what a stunning article, bringing tears to my eyes, reminding us not to be swept away even by beautiful writing, but to follow the story -- and what is omitted. I agree with Leslie that James Marcus did abandon his role as father to be "friend," --a major cultural change in the role of parent in this century -- but "friend" is not only or even primarily a parent's job. (A goal, to be sure!) Don't all parents hear at some point "I HATE YOU" if they issue an unwanted requirement? I had a hate message from a father like James, so proud of himself for facilitating his child's 'transition,' yet failing to do his homework on what the costs might be now, and down life's road.
You hear parents, and also therapists, expressing so much relief when they go along with the child-- but it helps no one.
But to the parent who is told: "do not discuss your reservations or I will cut you off, in either case I will not listen to your warnings"--what then....?
I would say "friendly" is good, "friend" is ok when there is no need for telling difficult truths, but in times of false belief systems breaking in upon the family circle, both "friend" and "ally" signal a dereliction of duty. Our duty as parents is to tell the truth, and stand firmly where we are.
"Sometimes things feel right not because they are right, but because they are easier."
This is every government-funded cult in a nutshell--especially this heavily-financed gender-stereotype enforcement lobby disguised as a cult: the Trans panic.
People are going along with this insanity because standing against it is so hard and so violently DANGEROUS.
Bravo, this is an excellent analysis of the Marcus piece.
It was unsettling to read "Who My Child Was and Would Be." Even the title, poignant, yet somewhat therapy-speakish? Is this supposed to be Radical Acceptance?
I do understand parents feeling helpless when their adult children go off-the-rails. If a parent expresses concern or dismay about a "gender transition", poof, you are disappeared from your child's life.
All of the people going along with this trans disaster create a ripple effect of harm.
I keep thinking about the parents of the 13-year-old girl in our Scout troop who recently went on "HRT". I don't know where they stand or how the girl got there, she is very clearly a butch type and probably a budding lesbian, she goes to some sort of alternative artsy school where probably a high percentage of kids are trans-identified and the teachers will all be on board. I did notice that the dad, when introducing himself at a committee meeting, referred to her as his "child", not his "son", so maybe he is on the fence (then again, how "on the fence" can you be once you've signed off on hormones?). But this girl is 13, maybe 14 now. At that point, parents still have power, even in a liberal city such as ours. I know it would be very hard, but I'd be moving heaven and earth to get my kid out of this, including potentially moving to a red state (something I thought I would never want in my life prior to Covid).
Adult children, and children approaching legal adulthood, are a whole different story though, and I understand parents wanting not to cut ties. Waxing poetic about it in the New Yorker, however, is an act of propaganda that is unforgivable.
It's difficult to know about this girl, Kate. The fact that she attends an alternative-artsy school is definitely a reg flag. Don't some of those schools have 50% of the students identifying as trans or NB? Even younger children are sprouting sexual identities they don't understand or haven't experienced. It's the coming-of-label-age.
I am very sorry to hear she is on HRT. What could the parents be thinking?
How many people realize that in a different environment this child would have a very different outcome?
I agree that the waxing poetic in The New Yorker is an act of propaganda. And that is what The New York Times and The New Yorker seek to publish.
Yes, I have heard that at some progressive schools, a huge percentage of the kids are trans-identified. That makes it harder to dissuade your kid, but on the other hand, it is also glaring proof that this is a social contagion, and should make everyone's alarm bells go off.
None of this is to say that I don't feel sorry for the parents, who were probably emotionally blackmailed into signing off on this, and are trapped in an "affirming" blue bubble. And I have to say, their girl "passes" pretty well. I'm not sure if that's already the effect of the testosterone or if she was always like this, but it's going to make it easier for the parents to convince themselves that they are doing the right thing. Nonetheless - my 13 year old, still mostly pre-pubescent son "passes" as a girl, too (he often has to correct people who either assume he is a girl or that he is "trans"), and that would never convince me that he is not a boy.
My son was very beautiful throughout childhood, had a long blond braid, and wore a lot of pink--including a dress I made for him at his request. People mistook him for a girl all the time, even in jeans and a sweatshirt.
