This is part 2. If you haven’t listened to or read part 1, I strongly recommend you do that first.
The first time I noticed something might be up was when my son texted me about changing phone plans. He’d been on our family plan forever and once he got a job, he paid for his third of the bill. In early December, he sent me a text telling me he wanted to be moved from our plan to his own.
I was busy at the time, and it didn’t seem like an emergency, so I told him I’d get to it when I could. He pleaded with me to do it immediately. OK. That was weird. But I didn’t think much of it. I asked him how his weekend was, and he said that it was a tough weekend because his girlfriend’s sister and dad did something fun without including her.
That also seemed a little weird. Not that it happened, but that it was such a big deal to him. I just figured that his girlfriend, who is bat-shit crazy BTW, was so upset that she made his life hell. Not my problem.
So, I called 611 and talked to AT&T, which is something he could have done because he’s been authorized to modify the account for twelve years. But, for some strange reason, he wasn’t able to figure out how to handle the situation. I did as he asked, called AT&T, then told him what they told me. Which was that he had to go to one of their retail stores and take care of it himself.
Fast-forward a few weeks to just after the new year. I’d had COVID for about a week and was on the mend. My wife had caught it from me and was still at the point where she was spending most of her days in bed. She was texting with our son. He knew we both were ill with a disease we weren’t particularly worried about, but that he was deathly afraid of. But he didn’t seem to care.
While we were both sick, he told my wife that he’s pretending to be a woman. And, that she shouldn’t tell me. She did keep it from me for a few days. Not because he asked her to, but because I was still sick, and she was worried about how the news might impact my health. Which is something that anyone would do for someone they love.
My wife has since sent me the entire transcript of their text exchange so I’m not guessing here. I know exactly what was said.
My wife’s immediate question was if he had been getting professional help. That’s a reasonable question and the first question that I think most parents would ask. His reply was that we should trust that he had made the right decisions.
Then he went on to say that my parental love is “explicitly conditional” and that I’m responsible for the “major absolutely-fucked-up-in-retrospect things from his childhood”. He’s working through “30 years of wrong” that, apparently, I caused.
Now, I probably wasn’t the best dad in the world. But I’ve been a pretty good one. I’d go so far to say I’m in the top 10%. Top 15% for sure. Ask my wife. She’ll agree. We are completely bewildered. He’s remembering a childhood that didn’t happen.
I found out later that he decided he was going to pretend to be a woman in late 2021. At 30 years old, he started using his newly-discovered confusion as a lens with which to view the previous 30 years. And, in-retrospect, he’s decided that I ruined his life.
That makes just as much sense as paying reparations for slavery and tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus. This was when we realized his ability to reach logical and rational decisions had completely disappeared.
It turns out that the reason he was in such a rush to get off our phone plan was because he was afraid that I might “do something dumb”. Like what? Add HBO to his data plan out of spite? What we learned from this is that he’s not only delusional, he’s also paranoid.
It was at this point that my wife and I seriously started questioning his mental health. We didn’t know about the hormone treatments yet. But we knew that he was on anti-depressants and had multiple COVID jabs. Who knows what that combination of drugs would do to someone? Oh yeah, that’s right, no one knows. Because nobody has bothered to check.
She invited our son to visit us so we could have a face-to-face chat. We figured that getting him out of that environment might have a positive influence.
He said that he’s afraid to travel. The main reason is that he hasn’t been able to use a public restroom in ten months because he’s afraid of being “harassed or hate crimed”.
Really? He’s six-foot-two for Christ’s sake. I’m sure that men pretending to be women do, on occasion, get the shit kicked out of them when they try to use the women’s restroom. And I’m also sure that, every time it happens, the mainstream media has a field day with it in the name of Glibtaq rights. When was the last time you heard about it happening? And have you ever heard of it happening inside an airport? Me neither. There’s that paranoia again.
About two weeks after he told my wife, he sent me an email telling me what’s going on and invited me to ask questions. I asked him to help me understand how he got to where he is. He replied with a rambling timeline of “his journey”, which I couldn’t care less about.
But I was nice and thanked him for sharing. Then I asked him to tell me, specifically, what drugs he’s on and their side effects, what kind of professional help he’s had, and other therapies or treatments he tried before turning to hormones.
