Religion is a Mental Illness

A Father’s Anger That Will Not Sleep

It has been two years since my 19 year old son walked into a Planned Parenthood and received HRT drugs on informed consent. His mother and I

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• That society is enabling a cult of self-harm disguised as a fantasy. I am also furious that society sees me as the problem because I’m “transphobic”.
• The medical establishment’s adoption of euphemisms for mutilating the bodies of teenagers— and calling it “gender affirming care”, all while making tidy profits.
• The medical staff that continues to supply my son with wrong sex hormones, even though his mental and physical health is in obvious decline. At 19 he was thin, and at 21 he is borderline obese. He also reports crying daily. Yet he’s unwilling to stop taking drugs that are the source of this harm.
• How the Democratic party (which I used to support) and Biden enable this social contagion. How Biden nominated Judge Jackson who refused to define the word ‘woman’. And I’m angry watching Rachel (Richard) Levine saying he was glad he had kids before transition while simultaneously advocating fertility destroying treatments for young people.
• The misogyny of a movement that allows sexual predators to gain access to women’s spaces simply by claiming they’re a woman.
• The misogyny of a movement that sees women as castrated men, and doesn’t value women’s ability to bring new life into the world. And that allows males to enter and dominate women’s sports (e.g. Lia Thomas), or injure women (e.g. Fallon Fox fracturing Tamikka Brents’ skull).
• The media for denying predators exist (e.g. Wi Spa), and not covering physical harms happening to natal women, or when they do for using word salad and intentionally confusing language, like “she raped her with her penis”.
• The media for not covering Planned Parenthood’s prescribing hormones with only informed consent and no due diligence or following up on the harm to young people who are damaging their bodies (the voices of detransitioners).
• The trans movement’s redefinition of words and introducing made up pronouns and trying to enforce their usage and control language.
• My own child for his entitled attitude that he should continue to receive college tuition while destroying his body and mind; his uncaring attitude for the emotional pain of his parents, and the enormous strain that his actions have put on my marriage.
• My own utter powerlessness in the face of these events, and feeling like a failure for not protecting my child from this cult.

• For the better part of a year I pleaded with my son to stop. His response was to call his mother and I transphobic.
• Every day for the past two years I have restrained myself from sending my son a nasty email telling him what I really think about his narcissistic behavior and misogynistic fantasy.
• I have twice given money to Partners for Ethical Care, hoping their billboard campaigns make a difference.
• I will never vote Democrat again.
• Some days I successfully pretend none of this is happening.
• I enjoy those few moments of morning amnesia where I can’t yet recall my current circumstances.
• I saw a therapist for about a year and a half, but it wasn't helpful. Part of me always saw the therapist as part of the profession enabling this social contagion. I also couldn’t trust him with my true feelings, as I feared judgment.
• Several times a week I have a crying jag that lasts several minutes. I do it when my wife is out walking the dog so as to not burden her with this.

"Most religions prophecy the end of the world and then consistently work together to ensure that these prophecies come true."

-- Anonymous

What it's like to be a pupil today as trans hysteria grips our schools

After becoming upset by the school's acceptance of transgender ideology, this 14-year-old female student has decided to expose the truth abo

Mail Online

• An anonymous student speaks out about transgender ideology in her school  • The student, aged 14, attends a state secondary school in South-East England • Claimed teachers say Lady Macbeth non-binary and girls wear breast binders

She’s 14 and attends a co-educational state secondary in South-East England — where she says one in ten children in her year identifies as trans or non-binary. After becoming increasingly upset by the school’s acceptance of transgender ideology, this female student has decided to expose the truth about life in an ongoing culture war.

The other day, I went to the school office to get a new copy of the timetable. The teacher I spoke to used ‘they/them’ pronouns about me, asking another member of staff, ‘they have lost their timetable, can they have a new one?’

He knows me really well and it’s clear that I’m a girl. I felt furious he didn’t just say ‘she’. But it’s not just the odd teacher here or there; I am regularly asked if I am in the process of transitioning.

There is a gender-neutral uniform policy at school and lots of the girls wear trousers. Those of us that do are often asked if we are transgender, especially if we have short hair, as I do.

The fact a girl likes playing video games, or doesn’t like feminine clothes or make-up is enough to be seen as potentially trans. When my mum complained about me being called ‘they’, the teacher apologised but explained he was being cautious in case I was transitioning. He said the teachers are treading on eggshells, scared of being labelled transphobic.

It feels like trans is all anyone talks about. The library has a section devoted to LGBTQQIA+ books and there is a display for Pride in the school entrance, with rainbow flags and words and terms such as ‘non-binary‘, ‘polysexual’, ‘demiboy’, ‘demigirl’ and ‘pansexual’. These words come up in lessons, too. I’m now in Year 10, and the other day a girl in my English class asked if the Greek god Zeus was a man or a woman and the teacher replied that Zeus could have ‘identified as non-binary’.

