Misinterpreting my first crush led me down a path of confusion, medical anxiety, and a 12 year long detour into a trans identity—here’s what I wish I had known.
My daughter, too, went silent and laid low her last years at home so we’d think the “phase” had passed and not try to talk to her. She made it very clear she wasn’t going to discuss her feelings with us. It’s so painful to be systematically shut out of a child’s life when you’ve had such a previously good relationship. If your kid gets into drugs or alcohol or an eating disorder or addiction, the rest of the world doesn’t rush to affirm them. I struggled with an eating disorder as a teen. Imagine if others had said to me, “You’re absolutely correct, you ARE fat. The problem isn’t in your mind. The problem REALLY is this fat body you’re in. Here are all the ways you can avoid eating. Here are the best methods for purging. Yayyy you! You’re on the right track. Now let’s get insurance to cover that liposuction, pay for your laxatives, and unquestionably affirm your “right” to be skinny!!! It’s complete insanity. And yet the majority of the population just goes along, or much more dangerously, pushes for that kind of reasoning. In a sane world, we compassionately send those who are hurting for help getting out of the deep, dark, rabbit hole. In our current world, we watch the pitchers of destruction wind up the ball and send these vulnerable kids hurling forward at light speed into the abyss. And the people cheer.
“In the past, trans men had to settle for being butch lesbians. But now we have the technology to live as our true selves- as straight men.” —Quote from an influencer
One thing I wish liberals understood — who are uncritically supportive of all things trans because they think it’s kind and compassionate — is that they are unwittingly supporting the medicalization of homosexuality.
Nope. They are unwittingly supporting the eradication of homosexuality by ´turning´ what would otherwise be a lesbian into a straight man or what would be a gay man into a straight woman.
Thank you for sharing your story and may it reach far and wide to as many girls as possible.
I completely lost my daughter to the trans abyss, so I come to this issue as a mom to help other girls embrace being a girl in whatever style or expression they choose. Here is my own way to reach girls as a mom: https://thetranstrain.substack.com/p/girls-are-you-sure
Together, you and I may be able to reach more girls. Thank you again for sharing your story.
I’m someone who grew out of dysphoria for my own reasons, but autism isn’t a part of my experience.
I’ve mentally theorized how traits from the autistic spectrum might relate to dysphoria, but I don’t have first-hand experience. This was so clarifying.
Thank you for this insightful essay. As a late diagnosed autistic lesbian, I recognise so much of the experiences you describe. I feel so lucky I grew up in the 80s, when transgender youth and the internet did not exist. I will share this with anyone willing to listen.
Your analysis also illustrates why it will always be difficult to be homosexual, no matter how much society becomes apparently accepting of difference. Because it means you are different from the majority of people who are the same sex as you. That challenge will never go away. ever.
We have thoroughly let down homosexual teenagers and thrown them to the wolves by encouraging them to explain their feelings by adopting a trans narrative rather than taking the time to gradually come to learn about themselves and accept themselves as they physically are.
Maia, I hope you write a book someday, you are an excellent writer!! And that's coming from someone who made writing their career. Not that my opinion is all that and a bag of chips, but I read a lot of content and your writing is refreshing. It's coherent (HUGE PLUS), real, raw, and to the point. It's unapologetic, and I love it. This is OldSchoolTrans from X, btw :-D
While I appreciate your advice for parents to try to talk about feelings, that only works if the young person is willing to engage in discussion. No matter how gently we tried to talk with our ROGD daughter--to ask her how she felt and where she thought those feelings came from, and to explain that her feelings were normal and okay--she couldn't hear us because she was convinced by internet lies and lies from her progressive church friends that we, the parents with whom she had had a close and loving relationship all her life, had suddenly become hateful transphobic bigots because we refused to affirm her in her delusion. I spent countless hours on the internet looking for information about the harms of social and medical transition and listened to many parent and detransitioner stories, all of which I attempted to share with my daughter. (I had agreed to watch and read things she wanted to share with me if she would do the same, but I alone kept up my end of the bargain.) She started binding in her late teens, went on testosterone at 20, and now at 24 identifies as a gay man. (She's a heterosexual woman in a relationship with a very normal-looking older man who identifies as queer.) We live in California, so she has been affirmed and love-bombed by everyone around her--family, friends, professors, fellow students, doctors, therapists, church members, ministers...her father and I are outnumbered. All we have left is prayer, and we pray day and night that she will wake up before she does more irreversible harm to her body.
