#151 Stephanie Davies-Arai Interviews Parents of Gender Confused Boys
Leading expert Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend discusses Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria with two concerned mothers, Emily and Marie, who are involved with Genspect, an international alliance of parent and professional groups whose aim is to advocate for parents of gender-questioning children and young people. They discuss current parenting struggles within the transgender movement, the role of feminism in protecting all children, and Autism, which affects many girls struggling with gender identity as well.
Listen here (Transcript below):
Transcript:
Stephanie Davis Arai interviews parents of gender confused boys
Stephanie: Welcome to FiLiA podcast. I'm Stephanie Davis Arai, writer and founder, and director of Transgender Trend.
Today I'll be interviewing two mothers, Emily and Marie about their experience with parenting trans identified boys. Huge, thanks to FiLiA for hosting this podcast.
Emily and Marie are key members of the new global parent support organization called Genspect launched on June the 19th. Genspect’s aim is to raise parent’s voices in relation to concerns about the treatment of their children for gender dysphoria.
The concerns raised by the two parents I'll be talking to you today will resonate with many parents across the world who are experiencing an unprecedented situation. Whereby they are expected to accept without question that their daughters are now their sons or their sons are now their daughters. Much has been said and written about the huge increase of referral rates of children to gender clinics, especially in relation to teenage girls, not so much has been written about boys.
So I'm delighted to be redressing that balance a bit in this podcast. The communication I get from parents, boys are also caught up in the phenomenon of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which is a term coined by the researcher, Lisa Littman, to describe adolescents who suddenly develop gender dysphoria after the onset of puberty.
The other thing I'd like to emphasise in this discussion today is what mothers are going through and how mother’s voices are being silenced through accusations of bigotry and transphobia if they do not go along with gender ideology. Mothers of trans identifying children are especially vulnerable as the priority is to protect their relationship with their children.
A statistic from the gender dysphoria support network shows that 95% of the attendees are mothers and just 5% are men. There are notable exceptions to that, fathers are just as concerned about what's happening. But this statistic confirms my experience of the overwhelming number of parents who contact Transgender Trend are also women and mothers.
So I'm interested in how this ideology, which has become a very, very toxic political debate again, silences women's voices.
I'd like to start with you Emily asking you: what is Genspect and why it was formed? If you could talk a bit about how much mothers’ voices in particular have been silenced until now and how parents have been dismissed, even in gender clinics, when your child was vulnerable and needed advocacy from you.
I'm particularly interested to hear your view on the impact on you, of mother's voices being silenced.
Emily: Well, thank you Stephanie, for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity to share what parents are going through. Genspect is an international alliance of parents and professional groups with the aim of advocating for parents of gender questioning teens and children.
The main focus is to allow parents an opportunity to network with each other. All the parents are radically in favour of gender non-conformity without the need to rush to medicalisation, they want to give young people space to explore their identities without feeling pressure, to fit in a box or change their body in some way.
They're pro LBG, they're pro dialogue, anti-transphobia and anti-exclusion. So the main focus is just to open up a new conversation for parents, because like you said, parents have been silenced in all of this. Parents have been told, if you don't immediately affirm your child in their questioning their gender, you are a bigot and your child will commit suicide, which we all know is not true.
Mothers, I think take a lot of the pressure of this because there's a lot of pressure on mothers in general to maintain the parent child bond. And so you just have to question, what does that mean? What does it mean to be responsible for the entirety of the parent child bond? Myself. I have a child who is at times gender questioning, he's in and out of it, mostly out these days, but sometimes, and it reminds me of anorexia a little bit. When things get stressful, it's a comfort to think if only I wasn't myself, I would be more comfortable or happy.
I got involved in February of 2021 with a parents group, but I have been personally dealing with this since May of 2020, just after Labour day, I guess, or Memorial day around the George Floyd thing that triggered it for my son.
Stephanie: I'm interested in what you said about the parent child bond and the fact that it is mothers who are given that responsibility for children, how their children turn out. I mean, from Freud onwards, there is a lot of blame on mothers if their children don't turn out well or their children make mistakes or whatever it is.
And I think parenting as well puts a lot of pressure on mothers and the role to be almost the archetypal mother who is constantly nurturing and protecting and self-sacrificing for their child. But of course the mother's role is much more complicated them than that.
In the animal kingdom, you will see that mothers will bite or push their cubs away if they're getting annoying. Part of the role of mothers is to be sometimes rejecting, not always accepting, sometimes say no, sometimes not allow things that the child wants. It's a very tricky, nuanced and complicated role.
but I am interested in how it is mothers who get the blame. It seems to me that in this particular area, mothers are getting the blame for being so-called unsupportive, if they don't go along with gender ideology and totally accept everything that it says, and that a mother's role is to support and the only way to support your child is by instantly affirming their gender identity, without question.
Emily: My personal take on gender ideology is that I don't believe in it. That's been an interesting paradigm for my family and observing the wider world. There’s a lot of therapists and we tried one ourselves and she told me that I needed to prioritise the parent child bond, and the way that I would help the situation was to get in touch with my son's feelings and stop overthinking everything and being so intellectual. And just go with the feeling. And I said to her, this is absurd. I'm not doing that. And she said, you're going to destroy the bond, and then you won't have any relationship.
And that's a scary thought for a parent, the parent themselves as vulnerable, that somehow their action or inaction will destroy a parent child bond. You've had this child for 16, 17, 18, 19 years. And all of a sudden you're being questioned and told that if you don't, everyone will suffer and it's your fault. It's tremendous guilt.
Stephanie: And that's part of what I think mothers are particularly susceptible to because we are given the full responsibility for our children that we're very susceptible to guilt, if we make mistakes or feel that we've got it wrong. Although, of course we are human beings and parents always make mistakes and luckily children are robust enough to survive them.
