‘We are in the midst of an enormous medical scandal’: Home truths of a transgender crisis
My daughter suffered from mental health issues, yet doctors failed to see any red flags. I am speaking because this phenomenon is much bigger than my family, and we need to talk about it. The pattern is the same, over and over again.
I am speaking as the parent of a young woman who declared a transgender identity completely out of the blue at the age of 17. So many parents feel they cannot speak out for fear of harming the relationship with their child. I am speaking because, as I have sadly discovered over the past few years, this phenomenon is much, much bigger than my family, and we most certainly do need to talk about it and raise awareness of what is being done to our children.
Our daughter has just turned 21 and has been in the transgender bubble for just over three years.
Growing up, she was not particularly “girly” and did not like dolls, for example, but I thought nothing of that because I hated dolls as a kid and I was a bit of a tomboy myself. She loved soccer and handball, and she was a brown belt in taekwondo. She tried so many extra-curricular activities – dance, singing, gymnastics, swimming, and tennis – to name a few.
She used to walk with me every morning when I walked our dogs and go to the gym with me as well. She enjoyed shopping with me and choosing her own clothes. We would go and have our nails painted together. We would go to plays and concerts together. We had such a close and loving relationship. She is very smart and always did really well in school growing up, but she was bullied at school when she was younger. As a result of the bullying and the lack of support from the school, we moved her to a new school when she was 13 years old. That went well for the first two years, and she had a stable friendship group of really lovely girls.
Around the time she turned 15, she switched friendship groups. The new group had a girl who “did not identify as a girl” and that was my first introduction to gender ideology. I felt the new friends had a very negative influence on our daughter. Around the time she changed friendship groups, our daughter started experiencing mental health problems. For three years, these mental health problems continued. We moved through both the public system (called the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service) and private mental health systems in our efforts to find help for our daughter.
We collected diagnoses of anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and possible borderline personality disorder. We took our daughter to more than 70 medical appointments related to her mental health in that three-year period. We focused on diet, exercise, love, support and psychotherapy. But our daughter’s mental health eventually became much worse.
We found out that she had been cutting herself and binge eating as well. She had always been very conscious of what she ate – in a healthy way – as she had been a vegetarian for several years.
In hindsight, I believe this period was when she started focusing on transgender. She ended up having a four-week admission to the mental health ward of a local private hospital in the winter, as it reached the point that she was refusing to get out of bed and refusing to go to school. When she came out of the hospital after those four weeks, she cut her hair short.
The next few months were extremely traumatic for our family. She barely attended school and became aggressive and verbally abusive toward us and her younger brother. She was lying, stealing and binge eating, and would not do anything that we asked of her. I found out she was smoking marijuana. If we wanted to go out as a family with her younger brother to, say, a soccer match, she would declare she was anxious and suicidal so that I could not go. She became extremely manipulative.
The stress we were under was enormous. Our son was 13 at that time, and the distress of her abusive behaviour caused him to become anorexic. I remember him curling up in a fetal position on the floor and sobbing, begging her to stop her out-of-control behaviour. I guess our son saw that his intake of food was the one thing he could control. We were pretty much shattered as a family. I remember sitting in her general practitioner’s office sobbing and begging for help. It really was a nightmare. I believe it was over this period that she started to become engrossed with online trans sites. I later found a history in her web browser full of trans searches and sites.
Then, that spring, she announced all over social media that she was, in fact, a male and had a new name. She claimed that she had told people at school months before and had been going by her new male name at school for some time. She told us that everyone at school, including the teachers, was supportive. Considering I had been in contact with the school regularly because of her mental health problems and the fact that she had had many absences from school, I was stunned that no one from the school ever told us about her transgender announcement.
She had a scheduled visit to her psychiatrist the week she announced she was trans, and she told her psychiatrist that she was suicidal, so he insisted that we take her to our local public hospital for admission to the adolescent mental health ward. The psychiatric registrar who admitted our daughter to hospital said he thought she had borderline personality disorder.
