I have two daughters who became indoctrinated by the transgender ideology they were exposed to when online due to school lockdown and online school during the pandemic. They were lonely and isolated, suburban, and white at a fraught time in America and transgender ideology casts you as a victim and special and unique.
My girls were, and still are, as the younger one is only now 13, searching for their identity and belonging (the *normal* role in childhood development of identity vs role confusion, Erik Erikson—child development specialist).
This has been exploited by troubled individuals who cast transgenderism as the solution to my girls’amd otber youngsters’ normal teenage angst.
And some folks get a lot of special attention for it. I believe some parents, a la Munchausen disorder, get a lot of attention and take a weird sense of, no pun intended, pride in socially transitioning their child.
That a national magazine would publish such specious information casts extreme doubt in my mind upon the validity of your actual parenting knowledge. Please be smarter.
The sources *are* the ones who are vetting the information. That’s not unbiased research. C’mon.
My daughters have been harmed by this ideology. I have seen other kids and families also harmed by this.
Your publishing of these transgender ideology articles that push social affirming of kids, with the implicit emotional blackmailing of parents, that their non-suicidal children, will become suicidal if they are not affirmed, is so woefully wrong, that it just really takes away your credibility as a parent’s resource.
Please retract the articles and publish parent’s letters who have objected.
This is an unfolding medical scandal and you are on the wrong side of history.
I signed it with my real name and as my title “Mother”.
The letter was really off the cuff as I typed it on my phone here in the US as we get ready for the big national holiday here of Thanksgiving while I’m in my car getting ready to head in to the grocery store.
Thank you to LGBT Courage Coalition for bringing the articles to all of our collective attention.
I will continue to write letters, as I have to my congress person (who reached out with a survey about the constituents concerns and one was “LGBT” rights), the attorney general of my state (who has said that transgender books MUST BE taught to elementary school children), and I will continue to go to my children’s public school (where the curriculum is TEACHING about group sex and anal sex and that there are “dozens of genders”), and let the pediatricians and psychologists know they’re really harming children with the way that all of this is being approached.
I am a parent of a teen who expresses gender-noncomforming behavior. When I read your article titled: My Child is Trans-How Can I Support Them Without Messing Up? (published June 24, 2023), I became quite alarmed. I was a gender-nonconforming child myself, and never once did I think that I was trans. I have grown to accept myself as a woman and I enjoy a happy and healthy life. After reading your article and seeing that “watchful waiting” was considered a sharp rejection of my child, I was stunned. The article would lead me to believe that I must affirm my child as a different gender just because she likes to wear pants and enjoys more technical fields? I found this extremely alarming. According to this, I am harming my child by allowing her to grow into herself as the person she is with the body she was born with and I need to affirm her as a different gender. One that would require her to become a lifelong medical patient.
Thankfully, I know better. I grew up in the time of “Free to Be You and Me” where I learned that it is perfectly ok for a boy to like dolls and a girl to run faster than boys. That we are all people who should be respected and loved for who we are; NOT that we needed a lifetime of medical intervention to be our authentic selves. But how many young, new parents are reading this and thinking that this is fact?
In a subsequent article, New Study Shows the Dramatic Impact Validating Trans and Non-Binary Youth Can Have on Mental Health, (published November 15, 2023), sites a study by the Trevor Project that suggests that parents must socially transition a child as soon as they come out to you. A social transition is a very big deal. It sends a child down a path toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and eventually surgery. Surely you know that this is not a way to validate self-expression, especially since many potentially gay and lesbian children express opposite gender behaviors (also those who are not gay, for the record).
You are encouraging a whole new set of parents to look at their son who wants to wear nail polish to think that he is really a girl inside? I have taught preschool for many years. The number of boys coming to school in nail polish or putting on heels during dress up play has absolutely no bearing on their gender. It is play, plain and simple.