But we put impossible standards on ourselves to be the perfect parent, because I think of the enormous pressure on mothers to be in that role. But the idea that the most important thing is that we listened to our child's feelings is huge part of parenting advice today. And there's a massive parenting advice industry.
I've heard it a lot with the parents that I've worked with over 20 years, that parents are expected to listen to their child's feelings. And this has become, we must agree with our child's feelings.
When I was a child, our feelings weren't listened to at all, and it's good that we listen to children's feelings now, but we've almost gone to the opposite extreme where the message we're sending to children is your feelings are the most important thing and they control you.
And the message should be your feelings are valid, but you control your feelings and you can act in ways that, despite your feelings, you can still act in the best ways possible.
Emily: It brings up the concept of responsibility. Who is responsible for who's feelings? And when you place the responsibility for a child's feelings on the parent, you say my child desires and therefore you deliver, is that really the role of a mother?
Stephanie: Marie would you like to come in and talk about that? The role of mothers, the blame that mothers get and the silencing of mother's voices, which, goes along with the silencing of women's voices generally in this area, and that that mothers in particular are called bigots or transphobes or unsupportive, if they don't instantly affirm their children.
Marie: Yes. I think the trans is the latest iteration of blaming the mothers. I have a child who identifies as trans who is autistic. And in the 1950s, they were called refrigerator mothers, the mothers of children with autism. And then later on, that was not the case. And then I have a child with anorexia and there was also a lot of parent blaming, particularly blaming the mothers for the child’s problem. So I see that element playing itself out with this too, but I think now it's much worse. And I think even we, the good mothers, feel that we're responsible for our child's happiness. Stella O’Malley wrote a book called Cotton Wool Children, where she addresses some of the issues of how we feel the responsibility that our children need to be happy and protected.
So all of a sudden, when a child is doing something that is so dangerous, like wanting to take hormones and has deluded thinking in and they want to erase their history, we’re supposed to go along with that for the sake of their ‘happiness,’
I think it's wrong because we have their long-term wellbeing and we have the life experience that they don't have, to know what's going to happen down the road. Society doesn't really care about my child or Emily's child. All they care about is, whatever is the ideology or whatever the fat is or whatever the people making money off of this, you know, unfortunate people, everybody has their own agenda.
We, the parents, we are the mothers. We are the only ones who truly know our children and some mothers and some parents out of fear, they sell out to the idea that the way to make her children happy or protect them is to go along with this. But I think deep down, every parent would not choose this, if they're thinking long-term for the wellbeing of that child.
We have to look at the full picture. What happens five, 10 years down the road? Not just ‘is my child going to be miserable or happy right now.’
Stephanie: Yeah. It's interesting. What you said about making your children happy. I've really noticed in a lot of the reports of parents who go along with affirming their child is the opposite sex. Often what they say is I just want my child to be happy. Of course we all do. It certainly makes life a lot easier for us if our children are happy, of course, we want our children to be happy. It’s the main major consideration, but we also, as parents think about the long-term effects on children.
So my child being happy might be allowing them to eat chocolate for every meal, but I don't allow that because I also have a responsibility for their long-term health.
So that idea, that being concerned about your children's happiness and affirmation is a way of achieving that always is a bit of a red flag for me. It sort of suggests that parents who don't go along with it don't want their children to be happy and are unsupportive of their children. any comments on that?
Marie: I think we need to define what we mean by happiness. I mean, I think, a lot of our kids particularly have had some hard things happen in their lives. Some have had big trauma and traumatic events happen to them, but a lot of them have felt lonely, have felt isolated, have been bullied in school because they're very smart. Some are on the spectrum, some have ADHD, you know? I think that they're looking for a quick fix to these sense of lack of belonging, this unhappiness. Not feeling like they fit in their bodies, whether it's just being a teenager or whether it is because they have some neuro-divergence in their brain or whatever it may be.
Instead of learning coping mechanisms and maybe this is where we as parents need to be more aware and recognise the signs of what our children might be having some mental health issues, but they want something quick and some kids will go to drugs and for our kids, a new drug is this trans fad. They're just trying to find something that will satisfy that feeling of discomfort and sadness that they feel inside.
So, I mean, for my son, I don't know that he's ever going to be ‘happy’ because he has to learn to live in the body and the brain in which he exists as an autistic person. I think that what he needs is to learn healthy coping mechanisms and also if possible, dig deep into those things that have made him really sad and depressed and address those things.
But I just don't think that everybody in the world is going to live in a place of giddiness and happiness all the time. I mean, life is hard and we can find some joy in certain moments, but for some people life is hard. And I think my son is one of those people. Maybe Emily has other ideas?
Emily: I'm sort of at a loss for words for this, because it brings up a lot of my own spiritual beliefs and where I think that our universal attribute we all have in common is human suffering. And this represents to me an absolute suffering of the mind of young people and how do we, as parents help them to reconcile and accept that suffering is part of being human.
And I listened a lot to the de-transitioners’ talk. I really like their stories and they resonate with me because they often tell the same story. I went down this checklist and I accomplished all of the things I had to accomplish with this transition, I was passing as the other sex. And then I was left with myself again, and I was left with this feeling of emptiness that I had before.
And it's hard to tell a teenager that their brains are just not thinking long-term. but it's there and they're going to figure it out one way or the other.
Stephanie: It's also the case, isn't it that the adolescent years are not easy. They can be very painful. It can be a huge challenge. And often, we all have a sort of rocky road towards adulthood and it's a massive, massive change. You are literally changing from a child into an adult. Nobody said that I was going to be easily. And so the idea that you somehow should not experience any suffering or any difficulty at that stage of life, seems to me to be setting teenagers up for a sort of false ideal or the idea that you should always be happy, or we have a right to happiness. The struggles of life can be what lead us to ultimate satisfaction and happiness with life and there's nothing wrong with having to go through those hard times because the rewards are great.