After an all-night admission that my husband accompanied her with, I went to the hospital to visit her the following day. When I asked to see our daughter, I was told that I had a son. Already above her bed was the male name.
I was aware that two other girls who attended her drama group were saying they were boys, so I was very sceptical of her announcement of trans. She had never displayed any signs of the condition gender dysphoria. My scepticism was dismissed by the staff of the mental health ward. As parents who did not immediately affirm our child’s declaration of transgender, we were shamed and bullied by the medical professionals in that hospital ward. All of our voiced concerns were swept aside, and we were put down by hospital staff in front of our daughter, accused of being bigoted, not inclusive, and transphobic.
We were also told that we must accept that we now had a son or she would kill herself. They said, “Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?” They said they wanted to introduce her to a transgender staff member. The very next day was a Saturday, and I was called by the hospital to come and take our daughter out on day leave. I remember thinking at the time that they could not be too concerned about her being suicidal if they sent her home on day leave 24 hours after being admitted.
At a family meeting at the hospital we were ridiculed for “dressing her like a girl” when she was little. They were not one bit interested in her complex mental health history. We were told that she needed an immediate referral to an endocrinologist for hormones. She was 17, and we said no, that we did not agree to the referral and that we were returning to her GP and private psychiatrist. They needed our agreement for that referral. The hospital went ahead with the referral and wrote up her discharge summary, saying we did agree to the referral for hormones.
Our GP recommended we take her to a private psychiatrist in our hometown who specialised in gender. The only trouble was there was a six-month waiting list before we could get in to see him. From the hospital admission onward, our relationship with our daughter deteriorated significantly. She came out of the hospital after five nights and immediately shaved her head. The abuse she directed toward us escalated, and she was pretty much out of control. Her lying, binge eating and manipulative behaviour continued. She had another scheduled three-week hospital admission that spring in the same mental health ward of the same private hospital as she had been in five months earlier, except this time they pretended she was a boy. There was no improvement in her behaviour.
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All of our voiced concerns were swept aside, and we were put down by hospital staff in front of our daughter, accused of being bigoted, not inclusive, and transphobic.
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She left the hospital on day leave against the wishes of her treating psychiatrist to attend the endocrinologist appointment that had been made as a result of her earlier public hospital admission – the appointment we did not agree to. By this time she had turned 18.
When I went searching, I was absolutely stunned by what I found in the browser history of our daughter’s computer. It was almost unbelievable. YouTube videos of young girls singing the praises of testosterone, showcasing the changes to their bodies, and cheering each other on. Bragging about surgeries and showing off the scars of double mastectomies. It was macabre. I felt like I had landed in the middle of some sort of alien world, some parallel universe. How could anyone be cheering all these young people on to do such harm to themselves? I can honestly say I have never been as disturbed by anything in my entire life.
I found messages from transgender adults, cheering our daughter on and telling her to get rid of her unsupportive family. “Snip snip the mother f...ers” was one phrase I will never forget. That was from a trans adult who is portrayed in Australian media as some sort of hero. All I could see were red flags and grooming.
As a family, we were on the verge of breaking down. We were subject to daily torrents of verbal abuse and she called us the most despicable things. I was told I was a disgusting and pathetic parent, a white-privileged bigot, a boring heterosexual, a transphobe – the abuse just went on and on. It was like someone had put a script in her head because it did not sound like our daughter at all. She would stand with her face so close to mine and unleash her fury.
She was meant to be in her final year of school that year. However, due to missing most of the previous school year, she could not continue with school. We suggested she do a one-year university course that would give her the equivalent of her school leaving certificate. She enrolled in that course, and on the day she was due to start she wouldn’t get out of bed, telling me she had taken pills. I called an ambulance and she was taken to the hospital. I think I was just skin and bone myself at that time. I’d lost so much weight with the constant stress.