Please stop with this harmful writing. It is leading to what is going to be the largest medical scandal of our lifetime and too many innocent children and families will be destroyed by it. I would also suggest that you be much more careful who you get your information from and use your own critical thinking skills. The large uprise in young people being influenced by social media and now teachers and psychologists to believe they were born in the wrong body just does not make sense. I beg of you to please stop and do actual research on this topic before you enmesh yourself with these frightening articles.
The “study” consisted of asking kids to send a text message in response to a loaded prompt about what gives them “gender euphoria”. Absurd to even call this a “study”.
Wow. I can't even send them a comment because I actually think they are too far gone. They would just find my email warning of the dangers of gender affirmation to be "transphobic" and "hateful." I wish everyone would just stop reading the magazine (which I read when my kids were little). How disgusting to put this dangerous garbage out there for young, naive parents to read. At almost four, and continuing to age five, a child pretends his hair is long and says that's "girl" hair. By the time he's 11 or 12,, if this continues on the track that is set out by those who spew this garbage, he will have his puberty blocked, and, by age 17, he will be castrated. This is truly horrific.
Love_to_read Thank you for sending your letter. I was specifically responding to Hippiesq in my encouragement to send in a letter. I think the imagery of how a playful boy becomes a castrated man is just the kind of clear, blunt language these people need to hear.
My name is Kathleen, I am a mother of a formerly gender-distressed natal female teen and a lifelong liberal Democrat. I am writing to express my concern regarding the current practice of medical intervention for gender-distressed children and teens.With regard to My Child is Trans, the only premise with which I can agree is that we have to love our children and communicate that love as hard as we can. In our case, watchful waiting and 3+ years of effective psychotherapy to address our teen's pre-adoption trauma are leading her to love herself for who she is. Love sometimes means doing some very difficult things, even if it means our children hate us for doing it. This is not conversion therapy. If anything, the affirmation model which includes medicalization with cross-sex hormones and "sex reassignment surgeries" is conversion therapy. That article also can mislead parents into misreading childrens' quirky cues as a sign that they are transgender. As a gender non-conforming toddler who was adamant that I wanted a penis and peed while standing up (a source of great frustration for my parents), and who changed my name to Sambo, I can't imagine what the gender mills would have done to me, but it likely would have resulted in irreversible medical interventions and sterilization.As an East Coast leader of Our Duty, an international support group for parents of gender confused children, I have heard many stories form parents of how taking the affirming approach worsened their childrens' mental health. I can tell you that personally, we witnessed that over a 6-month period with 3 therapists, all of whom affirmed our daughter's identity (when they said they wouldn't by the way). Our daughter's mental health declined and her suicidal ideation worsened. It wasn't until we found a non-affirming psychologist who got to the root cause of our daughter's discomfort that we began to see clear signs of improvement in her mental health and comfort in her body.Europeans are waking up to the faulty affirmation-only treatment model and are quite vocal about how these medical interventions have utterly no evidentiary basis. On September 5, 2023, a Citizen Petition was filed with the FDA calling for a systematic review of the indiscriminate off-label prescription of puberty blockers for children, and it is still open for public comment. https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2023-P-3767-0001 As of this writing, there are over 600 comments - not an insubstantial number.Detransitioners - those who regret the medicalization and surgeries forming the backbone of the so-called "gender-affirming care" model - are suing their medical providers. There are over 51,000 members of Reddit's Detrans Subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/detrans/. More lawsuits are coming.
And earlier this year a clinician whistleblower blew the lid off how children are being mistreated in gender clinics. https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kidsThe second article I take issue with is the 11/15 "New Study" that purports to show the dramatic impact that validating trans and non-binary youth can have on mental health. As noted above, that did not happen in our case, and I believe that the Trevor Project's so-called study merits closer examination.
There is a lot of money to be made by transitioning gender-confused youth. The drugs being doled out without examining why children feel such distress will make them patients for life. The surgeries have untold risks and failure rates. Why isn't Parents Magazine doing a deeper dive? Parents, and by turn their children, are better served by honest and accurate reporting.
