We are endlessly told to be sympathetic to trans people; to respect their pronouns and to accept them in their new ‘authentic selves’. The ‘trans’ person has been elevated to near Godlike status, whose feelings and rights are paramount above every other person’s.
But, whilst society’s focus is exclusively on the ‘rights’ of the ‘trans’ person, the feelings of those in their family and others are being completely ignored.
Let us move away from the feelings of the person with Harmful Transgender Ideations (HTIs). (I reject the term Gender Dysphoria and will never use it as a clinical description). See why here:
https://x.com/Psychgirl211/status/1808825717204922755
). Let us instead consider the feelings of their families. Especially parents. How do the parents of a ‘trans-identified’ children or person cope with the process?
So, in this piece, I attempt addressing these issues by raising questions and making observations of the emotional impact of transgenderism on parents, focussing specifically on grief and various related issues.
Parents and families are grieving. They are grieving for the loss of the person they once knew. Grieving for the devastation that person’s actions has wrought on familial relationships. Grieving because the destruction caused by ‘pseudo-transition’ (the only thing that is being changed is secondary sex characteristics, not sex), is almost without exception, needless and fruitless.
What is the emotional impact on parents of a child transitioning? Obviously the ‘trans’ child is not dead, but they are no longer the person the parent created and raised.
Putting things more concretely:
- What happens when, say, a daughter has had a double mastectomy, is growing facial hair, has a deepened voice, has scooped out her reproductive organs, has a monstrous ‘neo phallus’ and now ‘identifies’ as a man?
- What happens when, say, a son has started Oestrogen and has had an orchidectomy; has removed his penis and is left with a cankerous wound, which is always trying to heal itself, but which we are all supposed to believe has become a ‘fully functional’ neo-vagina?
- What happens when a living child cuts a parent completely out of their life? When they aggressively reject their parents? When they somehow blame, the loving parent, who has done no wrong, for their HTIs?
Is this child still alive, to the parent, or is the ‘trans’ child analogous to Schroedinger’s Cat, both dead and alive at the same time?
And if so, what sense can parents make of this? How do they feel?
We thus need a new way to conceptualise the grief that is attendant to a child’s transitioning, because simply, the world has never experienced anything such as the wholesale effects of gender ideology on family functioning and interpersonal relationships, or on society in general. Our understanding of grief is limited to what we have always known. Even the physical death of a child through illness, accident or malfeasance cannot adequately describe the grief felt by parents who have lost a child to the wildly misnamed ‘Gender Affirming Care’ (GAC).
There are a number of theoretical models by which the process of grieving can be understood and there are understandably, different types of grief. The following is a simplified condensation of these models and types appropriate to ‘transitioning’ and GAC.
- Normative Grief: Where a person’s loss is acknowledged by society and the bereaved’s grief reactions are accepted and ‘acceptable’. For example, the loss of a parent, grandparent, sibling, friend, or even a pet. This is the ‘baseline’ for describing grief.
- Disenfranchised Grief: When a person’s loss is not supported or acknowledged by others and the griever’s ability to grieve is not recognised. For example perinatal loss; dementia, the loss of one’s home, such as in a fire or natural disaster, or by becoming a refugee, etc.
- Anticipatory Grief: Where the person is grieving before the grief-causing event occurs, in anticipation of the event. For example because of a terminal illness or caring for someone with a degenerative disease.
- Complicated Grief: Where a person gets ‘stuck’ in a grief reaction and cannot move on from the feelings of pain and loss. They are often unable to work, to effectively carry out the activities of daily living and they lose emotional connection with remaining loved ones.
- Ambiguous Grief: When there is no emotional ‘closure’. The loved one is physically absent but remains psychologically close. The loss may for example, be due to incarceration, military deployment, missing persons, etc.
I will also offer another type of grief, which I am calling Existential Grief .
Parents of the trans-identified child are in a uniquely awful position, because, as I argue in this piece, they are experiencing multiple griefs, a mixture of Disenfranchised, Anticipatory, Complicated and Ambiguous Grief. They wait, with dread for the next phase in their child’s transition. The process of their child’s transition may have frozen them into a state of emotional and adaptive dysfunction. They may have no contact with their child in years, and may only know of their child’s doings through other family members or via social media.
But, unlike with any other grieving group, despite the onslaught of pain resulting from their children’s behaviour, parents of ‘trans-identified’ children are not being permitted to grieve.
Grieving as a process
A familiar way of understanding of, and responses to, grief was proposed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss Psychologist, who developed a five-stage ‘Cycle of Grief’, to explain the psychological processes that occur when a loved one dies or is dying. These five-stages are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and, Acceptance.