This is not to say that your advice to parents isn't good, only that it may not work with everyone.
I wasn’t very ideological at 12 because the year was 2012, so I got caught up more in the Millenial social contagion of trans than this one. If a kid comes to you at 12 it’s a different story than if they do so at 16, 18, 21 etc. it’s easier to interfere when they’re young, but sometimes they don’t reveal the info until later
I always enjoy reading your posts Maia. You remind me of my daughter. She is 20 now and estranged from us. I have had a recent disappointment, and it has retriggered all my grief of losing her. I long to see her, to talk to her and have a relationship with her. It is a never-ending wound. She is now not even talking to her grandmother who has always been nothing but supportive of her. I am glad to hear you have returned to a good relationship with your parents. It gives me hope.
"Back in my day" even people who felt like they had the "soul" of the opposite sex found peace in their bodies and there was no urgency or desire to pursue surgery and hormones. Feeling like you had the soul of the opposite sex was more of a personal experience while you existed as your birth sex... it was not a belief that warranted surgical intervention. Surgery was seen as a last resort and somewhat drastic.
... until transitioning got easy. Now it's seen as routine, cakewalk, like no big deal, man. Just cut off your boobs and toss your nipples in the trash, it's all good broski. Everyone's doing it.
I see how this mindset shifted. 25 years ago, even the most hardcore dykes and butch lesbians and femme gay men were grounded in their birth sex, despite even major discomfort over their gender in social situations. They had gender dysphoria. Still, they did not seek to transition. They weren't suicidal, either. They were not even really suffering. It was more like an annoyance and frustration. Yes, gender dysphoria 25 years ago was not as severe as it is today. It just wasn't. Most people just handled it and I was in all the social spaces and nobody was threatening to kill themselves if they couldn't get on hormones by next week.
I can tell you what changed and why so many of today's self-identified trans people are having epic meltdowns and foaming at the mouth: the barriers to transition were systematically dismantled. Now, transition isn't something you need to think about long and hard, go through therapy to access, and really understand what you're getting into. Now, transitioning is just another piece of candy in the candy dish sitting out on grandma's table that you casually grab whenever you walk by...
As soon as transitioning became available via self-ID, suddenly people claim to be suffering from horrible gender dysphoria so bad that they want to die and can't wait even 3 months to get on hormones? I believe they really believe they're suffering, but that suffering stems from entitlement. In other words, they've set their sights on transitioning and if the world doesn't give it to them NOW, they're going to unalive themselves, not because of gender dysphoria, but because *how dare anyone tell me I shouldn't have surgery and hormones* (read: entitlement).
When these people throw tantrums and claim they would have killed themselves if they couldn't transition, it's not because living as their birth sex would have made them suicidal. It's because they have stored up so much contempt for people who had the audacity to tell them "no, you cannot have steroids and surgery tomorrow." The suicidal ideation that we see in most of these people is literally nothing more than an expression of their contempt for the existence of barriers to what they feel entitled to having free of charge, aka, medical transition. Gender dysphoria is not driving their suffering. That's just the excuse they use to get what they want.
I really believe that the more 'transitioning' became seen as an option, and the easier it became to get your sex marker changed without surgery or hormones, the less people became okay with living as their birth sex. I have witnessed entitlement increase in direct proportion to how easy/available medical transition became in the last 25 years.