So I wonder whether we do set our children up for as false expectations in life. If that's always our first priority, that they should be happy, sometimes they should be thinking of other people first. Sometimes they should be managing the frustrations and struggles of life In order to do the right thing or achieve ultimate satisfaction with life.
Emily: I agree with that. I think that one of the issues today is that kids don't have any life experience. They live at home. It's very safe. They're online, which is not safe, but they're online and they have the world in their palm. They have the entire internet, all this knowledge. And they think that they are so smart, but they have no life experience to make any sense of what they know or they think they know.
And who was saying this? I think it was Stella O'Malley. She said we've shrunk down childhood by introducing sex at a very young age, children as young as 10 are saying they're non-binary and then we've stretched out adolescence from maybe 13 or even 11, all the way to 25 or 28. So we've taken the best, most innocent part of life and made it smaller and stretched out the worst part of growing up to really long.
And I think, whoa, we've have this wrong and we need to back up a little bit and start extending childhood again. And then shrinking adolescence.
Stephanie: I think the issue here is treating children as adults as if they have the same understanding as adults, which they can't have. Because as you say, Emily, it's not so much about their level of maturity, but it's life experience, how you can possibly understand how you will feel. If you're a four-year-old boy saying I'm a girl, how you would possibly feel when you are aged 10 or age 17, age 25, or age 35, you can't know.
Something that you said Marie, that I'm interested in is you compared transgenderism as a new drug. And I've heard a lot from parents about the fact that their children seem to have been pulled into a cult.
And certainly a lot of the strategies of the gender identity lobby are cult like and that this manifests in their child suddenly speaking for the script, like a robotic repetition of something that they've read online or being taught somewhere else. So I'd be interested to know if that's your experience from your children
Marie: Absolutely. I wrote an essay that was titled ‘Help My Son has been Hijacked’ that he's been hijacked by the cult and his brain has been hijacked literally. Once we connect with other parents and we exchange stories, it's almost as if all of our children are reading from the same script and we are reading from the same script.
Like the ages may vary. The geographical places may vary but they're all connecting in the same virtual spaces and if they're connecting in real life, it's always like the cheerleaders, the girls who come alongside of them. And it's almost like they lose their ability to think by themselves.
And what is so ironic is that: Not only do they buy into the trans ideology, but a lot of them also buy into the critical theories. So all of a sudden they become rebels against the establishment against societal structures of putting them in gender or putting them in class or putting them down.
But they're being so manipulated. And the ones who are medicalised, like my son are absolute victims of the biggest capitalism scam that is going on right now, which is this medical experiment on our children and they're becoming these lifelong customers. So, it's a very insidious cult.
Dr Steven Hassan, who is one of the world's so called experts has even posted publicly on Twitter, that when he talks to the transitioners, the world acts like a cult, coming from someone who has so much experience dealing with cults and was a member of a cult himself, I think that says something.
There's also elements of like there's hypnosis videos, which sounds like what a lot of the cults do. They have them reciting mantras, endlessly, and our kids are listening to, I'm not saying every child, every boy is listening to hypnosis videos, but I know my son was exposed to that and a lot of our kids have been exposed to that. So yes, they are in a cult a virtual cult.
Stephanie: Emily, would you like to make any comments on that?
Emily: I do think that there seems to be during the presentation to the parents, a common set of words. Like I was always this way. I always felt different. I was just born in the wrong body. It makes you wonder what is this when your child, all of a sudden says something like that, especially when you don't know what's going on. One day you wake up and they're there saying this thing. Some children write it or text or email. but yeah, they all use the same lines.
Stephanie: It's like, when I hear what children say, it's like reading that sort of treaties of a transgender lobby group. It could come straight from the website. As parents, because I think the most vulnerable teenagers will be influenced by those as they're influenced by everything online, particularly that use of mantras, which in themselves are hypnotising: ‘trans women are women’ ‘trans women are women’ the language is very simple, very easy to remember, very easy to repeat. And the more you repeat something, the more it is unconsciously assimilated. Of course, young people are, by the nature of them being younger, especially vulnerable to that. But of course the most vulnerable children are more vulnerable, more susceptible to those messages.
As parents of boys, I understand the influence on girls, how girls are influenced by messages about their bodies, messages that encourage their body self-hatred. And the fact that girls are the majority of social media users and the harms to girls are well documented.
As parents of boys, what do you think makes boys vulnerable to those messages? in your experience, have you got any ideas why boys would be influenced?
Emily: I think that boys, vulnerable boys play a lot of video games. And what video games do is disassociate the body and you're watching a body in front of you as if that is your body, and if you practice that enough, it becomes very easy to think. Well, that should be my body, this body that I have, isn't anything, it's ugly, it's not the way it should look. It's almost like a mantra of the mind, but it's a visual mantra. You're watching these unrealistic bodies in front of you move and operate. And then I think they're told by everybody else, well, you just can pick and choose what kind of body parts you want, you can just choose, pick, choose your own adventure, choose however you want this to look like. It's so easy changing your skin in Minecraft. I think that's why boys are vulnerable.
Marie: I agree with Emily, I think, but I see that as more as the gateway towards falling into the rabbit hole. I think the video games are definitely the way that they go in and then they get trapped. But for my son, his vulnerability as an autistic was what I mentioned already, which is a sense of not belonging of always trying to find where does he fit both in terms of belonging in his own body, and in his own skin.
I mean, he describes feeling as if his brain doesn't fit with his body or his arms and leg didn't fit with his body. Just that sense of that malfunction of his interception, of not being able to understand how his feelings fit, how, what he feels fits with what he's supposed to be. And I mean, I don't know, it's still confusing to even understand it, but I'm just trying to explain it the way he explained it to us. I think my son tried many things that were totally non-related to gender. He was non-conforming, but in boy ways, he wore summer clothes in the winter when it was really cold and he wore jackets and gloves in the summer when it was really hot. He dressed up into something that looked maybe like a Batman character, like the Penguin with a top hat and a cane. And he even wore a monocle for a season. And the thing about his, every time he tried to put on a character or do a voice, he would do Donald Duck when he was little, you know, that kind of weird voice. He would try to speak in accents, like a Russian accent when he was a teenager. Always trying to be somebody else because he was so uncomfortable being who he was and people that didn't applaud him for it. They kind of either ignored it, laughed at it, accepted it with a ‘well, that's Tom, you know, that's just who he is’.