The tide is turning and people are waking up to the reality that gender affirming care is not evidence based. International organization Genspect.org is doing a deeper dive and creating a "Gender Framework to help and inform as many people as possible: those questioning their gender; those who have transitioned, regardless of how they feel about the outcome; those who have detransitioned; the relatives and friends of all these individuals; those working with them in clinical and therapeutic practice; those working in other professional fields affected by these issues; and anyone in society who seeks positive, thoughtful resolution of these often complex and sensitive problems." https://genspect.org/introduction-to-the-gender-framework/
Now THAT is the deep dive that I as a parent would like to see Parents Magazine undertake.
I am writing to you to express my concerns about your My Child is Trans article. I am the grandparent of a 6 year old girl whose mother shaved her head and sent her to kindergarten graduation in a tuxedo. About a month later I was informed by text that my granddaughter had a new name and pronouns and I needed to start using them. When asked where all of this was coming from my daughter stopped speaking to me and now does not allow me to see any of my three grandchildren.
I believe your article, My Child is Trans will lead well-meaning parents to interpret gender non-conforming behavior in very young children as a possible sign they are transgender and convince these parents that they should socially transition them. Small children do not know who they are and they should not be encouraged by parents to make life altering decisions. Small children believe everything their parents say and want to please their parents. My granddaughter and other children transitioned at a young age and affirmed in school have no way out of their new assigned names, pronouns and identities. They are now trans and they have no idea of what that means.
Social transition, the first stage of gender affirming care is harmful to children. Parents are supposed to protect their children from harm.
I would imagine that you have people on your staff trained in child development. These people should be aware that it is normal for a small child to want to grow up as the opposite sex or a unicorn or a superhero. My granddaughter believes in Santa. I am sure she thinks she will just grow a penis soon and then she will look just like all the other boys she sees when she uses the boys bathroom at school.
I suppose next you will be sharing advice from the social worker described in the article below. She tells therapists that if a little girl pulls out her barrettes that means she wants to be a boy and if a baby boy pulls at his onesie that means he wants to be a girl.
Kudos for raising the alarm and for giving such useful and detailed suggestions on how to respond.
The pro-trans articles are useful because they show how trans activists and their allies turn logic on its head and use half-truths to try to win arguments. The description of "watchful waiting" was so inaccurate and incomplete that it would get a D-minus in a college assignment - provided the professor wasn't a trans ally, that is.
One of the worst things about Parents Magazine's approach to so-called trans kids is how it reverses the roles of parent and child. In a gender-affirmative world, it's the child who drives the parenting. This is based on the false narrative that children somehow know their true "gender" even at a very young age. Sure, and when I was six years old, I was most insistent that my parents take me on a vacation to Candyland, the imaginary setting for a board game!
It would be interesting to know how the magazine came to be captured by gender identity ideology and which jobs are occupied by individuals who are pushing the trans agenda. I wonder whether anyone on the board is aware of the potential legal liability the company is acquiring each time it gives parents flawed advice on gender and on how to parent "trans kids."
Telling your child they can't eat three bags of M&M's before bedtime may make your child feel invalidated. Join us for a Hershey sponsored chocolate fest every evening at 9 PM eastern where your child can experience their true authentic selves.
I entered the site of Parents magazine through the provided link. The whole content of the site is absolutely sick. I would rather turn them to the police, than writing to them.
Here’s a copy of the letter I just sent:
Hello,
I have two daughters who became indoctrinated by the transgender ideology they were exposed to when online due to school lockdown and online school during the pandemic. They were lonely and isolated, suburban, and white at a fraught time in America and transgender ideology casts you as a victim and special and unique.
My girls were, and still are, as the younger one is only now 13, searching for their identity and belonging (the *normal* role in childhood development of identity vs role confusion, Erik Erikson—child development specialist).
This has been exploited by troubled individuals who cast transgenderism as the solution to my girls’amd otber youngsters’ normal teenage angst.
And some folks get a lot of special attention for it. I believe some parents, a la Munchausen disorder, get a lot of attention and take a weird sense of, no pun intended, pride in socially transitioning their child.