A few weeks later, after the usual daily torrent of abuse from her, we had to restrain her younger brother from lunging at her. I told her I wasn’t going to be treated like that any more. She left the house and went up the road to her glitter family, a girl she went to school with whose mother would pretend she was a boy. She told the mother her father had threatened her, so the mother took her to the police station and later that evening the police knocked on our door, and a DVO (domestic violence order) was served on my husband. The police did not even bother to come and talk to us or to find out our side of what had happened or how she had been behaving toward us.
Following the visit by the police we realised we could no longer have her living with us. A friend of ours owned a nearby house that had rooms he rented out to university students for accommodation, and luckily one room was vacant, so we moved her in there and paid 50 per cent of the rent.
At her request, I went to an appointment with her to the endocrinologist in May. I had not seen her since she had moved out and was not aware she was on testosterone. I later found out she had been started on testosterone at the second appointment with the endocrinologist. She’d seen the endocrinologist the previous December and then was given a script for testosterone in March.
No psychiatry, no psychology, no examination of her mental health history. A seriously mentally unwell teenager was given hormones that would make irreversible changes to her body.
My sister, who is a medical practitioner, came to the endocrinologist appointment with us. There was a “multidisciplinary team” of three people at the meeting, the pediatric endocrinologist, a nurse and a social worker. They said, “Oh, we are so pleased to meet you,” yet sat there at the meeting and did not bother to mention that they had already started our daughter on testosterone. I was suspicious. Our daughter’s voice had gone gravelly.
When I asked whether they were aware of her extensive mental health history, they said no, they were not. This was despite her being referred to them by the adolescent mental health ward of the very same hospital in which the endocrinologist had her clinic. The endocrinologist said, “Don’t you just want your daughter to be happy?” I honestly could not believe what I was hearing. Then they said they were referring her to an adult endocrinologist as she was now 18.
The following month we went with her to see a private psychiatrist who specialised in gender. He diagnosed her with complex PTSD, which he said was caused by childhood bullying. He was shocked she had been started on testosterone and said he would not have recommended it. He then told us he was closing his books to anyone under 25 so could not see her again.
By now I had nearly a year of research under my belt. I remember finding Dr Lisa Littman’s research on the new phenomenon of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” and rejoicing. I remember finding journalist Abigail Shrier’s first article, “When Your Daughter Defies Biology”. I remember finding the parents’ websites 4thWaveNow and Parents of ROGD Kids. I remember being put in contact with another Australian mum, and I ended up speaking with her for hours. My goodness, I was actually not alone in my scepticism. The more I researched, the more gender-critical articles I found, and the more I realised how shocking and widespread this medical scandal actually was.
That September, I accompanied our daughter to an appointment with the adult endocrinologist. I took a stack of those articles I had read to the adult endocrinologist and tried to engage her in a discussion about how concerned we were about our daughter’s mental health and how many people were starting to speak out about this social contagion. I was dismissed by the adult endocrinologist, who told me, “Your daughter is over 18. She can do what she likes.” I remember being in total disbelief. How could a medical practitioner have so little regard for their seriously mentally unwell patient?
We eventually had our daughter accepted into a program through a private hospital. It was a weekly dialectal behavioural therapy class. After the first week of attending the therapy class, she went back to using her own name. Within a few weeks, she stopped taking testosterone. We could see this huge improvement in her. She was coming over once a week for dinner. Our son refused to see her, so he would stay inside, and we would eat out in our back room and watch a movie. She had befriended a lovely girl from Europe who was living in the student accommodation, and she would come around with her and take our dogs for a walk. But eventually the girl had to return to Europe, and we noticed that our daughter started binding her breasts again.
Then she told us she had seen a local plastic surgeon to have her breasts cut off. We suddenly had an uneasy feeling and wondered if she could use our private health cover to do this. We rang our health fund and found out they had issued a quote to a local private hospital the week before for the surgery. We immediately removed our daughter from our private health fund. We wrote to the plastic surgeon, a long letter detailing our daughter’s mental health history and our grave concerns not only for her and her welfare but also for the growing number of young people caught up in what we saw as a social contagion. Our daughter actually gave us permission to speak to the surgeon about her.