But none of those things had traction, so he would stop them and then go to something else. But when he tried the trans thing, when he was told that he was queer, when he went looking on the internet for an answer to his discomfort that had nothing to do with gender. It was just ‘I'm uncomfortable in my skin I'm uncomfortable in who I am’ and the internet and two girls in university basically gave him the answer. ‘Oh, that means you are trans.’ All of a sudden when he tried that role, it stuck because he got applauded, he got popular, he got affirmation from the internet. All of a sudden he had everything that he had wanted all of his life, which was acceptance and to be the centre of attention.
I think that's a vulnerability for probably the majority of kids who are on the spectrum.
Stephanie: So yeah, it's interesting that the issue of social contagions raised by the study of Parental Reports on children, that children can be influenced. And then the contagion spreads and we've seen that, that is also more likely amongst teenage girls.
But I do think the virtual reality that our children spend a lot of time in has perhaps blurred the boundary between what's online and what's in real life. And as you said, Emily, they can have avatars. They can be whoever they want to be online and do whatever they want to do. You were talking about the comparison between the body they can create online and there are actual bodies that, that has been a way of increasing the insecurity of boys just in the same way as girls have been made to be insecure about their bodies through the objectification of women.
Marie: Yes, my son's avatar I think, is very telling in Dungeons and Dragons. He had an avatar that was a disembodied fairy. A ferry that basically was a head and body-less it was almost like an ethereal translucent body that was non-human, it didn't have a sex or anything like that.
So I think that is very telling of where his mind was at. He also told us that he wished that he could be the guy who gets the girl in the end, that he wished he could be a typical guy and have a girlfriend. But none of those things had worked out for him, you know, had been rejected by girls. so therefore, since he wasn't the typical guy who was athletic with a six pack. There's no typical guy, but, you know, in their minds, they think that's what a typical guy is supposed to look like and who gets the girls at the end. Then this made sense that he wasn't really a guy he was a woman.
Stephanie: In the communications I get from parents, it is overwhelmingly, parents of girls, because it's overwhelmingly girls who have been referred to gender clinics, but I think we do lose sight of the really unprecedented increasing the number of boys as well and the boys tend to get lost because girls outnumber them by so many.
What do you think it is that makes Autistic boys so vulnerable to this? Because from communications I get from parents about 90%, I'd say nearly 100% actually of parents, of trans identified boys.
Those boys are ASD. They are Asperger’s syndrome, they're OCD. Some previously come out as gay and amongst that, some have also had previous traumatic episodes to deal with in their lives. But certainly this is why I think that what I'm seeing is a number of boys who are also caught up in the rapid onset gender dysphoria phenomenon that we're seeing. And we're mostly saying that's teenage girls.
But I think it's changed for boys as well. But I hear from parents that they're autistic Asperger’s, OCD boys tend to hold onto something very strongly and go through phases where they will have an obsessive interest in something for a certain amount of time and then move on to something else.
So, Marie, could you talk more about that and what your thoughts are on that?
Marie: Yes, absolutely. I think we have both mentioned the vulnerability aspect of it. Emily pointed out the video gaming, which, absolutely. I agree with her. whether that is the thing that fits it or whether that's the gateway into the trans world, for some it's anime, also as a gateway into it.
But yes, the keeping them in that space is both something that could be a good thing and a really scary thing. The good part of it is that typically the autistic kids don't stay stuck on one thing forever. You know, they will obsessively hyper-focused on the one thing for whether it's months or years, and then they will move on to the next thing.
So for my son, when he was a toddler, he was Thomas the Tank Engine. And, then he got a little older, it was Minecraft and the Mario brothers so he kind of went through these stages where that's all he talked about and his friends would come and that's all he wanted to play and everybody else would outgrow it. And here is this teenager still playing Mario or Minecraft, whereas other boys had moved on.
But I think what makes it very frightening though, is that because of the medicalisation that is now playing a part in this, now we have this autistic boys or young men who instead of just being obsessed with ‘I'm a woman I'm going to dress like a woman I'm going to shave my body’ It's all about the ritual, it’s very performative. ‘I have to look like that ideal woman that I have in my head’ possibly an anime character, because I don't think that any woman looks the way that my son tries to look. Instead of just being about, ‘I'm going to do all these things, all these rituals, all of this obsessive compulsive behaviours to make myself look like a woman’.
Once they start taking hormones, you are dealing with a whole other level of this issue. Their brain changes, their body starts changing, and it could feed into more and more interest in pursuing this so to me cross sex hormones, wrong sex hormones are drugs. They may be legal and prescribed by doctors like opiates were, but I see them as drugs that are harming him and harming his brain.
This is new territory. I mean, if drugs were not involved, we would just take a deep breath and just wait this thing out and say, okay, well maybe it will be 2, 3, 4 years, who knows, but he'll come out on the other end of it. And I still believe that my son will and probably most of these autistic boys will come out of it at some point.
Many of them are going to be damaged for life. By the time this obsession, this fixation plays itself out.
Stephanie: Parents are on this pathway, we know what's coming up and its drugs. And children have been encouraged to see puberty blockers as the kind of logical next step.
And therefore it's imperative that they get those puberty blockers at stage two, right at the start of puberty. So their bodies don't start changing as it's put to them. They don't go through the so-called wrong puberty. And so the whole issue has become so much more stressful because of that opportunity that's coming up for the children to be medicalised.
What we know from the research is that once children are on puberty blockers, they don't tend to get off. Almost a hundred percent then go on to cross sex hormones. And we don't know what this treatment will do to the child's brain.