More recently another teacher said Lady Macbeth was ‘neither a man nor a woman’. I think most parents will have no clue this is what their kids are being taught.

So I’m glad the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan is set to tell schools they must be more open about their handling of trans issues. I would be too scared to say this at school, though. I would lose my friends if I did, as they’re completely intolerant of anything they think is transphobic.

That’s what made me decide to speak out here — without giving my real name.

When I started at my secondary school four years ago, I didn’t even know what ‘transgender’ meant. It hadn’t been talked about in primary school or at home. But within days, we were told by a teacher in our PSHE (personal, social, health and economic education) class that we would be seen as ‘transphobic’ if we used any of the ‘offensive words’ from a long list, which included ‘gender bender’ and ‘butch’.

I had no idea what transphobic meant, but I could tell it was definitely something I didn’t want to be seen as. At that age, when you are told something at school you just believe it. We trusted that what the teachers told us was true. 

But I did ask my mum about it later. She is a feminist and is critical of students being dictated to. She said that often it depends how you use words — that people within queer communities have used ‘gender bender’ as a positive way to describe themselves and that ‘butch’ is used by lesbians to describe other lesbians who are quite masculine in appearance.

While still in my first year, 11-year-old girls in my class began asking to be called ‘he’ or ‘them’.

Soon afterwards a number of others were doing the same. It felt as if they joined in because it meant they were seen as cool.

You get special treatment if you say you are trans or non-binary and suddenly become the centre of attention when you ‘come out’.

As soon as a girl says she is a boy, her name is changed on the school register and students are told to use their chosen boy’s name.

Now, out of 200 students in my year, at least 20 say they’re trans — almost all are girls claiming to be boys or non-binary. Although there is one boy saying he’s a girl, this really is largely about girls saying they are boys. The kids in my year don’t say they are lesbian or gay, because those words are thought to be an insult.

There is a straight boy going out with a straight girl who says she is trans, so he now has to say that he’s bisexual. It’s often said by my schoolmates that trans girls are ‘better’ girls than ‘other girls’. I find this insulting. But the teachers don’t take any action even if they do hear conversations like this.

Recently, I was watching a news item with friends about the changes to the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland and every time a guest on the programme said, ‘this is a threat to sex-based rights’, my friends were sneering and laughing. It made me feel as though girls have no rights and are not respected in my school.

There is constant talk of transphobia and bigotry and many of the students who say they are trans constantly talk about being ‘victims’, with anyone who isn’t trans being the perpetrator.

Coming out as a lesbian or gay doesn’t have the same effect, but barely any students do, in my experience.

My friend Kelley* was ‘affirmed’ [accepted without question] as a boy in Year 7. She has serious mental health issues and is regularly off school as she self-harms.

Kelley socially transitioned without any teacher challenging her. She has a new name and can now use the boys’ changing rooms. All my friends pretty much believe in ‘gender identity’. Girls and boys are referred to by teachers and students as ‘assigned female at birth’ or ‘assigned male at birth’. This is shortened to AFAB and AMAB.

There is also confusing language such as the word for being attracted to non-binary people, ‘skoliosexual’. I find it ridiculous — but can’t say that.

There is a lot of breast-binding going on, too, but we don’t know who might be on puberty blockers because no one talks about that. One trans-identified girl wants to get a breast binder, but was complaining that her parents would not want her to.

I joined the Equalities Club because I believe in equal rights for all, then found it was impossible to talk about any group, other than trans people, that was discriminated against. There’s a rule against wearing badges in school but some students wear trans flag and pronoun badges and nobody tells them off.

Recently, a group of us were watching Prime Minister’s Questions and when MPs talked about maternity care, using the terms ‘birthing partner’ and ‘non-birthing partner’, I wondered out loud why they didn’t just say ‘mother’.

I was told off by a friend who said that not everyone with a cervix is a woman. I didn’t want to disagree because I knew what would happen — I would be publicly humiliated.

Until now, I’ve just gone along with most of it. But there are some things I can’t leave alone. For example, I really like J. K. Rowling but she was called a ‘TERF’ (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) by a friend, who said she was heartbroken to hear that J.K. was ‘anti-trans’.

I asked in what way J.K. was transphobic but this friend couldn’t give me an answer, she just said: ‘I hope all TERFS drop dead.’ I was shocked by her anger.

There have also been violent comments on social media towards ‘transphobes’ with students from the school threatening to strangle them.

That’s why I’m writing this piece anonymously, although I believe I should be able to say these things without fear of attack. I want adults to know what it’s really like in schools like mine now.

