This is the second in a series of essays to be published by Binary. This account is written by an Australian mother about the reality of dealing with gender dysphoric children. This mother doesn’t just lament about the difficulties, she offers powerful and tested ways to support teenagers through this difficult period.

The Stolen Genderation

– It all hangs on a single lie –

By A. Mother.

My oldest daughter Penny was 16 years old when she told me she was actually a man born in the ‘wrong body’.

I was bewildered but supportive.

Eighteen months later, my youngest daughter Polly told me that, just like her adored older sister, she was also a man born in the wrong body.

I was terrified. And rightly so.

After much soul searching and tens of thousands of dollars of therapy, Penny, Polly and I are muddling along together. They are starting to question the Radical Gender Ideology that they have been saturated with, online and at school, by Trans Radical Activists (TRAs).

I am hopeful that they will find their way and not become members of the Stolen Genderation.

But things went so much worse for David, a colleague of a family member, and his lovely daughter Sarah.

Sarah, like my own two daughters at the same age of 16, was gaslit by the omni-present ‘wrong body’ myth.

The ‘wrong body’ myth is spread by the ‘affirmation’ school of thought. The ‘affirmation’ school of thought is a philosophy that claims that a child or vulnerable young person experiencing gender dysphoria – an intense and sudden dislike of one’s biological gender - must be ‘cured’ with a gender transition as quickly as possible.

This myth and philosophy are built on a single lie and several unchallenged assertions.

The First Assertion – The scale of this phenomenon is the result of improved societal acceptance

The last decade has seen skyrocketing numbers of children and young people claiming to have gender dysphoria and demanding the ‘cure’ of gender transition.

TRAs claim that this phenomenon is due to improved acceptance of the trans-community, allowing tens of thousands of children with gender dysphoria to live an authentic life through the liberation of gender transition.

I don’t believe this assertion.

I believe that children are especially susceptible to social contagion around the age of 16. Beliefs are very malleable. Fads, memes and catch phrases abound. These form the zeitgeist of each generation.

Instead of asking ‘what’s your star sign’, teenagers break the ice with ‘what’s your pronoun’?

The grooming activities of TRAs, dark marketing through personal digital algorithms, and glowing, uncritical traditional and social media coverage of gender transition are the true factors behind this massive surge of gender dysphoria in children and vulnerable young people.

Personally, I’m as connected as a kibbutz. And yet, in my tightly constrained circles, I know of six other young women just like Penny, Polly and Sarah.

The Second Assertion – Gender Dysphoria is a permanent and dangerous condition

There is frighteningly little discourse about this one.

If a child or vulnerable young person is experiencing gender dysphoria, the ‘affirmation’ philosophy insists that they must be fast tracked into a set of dangerous cosmetic medical procedures and experimental hormone treatments. These procedures usually result in sterility, phantom limb pain, degradation in pre-existing mental health conditions, and deep remorse.

I think gender dysphoria, particularly in young women, is a normal part of adolescence. But in this generation, it is worsened by omni-present Radical Gender Theory spread through social media and reinforced in schools.

I certainly experienced gender dysphoria as a young woman. As soon as I was old enough to realise that, societally speaking, being a woman is the short end of a shitty stick, I developed a profound dislike of my femininity. I saw it as a burden and a weakness. My uterus was a painful messy encumbrance that I had no plans for.

I’m certain that if I had been subjected to the same messaging as Penny, Polly and Sarah at the same age, I would have believed it too. And yet, I matured through it and embraced my femininity.

The unquestioned assertion that gender dysphoria is a permanent and highly dangerous medical condition feeds a false sense of urgency.

Gender Clinics urge parents like David and myself, “Quick do it now! Any delay will make the changes more difficult to back out!”

This is just one of their deeply unethical scare tactics.

There is no room in the ‘affirmation’ philosophy for the likelihood that children will mature through gender dysphoria.

Gender Clinics are chop shops hustling children onto a conveyor belt that steals their fundamental human right to a family life. There are no safeguards, except parental permission required for a minor. And that parental permission is coerced through scare tactics and bad science.

How did Gender Clinics manage this? How have they managed to fly under the radar for so long? Why are there no other safeguards on these dangerous procedures?

Those forbidden questions lead us neatly to the single lie that the whole philosophy hangs on.

The Lie – you must affirm your child’s new gender identity or they will commit suicide

This lie is so wide-spread that I see it everywhere. There is very scant evidence for it. Most of it anecdotal. All the studies I can find are commissioned by LGBT lobby groups.

Their methodology is poor, highly subjective, and the desired answer is seeded in the question “Have you ever considered committing suicide?”

And let’s face it, every teenager would answer “yes” to that question if you caught them on the right day.

And yet, this suicide myth is treated as gospel truth. It is even found in State Health policies.

Source: QLD Health publication – Information for Parent of Children Diverse in Gender or Sexuality

Unfortunately, I didn’t know David when the Gender Clinic hit him with the suicide myth. If I had, maybe things would have turned out better for Sarah.

