NOT SHUTTING UP

CHILDREN OF TRANSITIONERS – 25 DECEMBER 2021

The site received a lot of attention last week, when Maya Forstater kindly linked to one of our articles on Twitter. There were some lovely and positive and supportive comments from readers. Thank you! The article, written by the daughter of a transitioner, referred to the breach of privacy and safety male transitioners can be to their daughters. Not all, obviously, but the Twitter mob decided to read it that way. Predictably, it brought a shower of extreme anger, name calling and abuse. For some of us, this is familiar behaviour.

A few examples of the nasty bits!

It’s obviously not pleasant being called ‘trash’ and ‘scum’ for talking about your lived experience in your own terms. For children and partners of trans people, particularly late stage transitioners, you are caught between what you want to say and what you are allowed to say. Between what cannot be acknowledged and what must be said.

As the mob on Twitter lights the torches and sharpens the pitchforks, it often feels as if we are in a battle to prove that 100% of children of transitioners are happy or 100% aren’t. I’m not interested in doing that. It’s not a battle of the Google searches. And when someone tweets an article it doesn’t mean that they automatically agree with everything we say. I have my experience, the experience of my contributors, the people who have contacted me or supported me on social media. The experience of people who have written about having a trans parent, good and bad. The experience of those who have spoken about having children with a trans partner.

We obviously work within a context of happy and unhappy families. Lots of unconventional families work out just fine. Lots of conventional ones are miserable. But we are also working in a modern context where everything trans people do has to be lauded and the victims are ignored. And this leads to an unfair bias in organisations who should be objective.

Research into children of trans parents is limited and frequently biased. This recent study recruited trans parents via Gendered Intelligence and Stonewall, and interviewers had training from Gendered Intelligence. Both groups are very pro-trans.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295192.2020.1792194

I am grateful to the researchers for acknowledging the limitations in previous studies. There really is very little that we know about long term outcomes for children of transitioners.  It’s great to see that some families are similar to control groups, although it’s worrying to see the word ‘transphobia’ used in referring to partners, as I’m not sure it’s really a thing you can define or measure. It’s such a tiny sample, and the respondents seem too diverse to reveal much. It’s interesting also to see how many family members declined to respond – including 13 of the children. And the definitions of the trans parent: “trans, transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid, agender and gender nonconforming”. How can you compare having a ‘gender nonconforming’ parent to a transsexual one? Equally, a cohort made up only of trans widows will give an entirely different point of view. At that age I would have only said positive things because I loved my father and wanted to please him. Where is the balance? I wouldn’t have even seen an online advertisement by either of these groups. It is interesting to note that, according to this study, it’s possible that up to 500,000 people are trans in the UK and potentially 49% are parents. If they only have one child, that’s nearly a quarter of a million children. We desperately need to know more. And to do that, we have to be clear about who and what we are looking at.

To be blunt: transition is usually sexually motivated. I’ve written about it a lot already, linked to clinicians and papers about it. You’ll find it on this site in my pieces about autogynephilia. That can be relatively benign and manageable, or it can escalate and become a source of distress. What can we say about a research paper that can’t acknowledge what all sexologists know? That uses terms like ‘transphobic’ and ‘cis’ as if that’s not part of a gender ideology most people reject? And if your husband decides to wear your clothes and call your marriage a lesbian relationship and you don’t like that, is it really ‘transphobia’? Is denying anything to your autogynephile husband ‘transphobic’? Who benefits from pretending that our fathers aren’t struggling with their mental health, and that relationship breakdown is the fault of the ‘transphobic’ partner?

I’ve spoken before about autogynephilia, and the shame and rage that is provoked when autogynephiles feel thwarted or rejected. Bizarrely, this now seems to be a normal part of our culture. Labour MP Rosie Duffield isn’t able to go to her party’s conference at the moment because her life has been threatened by trans activists. We get called ‘trash’ and Nazis just for talking. And the focus of this anger is women, because this culture is also incredibly misogynistic.

There’s lots of online abuse, but I want to share with you just a fraction of what was sent to JK Rowling, and introduce a sobering thought: how many of these people are parents?

From the responses to our own article, the answer seems to be at least a few.

Oh, the irony. We ARE your children… answering back for ourselves.

Politicians are threatened, academics have to have security escorts, women’s meetings are picketed by screaming crowds. Lesbians are publicly assaulted for rejecting male transitioners. The most awful abuse is thrown at one of the planet’s most beloved authors. Women are reported to their employers, they are sued for saying something on social media, they are reported to the police and arrested for saying that men can’t become women. They lose jobs and contracts.