I know a lot of people from 25 years ago who never felt completely comfortable as their birth sex socially, but nobody was suicidal. Nobody was that distressed over it. But as soon as transitioning became an option, I noticed people locked their sights on it as their chosen solution, and THAT seems to create more of the distress - when people KNOW they can medically transition relatively easily, they become even MORE uncomfortable with their birth sex because of their attachment to transitioning. They want to transition, they've made up their minds, and that increases their suffering. People are never honest with themselves about their motivation, so of course they don't see it. But I really don't think most of these people would even feel that distressed over their gender if transitioning wasn't so popular or easy.
I know for me, I never acted like a female and never bonded with females, I was accepted as one of the boys since I was basically in preschool, but even with all that, even being mistaken for a boy as a kid because I was allowed to wear boy clothes and have short hair, transitioning NEVER occurred to me until I met someone who did it. Until then, I didn't know it was possible. Once I knew, I made the decision and that was it.
Prior to knowing transition was possible and wasn't really that hard (hormones, anyway), I was just living as a masculine person who sometimes got chased out of female restrooms by security guards, so I used the men's room to keep the peace, still not ONCE ever thinking "I should be a boy/I should transition/I wonder if I can become legally male" - someone had to plant the idea in my mind first. Then I found trans-related LiveJournal communities and that was it. I saw what it took, I cheated the system to get what I wanted and bypassed all the rules even back in 2005, and I was on my way.
That’s exactly what happened to us! My daughter was also about 12 when this started, but we had no idea what was going on with her as trans ideology was not on our radar. She had no smart phone and very little access to computers at that age, but likely learned about this first at the progressive UU church we were attending at that time. A lot of her church friends were coming out as asexual, non-binary, etc. It was all so new to us, and at first we thought it was just a phase that she would outgrow—she had been such a girlie girl and had never once expressed dissatisfaction at being a girl. She was going through puberty and experiencing all the normal emotions girls experience when their bodies are changing, but she refused to believe that what she was experiencing was normal and instead believed the lie that if she was uncomfortable in her body, she must really be a boy. At 14 she wanted puberty blockers, testosterone, a chest binder, and a double mastectomy, all of which we refused because of her age, the long term health consequences, and the irreversible nature of these interventions. She hated us for not complying with her demands, and she pretended that she was rethinking being trans. That all changed when she turned 18, and you know the rest of the story from my previous post. We tried talking with her many times between age 14 & 18, took her to counseling (not helpful!) and prayed she would desist, and she led us to believe she was moving in that direction so we would back off and leave her to work things out on her own. Hindsight is 20/20, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know.
Hopefully parents today will be armed with more information and will know it when they see it. There are no guarantees, though. Teenagers are notorious for believing their parents are moronic dinosaurs. I never thought our daughter would turn on us the way she did as she was raised in a very loving home. How wrong I was. 😢
These issues often have to be handled very strategically, as if you’re fighting a war. Not against your child, but against the mind virus that has hijacked them
It sounds as though your initial discussion with your mother (about feeling uncomfortable in the locker room) completely elided the idea you could be gay. Was this a blind spot, or was it addressed and possibly dismissed? When did you figure out that homosexuality was an option? (even if you wouldn't apply it to yourself, but potentially if a friend expressed their feelings).
As a father to very young children, I am trying to figure out how to apply your story to my own parenting, and am looking for potential missteps your parents took (not to say I blame them, the commander in the field gets a lot of grace, but the after action reports are important for future operations!).
At 11/12 the thought of me being gay seemed impossible- because love was something for adults. No one really told me what crushes were until I was much older
Im not sure if anyone else has brought this up, but it is very telling that you stopped identifying as trans around the time the female frontal cortex forms (~25). Your writing is wonderful. Keep going, I'll keep reading!