It pissed him off, and he would cry angrily, "Why don't people like me?"
So I embroidered a sweatshirt for him in bright colors saying, "Proud to be a boy with long hair." I even embroidered a second, when he outgrew the first.
It didn't stop everyone (some people are REALLY determined to groom children into sexism). But it certainly helped.
We also made a point of fostering his bond with his father and talking about them as father-&-son. He needed to know for a fact that his maleness is tied to the profound love between him and his #1 role model in life.
And we enlisted every man we met to support him and assure him that he was the most boyish boy of all boys, because there's no such thing as a boy who is not 100% boy: contractors working on our building site, men with beautifully-shining long hair, random hippie fathers of his friends, grandfatherly elders who called him "lad." They were all willing to help.
We met a LOT of really nice men.
He's 28 now and perfectly happy being a man like his dad.
My son doesn't even dress in a particularly feminine way, although he has started to develop a somewhat precocious interest in fashion and has begun dressing in a way that makes him look more like a college student than a middle schooler. It's his very long hair and pretty face that are enough for people to think he must be/want to be a girl. He says he likes to write his he/him pronouns on worksheets to ward that off. In that way, the stupid pronoun ritual at his school, for him, serves the same purpose as your son's embroidered sweater. Probably not what the creators of the pronoun policy had in mind.
It doesn't matter how your son dresses, how long he wears his hair, or anything else. He is 100% male and always will be. He will grow up to be a man like his father, uncles, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. It is his heritage.
I seriously can't believe your son's school has children writing their pronouns on their worksheets. That's cult indoctrination.
My son didn't wear his dress except a few times, after a couple of little five-year-old friends (girls) told him that girls wear dresses and boys wear pants. They were all three wearing pants at the time, which was very confusing to the little girls when I pointed this out (social indoctrination!). I asked my son if he wanted to wear a dress, and he said yes, so I got out one of my floppy sundresses and pinned it on him, and they all played happily that way all day.
Later that week, I let my son pick out fabric for a dress (he chose hot pink flannel with kittens on it), and I made him a little tunic-style dress that he wore over his colored tights. It made him look like a little prince.
The girls' mother was a hardcore (pre-Trans panic) "progressive" who was very embarrassed to hear what her girls believed. We went to a birthday party at their house soon after, and when the mother opened the door to us, my son marched up in his hot pink dress and said, "Some people think boys can't wear dresses, but we think they can, and WE'RE RIGHT," and he marched right under her arm into the house.
She said, "Well! ALL RIGHT then!" And we laughed.
There was another boy in our community who had been adopted from Thailand at age two, where he'd been living with a foster family of girls who dressed him in dresses for fun. HE was serious about dresses, which reminded him of the family he missed. We were talking to his father at an event one day, when the little boy zoomed past in a wedding dress, and his father said, "He's in his full battle-gear today." He eventually grew out of it.
Thank heaven that was the early 2000s long before the Trans panic, or that poor child would have a butchered body today.
Many parents are blackmailed into this with the cruel threat of losing their child: by suicide ("would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?"), by the child running away (into the arms of groomers and, unfortunately, often sex traffickers), or even by the state removing them over accusations of "abuse" by "misgendering."
Just because he chose to keep contact with his vulnerable young adolescent daughter doesn't mean it wasn't a heartrending choice for him. I'd subtly sound him out. If he's open to help, you can give it to him.
You can read stories on PITT about how different parents have reacted to this situation, including moving to another state. Some parents have the flexibility. Others simply don't. With a family of multiple children and a location-dependent income, it can be an impossible choice.
“And as Skrmetti and other lawsuits made their way through federal courts, some of the central medical claims girding the legal case for pediatric gender treatments — that decades of thorough study had found them to be safe and effective — began to unravel amid growing scrutiny by other doctors and experts. Last summer, thousands of emails and other documents released in a case challenging Alabama’s ban raised further questions about medical standards at the heart of the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit against Tennessee….
In most respects, the movement’s day in court felt like a retreat….Pressed on the longstanding claim that gender-affirming care prevented dysphoric teenagers from killing themselves, Strangio conceded the point. ‘There is no evidence,’ he told the court, ‘that this treatment reduces completed suicide,’ adding that ‘completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.’ Engaging with the conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, Strangio even uttered the phrase he considered anathema: ‘born male.’”