Just step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture. Who exactly are these angry people making others afraid to speak? For all the abuse thrown around Twitter, it’s all really a lot of kerfuffle to distract from the reality that for some of us these very, very angry people… are our Dads.

These are also our fathers:

Karen White: father of one child

Jessica Brennan: father of two children

Details withheld to protect the child

Douglas “Tai” Wakefield: two children

David Challenor, trans activist who influenced Green Party policy: three children

Mark Turton: one child

These are the most awful examples, yes, but if we are really going to look at how this issue affects people in real life we have to talk about the extremes. Because there are real children in those families. There are some obvious challenges someone could make at this point. Yes, these are awful cases, but aren’t lots of regular parents equally awful? Yes! Absolutely. But the point we are trying to get at again and again on this blog is that creating a legal fiction that these are women, and then utilising the police, schools, hospitals, refuges etc. in enforcing that fiction, doesn’t help children. Failing to acknowledge that transition is sexually motivated doesn’t help. Acting as if anyone who is trans gets a free pass for their behaviour doesn’t help. It doesn’t give us a chance that children of non-trans parents would have. It makes us afraid to tell our story. And it pushes our fathers away from things that might actually help, like therapy and treatments like antidepressants. And the mob on social media attacking anyone daring to talk about this obviously doesn’t help either. We need the authorities to stop listening to the activists on Twitter and chasing Stonewall accreditation and actually apply some rational thinking.

These men are evidently in deep distress. But while society focuses on them, what’s the impact on us?

When you have to stop daddy killing mummy, but he still gets to make coin from it:

These are also our fathers [extracts from transwidowsvoices.org]:

“…The ‘red mist’ descended once again and he tried to push me out of the moving car, I was tight against the door. I shouted “What do you want me to do?”…the response still chills me to my bones…”I want you to die, bitch!”, he screamed still pushing me tight against the car door while bombing along at about 70 miles per hour.

As you can guess that was the final straw. He came to the house twice more at my behest over the next year, otherwise he had made little attempt to see our children and when he did come he used it to remove his philatelic collection from the house. When he was there, a feeling of doom and walking on eggshells came over us all, while he went to his study and didn’t interact with any of us…”

“…After the transgender announcement, the neglect became worse, and it was very obvious how irrelevant our children and I were to my spouse in this newfound quest. And then the massive expenses began to rack up: clothing, wigs, electrolysis and waxing, voice training. Eventually I realized that this stressful situation, where I had no idea what my husband would demand to do next or what the next broken promise might be, it was physically killing me and I needed to leave.

I told my husband that I wanted a divorce. He told me I was making a terrible mistake. He explained how he would become this amazing person after transition, when he is free to be his true self as a woman. That the drinking and being an absentee spouse and parent, all of that bad behaviour was because of his gender dysphoria and would be cured by transition.

Fast forwards several years to today. My ex-spouse pays child maintenance but otherwise barely interacts with our children. Mutual friends tell me that my ex lives in state of hoarding and filth, and has become an alcoholic. That’s my ex’s life as their “authentic self”.”

“When I told my husband I was leaving he said he was going to kill himself. He said I was punishing him for his depression that was caused by the pain of not being able to live as a woman. He said I thought I was better than him, that I was a cruel snob, that I was being coached by “lesbian feminist bitches” and destroying our family and hurting our kids. For years after I got out, he kept trying to control me through threats of suicide. He said he could not live as his true self except with me. When that didn’t work, he recruited his brother who gleefully threatened and intimidated me daily for two years. I had escaped the sexual abuse but I was still desperate and bedraggled with three children now 4, 8 and 11.

I did the best I could to build a happy new life for me and the kids. I struggled with alcohol abuse, but I thought my kids were generally thriving. My younger two seemed like happy toddlers, my oldest acted out a bit but was easily enough distracted. I don’t know what, if anything, he took in of my husband’s sexual proclivities or his abuse. I still don’t. What I do know though, is that he has his own struggles with his gender identity which have made our relationship difficult.”

Daddy’s a lesbian now

Here too, a father using his two children as props in a TikTok video showing why lesbians should date him. The kids are so sweet and enthusiastic. Daddy seems to have lost any measure of where the boundaries are. The ‘little humans’ are included in the deal, apparently

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Baby Daddy

Imagine you discovered that when you were a baby your father fed you from his chest. He didn’t produce enough to feed you properly and you didn’t get enough nutrition. The drug being used was domperidone, which the FDA had warned patients not to use for lactation because the drug is excreted in breast milk and could harm the baby. You were effectively an experiment. All this to validate his sexual orientation…