He refused to answer.
Instead, he pointed us to a site that he believes explains everything. I don’t know for certain, but I’m assuming it’s where he’s getting all of his information. So, I took a look. As soon as I saw the term “ovary-havers”, I realized that’s it’s just a propaganda piece designed to manipulate the vulnerable.
We’ve since tried many different ways to get him to help us understand how he came to take such drastic measures, and he absolutely won’t tell us.
What have we learned? We’ve learned that the first rule of Trans Club is: “don’t talk about Trans Club”.
I’m willing to open a dialog but if he’s going to dictate what we’re going to talk about, that’s not a conversation, it’s an indoctrination. No thank you very much.
I’ve been around long enough to know that when someone won’t even consider the possibility that they may be wrong, they probably are wrong. And I’ve found that when someone won’t defend their position, it’s because they can’t defend their position.
So, now we have four indications of mental illness. He has clinical depression, he’s delusional, remembers things that didn’t actually happen, and he’s paranoid. Anyone paying even the least amount of attention could see that.
Presumably he was under at least one doctor’s care. So, why didn’t his doctor do anything? In early February of 2021, he had his first appointment to discuss the topic of hormone replacement therapy. On February 9th, he received his first doses. That’s right, in less than a week and a half, he went from “I’d like to know more” to “roll up your sleeve”.
Instead of his doctor recognizing the symptoms and treating him for the disease he has, my son was allowed to decide to inject something into his body that it was never intended to handle.
And now, his male body has been flooded with a drug cocktail of anti-depressants, the COVID vackseen, and female hormones. Tell me that’s not going to fuck somebody up. That’s right, you can’t.
Someone has to be the voice of reason.
The medical establishment won’t do it. His friends won’t tell him he’s making bad choices because he’s surrounded himself with people who see no problem with what he’s doing. They actually encourage it. The people he works with can’t say anything because doing so is illegal. In fact, in some places, employers can be held liable if a customer neglects to use someone’s personal pronouns.
So, that leaves us. If everyone reinforced his delusion, there would be nobody around tell him the truth.
He’s thrown down an ultimatum. If we want to continue to have a relationship with him, I must acknowledge and apologize for all the horrible things he misremembers I did or said. And we must recognize his new identity, use his new name and pronouns, and refer to him as our “daughter”.
Yeah. That’s not going to happen.
He also put in front of us the impossible hurdle of convincing him that we won’t say anything bad about him when he’s not around.
Why would we stop now? Pretty much since the day he was born, my wife and I have talked about him behind his back. Sometimes we talked about how proud we were of him. Sometimes, if he did something particularly dumb, we’d laugh at him. It’s what parents do. It’s how we entertain ourselves.
I say it’s an impossible hurdle because if I told you I wouldn’t say anything bad about you behind your back, would you believe me? Hell, I wouldn’t believe me. I judge people. It’s sort of my thing.
We’re his parents. We’re not getting paid for anything. We’re not using him as a pawn to further some political agenda, we have no need or desire to virtue signal, we’re not working to make him codependent on us like his crazy-ass girlfriend, and we’re not checking off a box on a form so we can be reimbursed by an insurance company.
So, no. We won’t be reinforcing his delusion. We’re his last line of defense. Someone needs to be around to support him if and when he ever breaks free of his programming.
We told him that he’ll always be our son and the pronouns we use will continue to be he/him. We said that he has always been, and will always be, 100% human male. No amount of chemicals, body modification, makeup or affirmation is ever going to change that.
I really wanted to mention the adage about a leopard changing his spots and the one about putting lipstick on a pig, but my wife wouldn’t let me.
Instead, we told him that if he wants to have an open and honest conversation with us, we’re more than willing to listen. But it must be a two-way street.
We’re his parents. And sometimes parents have to make the tough decisions.
I realize that there’s a good chance that we’ll never see or hear from him again. He’s said as much. But whatever the future brings, I know we’ve done all we can. We told him we love him and that we’re here for him should he ever need us.
And then I changed his ringtone to “Dude Looks Like a Lady” so I’ll know it’s him when he calls.
NOTE: I use the term “Glibtaq” in this article. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you can check out where I defined it in “Fixing the Brand“.