How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost,” by Nicholas Confessore, June 19, 2025, New York Times
I would love to sound them out, but I almost never see them. I also don't know if it would be possible to ask about this without creating a very awkward situation.
If he's adamant that it's all been a bed of roses, then you have your answer and can give him a sympathetic pat on the arm and leave it at that.
But if he's willing to admit that it's been hard, you can ask him to tell you more about that. Listen sympathetically to as much as he wants to admit to.
At the very least, he'll learn that he knows someone he can talk to, in a world in which he almost certainly has no one else.
Thank you. Tightening the knots that hold me to the mast of reality and truth as I type….
This excellent piece is the answer to my wish for a beautifully written, powerful rebuttal to the Marcus story. I hope it will get republished somewhere and reach a larger audience. And on this Thanksgiving Day, I want to express my gratitude to DIAG for putting out great pieces like this one and for everything else you are doing to push back trans ideology.
This is so well-written. I hope you will send it to The New Yorker for publication as a response to Marcus's piece, though the likelihood of the magazine publishing it is next to nil. It's The New Yorker, not The Topeka Kansan; Marcus's narrative is what editors and most of their readership have already embraced and want to see affirmed, preferably eloquently.
I've been defeated in trying to talk with friends whose children have been seduced by this ideology. In expressing my opposition, I lost a friend of several decades whose son was captured; I suspect she continues to have the doubts she did initially, but the cost of dissent is too great with a bought-in husband and a "progressive" peer group. Easier to avoid a discrete source of dissonance, i.e. me. Same with a new friend I wished to cultivate. When she shared that her daughter ("son," she said) had just had a hysterectomy and planned to have her breasts cut off in November ("top surgery," of course), I acknowledged how difficult this must be for her and invited just as gently as I could a dialog. I never got a response, and assume by now her daughter -- a young lesbian, like so many of the current cohort -- has had her double mastectomy.
It seems sunk cost is just too great for these parents, becoming ever higher according to the length of time they have "affirmed" the child and the severity of medical/surgical mutilation they have eventually supported. From your description, Marcus's article is a writer's version of protecting a lie and obscuring a truth he cannot bear to face.
It's like we all woke up in the Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man," watching in horror as the indoctrinated lure their family members to join them on the spaceship. After all, it's a good cause for humankind. It's an advance for humanity. They only learn too late that "To Serve Man" is a cookbook.
I didn't want to "like" your comment, because the information in it is tragic, not likable at all. But I've been where you are with old friends who vanish once a difference of opinion on this issue emerges. There is real solidarity in truth.
I do talk to parents like this. Although, as you say, they might cut you off.
Still, it's worth it. Now they know that there are kind, sensible, knowledgeable people against this. That's priceless information. The cult relies upon silencing us to keep anyone from learning the truth about it, but they can't silence word-of-mouth.
These parents can never unlearn now what they've learned from you.
That crack in the wall of silence is their children's lifeline.
I wonder why people feel compelled to draw others in to their obsessions. I suppose it’s a sign of their insecurity and uncertainty. You see it with addictions. With ‘trans’ it becomes desperate, a furious forcing as if to acknowledge how shaky and insubstantial it really is.
Humans are hardwired to enforce our most painful experiences on others in order to psychologically deny the depth of our own pain. It's not sick if it's normal for your tribe. That's how the psychology goes.
In the case of the Trans panic, the reaction is even more furious because these people have been allowed to take over entire governments with their emotional blackmail, threats, and dangerous violence. There's no one more enraged than a dangerous abuser who is, after a long period of submission, finally told NO.
Women are frequently murdered while they're trying to leave the men who abuse them. I worked for years at a Battered Women's Shelter, and we got families sent to us from major cities hours away, in order to hide the women and their children from the men they were escaping.
One might almost call this an epidemic that MUST be stopped. . .if that phrase were not reserved for men who claim that "misgendering" them is genocide.