My daughter, too, went silent and laid low her last years at home so we’d think the “phase” had passed and not try to talk to her. She made it very clear she wasn’t going to discuss her feelings with us. It’s so painful to be systematically shut out of a child’s life when you’ve had such a previously good relationship. If your kid gets into drugs or alcohol or an eating disorder or addiction, the rest of the world doesn’t rush to affirm them. I struggled with an eating disorder as a teen. Imagine if others had said to me, “You’re absolutely correct, you ARE fat. The problem isn’t in your mind. The problem REALLY is this fat body you’re in. Here are all the ways you can avoid eating. Here are the best methods for purging. Yayyy you! You’re on the right track. Now let’s get insurance to cover that liposuction, pay for your laxatives, and unquestionably affirm your “right” to be skinny!!! It’s complete insanity. And yet the majority of the population just goes along, or much more dangerously, pushes for that kind of reasoning. In a sane world, we compassionately send those who are hurting for help getting out of the deep, dark, rabbit hole. In our current world, we watch the pitchers of destruction wind up the ball and send these vulnerable kids hurling forward at light speed into the abyss. And the people cheer.
You’re right. It’s totally insane how we treat gender dysphoria dysfunction compared to other things
“In the past, trans men had to settle for being butch lesbians. But now we have the technology to live as our true selves- as straight men.” —Quote from an influencer
One thing I wish liberals understood — who are uncritically supportive of all things trans because they think it’s kind and compassionate — is that they are unwittingly supporting the medicalization of homosexuality.
Thank you for this brilliant essay.
Thank you for reading!
Nope. They are unwittingly supporting the eradication of homosexuality by ´turning´ what would otherwise be a lesbian into a straight man or what would be a gay man into a straight woman.
Thank you for sharing your story and may it reach far and wide to as many girls as possible.
I completely lost my daughter to the trans abyss, so I come to this issue as a mom to help other girls embrace being a girl in whatever style or expression they choose. Here is my own way to reach girls as a mom: https://thetranstrain.substack.com/p/girls-are-you-sure
Together, you and I may be able to reach more girls. Thank you again for sharing your story.
This is very needed work. Thank you.
I’m someone who grew out of dysphoria for my own reasons, but autism isn’t a part of my experience.
I’ve mentally theorized how traits from the autistic spectrum might relate to dysphoria, but I don’t have first-hand experience. This was so clarifying.
I’m so glad you gained knowledge from my essay
Thank you for this insightful essay. As a late diagnosed autistic lesbian, I recognise so much of the experiences you describe. I feel so lucky I grew up in the 80s, when transgender youth and the internet did not exist. I will share this with anyone willing to listen.
You should write an essay about that!
Thank you, Maia. This is beautiful. ❤️
Your analysis also illustrates why it will always be difficult to be homosexual, no matter how much society becomes apparently accepting of difference. Because it means you are different from the majority of people who are the same sex as you. That challenge will never go away. ever.
We have thoroughly let down homosexual teenagers and thrown them to the wolves by encouraging them to explain their feelings by adopting a trans narrative rather than taking the time to gradually come to learn about themselves and accept themselves as they physically are.
Outstanding essay, great contribution.
Reminds me a bit of Chloe Cole talking about how autism impacted her.
We really need more of these stories so thank you!!!
Thank you ❤️
Maia, I hope you write a book someday, you are an excellent writer!! And that's coming from someone who made writing their career. Not that my opinion is all that and a bag of chips, but I read a lot of content and your writing is refreshing. It's coherent (HUGE PLUS), real, raw, and to the point. It's unapologetic, and I love it. This is OldSchoolTrans from X, btw :-D
Thank you ❤️❤️❤️
Nice to see you on here
❤️❤️❤️
While I appreciate your advice for parents to try to talk about feelings, that only works if the young person is willing to engage in discussion. No matter how gently we tried to talk with our ROGD daughter--to ask her how she felt and where she thought those feelings came from, and to explain that her feelings were normal and okay--she couldn't hear us because she was convinced by internet lies and lies from her progressive church friends that we, the parents with whom she had had a close and loving relationship all her life, had suddenly become hateful transphobic bigots because we refused to affirm her in her delusion. I spent countless hours on the internet looking for information about the harms of social and medical transition and listened to many parent and detransitioner stories, all of which I attempted to share with my daughter. (I had agreed to watch and read things she wanted to share with me if she would do the same, but I alone kept up my end of the bargain.) She started binding in her late teens, went on testosterone at 20, and now at 24 identifies as a gay man. (She's a heterosexual woman in a relationship with a very normal-looking older man who identifies as queer.) We live in California, so she has been affirmed and love-bombed by everyone around her--family, friends, professors, fellow students, doctors, therapists, church members, ministers...her father and I are outnumbered. All we have left is prayer, and we pray day and night that she will wake up before she does more irreversible harm to her body.
