I never thought I would be one of the lucky ones. My son is desisted. And as more time passes, I’m seeing him become more and more comfortable in his own skin, building a well-adjusted, well-rounded life for himself. It’s almost to the point where I am not worried about him getting sucked back into the cult when he goes off to college. Not quite to that point of course—as you all know, once you are touched by gender ideology, your life will and can never be the same. There will always be that lingering, persistent doubt, not to mention your lost faith in humanity. That said, I see a path now to a normal life, or at least one more similar to the life I had pre-gender ideology.
This is not the only reason why I am celebrating a successful 2023. What’s bringing me rays of hope this year is that I see the ranks of desisters and detransitioners growing! It’s almost common enough now that most civilians I’ve encountered know of at least one teen or young adult who has shifted through some alternate identities and wound back on their actual one. I have three examples of this just in my own family! That personal experience is enough to cure most people of the misguided “born in the wrong body” trope. It was always the activist’s successful insertion of the certainly of trans into schools, the government, and our culture in general that led to the demonizing of parents who push back. If that certainty is in question – and it most certainly is! – the moral imperative to support transition must gradually fade.
My son was one of the first desisters in my support group. While my situation gave some hope to others (or at least I tried to spread some hope!), the vast majority of my cohort were still suffering. Now, I’m hearing about desisters in the support groups all the time. This is no consolation at all for the many parents I know who are still in the trenches, with children, teens, and young adults that wield their trans-identities like armor to protect them from a scary world, or like an automatic weapon to exert outsized control on their families, friends, and the world around them. But, I actually think it should be source of hope for these families as well, because if the world moves on, their kids will eventually as well. Not soon enough perhaps, but I am starting to have faith that we as a society WILL move past this insane, scary, and wholly regrettable human era.
What I am going to resolve in 2024 is to continue to be part of that movement away from gender ideology. When I was fighting for my son’s life (or that’s how it felt at least), I leapt headlong into guardian mode, overprotective, hypersensitive, domineering, and frankly, smothering. I felt that was what I had do to—and I guess it worked. But that is not going to help me at all in forging a strong bond with my soon-to-be adult child, and my single-minded focus on gender and its evil isn’t conducive to modeling healthy behaviors for my son. What I would like to model is that life is to be lived and experienced, and that one aspect of you cannot be and is not all of what you are. I can’t tell him he is more than gender, while being all gender, all the time myself. So, this year, I’m going to show him that I enjoy life. I’m going to make more friends, spend time outside with my dog, and start a couple of new hobbies. I’m going to balance my work and home lives better, and I’m going to get off my phone when I’m with my family. I’m going to make dedicated time for my son and my other kids and be fully present when I do. And (this one’s the hardest) I’m going to do my best to suppress extreme responses to mentions of gender in the news or in my social circles and pretend to just shrug it off like it’s not worth my time.
That said, I will continue to fight and push back against gender ideology, I will be brave enough to speak out and assert the truth whenever I have the opportunity in my daily life. Now that my son is desisted I have the freedom to do this, and the obligation to exercise this freedom. At the same time, I pledge to move myself forward, to be a whole person, like my son is becoming, and to feed those parts of myself that I have let languish—and to know that, when I do this, it’s part of what it will take to repair our society and end gender ideology once and for all.
May 2024 be the year where all of us get a reprieve from sadness, frustration, fear, and anger, and make way for hope, rebuilding, and the love and trust of our families. Happy New Year!