But Eleganta, it would no longer be possible to send women and children far away to protect them from violence. Women who flee violent men now get forced back
Women's Shelters do not force women to go back to abusers. They don't have the ability to force women to go anywhere.
These days, they create the risk that those women will be housed at the shelter alongside an abusive man, forcing the women to choose between staying and running away somewhere else: to family, friends, allies, or onto the street.
It's certainly a risk. But the abusive men rarely show up, compared to the number of women in shelters across the country. And the women probably don't even know they're running that risk. Most women don't know about any of this at all.
OF COURSE they should not run that risk.
OF COURSE.
And, in British Columbia and Scotland, they don't have to, because of the Vancouver Women's Shelter and Beira's Place.
Truthfully, any of us can do what the original women's shelters did: organize to create secret spaces where women can be housed to escape abusive men. It's a ton of work. It has to be secret (women's shelters have always been secret). But it's possible. JK Rowling might even help financially.
Women have ALWAYS had to fight tooth & nail for every single thing we've ever had. That's one way we can tell that men in dresses aren't women.
A father agonizes over his son’s breast buds. Father has nightmares about losing the reflection of his own masculinity in his son who is taking estrogen. Father notices other men noticing his son’s new breasts in different types of clothing. The son has a boyfriend, he details their troubled homosexual sex life as the son transforms into a gynoandromorph. The son’s boyfriend transitions too, demonstrating again the socially contagious nature of trans identification. The father reads and quotes books by other men to learn about the female experience and then questions and gently chastises actual women’s critiques of these ersatz, fetishistic parodies of womanhood. Neither the father nor the son have any respect for women, women’s opinions simply do not exist or matter in their perverted, busty world. Soft skin and conical “prepubescent” gynecomastia are the center of their shared existence. How people don’t see the overwhelming maleness of the whole enterprise escapes me. I dont see a story of passivity here. At every step the father made choices to align with his son. He believes his son can be a woman not because he’s afraid of losing his son, but because other men (through the medium of books) told him this is a real thing. He summarily dismissed the claims of women that it isn’t. I think that’s the significant part here.
In a way, this essay is a testament to the Marcus's skill as a writer. If you think of James the father as a character in a short story, we see a brutal arc of tragedy rather than a rainbow of enlightenment. As I have commented elsewhere, his piece perfectly and beautifully (if unconsciously) depicts the agism within our entire culture but seen so clearly in families struggling with trans identified children and young people. James, clearly a deeply intelligent, sensitive, caring, and brilliant human being, is reduced at the end to a baffled and helpless toddler. What does that tell you?? Marcus is too honest a writer to hide that poignant reflection from the piece, which keeps it from being pure propaganda. This father cannot trust anything he has ever believed and must submit to "new rules." To some degree, that happens throughout our lives: we learn, change, and grow, sometimes from our own children. But the main benefit of aging (against all the inevitable suffering) in any human culture is the gathering of essential wisdom that can be passed on to the young. In our culture, our elders and even the middle-aged are "dinosaurs," who must override the knowledge, wisdom and understanding of beauty learned over a lifetime in order to stay connected to their young people. It's not right, and on some level, I believe Marcus knows it is not right.
what a stunning article, bringing tears to my eyes, reminding us not to be swept away even by beautiful writing, but to follow the story -- and what is omitted. I agree with Leslie that James Marcus did abandon his role as father to be "friend," --a major cultural change in the role of parent in this century -- but "friend" is not only or even primarily a parent's job. (A goal, to be sure!) Don't all parents hear at some point "I HATE YOU" if they issue an unwanted requirement? I had a hate message from a father like James, so proud of himself for facilitating his child's 'transition,' yet failing to do his homework on what the costs might be now, and down life's road.
Trying to be your child's "friend" instead of parent is a telltale sign of severe narcissism disorder.
You hear parents, and also therapists, expressing so much relief when they go along with the child-- but it helps no one.
But to the parent who is told: "do not discuss your reservations or I will cut you off, in either case I will not listen to your warnings"--what then....?
Are you familiar with Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT)?
They're an online community of parents with children groomed into this Trans panic, sharing their stories and support with each other.
They talk about your question all the time.