That a national magazine would publish such specious information casts extreme doubt in my mind upon the validity of your actual parenting knowledge. Please be smarter.
The sources *are* the ones who are vetting the information. That’s not unbiased research. C’mon.
My daughters have been harmed by this ideology. I have seen other kids and families also harmed by this.
Your publishing of these transgender ideology articles that push social affirming of kids, with the implicit emotional blackmailing of parents, that their non-suicidal children, will become suicidal if they are not affirmed, is so woefully wrong, that it just really takes away your credibility as a parent’s resource.
Please retract the articles and publish parent’s letters who have objected.
This is an unfolding medical scandal and you are on the wrong side of history.
I signed it with my real name and as my title “Mother”.
The letter was really off the cuff as I typed it on my phone here in the US as we get ready for the big national holiday here of Thanksgiving while I’m in my car getting ready to head in to the grocery store.
Thank you to LGBT Courage Coalition for bringing the articles to all of our collective attention.
I will continue to write letters, as I have to my congress person (who reached out with a survey about the constituents concerns and one was “LGBT” rights), the attorney general of my state (who has said that transgender books MUST BE taught to elementary school children), and I will continue to go to my children’s public school (where the curriculum is TEACHING about group sex and anal sex and that there are “dozens of genders”), and let the pediatricians and psychologists know they’re really harming children with the way that all of this is being approached.
I sent a letter
Good morning,
I am a parent of a teen who expresses gender-noncomforming behavior. When I read your article titled: My Child is Trans-How Can I Support Them Without Messing Up? (published June 24, 2023), I became quite alarmed. I was a gender-nonconforming child myself, and never once did I think that I was trans. I have grown to accept myself as a woman and I enjoy a happy and healthy life. After reading your article and seeing that “watchful waiting” was considered a sharp rejection of my child, I was stunned. The article would lead me to believe that I must affirm my child as a different gender just because she likes to wear pants and enjoys more technical fields? I found this extremely alarming. According to this, I am harming my child by allowing her to grow into herself as the person she is with the body she was born with and I need to affirm her as a different gender. One that would require her to become a lifelong medical patient.
Thankfully, I know better. I grew up in the time of “Free to Be You and Me” where I learned that it is perfectly ok for a boy to like dolls and a girl to run faster than boys. That we are all people who should be respected and loved for who we are; NOT that we needed a lifetime of medical intervention to be our authentic selves. But how many young, new parents are reading this and thinking that this is fact?
In a subsequent article, New Study Shows the Dramatic Impact Validating Trans and Non-Binary Youth Can Have on Mental Health, (published November 15, 2023), sites a study by the Trevor Project that suggests that parents must socially transition a child as soon as they come out to you. A social transition is a very big deal. It sends a child down a path toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and eventually surgery. Surely you know that this is not a way to validate self-expression, especially since many potentially gay and lesbian children express opposite gender behaviors (also those who are not gay, for the record).
You are encouraging a whole new set of parents to look at their son who wants to wear nail polish to think that he is really a girl inside? I have taught preschool for many years. The number of boys coming to school in nail polish or putting on heels during dress up play has absolutely no bearing on their gender. It is play, plain and simple.
Please stop with this harmful writing. It is leading to what is going to be the largest medical scandal of our lifetime and too many innocent children and families will be destroyed by it. I would also suggest that you be much more careful who you get your information from and use your own critical thinking skills. The large uprise in young people being influenced by social media and now teachers and psychologists to believe they were born in the wrong body just does not make sense. I beg of you to please stop and do actual research on this topic before you enmesh yourself with these frightening articles.
The “study” consisted of asking kids to send a text message in response to a loaded prompt about what gives them “gender euphoria”. Absurd to even call this a “study”.