I asked him whether he was cutting the breasts off young women 10 years ago. He sheepishly replied, “No.” We made it very clear that we did not support our daughter doing this. He made the comment that we were the first parents to object.
I briefly managed to get our daughter to see another psychiatrist around this time. Knowing that he was gender critical, I hoped for a miracle. After several sessions with him, she refused to see him again. He did diagnose her with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder. The autism spectrum diagnosis really made sense.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Looking back, I can see that she was always on the periphery of her friendship groups and that she never really felt like she fitted in or was like other girls. This became more obvious as she went through her teenage years. Yet of all the health professionals I had taken her to over those three years, no one had ever considered ASD.
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The pattern is the same, over and over again … Trans suddenly gives them status and credibility, and they become the centre of attention.
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Sadly, our daughter became more and more alienated from us. She fell back down the trans rabbit hole, just as we had hopes that she was coming out of it. She refused to see us for Christmas, and in January she told us she never wanted to see or speak to us again. She moved from the student accommodation and blocked all our numbers.
It is now three years since she declared she was transgender, and she has spent that three years on a disability support pension for mental health. She is not working and not studying. She attempted to restart her studies but ultimately withdrew from every course she attempted.
I have come into contact with so many parents like myself, all gravely concerned about the social contagion that our children have been swept up in and the scale of the harm that is being done by irreversible interventions like hormones and surgeries. I have read far too many heartbreaking stories of regret, of young people with maimed and permanently disfigured bodies – bodies that they will never be able to return to how they were.
The pattern is the same, over and over again: children and young adults who are mentally unwell, perhaps traumatised with histories of bullying or sexual assault; children who are most likely same-sex attracted; children who are on the autism spectrum and neurodiverse children; children who are misfits or socially awkward. Trans suddenly gives them status and credibility, and they become the centre of attention.
It is hard to imagine any other medical condition with a serious, life-altering treatment where the diagnosis is solely dependent on the reliability and accuracy of a child’s or young person’s self-report. We were supposed to accept, unquestioningly, the crazy notion that our female child became a boy overnight at the age of 17 and that she needed to alter her body to match this invisible internal identity. It was, to us, an obvious mental health issue.
Our daughter had serious mental health issues over a three-year period prior to her self-diagnosis as being transgender. There were serious red flags waving. These issues, these red flags, were all completely ignored by the medical profession.
She has also had another three years of very poor mental health because, in their rush to affirm transgender to the complete dismissal of all of her comorbidities, the medical profession has failed to treat her appropriately.
Parents understand social contagion among teens. We were teens once as well. Social contagions have always existed. What has changed is that today they are influenced by thousands upon thousands on social media and misinformation on the internet.
There was a cluster of girls in our daughter’s drama group who declared they were transgender. Three young women, all in the same drama class, suddenly becoming transgender? Surely that alone should raise red flags with any credible medical practitioner. Yet instead of seeing this social contagion for what it really is, the medical profession has lost sight of the Hippocratic oath and accepted the self-diagnosis of these young people. It beggars belief.
We all know puberty is an uncomfortable physical and emotional time for adolescents. Yet to reach maturity, we have to go through it. Puberty is not a disease, nor is it optional. It is the only path to our adult selves. To stop this in children is inconceivable. To put a mentally unwell and traumatised teenager on opposite-sex hormones is inconceivable. We are in the midst of an enormous medical scandal.
Postscript: Our daughter’s mental health issues first emerged more than seven years ago. Almost three years into this period, she announced she was trans and was started on testosterone. Now she regrets this and hates the irreversible damage it has done to her. She no longer identifies as trans.
This account was written in 2021 by an Australian mother who remains anonymous to protect her family. It is an edited extract from the upcoming book Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans: Tales from the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids, edited by Josie A. and Dina S., and will be published by Pitchstone Publishing, Durham, North Carolina, US, on August 14.