I would say "friendly" is good, "friend" is ok when there is no need for telling difficult truths, but in times of false belief systems breaking in upon the family circle, both "friend" and "ally" signal a dereliction of duty. Our duty as parents is to tell the truth, and stand firmly where we are.
"Sometimes things feel right not because they are right, but because they are easier."
This is every government-funded cult in a nutshell--especially this heavily-financed gender-stereotype enforcement lobby disguised as a cult: the Trans panic.
People are going along with this insanity because standing against it is so hard and so violently DANGEROUS.
It's easier to just submit.
Government funded? Tell it to the “trans” billionaires and Big Pharma elements that have been major funders of the “trans” campaign.
The government has been funding the gender-enforcement lobby for years.
All James Priztker and his bros have to do is buy off the politicians who make the decisions about how to allocate government spending.
That's OUR taxpayer money being spent to promote this garbage.
Bravo, this is an excellent analysis of the Marcus piece.
It was unsettling to read "Who My Child Was and Would Be." Even the title, poignant, yet somewhat therapy-speakish? Is this supposed to be Radical Acceptance?
I do understand parents feeling helpless when their adult children go off-the-rails. If a parent expresses concern or dismay about a "gender transition", poof, you are disappeared from your child's life.
All of the people going along with this trans disaster create a ripple effect of harm.
I keep thinking about the parents of the 13-year-old girl in our Scout troop who recently went on "HRT". I don't know where they stand or how the girl got there, she is very clearly a butch type and probably a budding lesbian, she goes to some sort of alternative artsy school where probably a high percentage of kids are trans-identified and the teachers will all be on board. I did notice that the dad, when introducing himself at a committee meeting, referred to her as his "child", not his "son", so maybe he is on the fence (then again, how "on the fence" can you be once you've signed off on hormones?). But this girl is 13, maybe 14 now. At that point, parents still have power, even in a liberal city such as ours. I know it would be very hard, but I'd be moving heaven and earth to get my kid out of this, including potentially moving to a red state (something I thought I would never want in my life prior to Covid).
Adult children, and children approaching legal adulthood, are a whole different story though, and I understand parents wanting not to cut ties. Waxing poetic about it in the New Yorker, however, is an act of propaganda that is unforgivable.
It's difficult to know about this girl, Kate. The fact that she attends an alternative-artsy school is definitely a reg flag. Don't some of those schools have 50% of the students identifying as trans or NB? Even younger children are sprouting sexual identities they don't understand or haven't experienced. It's the coming-of-label-age.
I am very sorry to hear she is on HRT. What could the parents be thinking?
How many people realize that in a different environment this child would have a very different outcome?
I agree that the waxing poetic in The New Yorker is an act of propaganda. And that is what The New York Times and The New Yorker seek to publish.
Yes, I have heard that at some progressive schools, a huge percentage of the kids are trans-identified. That makes it harder to dissuade your kid, but on the other hand, it is also glaring proof that this is a social contagion, and should make everyone's alarm bells go off.
None of this is to say that I don't feel sorry for the parents, who were probably emotionally blackmailed into signing off on this, and are trapped in an "affirming" blue bubble. And I have to say, their girl "passes" pretty well. I'm not sure if that's already the effect of the testosterone or if she was always like this, but it's going to make it easier for the parents to convince themselves that they are doing the right thing. Nonetheless - my 13 year old, still mostly pre-pubescent son "passes" as a girl, too (he often has to correct people who either assume he is a girl or that he is "trans"), and that would never convince me that he is not a boy.
My son was very beautiful throughout childhood, had a long blond braid, and wore a lot of pink--including a dress I made for him at his request. People mistook him for a girl all the time, even in jeans and a sweatshirt.
It pissed him off, and he would cry angrily, "Why don't people like me?"
So I embroidered a sweatshirt for him in bright colors saying, "Proud to be a boy with long hair." I even embroidered a second, when he outgrew the first.
It didn't stop everyone (some people are REALLY determined to groom children into sexism). But it certainly helped.
We also made a point of fostering his bond with his father and talking about them as father-&-son. He needed to know for a fact that his maleness is tied to the profound love between him and his #1 role model in life.