Wow. I can't even send them a comment because I actually think they are too far gone. They would just find my email warning of the dangers of gender affirmation to be "transphobic" and "hateful." I wish everyone would just stop reading the magazine (which I read when my kids were little). How disgusting to put this dangerous garbage out there for young, naive parents to read. At almost four, and continuing to age five, a child pretends his hair is long and says that's "girl" hair. By the time he's 11 or 12,, if this continues on the track that is set out by those who spew this garbage, he will have his puberty blocked, and, by age 17, he will be castrated. This is truly horrific.
Consider writing just what you did here in the form of a letter. They need to hear the harsh truth of what they are suggesting.
I sent this to them today. Just copied it and pasted it here 👍
Love_to_read Thank you for sending your letter. I was specifically responding to Hippiesq in my encouragement to send in a letter. I think the imagery of how a playful boy becomes a castrated man is just the kind of clear, blunt language these people need to hear.
Thanks to both of you. Yes, they should know how many of us parents really feel.
I sent this on to our Granparents Fight Back group . We will be writing letters. Thanks for all you do !
Dear Editor,
My name is Kathleen, I am a mother of a formerly gender-distressed natal female teen and a lifelong liberal Democrat. I am writing to express my concern regarding the current practice of medical intervention for gender-distressed children and teens.With regard to My Child is Trans, the only premise with which I can agree is that we have to love our children and communicate that love as hard as we can. In our case, watchful waiting and 3+ years of effective psychotherapy to address our teen's pre-adoption trauma are leading her to love herself for who she is. Love sometimes means doing some very difficult things, even if it means our children hate us for doing it. This is not conversion therapy. If anything, the affirmation model which includes medicalization with cross-sex hormones and "sex reassignment surgeries" is conversion therapy. That article also can mislead parents into misreading childrens' quirky cues as a sign that they are transgender. As a gender non-conforming toddler who was adamant that I wanted a penis and peed while standing up (a source of great frustration for my parents), and who changed my name to Sambo, I can't imagine what the gender mills would have done to me, but it likely would have resulted in irreversible medical interventions and sterilization.As an East Coast leader of Our Duty, an international support group for parents of gender confused children, I have heard many stories form parents of how taking the affirming approach worsened their childrens' mental health. I can tell you that personally, we witnessed that over a 6-month period with 3 therapists, all of whom affirmed our daughter's identity (when they said they wouldn't by the way). Our daughter's mental health declined and her suicidal ideation worsened. It wasn't until we found a non-affirming psychologist who got to the root cause of our daughter's discomfort that we began to see clear signs of improvement in her mental health and comfort in her body.Europeans are waking up to the faulty affirmation-only treatment model and are quite vocal about how these medical interventions have utterly no evidentiary basis. On September 5, 2023, a Citizen Petition was filed with the FDA calling for a systematic review of the indiscriminate off-label prescription of puberty blockers for children, and it is still open for public comment. https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2023-P-3767-0001 As of this writing, there are over 600 comments - not an insubstantial number.Detransitioners - those who regret the medicalization and surgeries forming the backbone of the so-called "gender-affirming care" model - are suing their medical providers. There are over 51,000 members of Reddit's Detrans Subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/detrans/. More lawsuits are coming.
And earlier this year a clinician whistleblower blew the lid off how children are being mistreated in gender clinics. https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kidsThe second article I take issue with is the 11/15 "New Study" that purports to show the dramatic impact that validating trans and non-binary youth can have on mental health. As noted above, that did not happen in our case, and I believe that the Trevor Project's so-called study merits closer examination.
There is a lot of money to be made by transitioning gender-confused youth. The drugs being doled out without examining why children feel such distress will make them patients for life. The surgeries have untold risks and failure rates. Why isn't Parents Magazine doing a deeper dive? Parents, and by turn their children, are better served by honest and accurate reporting.
The tide is turning and people are waking up to the reality that gender affirming care is not evidence based. International organization Genspect.org is doing a deeper dive and creating a "Gender Framework to help and inform as many people as possible: those questioning their gender; those who have transitioned, regardless of how they feel about the outcome; those who have detransitioned; the relatives and friends of all these individuals; those working with them in clinical and therapeutic practice; those working in other professional fields affected by these issues; and anyone in society who seeks positive, thoughtful resolution of these often complex and sensitive problems." https://genspect.org/introduction-to-the-gender-framework/
Now THAT is the deep dive that I as a parent would like to see Parents Magazine undertake.