This is not to say that your advice to parents isn't good, only that it may not work with everyone.
I wasn’t very ideological at 12 because the year was 2012, so I got caught up more in the Millenial social contagion of trans than this one. If a kid comes to you at 12 it’s a different story than if they do so at 16, 18, 21 etc. it’s easier to interfere when they’re young, but sometimes they don’t reveal the info until later
Please see my reply which appears above my first post.
It’s truly a disservice of the medical establishment to be presenting this as a viable path.
I always enjoy reading your posts Maia. You remind me of my daughter. She is 20 now and estranged from us. I have had a recent disappointment, and it has retriggered all my grief of losing her. I long to see her, to talk to her and have a relationship with her. It is a never-ending wound. She is now not even talking to her grandmother who has always been nothing but supportive of her. I am glad to hear you have returned to a good relationship with your parents. It gives me hope.
Great post, as always!!
"Back in my day" even people who felt like they had the "soul" of the opposite sex found peace in their bodies and there was no urgency or desire to pursue surgery and hormones. Feeling like you had the soul of the opposite sex was more of a personal experience while you existed as your birth sex... it was not a belief that warranted surgical intervention. Surgery was seen as a last resort and somewhat drastic.
... until transitioning got easy. Now it's seen as routine, cakewalk, like no big deal, man. Just cut off your boobs and toss your nipples in the trash, it's all good broski. Everyone's doing it.
I see how this mindset shifted. 25 years ago, even the most hardcore dykes and butch lesbians and femme gay men were grounded in their birth sex, despite even major discomfort over their gender in social situations. They had gender dysphoria. Still, they did not seek to transition. They weren't suicidal, either. They were not even really suffering. It was more like an annoyance and frustration. Yes, gender dysphoria 25 years ago was not as severe as it is today. It just wasn't. Most people just handled it and I was in all the social spaces and nobody was threatening to kill themselves if they couldn't get on hormones by next week.
I can tell you what changed and why so many of today's self-identified trans people are having epic meltdowns and foaming at the mouth: the barriers to transition were systematically dismantled. Now, transition isn't something you need to think about long and hard, go through therapy to access, and really understand what you're getting into. Now, transitioning is just another piece of candy in the candy dish sitting out on grandma's table that you casually grab whenever you walk by...
As soon as transitioning became available via self-ID, suddenly people claim to be suffering from horrible gender dysphoria so bad that they want to die and can't wait even 3 months to get on hormones? I believe they really believe they're suffering, but that suffering stems from entitlement. In other words, they've set their sights on transitioning and if the world doesn't give it to them NOW, they're going to unalive themselves, not because of gender dysphoria, but because *how dare anyone tell me I shouldn't have surgery and hormones* (read: entitlement).
When these people throw tantrums and claim they would have killed themselves if they couldn't transition, it's not because living as their birth sex would have made them suicidal. It's because they have stored up so much contempt for people who had the audacity to tell them "no, you cannot have steroids and surgery tomorrow." The suicidal ideation that we see in most of these people is literally nothing more than an expression of their contempt for the existence of barriers to what they feel entitled to having free of charge, aka, medical transition. Gender dysphoria is not driving their suffering. That's just the excuse they use to get what they want.
I really believe that the more 'transitioning' became seen as an option, and the easier it became to get your sex marker changed without surgery or hormones, the less people became okay with living as their birth sex. I have witnessed entitlement increase in direct proportion to how easy/available medical transition became in the last 25 years.