And we enlisted every man we met to support him and assure him that he was the most boyish boy of all boys, because there's no such thing as a boy who is not 100% boy: contractors working on our building site, men with beautifully-shining long hair, random hippie fathers of his friends, grandfatherly elders who called him "lad." They were all willing to help.
We met a LOT of really nice men.
He's 28 now and perfectly happy being a man like his dad.
That's a beautiful story!
My son doesn't even dress in a particularly feminine way, although he has started to develop a somewhat precocious interest in fashion and has begun dressing in a way that makes him look more like a college student than a middle schooler. It's his very long hair and pretty face that are enough for people to think he must be/want to be a girl. He says he likes to write his he/him pronouns on worksheets to ward that off. In that way, the stupid pronoun ritual at his school, for him, serves the same purpose as your son's embroidered sweater. Probably not what the creators of the pronoun policy had in mind.
Thank you. :)
It doesn't matter how your son dresses, how long he wears his hair, or anything else. He is 100% male and always will be. He will grow up to be a man like his father, uncles, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. It is his heritage.
I seriously can't believe your son's school has children writing their pronouns on their worksheets. That's cult indoctrination.
My son didn't wear his dress except a few times, after a couple of little five-year-old friends (girls) told him that girls wear dresses and boys wear pants. They were all three wearing pants at the time, which was very confusing to the little girls when I pointed this out (social indoctrination!). I asked my son if he wanted to wear a dress, and he said yes, so I got out one of my floppy sundresses and pinned it on him, and they all played happily that way all day.
Later that week, I let my son pick out fabric for a dress (he chose hot pink flannel with kittens on it), and I made him a little tunic-style dress that he wore over his colored tights. It made him look like a little prince.
The girls' mother was a hardcore (pre-Trans panic) "progressive" who was very embarrassed to hear what her girls believed. We went to a birthday party at their house soon after, and when the mother opened the door to us, my son marched up in his hot pink dress and said, "Some people think boys can't wear dresses, but we think they can, and WE'RE RIGHT," and he marched right under her arm into the house.
She said, "Well! ALL RIGHT then!" And we laughed.
There was another boy in our community who had been adopted from Thailand at age two, where he'd been living with a foster family of girls who dressed him in dresses for fun. HE was serious about dresses, which reminded him of the family he missed. We were talking to his father at an event one day, when the little boy zoomed past in a wedding dress, and his father said, "He's in his full battle-gear today." He eventually grew out of it.
Thank heaven that was the early 2000s long before the Trans panic, or that poor child would have a butchered body today.
I love this!
Girls "pass" better than boys do because our eyes rely so much on haircuts and facial hair for casual sex identification.
It's a lot harder to hide an Adam's apple, male jawline and brow ridge, male shoulders, etc.
Many parents are blackmailed into this with the cruel threat of losing their child: by suicide ("would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?"), by the child running away (into the arms of groomers and, unfortunately, often sex traffickers), or even by the state removing them over accusations of "abuse" by "misgendering."
Just because he chose to keep contact with his vulnerable young adolescent daughter doesn't mean it wasn't a heartrending choice for him. I'd subtly sound him out. If he's open to help, you can give it to him.
You can read stories on PITT about how different parents have reacted to this situation, including moving to another state. Some parents have the flexibility. Others simply don't. With a family of multiple children and a location-dependent income, it can be an impossible choice.
“And as Skrmetti and other lawsuits made their way through federal courts, some of the central medical claims girding the legal case for pediatric gender treatments — that decades of thorough study had found them to be safe and effective — began to unravel amid growing scrutiny by other doctors and experts. Last summer, thousands of emails and other documents released in a case challenging Alabama’s ban raised further questions about medical standards at the heart of the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit against Tennessee….
In most respects, the movement’s day in court felt like a retreat….Pressed on the longstanding claim that gender-affirming care prevented dysphoric teenagers from killing themselves, Strangio conceded the point. ‘There is no evidence,’ he told the court, ‘that this treatment reduces completed suicide,’ adding that ‘completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.’ Engaging with the conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, Strangio even uttered the phrase he considered anathema: ‘born male.’”