These stages are not necessarily linear. We can move backwards and forwards along this path as circumstances change. We can, for example, go from depression back to anger, from acceptance back to bargaining. But eventually for most of us, we resolve the loss of a loved one and move forward with life. Death, after all, is a part of living.
Our understanding of grief needs to include grief arising from transgenderism
But the “familiar” way of understanding of, and response to, grief is inadequate when considering the feelings felt by the parents or loved ones of a trans-identified child. This is because, the loss is nearly always unavoidable, eg old age, disease, accident, or even an ‘Act of God’. And, even when avoidable, (such as with suicide or homicide), we have a psychological framework within which to place the death/loss/absence of the loved one. However painful or random the loss is, we have developed the psychological tools to understand it.
So, no matter how awful the death is, it has happened. It has an ending and the psychological process of recovery as difficult as it is, can be embarked upon.
Even in cases which may result in ambiguous grief (such as where a person goes missing, or in suicide), the production of a death certificate can mark the point at which the grieving can begin. And again, with complicated grief, there is discrete event which has occurred and with appropriate help, the person can be assisted to become ‘unstuck’ from their grief and to move on with their lives.
I however posit that transitioning should be recognised as a metaphorical, and prolonged ‘death’, insofar as the outcomes of GAC are always irreversible and deleterious. And, that the parents and families of ‘trans-identified’ person are experiencing a type, (or types), of grief, which society has not yet learned to accommodate.
Transition as prolonged 'death'
In all of these models of grief heretofore outlined, the child’s ‘transition’ is comparable to a death, because the child, as was, no longer exists. They are lost to the parent through their ‘transition’. And this ‘transition’ is not a discrete happening. It is often a multi-step, prolonged process, often beginning with pronoun and name changes. But these changes, although regarded as harmless and benign (and that favourite word of genderists, ‘reversible’) almost 100% of the time, presage the cult-like necessity of chemical and medical interventions in search of the unreachable goal of ‘becoming’ the opposite sex.
The parent is thus caught in a continuous spiral of denial and depression that is a bizarre mirror image of their child’s emotional and medical journey. Each party is locked onto a mutual and reflective pathway of despair. The child, is on a futile journey towards a biological impossibility, which, by its very nature, can only end in failure. And, at every new step taken by the child, at each new rejection of their natal sex, parental grief is mirrored, reactivated and intensified.
Here, I examine how the loss felt by the parents of ‘trans-identified’ children can be applied to and understood within the extant models of grief.
Models of Grief
Disenfranchised Grief
Parents of the ‘trans-identified child’ experience what psychologist, Emeritus Professor Kenneth Doka describes as disenfranchised grief. This occurs where society has denied the bereaved’s, ‘need, right, role, or capacity to grieve’. The normal supportive responses of grief are not afforded the parents of the trans-identified child.
There are three types of Disenfranchised Grief:
1. Where the relationship between the griever and the deceased is not recognised.
2. Where the death or the loss is not recognised.
3. Where the griever’s ability to grieve is not recognised.
Parents mourning the loss of a ‘trans-identified’ child are experiencing types 2 and 3. However, in reality, they are experiencing a profound emotional loss not even conceptualised, much less acknowledged and responded to with sympathy.
They are instead, meant to welcome their child’s purported discovery of their ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ self. They are only permitted to celebrate and share in their child’s newfound ‘Trans Joy’.
If they dare to show even the smallest amount of grief, or express the merest smidgeon of opposition, they face near-universal vilification and opprobrium. They are called ‘transphobic’, or they are blamed for not being sufficiently ‘supportive’. They are called bigots by people whom they have known for decades. They may even face legal sanction and prison if they do not help a minor child in this process of slow self-destruction. There is no support for these parents. There is no outlet for their prolonged and profound feelings of grief.
Anticipatory Grief
Anticipatory grief refers to feelings of grief or loss that may be felt before the grief-causing event actually happens.
Parents of children who have embarked on the process of ‘transition’ feel anticipatory grief. Again, this is a stepwise, and ever-escalating process where the parent’s losses constantly mount up and compound each other. Where, the parent may over a period of years, spend every waking moment asking themselves, “what is going to happen next”?
The anticipatory grief often starts with, as mentioned previously, the loss of the child’s birth name (and thereby pronouns). Parents generally do not pick names for our children at random, as if choosing the week’s Lottery numbers. The name given to a child carries significance to the parent. It is not a ‘deadname’. It may commemorate a loved one; it describes the parents’ hopes and wishes for the child’s future, and in some cultures, it venerates the past. It captures the personality and spirit of the newborn.
