Róisín Michaux at The Critic on the mothers who affirm their children's trans identities:
I’ve spent the last couple of years lurking on their online fora. Whilst some of the women are quite clearly mad or bad, most sound like they just really love their kids. At a complete loss, they join the groups for information, only to have the trans suicide gambit deployed at any hint of scepticism. Posts are policed for noobs using deadnames and correct-sex pronouns and any other non-affirming language or concepts. Once they’re far enough along their child’s “gender journey”, the moms turn into evangelisers themselves, becoming the blood-sucking zombies who only moments ago were aghast at all the blood-sucking zombies. It’s a pyramid scheme of misery.
These groups exist to support the belief system, not the families suffering under it....
It makes perfect strategic sense for activists to build up squadrons of trans moms: whilst NGO careerists and government ministers will swap jobs and eventually lose interest, mothers will be stuck with their choices forever. That makes them the perfect ideological foot soldiers. The child-focussed Irish NGO BelongTo spent €1.5 million on grants in 2022. Though it doesn’t go into specifics about who got the cash, one of the pillars of their activities is “supporting parents”. No doubt it hopes the “support” will go both ways....
Every now and then in the trans mom groups, a mother announces that her child has decided they’re not trans after all. “Thank you all for your support, but I don’t need this group anymore.” Just like that, she’s gone. (I like to picture her gleefully setting fire to breast binders in the garden with a glass of wine in her hand).
After she was walking on eggshells for three and a half years, this happened to Clare. Her autistic daughter desisted a few weeks ago, telling her: “I know I am female, but I’m just not feeling it.” A mother of four girls, she never affirmed her daughter’s body dysmorphia. Instead, after a period of fighting, she decided to shut her trap and wait out the storm. She will be present in Dublin at the KJK event, but she probably won’t speak. She doesn’t want to push her luck. “I am so happy,” she said of her daughter’s announcement. “My instinct told me from the very beginning that this was wrong.”
The mothers who go the other way are relentless, and it’s not hard to understand why. They will be the last holdouts when the gender fever breaks. Even if they eventually concede that it’s all bonkers, they are likely to drag us all down before they crash. As author Helen Joyce has said, they need to believe that they did the right thing for their own sanity.
It's such a cruel business: telling the poor mothers that their children will kill themselves if their new gender identity isn't immediately affirmed. Once they've gone down that path, of course, they become keen proselyters for the cause, because to admit a smidgen of doubt would be to admit that they've ruined their children's lives...
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