How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost,” by Nicholas Confessore, June 19, 2025, New York Times
Yes, we all read Confessore's piece. It was helpful. But it was not the honest factual journalism needed.
He didn't even admit that Kate Strangio is a woman masquerading as a vaudeville villain.
🤣
I would love to sound them out, but I almost never see them. I also don't know if it would be possible to ask about this without creating a very awkward situation.
There are ways:
"So how's so-&-so doing?" Gently.
Sympathetic listening.
"Has this been hard for you?" Even more gently.
Sympathetic listening.
If he's adamant that it's all been a bed of roses, then you have your answer and can give him a sympathetic pat on the arm and leave it at that.
But if he's willing to admit that it's been hard, you can ask him to tell you more about that. Listen sympathetically to as much as he wants to admit to.
At the very least, he'll learn that he knows someone he can talk to, in a world in which he almost certainly has no one else.
Thank you. Tightening the knots that hold me to the mast of reality and truth as I type….
This excellent piece is the answer to my wish for a beautifully written, powerful rebuttal to the Marcus story. I hope it will get republished somewhere and reach a larger audience. And on this Thanksgiving Day, I want to express my gratitude to DIAG for putting out great pieces like this one and for everything else you are doing to push back trans ideology.
This is excellent both in writing and information. The enabled delusion by a parent to a child is egregious and needs to be said, as it harms so many.
This is so well-written. I hope you will send it to The New Yorker for publication as a response to Marcus's piece, though the likelihood of the magazine publishing it is next to nil. It's The New Yorker, not The Topeka Kansan; Marcus's narrative is what editors and most of their readership have already embraced and want to see affirmed, preferably eloquently.
I've been defeated in trying to talk with friends whose children have been seduced by this ideology. In expressing my opposition, I lost a friend of several decades whose son was captured; I suspect she continues to have the doubts she did initially, but the cost of dissent is too great with a bought-in husband and a "progressive" peer group. Easier to avoid a discrete source of dissonance, i.e. me. Same with a new friend I wished to cultivate. When she shared that her daughter ("son," she said) had just had a hysterectomy and planned to have her breasts cut off in November ("top surgery," of course), I acknowledged how difficult this must be for her and invited just as gently as I could a dialog. I never got a response, and assume by now her daughter -- a young lesbian, like so many of the current cohort -- has had her double mastectomy.
It seems sunk cost is just too great for these parents, becoming ever higher according to the length of time they have "affirmed" the child and the severity of medical/surgical mutilation they have eventually supported. From your description, Marcus's article is a writer's version of protecting a lie and obscuring a truth he cannot bear to face.
It's like we all woke up in the Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man," watching in horror as the indoctrinated lure their family members to join them on the spaceship. After all, it's a good cause for humankind. It's an advance for humanity. They only learn too late that "To Serve Man" is a cookbook.
I didn't want to "like" your comment, because the information in it is tragic, not likable at all. But I've been where you are with old friends who vanish once a difference of opinion on this issue emerges. There is real solidarity in truth.
I know that episode, and it's good to have company. Thank you.
Isn't that based on a Kurt Vonnegut story?
I don’t know.
I do talk to parents like this. Although, as you say, they might cut you off.
Still, it's worth it. Now they know that there are kind, sensible, knowledgeable people against this. That's priceless information. The cult relies upon silencing us to keep anyone from learning the truth about it, but they can't silence word-of-mouth.
These parents can never unlearn now what they've learned from you.
That crack in the wall of silence is their children's lifeline.
Beautifully written and a perfect rebuttal to the fantastical Marcus piece. I wish the New Yorker would publish this.
It sounds like James Marcus gave up his role as parent in order to accompany his chlld on a journey to nowhere.
brilliant
Incredible piece. Thank you. So clear. I heart reality.
I wonder why people feel compelled to draw others in to their obsessions. I suppose it’s a sign of their insecurity and uncertainty. You see it with addictions. With ‘trans’ it becomes desperate, a furious forcing as if to acknowledge how shaky and insubstantial it really is.