So, whilst having to remember a new name, the parent has to also juggle with the mental gymnastics of a changed, or even neo pronoun. They may have to struggle with the idiotic ‘they’, the use of which is ridiculously awkward, and which defies the most basic rules of English grammar.
This change in name/pronoun is often accompanied by ‘social transition’, a process whose wider social effects are horrendously ill-recognised. The parent questions whether their child be satisfied with these (relatively), benign and reversible steps. Or will they progress to irreversible hormone ‘treatments and surgical interventions?
And, once the surgeries begin, next comes the question that is almost unbelievable to comprehend that, should, in a civilised society, where ethics govern medical behaviour, be inconceivable, viz: “which body part will be the next to go, or needlessly altered?”.
And, to add even more horror, the parent may see their child’s physical, emotional and cognitive disintegration play out on social media. They may see their child posting videos of their ‘transition’ and encouraging other youngsters to follow them. Whenever I see such videos, my immediate thought is of the parents and the unbearable, unimaginable pain they must be feeling when (or if), they can steel themselves to watch.
Complicated Grief
This occurs when the grieving response becomes maladaptive and where the person is experiencing unproductive, unhelpful, or dangerous thoughts and behaviours in response to the death or loss of a loved one. Complicated grief is like being in an ongoing, heightened state of mourning that keeps the person from healing. There is intense sorrow, pain and rumination over the loss of the loved one and an intense focus on the person who has died.
An instantly recognisable literary example of this is Miss Havisham, in Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, who, after being jilted at the altar insists on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life, living in a ruined mansion. Miss Havisham has become ‘stuck’ in her grief. Time has stopped and her behaviours have, as a result, become abnormal.
The parents of the trans-identified child do display and experience some of the feelings and behaviours associated with complicated grief. The heightened emotional arousal, the intense pain and sorrow, the rumination, the intense focus on the transitioning child.
However, none of these features are maladaptive. The phenomenon of the ‘trans’ identifying child (whether minor or adult), is so abnormal that, in my view, the parent is responding in an entirely normative way to an unprecedented and unbearable situation.
Rather, it is society’s response to the parent of the loss-stricken trans-identified child that is entirely maladaptive. More often than not, the child’s ‘transition’ is the result of grooming, either by teachers or by health professionals, or by online predators who encourage the belief that the child is experiencing ‘Gender Dysphoria’ (which in reality is HTI). In such cases, when everyone and everything is against them, how can parents not experience a complex reaction to what they are encountering?
Ambiguous Grief
Here, the child may have absented themselves from their parents’ lives, but, in the age of social media, the parent can often track their child’s ‘transition’ (in reality a gradual, blow by blow, step by step process of self-destruction), on TikTok, or on other social media platforms. I have also spoken to parents whose only ‘contact’ with their child is now through their insurance providers, where they are kept informed of their child’s next procedure. Or, they hear about their child’s activities and life only through friends and relatives.
This type of grief is particularly salient and cruel for parents, because they are invariably blamed and verbally attacked, (often viciously), by the children themselves, for not wholeheartedly supporting their ‘transition’.
There is no possible room for emotional ‘closure’, because the parent is often seen, (by the child, by agencies and by the law) as source of danger, threat and harm to the ‘trans identifying’ child. The, until now, universally accepted guiding principle that parents: (a) have their child’s best interests at heart; and, (b) act in a way to optimise their children’s wellbeing, have been jettisoned. Parents are now seen as being inimical and dangerous to their ‘trans-identifying’ children.
Existential Grief:
We human beings are animals, albeit with big brains, that have allowed us to develop language and culture and science.
In reality, our primary function on this Earth is to reproduce and to keep the species alive. We are driven by this innate, profound and for most of us, unconquerable biological drive. This is why, even with all the cost, difficulty and self-sacrifice, most of us still have children.
But many ‘transitioners’ are children, (or young adults), for whom the biological imperative to reproduce has not yet become activated. Or, they are frequently older men such as ‘India’ Willoughby, or ‘Rachel’ Levine, who have already had their children.
What 15-year-old sees themselves as a parent? Or, indeed, with our extended period of ‘adolescence’ in the West, what 20, or even 30-year-old is ready to become a parent? So, these naive ‘trans-identified youngsters’ blithely and uncomprehendingly allow themselves to undergo a process that will render them infertile.
But parents see. Parents know. Parents witness the loss of their child’s, and thereby their own, future genetic lineage. But the parent is not allowed to grieve for their ‘lost’ grandchildren. They must not mourn or even acknowledge the loss of a future child who will now never exist.