Although we have some studies, we have some previous studies to show the drop in IQ points. But particularly for vulnerable children, those cognitive effects are perhaps unseen, but quite devastating, quite very significant effects on a child's development.
As you say that the child no longer has the opportunity to really grow up and, see out a phase or a stage in their development as they would, if they went through any other identification as a teenager, as a goth or a punk or an emo, or whatever the other groups are in adolescents that teenagers can become obsessed with and then move on from. That chance is not there if children go on to medication.
Perhaps this is a chance for you as parents to really talk about that, that fear that you have, that your child will be stuck on the path that they might otherwise have grown out.
Emilly: I think that this for me brings up a lot of issues that I have with the movement in general, mostly medical safeguarding. Medical safeguarding exists to protect the very few that this would harm.
It doesn't exist to make sure we don't miss one person that this might benefit. It's to protect the most vulnerable. Something as serious as blocking puberty, you're blocking sexual development, you're taking away reproductive capability. And I truly believe that it is a human right to maintain body integrity for as long as you possibly can.
And if you're an adult and you've thought through this, and this is really what you want to do, fine, whatever, be an adult. Do it. But kids just don't have the life experience to be able to make long-term decisions like this. We don't even let kids buy a car until they're 18. You can't rent a car until you're 25.
As a society, we haven't made up these rules because you know, it's arbitrary. You cannot put yourself in a contract and be responsible for paying for a car until you're 18 years old but we're allowing these teenagers and these kids to make decisions that will affect their body, the number one thing of your whole life, your vessel that you exist in. It's disturbing to me to say the least.
Stephanie: Marie, do you want to say anything about that? As a parent, how to talk about your fears or your thoughts about that medical pathway?
Marie: Well, you know, it's interesting how your fears change.
So my son came out to us when he was 19. He was a little bit later in his feelings or his discovery of the gender dysphoric feelings and the trans issue came out for him later than for a lot of these teenagers. So he probably was like 18 when he started exploring this and 19 when he came out to us.
At that point, the hope is let's keep him safe. And maybe there will be an opportunity to talk about therapy later, but basically we were very fortunate that we found a non-affirming therapist, meaning his whole approach was let's wait and see, let’s push the pause button on this. Let’s not rush in to anything. You need to be an adult, a fully grown adult after 25 with a career and your own insurance and responsibilities before you make this decision.
So we had that person on our side supporting us in that, but when my son was 20, the internet won over his therapist and us, and the advice of people who loved him.
And he went to an OB GYN. And on the very first visit, got a prescription for hormones and testosterone blocker. Even before his blood work had come back. He had this prescription and started taking the hormones. After one visit.
We know he did not give her the medical history because this person would have probably set herself up for a lawsuit if she would have read his true risk factors from family illness and auto-immune and all kinds of disorders and things that run in our family.
She obviously didn't care that he was autistic and vulnerable. All she cared about was just to write him that prescription. And so I totally agree with Emily that we need gatekeepers. His therapist naively thought that a medical doctor would contact him to get his professional perspective on whether this person should be giving these hormones or not. He did not know that there is no need for such a thing. That doctors literally on the person's word can just write your prescription and put you on hormones. So now that he's on hormones our fear has come true.
So the next fear is, is he going to have surgery at some point in the future? I mean, he's 21. So your fears just kind of escalate with the stage at which they're at.
I think the parents who are most afraid are those who have 17-year-old kids, because they see that 18th birthday as the most dreaded birthday. They see the rite of passage of their kid go into university as the most fearful. It's so sad that not only are our kids being robbed of their transition to adulthood, which should be something that should be celebrated and applauded in a moment of joy. But it's become this horrible nightmare for so many.
The kids are in the nightmare, but they're asleep. They're in it. They just don't know it. They will wake up one day and realise it was a nightmare, but the parents are living the nightmare and it just doesn't stop. Even when you hear the stories of the transitioners, you know, there's so much pain there and suffering for everyone involved.
Stephanie: And you raised something that's really important for me that I see this age group of 17 to 25-year-old young people as sort of falling through the cracks. They don't go to the child and adolescent gender clinics. They go to adult clinics where they will have no counselling or any form of exploration at all. Not that there’s enough at the child and adolescent clinics, but they will get nothing.
And just as boys develop one or two years later than girls, in my experience, it's parents of boys who relate stories of the boys going off to university and becoming trans at uni, they joined the LGBT plus society and all universities in the UK are completely captured by trans ideology and silencing of any other viewpoints.
And of course, young people going off to university for the first time are again in a very vulnerable position because often it's the first time away from their parents, from their homes, from their friends. And they have to get on with, establishing themselves in a completely new environment, completely on their own.
And we are aware of mental health issues developing at universities. And yet once again, the issue is that when it comes to transgender, normal medical rules don't apply, normal developmental understanding and knowledge does not apply. They are like a magical group that set apart from all our other understanding about young people and children. I'm not sure what the age is that you can hire a car in the UK actually. But 25 seems to me to be reasonable for those car hire companies. I can see why they've put it at that age because the adolescent brain doesn't finish its full development until that around the mid-twenties. And that means that all of those typical teenage traits of not being able to look ahead to the future and understand long term consequences of behaviour, risk-taking, elevated reward systems that go into action when anything good happens.
When you look at the referrals to the Tavistock clinic, referrals are mostly centred around the 13, 14, 15, 16-year-old age group and then 17, it drops off and it's because the 17 year olds are not going to the child and adolescent gender clinic. They're going, or they're waiting for their appointments as an adult gender clinic where they know they'll just be prescribed their drugs with no questions asked.
And to me, the parents who are the responsible parents ask those questions, but we are in a position where our normal trust in the medical health providers, our normal trust in the therapists our normal trust in teachers, in schools, we can't depend on that because this area is treated as something completely different, because it's a really highly politicised issue.