Humans are hardwired to enforce our most painful experiences on others in order to psychologically deny the depth of our own pain. It's not sick if it's normal for your tribe. That's how the psychology goes.
In the case of the Trans panic, the reaction is even more furious because these people have been allowed to take over entire governments with their emotional blackmail, threats, and dangerous violence. There's no one more enraged than a dangerous abuser who is, after a long period of submission, finally told NO.
And that is why the most dangerous time for an abused woman is when she tries to leave
Absolutely.
Women are frequently murdered while they're trying to leave the men who abuse them. I worked for years at a Battered Women's Shelter, and we got families sent to us from major cities hours away, in order to hide the women and their children from the men they were escaping.
One might almost call this an epidemic that MUST be stopped. . .if that phrase were not reserved for men who claim that "misgendering" them is genocide.
But Eleganta, it would no longer be possible to send women and children far away to protect them from violence. Women who flee violent men now get forced back
Women's Shelters do not force women to go back to abusers. They don't have the ability to force women to go anywhere.
These days, they create the risk that those women will be housed at the shelter alongside an abusive man, forcing the women to choose between staying and running away somewhere else: to family, friends, allies, or onto the street.
It's certainly a risk. But the abusive men rarely show up, compared to the number of women in shelters across the country. And the women probably don't even know they're running that risk. Most women don't know about any of this at all.
OF COURSE they should not run that risk.
OF COURSE.
And, in British Columbia and Scotland, they don't have to, because of the Vancouver Women's Shelter and Beira's Place.
Truthfully, any of us can do what the original women's shelters did: organize to create secret spaces where women can be housed to escape abusive men. It's a ton of work. It has to be secret (women's shelters have always been secret). But it's possible. JK Rowling might even help financially.
Women have ALWAYS had to fight tooth & nail for every single thing we've ever had. That's one way we can tell that men in dresses aren't women.
Thank you for this gorgeous piece of truth-telling. 🙏❤️🙏
Thank you for this poignant and truthful essay.
Dastardly good!
A father agonizes over his son’s breast buds. Father has nightmares about losing the reflection of his own masculinity in his son who is taking estrogen. Father notices other men noticing his son’s new breasts in different types of clothing. The son has a boyfriend, he details their troubled homosexual sex life as the son transforms into a gynoandromorph. The son’s boyfriend transitions too, demonstrating again the socially contagious nature of trans identification. The father reads and quotes books by other men to learn about the female experience and then questions and gently chastises actual women’s critiques of these ersatz, fetishistic parodies of womanhood. Neither the father nor the son have any respect for women, women’s opinions simply do not exist or matter in their perverted, busty world. Soft skin and conical “prepubescent” gynecomastia are the center of their shared existence. How people don’t see the overwhelming maleness of the whole enterprise escapes me. I dont see a story of passivity here. At every step the father made choices to align with his son. He believes his son can be a woman not because he’s afraid of losing his son, but because other men (through the medium of books) told him this is a real thing. He summarily dismissed the claims of women that it isn’t. I think that’s the significant part here.
In a way, this essay is a testament to the Marcus's skill as a writer. If you think of James the father as a character in a short story, we see a brutal arc of tragedy rather than a rainbow of enlightenment. As I have commented elsewhere, his piece perfectly and beautifully (if unconsciously) depicts the agism within our entire culture but seen so clearly in families struggling with trans identified children and young people. James, clearly a deeply intelligent, sensitive, caring, and brilliant human being, is reduced at the end to a baffled and helpless toddler. What does that tell you?? Marcus is too honest a writer to hide that poignant reflection from the piece, which keeps it from being pure propaganda. This father cannot trust anything he has ever believed and must submit to "new rules." To some degree, that happens throughout our lives: we learn, change, and grow, sometimes from our own children. But the main benefit of aging (against all the inevitable suffering) in any human culture is the gathering of essential wisdom that can be passed on to the young. In our culture, our elders and even the middle-aged are "dinosaurs," who must override the knowledge, wisdom and understanding of beauty learned over a lifetime in order to stay connected to their young people. It's not right, and on some level, I believe Marcus knows it is not right.
Interesting insights, Elizabeth!
They ALL know it is not right.