Rod Dreher
The American Conservative
Hey, I’m in Nashville today at the Southern Baptist ERLC event, so please forgive the light posting. I want to bring to your attention an extraordinary letter from a reader who writes about how he fought the transgender cult that briefly seized his daughter’s imagination. He’s responding to a letter another reader wrote about how this thing has her child in its grips, and the local school authorities are fighting her, the mom, over it. I want to share it with you in case it is helpful to you in your situation. I have edited it slightly to protect privacy:
I wrote you a week or so ago about my experience with this sort of thing in [xxx] County. I absolutely know where this person is coming from and I feel her pain and frustration . The only thing I can tell her, if she has the stomach for it, is to get almost downright combative with the counselors in the school and any psychologist that her teenage daughter sees especially if she, the parent is paying for it. I would keep the pressure on these counselors and their bosses, principals and superintendent as well as school board members. I would usually do it in private and not in any type of open session. In my case it paid off on a few levels.
1) I got to learn how this all worked. How the policies were formulated and where the counselors were all coming from and what they were facing and why they were doing what they did. I learned that the counselors were being reactive more than anything else. They just wanted to keep the peace in the school and they wanted to avoid incidents like bullying, or self-mutilation. Apparently “cutting” was a big thing with a lot of these female to male tans-cultist types prior to their announcement that they were crossing over, or out and out breakdowns. I had one counselor tell me that the sexual tension, etc. amongst teens these days borders on the criminal.There are no more taboos.
2) I made a few psychologists’ lives nightmarish for essentially outing them for not following protocol on hormone therapy recommendations.It helped that I come from a family of physicians and as such I had a lot of physician family friends, including a professor of psychiatry. I was aggressive on this end. I would ask these psychologists who advocated hormone therapy if they understood any of the metabolic effects of introducing large amount of testosterone into a still developing female’s body, and if their recommendations took into consideration the long-ranging effects of this sort of thing, and if their malpractice/E&O insurance covered it. I told them if I found out that if (he) in anyway was going to help facilitate my daughter into any of this, that he would be hit with a lawsuit and possible criminal charges. It helped that another parent going through the same thing was a trial attorney.
3) You are going up against a very powerful lobby and their believers. Other trans types are very aggressive and are instructed to be by other transgenders as well as advocacy groups. I would get calls at my house at all hours of the night. I had my house egged, a window broken. I had an advocacy group threaten me and my lawyer friend/ally/parent with a civil rights suit until the lawyer said “put up or shut up” – that was actually fun, because we actually had a better case against them then they had against us.
Rod, I have been in the negotiating and deal making business since I graduated from college in 1991. I’ve seen a lot of things. I’ve seen scams and scams that were nothing more than disguised attempts at negotiation. This trans cult to me smelled like a scam and a “thing” as my Wall Street friends would call trends, as soon as I experienced it and the more I learn about it.This parent though, needs to understand that she is in for a tough and wild ride. The recent convert is usually the most enthusiastic about their belief. She needs to stay true to her beliefs as much as her daughter is staying with hers for the time being.
She does not need to be combative [with her child], and there are even certain accommodations that you can make. In my daughter’s case, she wanted to start me calling her by her new male name because she said she would no longer answer to her given name. Instead of fighting with that, I made a counteroffer. Since her given name and the new male name both started with the same letter, I said “ Okay, I’ll call you ___, but I’m not going to call you by the boy name because, a) I really don’t like that name and b) I still don’t buy that you are a boy in a girl’s body.” When she agreed to that, as a negotiator, I knew that I had her compromise her “belief.”
Finally, at the end of last year she came to me on her own after coming home from her first semester in college looking like my daughter. She finally admitted that she was a girl. I did not press the trans issue with her too much. I needed to keep peace at home. I had two other kids, and I was not turning my home into a hot war zone. I pressured all of the so-called experts, made them try to defend their positions on established fact and gave them fair warning that any parenting interference, any advocacy of drug prescription or surgery that was not backed by sound medical evidence or need would make their lives miserable.
In subsequent correspondence, the reader told me that this trans thing is a much bigger fad than many adults realize. He mentioned family members in a particularly conservative Southern parish who told him it’s all the rage in the local public school.
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