Regards,
Kathleen
This letter is amazing!!! Thank you for your deep research, exceptional detailing of information, and for the clear writing.
Thank you so much for writing about this issue. I'll definitely send comments on each article.
Here is my letter
I am writing to you to express my concerns about your My Child is Trans article. I am the grandparent of a 6 year old girl whose mother shaved her head and sent her to kindergarten graduation in a tuxedo. About a month later I was informed by text that my granddaughter had a new name and pronouns and I needed to start using them. When asked where all of this was coming from my daughter stopped speaking to me and now does not allow me to see any of my three grandchildren.
I believe your article, My Child is Trans will lead well-meaning parents to interpret gender non-conforming behavior in very young children as a possible sign they are transgender and convince these parents that they should socially transition them. Small children do not know who they are and they should not be encouraged by parents to make life altering decisions. Small children believe everything their parents say and want to please their parents. My granddaughter and other children transitioned at a young age and affirmed in school have no way out of their new assigned names, pronouns and identities. They are now trans and they have no idea of what that means.
Social transition, the first stage of gender affirming care is harmful to children. Parents are supposed to protect their children from harm.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/your-four-year-old-child-is-not-transgender
https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/medicalization-of-gender-non-conformance
https://www.transgendertrend.com/childhood-social-transition/
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-danger-of-social-transitioning/
https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-cause-not-a-cure
I would imagine that you have people on your staff trained in child development. These people should be aware that it is normal for a small child to want to grow up as the opposite sex or a unicorn or a superhero. My granddaughter believes in Santa. I am sure she thinks she will just grow a penis soon and then she will look just like all the other boys she sees when she uses the boys bathroom at school.
I suppose next you will be sharing advice from the social worker described in the article below. She tells therapists that if a little girl pulls out her barrettes that means she wants to be a boy and if a baby boy pulls at his onesie that means he wants to be a girl.
https://pitt.substack.com/p/empathetic-manipulation?r=2lixqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Please help put a stop to this nonsense!
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/09/28/2023-21274/safe-and-appropriate-foster-care-placement-requirements-for-titles-iv-e-and-iv-b. Please submit similar comments to the federal government who wishes to require all foster parents affirm "trans" foster kids.
I posted my letter just now!
Kudos for raising the alarm and for giving such useful and detailed suggestions on how to respond.
The pro-trans articles are useful because they show how trans activists and their allies turn logic on its head and use half-truths to try to win arguments. The description of "watchful waiting" was so inaccurate and incomplete that it would get a D-minus in a college assignment - provided the professor wasn't a trans ally, that is.
One of the worst things about Parents Magazine's approach to so-called trans kids is how it reverses the roles of parent and child. In a gender-affirmative world, it's the child who drives the parenting. This is based on the false narrative that children somehow know their true "gender" even at a very young age. Sure, and when I was six years old, I was most insistent that my parents take me on a vacation to Candyland, the imaginary setting for a board game!
It would be interesting to know how the magazine came to be captured by gender identity ideology and which jobs are occupied by individuals who are pushing the trans agenda. I wonder whether anyone on the board is aware of the potential legal liability the company is acquiring each time it gives parents flawed advice on gender and on how to parent "trans kids."
Telling your child they can't eat three bags of M&M's before bedtime may make your child feel invalidated. Join us for a Hershey sponsored chocolate fest every evening at 9 PM eastern where your child can experience their true authentic selves.
Just sent a letter! BTW, is there a way to get some stickers made up. I would like to buy some and put on my computer and hand out.
Hi there,
I entered the site of Parents magazine through the provided link. The whole content of the site is absolutely sick. I would rather turn them to the police, than writing to them.
I read these comments and just sent my letter without looking at their site. It does sound pretty horrible.