In your experience as parents, of boys and young men, what do you think connects boys and girls in their vulnerabilities to identifying as transgender.
What are the issues that you think all children are vulnerable? And what are the issues that you think are unique to boys or different to girls from your experience as parents of boys?
Now, I talk a lot about girls my work has been about girls, but I also have three sons and a daughter. So, I've got great sympathy for the growing up of boys, and in particular issues that face boys in the culture that they're growing up in. But if you got any thoughts on that?
Emily: I think that boys and girls for that matter are given a concrete solution to a spiritual problem and it feeds right that adolescent brain that, oh, it looks just this so simple, I could just do this and I'll feel better.
And it's very simplistic thinking, not long-term.
I think that's kind of the main thing that connects all boys and girls in this. But I also think that boys are developing and children in general are developing their sexuality in a way that we've never seen sexual development in all of human history. For ever boys and girls were together in public or at parties or at school or wherever and there was no mediation of a electronic device and there was attraction or not attraction and dating and then they would figure it out. You know, the old let's meet down at the golf course and make out, or I don't know what you call it in England, they don't do that anymore. These kids are so sexually underdeveloped.
And so their sexual development is occurring in a vacuum online with this obscene amount of pornography available. And sometimes you're not even looking for it. It's just there. And that affects the sexual development of a teenager. And boys have a highly internalised private experience. Girls share. They want to talk. They are kind of out in the open with what they are feeling about everything. Whereas boys internalise most things, including their sexual development. So in that way, I think they're different.
Marie: I agree with Emily. There's a couple other things that I think are common.
We've talked to several professionals, such as Dr Steven Levine I'm not sure, and he said that he's treated probably thousands of children and adolescents and young people with a gender dysphoria. And he said 100% had social anxiety in common or social awkwardness. It didn't matter if they were boys or girls. They had that in common that sense of not really fitting in.
And then the other thing that I think is really playing into it, and that is a societal issue is absolute rigid gender roles. If you're a woman you're supposed to look this way, if you're a man you're supposed to look this way, and all of a sudden the concept of a tomboy, the girl who acted like a boy and wanted to be like the boys and wanting to play like the boys. There's no room for that sort of behaviour exploration at all.
All of a sudden now, if you're going to act that way, then now you are trans. And then the same thing for boys. Boys who were soft and artistic, or, maybe a little bit feminine, maybe boys who would grow out and be heterosexual or boys who would be homosexual, either way. All of a sudden they're not allowed to be that soft kind of boy. No, you're trans you're not boy. And, it's quite horrifying actually, when you even hear the testimonies here in the United States, there's been some hearings in the Congress where parents who have supported their children transitioning, you listened to their stories and it is horrifying because you realising this girl, was just a tomboy or this little boy just liked to wear his sister's skirts or something and all of a sudden the parents have bought into this mentality that –whether it's teachers or parents or whoever out there they're telling this kids:
‘it's okay if you feel like a girl, it's okay to feel like a boy because you can be a boy or a girl.’
I think that is very frightening and what's ironic is not only are the, the gender roles rigid, but once you become trans and you want to be a woman, particularly from my experience with a boy, I don't really have experience with a daughter doing this, but all of a sudden they're supposed to look a certain way.
I mean, at home it was ironic because my daughter had got a very, my daughter is a police officer, and she got very short haircut and my son had hair down to his hip, you know, and in his mind to be a woman, you have to have long curly hair. I don't understand why the whole body has to be shaved because women have body hair.
But then once you will get boxed yourself into this cross-gender thing, then you have to be so stereotypically what you have in your mind.
Stephanie: It's something that I noticed as my four children who are all in their twenties now. During the time that they were growing up, how much it was over the last decade, how much toys and clothes and shoes and books suddenly became pink and blue, very highly exaggeratedly, gender stereotyped, and all of children's marketing was highly gendered stereotyped.
I watched that happen as my children grew up. And my daughter was suddenly presented with Lego friends, which was a really patronising toy that was like a playmobile it wasn't didn't have any building, no building skills required anymore. You could put girls in a, in a coffee shop or a hairdresser, they could have a make-over or whatever it was.
And my daughter was just as good at building complicated Lego models as her older brothers. And was always very proud of them, so that all of that happened in toys and clothes and books, everything became very delicate and passive and sexualized the girls and very tough and macho for boys.
And so I think that kind of marketing towards children, I still get why its allowed and there aren't any restrictions on that, but I would think that that, that would have the same effect on girls and boys who were very suggestible, of course, growing up as the messages they get from their culture.
I think it's more exaggerated with girls because they then see images of grown women being sexualised and objectified. And that ties into what they're hearing as girls. Whereas boys have become more objectified, but they still have a greater range of role models to look up to, apart from that.
But I think that you're right. There are boys who are more sensitive who have a, a greater range of interests who don't feel comfortable within such a rough and tumble macho culture. Where is the place for them? If they're not in the blue box, the only other place is the pink box for the girls.
So I think there is those kinds of influences come very, very early in that very sort of gender stereotyped culture is introduced right from the start for girls and boys.
And I think it does influence parents as well, because it's easier to pick out the, the pink thing for your daughter and the blue thing for your boy, because it doesn't involve any thinking. And if you have to think and challenge something, you're less likely to do that. So I think gradually parents are influenced as well by that culture we've created for children.
But I think it's also interesting what you said about boys and girls and boys being more internal. I think boys tend to also like sort of simple solutions rather than talking things through as girls do. The boys, and I'm trying not to stereotype here, but I think generally there's a wish for a solution to be able to give an easy solution to something.
But also I wonder that internalising something means that boys don't as much as girls talk through issues and therefore be able to process them, which is the positive side of talking things through. However, when girls talk things through, they tend to take on each other's emotions. So if one girl in the group is depressed and suffering anxiety, then other girls will become depressed as well, in solidarity.