My own experience of taking my eldest daughter Penny to a Gender Clinic (after she threatened to kill herself unless I did) threw up red flag after red flag. I only recognised these red flags due to my background in medical research and my own intuition.

I genuinely believe that my Penny was persuaded by an online TRA groomer to make a suicide threat to force me to take her to a Gender Clinic. And when I acceded to this demand, the Gender Clinic doubled down.

Penny was right beside me when the Gender Clinic doctor told me I had to immediately affirm her brand-new gender identity, use her preferred name and pronouns, and start her on testosterone to reduce the imminent risk of her committing suicide.

I started questioning the Gender Clinic doctor over her sources for this statement. I also questioned the urgency of starting a gender transition. I asked for evidence that gender transition is an effective treatment for gender dysphoria in the long-term. I asked if there were alternative treatments for gender dysphoria. I asked what the long-term health risks were. I asked for evidence about the long-term outcomes of patients who had a gender transition as a minor. I asked what safeguards were in place to check for peer contagion.

Unsurprisingly, the Gender Clinic doctor became increasingly hostile. Then she hit me with her trump card – the most unethical scare tactic of all. She looked me in the eye and asked, “would you prefer a living son or a dead daughter?”

Well, I smelt the bullshit and checked out.

But the day after her 18^th birthday, Penny went back. I found a consent form to start testosterone treatment in her room. My world fell into a heap.

Thankfully I kept my nerve and with the assistance of Penny’s psychiatrist we worked it through.

I now affirm Penny (and Polly) by using their preferred names and doing my best with the pronouns. In exchange I have asked them to delay the start of any chemical or surgical procedures until they move out.

In so doing, I hope to buy them enough time to find their own questions. And to spot the assertions and the lies.

Unfortunately, poor David had been sufficiently cowed by the Gender Clinic doctors’ dire warnings of imminent suicide to start Sarah on testosterone immediately.

Things got worse and worse.

The testosterone exacerbated Sarah’s pre-existing depression. It made her aggressive and impossible to reason with. The family bonds stretched and eventually snapped. Sarah left home at the age of 17 and moved to Melbourne.

At the age of 22, Sarah experienced crippling gender transition remorse. She realised that the gender transition had not been the cure to her many woes. She was never born in the ‘wrong body’. She had been lied to. At the goading of TRA’s she had ruined her body and been tricked into sterilising herself.

In a self-fulfilling prophesy, she committed suicide.

Upon hearing the news, David had a mental breakdown in the office. He kept repeating “I just followed the advice.”

A recent study from Sweden published in the Public Library of Science has found that the risk of suicide increased in gender dysphoric patients AFTER a gender transition. I concede that a single published study does not prove much by itself, except that the situation is so much more complex than Gender Clinics, and State Health Departments, portray it.

Disgustingly, Sarah’s suicide will be added to wobbly statistics as yet more ‘proof’ that gender dysphoric children are at great risk of suicide. But these wobbly statistics do not differentiate between pre- and post-transition patients. These wobbly statistics do not acknowledge the huge, and growing, phenomenon of gender transition remorse. These wobbly statistics do not acknowledge that gender dysphoria is common in children experiencing depression.

Gender Clinics are endangering children whilst promising to protect them. And cowing parents into agreeing to dangerous experimental cosmetic procedures with unknown long-term health risks by using the most unethical of scare tactics.

And why have you never heard of this? The next Stolen Genderation essay will cover the ABC’s role in promoting the huge surge in the popularity of gender transition in children and vulnerable young people.

So what can a parent do if you find yourself in this situation?

Find a mental health professional who does not follow the ‘affirmation’ model

There is an alternate school of thought in the treatment of gender dysphoria in children and vulnerable young people – ‘active watchful waiting’. This low intervention philosophy takes a more holistic and less ideological approach to helping gender dysphoric children mature through their difficulties.

Several mental health professional bodies advocate the ‘active watchful waiting’ philosophy in the treatment of gender dysphoria.

Contact the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) or the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists (NAPP) for lists of mental health professionals in your area.

Get help for your child if you can, but please remember that bad therapy is worse than no therapy.

Join the fight

Please support the work of Binary.

Binary is the only Australian lobby group supporting parents of gender dysphoric children in this unprecedented and harmful social experiment – the Stolen Genderation.

Please match the average donation of $50 and enable Binary to continue the fight for safeguards on gender transitions in all States and Territories of Australia. And to end the use of the suicide myth by Gender Clinics as an unethical scare tactic against terrified parents and their deeply vulnerable children.

Remember, you’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.

Yours sincerely,

A. Mother

A. Mother is a collective pen name used by parents of children and vulnerable young people experiencing Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. This collective pen name is intended to protect the individual contributors from reprisal by Trans Radical Activists, and to protect their children from identification. These stories use pseudonyms, but each is drawn from lived experience.