We accept and respond sympathetically to the grief that accompanies infertility. But this is different. This ‘infertility’ is not natural. It is deliberate, calculated and engineered by doctors. It causes a powerful, existential grief in parents that has no parallel or precedent.
The family
And, whilst having to cope with the multiple griefs described here, the parent may also be battling family members who support the child’s ‘transition’. This can be with the other parent, their own parents, siblings and other relatives. The presence of a ‘transitioning’ child is like a Black Mirror. The child’s own inner confusion and emotional dysregulation is projected back to the family. Marriages are torn apart. Spouses, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins take sides, often amidst intense acrimony.
And, in this milieu, the parent is often trying their hardest to protect younger, (or sometimes older) brothers and sisters from also being caught up in the web of their sibling’s trans identification.
Family dysfunction
It would be remis to not acknowledge that sometimes a child’s trans-identification (nevertheless still misguided), is the result of dysfunction within the family. And, in girls, sadly, this is often unreported Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA). I will address the issue of CSA as a driver to ‘trans’ identification in a later piece.
But in most cases, there is no family dysfunction. I have read countless accounts and spoken to many parents of previously entirely normal young girls or boys (but mostly girls) who, overnight, announce their new ‘trans’ identity to their bewildered and disbelieving parents. These children will have shown no hint of so-called ‘Gender Dysphoria’ for their entire lives. Indeed, the girls are often very feminine and the boys may display what is typically seen as ‘effeminate’ behaviour or sensitive ‘female’ traits. (It is probably likely that many of these children are gay and that their trans identification is a way to cope with the feelings of same-sex attraction that hit around puberty).
In many families, the child’s transition is completely unexpected. There is no warning, no precursor and no familial dysfunction. From the ‘transitioning’ person’s perspective, this is known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). But, from the parents’ perspective, ROGD ought to be described as ‘Thunderclap Transition’, because it hits parents out of the blue and with absolutely no warning.
The wider picture
We often describe people who believe in gender ideology as being part of a cult. But it is worse than this. Cults, after all, are not normalised or given social acceptance. The State will not penalise parents for protecting children from a cult. But children who have fallen prey to gender ideology are caught in the throes of a phenomenon that is part cult, part neo-religion, part state-supported youth movement. Their thinking is distorted, their emotions are dysfunctional, their development is arrested and their brains have been damaged by powerful synthetic chemicals. They are quite frankly not thinking straight.
So, why should parents blithely be accepted to accommodate an ever-escalating pattern of rejection and hostility from children under the influence of a mind-altering neo-religion? At what point does parental tolerance reasonably end? Why should parents be expected to accept their ‘transitioning’ child, when affirmation’ causes not only the child’s destruction, but often the complete rejection of their familial ties?
Conclusion 1 – Applying existing models of grief
Models of Disenfranchised, Ambiguous and Anticipatory Grief can adequately describe what is felt by the parents of a ‘trans-identified’ child. But these models are not being used to help parents cope with the process of transition. Indeed, in researching this piece, I found no mention, or even awareness, that ‘transitioning’, (either social, chemical or surgical), is a process that evokes grief in those connected to the ‘transitioning’ person, particularly parents.
Indeed, other people’s feelings are not mentioned at all. Parents in particular, when mentioned, are only conceptualised as vectors by which the person’s ‘transition’ can either be supported or thwarted. The entire focus is wrongly on the supposedly negative (pre ‘transition’), and supposedly positive (post ‘transition’), emotions of the ‘trans-identifying’ person.
But the thinking and literature around this subject must now be updated to include the new phenomenon of ‘transition’ and the impact this has on a ‘transitioning’ person’s loved ones.
Unfortunately though, this a discussion that cannot even begin whilst society is still in the grip of the collective madness of gender ideology.
Conclusion 2 – The future
The irony of the move to ‘transition’ children and youngsters via the dissimulation of ‘GAC’, is that these children who have ‘transitioned’ will eventually realise their ‘embodiment journey’ has been a failure. They can never reach their desired goal, because, simply, mammals cannot change sex. And, as we can see from the steadily increasing numbers of detransitioners, the only result the process of transition can only ever really achieve is a broken body and/or damaged mind. They will never reach their final destination.
When this truth finally dawns on the hundreds of thousands of ‘transitioned’ children who will be there to pick up the pieces? Who will take these children back with open arms? Who will be there to provide the physical care and financial and emotional support probably required for the rest of their (likely foreshortened), lives?
Not the doctors.
Not the gender clinics.
Not their ‘Rainbow Families’.
No. It will inevitably be Mum and Dad.
And their grief will still remain.