And so girls have a sense of sympathy or empathy with other girls and how they're feeling. Perhaps boys also do, but boys are not so allowed to express that and cut it off.
We never know what is culture and what, you know, what is nature and what is nurture. It's probably a bit of, but anyway,
Emily: I don't know if it's not that they're not allowed to. I think personally in our family, we encouraged talking about things and we ask really hard questions and expect that there's a reasonable effort in the response not, well, I just feel like that. Well, that's not an okay response for me.
This is a life-changing decision, extraordinary claims, need extraordinary evidence, bring it. and so far that's really been helpful in our conversations. but another thing that piqued my interest when Marie was talking was that there's this lying going on this lying to children, that somehow they can be the opposite sex. It's just not possible.
And I refuse to lie to my children. When my son was five, he claimed that the baby came out of the belly button. Well, I said, no, the baby doesn't come out of the belly button. And he said, well, no, it does. And we got into it. And finally he accepted that the baby comes out of the vagina from the womb.
And I explained it to him, I showed him a picture and said, look, this is how it happens. And, and he dropped it for a long time. We live out in the country. and so he saw some animals mating once and he wanted to know how the sperm got to the egg. And it was a hard conversation to have with an eight-year-old. Because he had seen the animals, it was a little bit easier to explain it.
And I promised myself, I will never lie to you. I will never tell you something false. And that is in my constitution. And I told him the other day, I will not start lying to you now because it makes youth feel like maybe you don't understand the world, which I don't think you do.
I don't think it's possible that you can become a woman.
Marie: Yeah. I'd like to address the issues of internalising. I think that part of the autism trait is internalising of your feelings and having a really hard time expressing them. People on the spectrum feel deeply, they can be very empathetic and compassionate and even empathic of taking the feelings of other people, but it's just hard for them to be able to express them.
My son sometimes does a really good job of expressing how he's feeling to us, but in therapy, he refused to dig even to scratch the surface of why he might have started having these feelings. He wouldn't hear of it. He just wanted the solution, the solution, the solution. And I think that's like Emily says, you know, they don't want to go through a process, they just want the outcome. Unless the process is hormones, but you know, they see the taking the hormones as the outcome. This is what I want. I think for a lot of the kids from the spectrum, and this is true for a lot of what the parents are sharing in the groups that we're a part of. it is kind of a lonely thing. There's a lot of these kids that have not told their grandparents. They have not really come out to their friends. They haven't come out to their neighbours. I mean, I am quite amazed with our son who was doing hormones and yet even the people closest to him had no idea what he was doing. They didn't know what was going on. They knew something was going on, but they didn't know what was going on because he hadn't told them. And yet in our home, we're seeing all of these transformations and him wanting to be a woman and him being referred to as a woman. But he truly, a lot of it is in his imagination and the internet.
He has a definite female persona on the internet and like his Amazon name is the female name. And, you know, obviously he has a female version of himself all over the internet, but he himself in the real world hasn't fully really come out, so it's very confusing. I think for him, it's so much of it is in his head and what he envisions about himself and it's almost like a lonely game he plays.
Stephanie: Do you think that part of being on the spectrum that you, compartmentalise aspects of your life?
Marie: Yes, absolutely. I don't think he's comfortable at all with any of this. But he does and has always compartmentalised. He could put on a persona and be the student and then come home and crash from exhaustion.
He could go to social events with his really good group of friends, probably a lot of them on the spectrum themselves and come home and be absolutely spent and wiped out from the effort that it took or go to work. so he does. He masks and puts on and then comes back. So this is yet another mask.
I'm not really sure where right now, because he doesn't live at home anymore. And he's somewhat estranged from us. But I'm not really sure where this mask is being worn other than the internet. but I don't think he's fully … it's very strange because he's doing hormones, you would think is fully committed to it, but he hasn't socially taken the steps to tell the world, okay, I am this woman. I am this new person. He hasn't done that at all.
Stephanie: It always strikes me that the story is ‘I hid my true self and then I came out as transgender’ But the extent to which you then also have to hide what you truly are when you've transitioned in particularly when you've taken medical treatment, that superficially makes you appear to be the opposite sex, how you have this awful dark secret that you are still trying to hide from other people that I'm actually female, but I'm presenting as a man. I look like a man, but I'm actually female.
Marie: I think that's one of the difference also between boys and girls and a lot of the therapists have mentioned it, which is for the girls they typically have a social transition first. They start wearing the men's clothes. They do the man's mannerisms. They want to be called the man name in school or whatever. So they're out, as guys and are masculine for a while before they go for the testosterone.
With a boy. It's like the opposite almost. It's like, give me the hormones, before they transition and it may take them a while to transition. For some, they just do the hormones for a while, but they're not fully out as females either. So I think that's a difference between the two of them.
Stephanie: we're getting towards the end of the podcast. I want to say thank you so much for coming on and talking about your experiences as mothers of boys. And I'm very aware of the fact that not only are girls given more attention, but mothers of boys don't even get the feminist support. There is a lot of feminist concern about what girls are doing, what's happening to girls.
And I think there should also be to the same level of support towards parents of boys. And I hope that this podcast has done something towards addressing that, that mothers of boys also deserve feminist support for this situation, which really is unprecedented, no parents ever expected to be facing this.
Is there anything more that you need that you think parents of boys would need or would appreciate in terms of support or in terms of raising awareness really even though the proportion of boys as there still is an enormous rise in the number of boys and what we can do to help parents of boys.
Emily: One of the things that parents can do to help their boys is to recognise when their child is disassociating from their body too much and getting too addicted to the internet. I don't think we talk enough about internet addiction and the loneliness that it comes with.
A few friends of mine have read Abigail Shriver's book and Irreversible Damage, and all of them have young children and they said, ‘oh, we're going to clue into our kids and curb the internet use, because we now know that this is bad then, and this is a little bit out of control.’
It's so hard because you really want to give your child freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility and that's our job as parents until they can grow up a little bit.
