concerns, the clinic suggested a team meeting.

“And they were very reassuring. ‘Look, we’re not going to move forward with hormones or anything. This is a family decision. Nobody’s going to push this on you. This is not going to happen.’ But [they had] a pediatric gynecologist at the meeting for my male child. And she says, ‘Well, forty-one percent of these kids will commit suicide if they don’t get affirmative care.’”

Having read and digested all the available research herself, Ellie knew that was false.

“And I let her have it. I said, ‘You have no idea where those statistics come from, do you? Those statistics are lies. They’re made up. They’re based on garbage. And having a child who’s already had a suicide attempt, I’m exceptionally offended by that.’ And she kind of backed down and apologized all over herself, but I figured it out then. These people didn’t know what they were talking about.”

She needed to get him off the blockers. Carter needed therapy, someone to help deal with his emotional issues. The clinic, though, would only refer Carter to gender-affirming therapists. With so many kids experiencing isolation and depression due to the Covid lockdowns, everyone else was booked.

Meanwhile, she tried to stall on Carter’s next puberty blocker shot. Carter refused to go to school and was becoming more belligerent, screaming at people for “misgendering” him and demanding estrogen.⁷ Not knowing what else to do, and still a good liberal convinced that affirmation was the answer, Horst took him in to get another dose of blockers. The clinic was out of the three-month shots. They gave him one that would last six months.

Ellie was frantic. Reading the research, she’d discovered that blockers not only stopped visible bodily changes. The drugs also blocked the crucial brain development that occurs during puberty.

“It was devastating because I knew that this stuff wasn’t safe and that he wasn’t developing neurologically the skills that he needed. He wasn’t developing critical thinking skills. He wasn’t developing the capacity to understand long-term consequences. All the things that you would need to know to figure out whether or not this made any sense at all.”

She called the clinic again, hoping she could persuade the clinical director to agree that Carter should be referred out to a non-affirming out-of-network therapist.

“And so she said, ‘Well, the social worker did recommend your child start hormones. Did you know that?’ And I said, No, I didn’t know that. I said, what criteria do you use to determine who will benefit and who won’t? And she said, ‘We don’t really have criteria.’”

No criteria? At all? Ellie couldn’t believe her ears. She pointed out the risk that moving Carter from puberty blockers onto cross-sex hormones would render him sterile.

“She didn’t seem to think the fertility was a big deal. ‘Yeah, they do, but he’ll get these nice curves and small breasts. He’ll probably need implants because they won’t really get that big. So, probably need implants. But his skin will get softer.’ She said, ‘It’s not like testosterone for the girls. It’s much gentler for the boys’. I mean, this is insanity.”

In the meantime, Carter had been emailing the endocrinologist, demanding a cross-sex hormone prescription [for estrogen]. The endocrinologist responded that the team supported his decision to medically transition. But they couldn’t legally get around his mother’s refusal to consent.

Ellie was being pummeled from all sides, everyone trying to break down her resistance. Her husband was pressuring her to approve the cross-sex hormones. Her son was screaming at her and berating her. And the medical professionals were telling them that they were right and Ellie was wrong.

But Ellie stood firm.

She knew the claims that not affirming kids would lead them to suicide were false, but her son had attempted to kill himself before all this trans insanity began. So, for Carter, there was still a suicide risk, and it came from going along with this madness.

“I thought if he did this [transition] and he figured out that it was a lie he’d kill himself. He wouldn’t survive that.”

By 2022, Carter was no longer on puberty blockers and had been dismissed from the gender clinic as a patient without getting a cross-sex hormone prescription. Ellie discovered he was making appointments with his pediatrician without her approval. She hand-delivered a letter to the doctor, citing all the studies she’d read about the harms of cross-sex hormones and making it clear that she did not consent.

She also saw that Carter had pulled up a webpage on their home computer for do-it-yourself hormones.

“There were people called bathtub brewers. So these people buy raw materials from China and they make estrogen in their own homes and they sell it online,” says Ellie. “I saw this page was open on the computer and I asked him about it and he said, ‘I was looking at that for some friend’.”

The red flags went up.

Mysterious lab documents arrived, showing that Carter had had blood tests to check his hormone levels.

When she confronted the doctor, she got denials. They’d just run some tests because his vitamin D levels were low, the doctor claimed.

Ellie checked Carter’s texts and discovered messages back and forth with an older girl at school. The girl was eighteen and Carter was sixteen.

She hadn’t adopted a trans identity but was what a number of mothers of gender-confused boys call a cheerleader. These are girls who, quite literally, cheer boys on who show any signs of interest in transgenderism.

