Right before the pandemic, Josie’s teenage son dropped a bombshell. He told his parents that he was transgender. At the time, her son, who has ADHD, had been struggling socially and was cut from the baseball team.
Then the lockdown dealt a blow to his mental health.
“It was a perfect storm, and it hit all at once,” Josie, a pseudonym she uses to protect her son, told The Post.
“He became a social-justice warrior … he wants to help women and he doesn’t want to be that horrible man that society talks about. He wants to protect women by becoming one. It’s a naïve logic,” she said.
Her son, now 18, graduated in June and was planning to take a gap year to apply to college. Instead, he left home about six weeks ago, and he isn’t speaking to his parents.
Earlier this month, Elon Musk spoke to the Financial Times about his own estrangement from his trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, 18, blaming “neo-Marxists” at elite schools and universities for their fractured relationship.
“It goes to show you that no nobody is out of reach,” Josie said of Musk. “Just because you have money, it doesn’t mean that you can protect your kids.”
Like many teens struggling to fit in, Josie’s son initially found his solution on the internet: He was clearly a girl and transitioning would solve his problems. That belief was reinforced by his public high school in a ritzy Southern California town.
“The school is very much affirming. They celebrated it and changed his name behind our back,” Josie said.
But there was one teacher in particular who fostered his desire to change genders (something he’s said he’s wanted and then wavered on). She discovered emails the teacher had sent her son, giving encouragement and sharing resources on how to transition without the financial and medical support of his parents.
“He sent him some stuff that was very alarming. He told him it would be a difficult path, meaning to transition and leave your parents, but he’d be glad he did,” Josie explained.
While she doesn’t know where her son is living, she is certain of one thing: The teacher “took the parenting away from us. It’s like a cult. And the first thing a cult says is to get rid of your parents.”
Josie has become an integral part of an underground network of parents fighting against medical intervention in children struggling with gender dysphoria. She helps runs a Substack called Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans, which publishes the accounts of parents and detransitioners — people who have transitioned only to realize it was a mistake and revert back to their original identity.
They share the worry that gender-confused children are encouraged by societal forces, including doctors, to seek out medical interventions such as puberty blockers and elective surgeries to remove their breasts or alter their genitalia. And they’re concerned these kids might be irrevocably harming themselves at a young age.
In the last year, support groups for parents and detransitioners have mushroomed and some European countries are changing course, including in the UK, where the NHS has tightened restrictions on medical interventions for children.
The detransitioners Reddit group membership has also swelled to more than 40,000. “They recall groceries if two people get sick but 40,000 people and no one pays attention,” Josie said, calling the matter a “medical scandal.”
She noted that it’s not a Republican or a Democrat issue but a human one. “Every parent I meet [going through this] were Democrats. These are not right-wing people despite what the media will tell you.”
As for her own son, she holds out hope they can repair their relationship.
“It’s a horrible thing to tell a child you have to change your body to be happy. If I had my son ten years earlier, this wouldn’t have happened,” she said, adding, “I just want him to have a good life.”