Marie: Yeah. It's following on from Emily said: when I look back at how my sister and I grew up, I mean, we literally probably didn't spend hardly any time inside the house except to do homework.
I mean, we were outside playing all the time and of course we didn't have phones and the internet and all that when I was growing up. But, if I had to do over one thing and I do have regret about it, I would not have put an electronic device in my seven-year-old son's hands. Everything changed when he got that device. He was playing outdoors and running around and being an active boy until he got that.
My advice to parents is take them outside, have them play, give them outdoor chores. I know COVID threw the world upside down, but we're kind of coming out on the other side of that. And I don't know when we shirked our responsibilities of parents pointing the finger at myself, that we decided that it was okay for our kids to spend hours upon hours on an electronic device and in their rooms locked for hours on their devices.
I don't know why we lost our way as parents allowing that? But I think, you know, I, I think maybe the ones that are 17, 18. Okay. They're grown. But the people listening to this who have younger kids.
Lock those devices up. limit them. Don't just hand it to them. It is like handing them a weapon. Yes. Like a weapon, you would not give a child, a young person, a gun. Don't just hand them electronic devices. Yes. I know that schools are all electronic device now, but you know, they're doing a lot more than school and kids need to be outdoors. They need to be sweating. They need to be in the sun. They need to be running. I think that would help a lot of this quite frankly, and have them get together with other kids in the neighbourhood or, or friends. It’s not organic, when I was a kid, we gathered together and had lots of play dates but make it work, get together with other parents and have groups of kids getting together, doing things face to face, not just online.
And I think hopefully this newer generation of parents, I have an adult daughter who is a mother and I see a big change. Her child is not allowed to have an electronic device in her hands at all. So I'm hoping that maybe there is like a reactive there's there is a group of parents being reactive to ‘okay, this is too much.’
So that would be my advice. Prevent.
Stephanie: Which seems to be one of the areas that affects girls and boys equally the number of hours per day they spend in this sort of virtual reality online, rather than being outdoors, playing, exercising, their bodies, being really in their bodies and learning to be confident and learning to face up to the kind of difficulties they would have in negotiating and navigating those sorts of rules of play.
I know when I was a child, I played with mostly older boys on my street outside, and I had to deal with their bullying or lack of interest in me or my opinions. So you learn all those sort of social skills automatically through playing and this is something that I think our generation of parents have grown up with this coming new.
And I look back to when I was a child, I think I was age five before we had a TV in our house, and that was new for my parents. And what interests me is seeing that the generation of my parents is quite addicted to TV. And my generation is the one that's saying, no, not so much TV, or, or we won't have a TV in the house.
And I see the same thing happening with the internet, that our generation, it was something new and we will end up being addicted to it, but our children won't, they will recognize the harms and stop.
I do think that as a society, we haven't been aware enough of, certainly what our children are being exposed to on-line. It's almost like we've opened the door to adult life for them to access at very young ages.
What sort of support would you like to see other women give you as mothers of boys?
I'm so aware that support goes towards girls more than boys. As mothers of boys, I would like to know what we can do or anybody listening can do to support the mothers of boys who are caught up in this.
If you've got any ideas on that, what you'd like to see?
Emily: I think that what you brought up before the support from the feminists would go a long way. I understand their concerns because there's a lot of men on the internet and in real life causing a lot of the troubles and it's exacerbating the general distrust of men and boys who grow up to be men, fall into that category.
But know that these young boys are not those men and don't have to become those men and we can through society and supporting parents help break them free from those bonds that they would grow up that way. They don't have to.
Marie: Yeah, I agree. I think I would like for the feminists to see our boys as victims, I mean, I really see my son as a victim of a system, a society that wants to use him and abuse him and then spit him out and leave him to his own devices.
What we see happening to the de-transitioners is horrific. So I mean this cohort of boys are generally sweet boys. Some are shy, very vulnerable and they're being taken advantage of and I really think that those who medicalise when they grow up and we do believe that many are going to grow out of it - Dr Hakim, has referred to this. He says that he predicts that in five years, it will be a tsunami of the de-transitioners. They're going to be possibly damaged men. honestly the potential, like my son had to drop out a four-year university to go to a tech school because this trans thing ruined his ability to do school, to concentrate, to function cognitively the way he was as student with a really good grade point average.
So when these boys get trapped in this, all of society loses because these are very, very bright boys that are going to be on the path to be engineers and doctors and scientists and researchers and computer scientists. And there are many parents who are choosing not to send their child to university because of what waits for them. The fear how they're going to be trapped by this ideology.
So it's, it's something that doesn't just affect our boys. It affects society. This is a generation where the bright minds are being hijacked by the cult and we all lose out. So have compassion, have compassion for them and don't judge them and put them in the same category as your 50-year-old autogynephile, you know, or the people who are using this, the predators who are using this to get in, that's not our boys at all.
Stephanie: Thank you. It's something that I think that the adolescent cohorts of, children who suddenly develop gender dysphoria after puberty. And in fact, the children who have gender dysphoria when they are little children, have got nothing to do with late transitioning males, who are the ones that seem to have an awful lot of influence in this area.
And want to change policies that erase women's rights that we can't put the young boys together with that group. They're completely separate groups. And what I see is the vulnerability of autistic spectrum, OCD boys, boys, who don't fit into a culture of toxic masculinity, either find it uncomfortable or difficult to fit into that kind of boys who are influenced by porn in a way that turns them off being man. Boys who are gay.
So they're normally the sort of boys that we would have a lot of empathy for and sympathy with, and that we mustn't confuse them with the groups of older man. But I personally would like to make sure that that mothers in particular, parents and mothers in particular are really, really supported in struggling with this issue and trying to navigate it with their boys.
So thank you so much for coming on and speaking to us today. I think it's so valuable to hear your experience and to finish off, I just want to remind people that Genspect has launched.