“They take them shopping for girl clothes, or they give them their girl clothes, and they really, you know, give the boys a lot of attention. Now, adolescent boys, I mean, I don’t know if you remember, but I certainly remember, the adolescent boys are so naive when it comes to girls and dating, and emotions and sex.

“Girls are way ahead of the boys, and especially a child who has mental health issues and other issues and can’t quite navigate the social landscape—to have this kind of attention from girls can be really exhilarating and confusing, I think. You know, here you finally get attention from girls, but they’re telling you you’re a girl too and they’re giving you girls’ clothes and they’re giving you a lot of support to not be male.”

The girl’s parents were also committed to transgender ideology. They became Carter’s “glitter family.” Glitter moms, glitter dads, and glitter families are often trans ideologues, but are sometimes predators. They might be strangers, friends of the family or extended family members. What they all have in common is their eagerness to act as stand-ins for a child’s real parents when a mom and/or dad balks at a child assuming a trans identity. These glitter crews might do almost anything to undermine the parents’ refusal to affirm. Some merely arrange for a kid to get a chest binder or a tuck kit (to hide the bulge of a penis) behind the parents’ backs. Others actively campaign to get children to run away from home.

With her parents’ full support and consent, Carter’s school friend had bought bathtub hormones online. She then injected Carter with them. But, from his texts, Ellie could see that the girl had somehow messed up the injection. So Carter had turned to his pediatrician.

“[The pediatrician] instructed him on how to inject this street drug made by somebody in their home.”

The blood tests that Ellie was told were simply to determine his vitamin D levels actually were designed to ascertain his baseline sex hormone levels so he would know how much of the illegally produced estrogen to inject into his body. The pediatrician planned to monitor his hormone levels as he continued this black market cross-sex treatment.

Ellie was stunned. She’d always considered Carter’s pediatrician a friend. The woman had even come to visit her when she was in the hospital undergoing breast cancer treatment. And now, she was facilitating this deception. This doctor was coaching Carter on how to take drugs that, even if they were legally prescribed, could harm him irreparably. But bathtub hormones could be tainted with anything. The recklessness of the doctor’s behavior bordered on criminal.

A complaint filed with the medical board went nowhere, but the bigger problem was the family supplying the drugs.

Ellie wanted to press charges, but Carter was still fragile. Some of his texts and social media posts showed that he was still contemplating suicide. She worried he’d make another attempt if she got his friend and her parents in legal trouble.

She couldn’t risk calling the cops. But she could use what she knew as leverage.

Carter refused to believe that taking the bathtub hormones was illegal until Ellie read him the statutes. What they were doing could earn the glitter family as much as a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.

“When he heard that, he fell apart. He was so terrified something would happen to this family and this girl. And I said, ‘Here’s the deal. Nothing will happen to them as long as nothing happens to you. And we’re done with this. We’re going to confiscate this medication. And you’re not going to do anything. The minute something happens to you, it’s over for them.’ And that’s how I got him to stop the drugs.”

But the danger for Carter isn’t actually over.

He is now at college,⁸ more than 2,000 miles away. Ellie knows that it’s possible for him to get cross-sex hormones if he’s determined. She’s resigned herself to the fact that she has no control over that. Her biggest fear now is genital surgery. “Surgery will destroy him. Will destroy him. I’ve talked to enough detransitioners, male detransitioners to know this. There’s no real recovery from that.”

*All names are pseudonyms. The book Sacrificial Lambs is published by Pitchstone. Anita Bartholomew is an American author and journalist

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1. In the US, liberals lean Left in politics.

2. Stewart, Oliver and Colbert are political humorists on US TV who are popular with liberals and progressives. Oliver in particular uses trans activist talking points and dismisses concerns about the gender medicalisation of minors as right-wing disinformation.

3. A jock is a stereotypical athlete.

4. NPR is an American broadcaster known for its progressive politics and promotion of “trans rights” narratives.

5. Puberty blockers, known as GnRHa, suppress the sex hormones that drive normal development towards adulthood. They are approved for use with central precocious puberty, when a child’s sexual development begins too early; treatment is stopped when the child reaches an age when he or she can enter puberty in sync with peers.

Puberty blockers are not approved for use with gender distress. Gender clinics use them to interfere with normally timed puberty and the vast majority of children begun on blockers in this way go on to cross-sex hormones meant to be taken lifelong.

6. A film set in a mental asylum starring Jack Nicholson as a wild-haired patient.

7. Estrogen is given as a cross-sex hormone to feminise the body of a male who identifies as female. The counterpart drug for male-identifying females is testosterone.

8. Some US universities promote gender medicalisation through their student health services.