I know a lot of people from 25 years ago who never felt completely comfortable as their birth sex socially, but nobody was suicidal. Nobody was that distressed over it. But as soon as transitioning became an option, I noticed people locked their sights on it as their chosen solution, and THAT seems to create more of the distress - when people KNOW they can medically transition relatively easily, they become even MORE uncomfortable with their birth sex because of their attachment to transitioning. They want to transition, they've made up their minds, and that increases their suffering. People are never honest with themselves about their motivation, so of course they don't see it. But I really don't think most of these people would even feel that distressed over their gender if transitioning wasn't so popular or easy.
I know for me, I never acted like a female and never bonded with females, I was accepted as one of the boys since I was basically in preschool, but even with all that, even being mistaken for a boy as a kid because I was allowed to wear boy clothes and have short hair, transitioning NEVER occurred to me until I met someone who did it. Until then, I didn't know it was possible. Once I knew, I made the decision and that was it.
Prior to knowing transition was possible and wasn't really that hard (hormones, anyway), I was just living as a masculine person who sometimes got chased out of female restrooms by security guards, so I used the men's room to keep the peace, still not ONCE ever thinking "I should be a boy/I should transition/I wonder if I can become legally male" - someone had to plant the idea in my mind first. Then I found trans-related LiveJournal communities and that was it. I saw what it took, I cheated the system to get what I wanted and bypassed all the rules even back in 2005, and I was on my way.
I love hearing about the olden days when gender nonconformity wasn’t such a big deal
Let's build a time machine!!
That’s exactly what happened to us! My daughter was also about 12 when this started, but we had no idea what was going on with her as trans ideology was not on our radar. She had no smart phone and very little access to computers at that age, but likely learned about this first at the progressive UU church we were attending at that time. A lot of her church friends were coming out as asexual, non-binary, etc. It was all so new to us, and at first we thought it was just a phase that she would outgrow—she had been such a girlie girl and had never once expressed dissatisfaction at being a girl. She was going through puberty and experiencing all the normal emotions girls experience when their bodies are changing, but she refused to believe that what she was experiencing was normal and instead believed the lie that if she was uncomfortable in her body, she must really be a boy. At 14 she wanted puberty blockers, testosterone, a chest binder, and a double mastectomy, all of which we refused because of her age, the long term health consequences, and the irreversible nature of these interventions. She hated us for not complying with her demands, and she pretended that she was rethinking being trans. That all changed when she turned 18, and you know the rest of the story from my previous post. We tried talking with her many times between age 14 & 18, took her to counseling (not helpful!) and prayed she would desist, and she led us to believe she was moving in that direction so we would back off and leave her to work things out on her own. Hindsight is 20/20, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know.
Hopefully parents today will be armed with more information and will know it when they see it. There are no guarantees, though. Teenagers are notorious for believing their parents are moronic dinosaurs. I never thought our daughter would turn on us the way she did as she was raised in a very loving home. How wrong I was. 😢
These issues often have to be handled very strategically, as if you’re fighting a war. Not against your child, but against the mind virus that has hijacked them
I agree wholeheartedly! If only we knew then what we know now! I hope someday she will appreciate why we didn’t affirm her or give in to her demands.
It sounds as though your initial discussion with your mother (about feeling uncomfortable in the locker room) completely elided the idea you could be gay. Was this a blind spot, or was it addressed and possibly dismissed? When did you figure out that homosexuality was an option? (even if you wouldn't apply it to yourself, but potentially if a friend expressed their feelings).
As a father to very young children, I am trying to figure out how to apply your story to my own parenting, and am looking for potential missteps your parents took (not to say I blame them, the commander in the field gets a lot of grace, but the after action reports are important for future operations!).
At 11/12 the thought of me being gay seemed impossible- because love was something for adults. No one really told me what crushes were until I was much older
Thank you for sharing your story.
Im not sure if anyone else has brought this up, but it is very telling that you stopped identifying as trans around the time the female frontal cortex forms (~25). Your writing is wonderful. Keep going, I'll keep reading!