*Names have been changed.

The new NHS guidance recognizes social transition as a form of psychosocial intervention and not a neutral act, as it may have significant effects on psychological functioning. The NHS strongly discourages social transition in children, and clarifies that social transition in adolescents should only be pursued in order to alleviate or prevent clinically-significant distress or significant impairment in social functioning, and following an explicit informed consent process.

If those who are born Black or disabled are the chosen, trans people are the converts who have voluntarily accepted Marginalization. They choose to suffer more from their involuntary embodiment. Because of this, they become virtuous. They are saved.

To My Daughter's Therapist: You Were Wrong

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To my daughter’s gender therapist: you were wrong.

It has been some months since you and my daughter had the last of four sessions. In the third session I was invited to sit in on a discussion of the effects of T, testosterone, on a human female body. You smiled calmly as you led us through a series of Powerpoint slides, explaining that my daughter’s reproductive organs would atrophy, that she would grow a beard, that her voice would deepen, and that “the phallus” would become enlarged. I sat listening, summoning all of my own skills as a clinical psychologist to not let a tirade loose at you in front of my brittle and fragile 17 year old.

Between your third and fourth (and final) sessions with my daughter you and I had a one-on-one conversation wherein I believe you recognized that this mother and this family were not going to easily or willingly surrender this child to whatever gender transition services you were prepared to refer her for after just three forty-five-minute meetings.

I asked what it was specifically about my daughter that convinced you that medical transition would be the right course of action to relieve her distress. You said, “He has Gender Dysphoria.” I said, “She has an eating disorder, body dysmorphia, and ADHD, all of which seem to have some overlapping features with Gender Dysphoria. Why wouldn’t you assess for and treat those before triggering any kind of medical intervention?”

I asked you what happens if my daughter, upon taking T and going through the changes you described, is not relieved of her dysphoria. What if her feelings and symptoms of self-loathing, dissociation, anxiety, depression, and self harm become exacerbated? You visibly cringed at my questions and responded that most people who transition are satisfied with their results and don’t regret their decision. I asked where I might find peer-reviewed longitudinal studies that suggest that affirming and facilitating social and medical gender transition produce happy, well-adjusted teens and young adults. You said you would gladly send me links to those studies. The links never came.

I was clear, perhaps brutally so, that affirmation of male gender identity would not be the focus of your subsequent sessions and that you would instead help her explore her discomfort with her now almost fully developed, curvy female body. You would talk with her about her anxiety, her depression, her giftedness, her sense of alienation from her peers at a highly competitive suburban high school, and the impact of the pandemic at such a pivotal point in her life. In other words, you would work to slow the transition train way down.

Thinking back to that conversation I feel a delayed sense of dread as that was before I knew that major medical and mental health associations, the law, and key players in our state and federal government had also adopted a gender identity affirming stance, albeit for their own personal and political purposes. At the time I was unaware that in some instances parents had been reported to Child Protective Services just for refusing to address a child with his or her chosen name and preferred pronouns. In a way, though, I’m glad for my ignorance because I believe my forceful early pushback saved my child’s life. I would not take any of it back.

With an abundance of unconditional love, real psychotherapy, solid psychiatric care, and some long-overdue changes in her personal and social life, my daughter is coming into her own as a quirky, witty, gender non-conforming young adult. She is grieving as she sheds her preoccupation with chemically and surgically transforming her body into something that would never result in her being male. She will not have to live out her life in a Frankenbody. No dry and shriveling vagina. No beard or male-pattern baldness. No irreversibly thickened vocal chords. And no enlarged and exposed clitoris. You called it a phallus, but she would never pee or ejaculate from her clitoris. It is anatomically impossible.

A critically important thing that we learned along the way is that my daughter, as many other young people who declare transgender identity in adolescence, is on the autism spectrum. She was diagnosed by an experienced child and adolescent psychiatrist and is now coming to understand how certain aspects of her autism resulted in collapsing and narrowing her focus into gender identity as a way of explaining and coping with what made life so difficult for her during her middle and high school years. She is learning to reconcile with being socially awkward and having idiosyncratic interests and will be better for it as she inhabits her full adult self sometime in her late 20’s. She is a brilliant and beautiful human being whose entire future came so close to being stolen from her by the gender transition industry. It is alarming that an entire generation of gifted children who may be on the autism spectrum is being sterilized in what amounts to a eugenics experiment with the participation of big-name medical and professional institutions, and to the benefit of a novel category of mental health practitioners: gender therapists like you.

Had my daughter continued on the path she was on when you were her therapist, she would be well into a regimen of weekly testosterone injections and eventual surgeries that would not have resolved her Gender Dysphoria, a diagnostic category that was included in the DSM-5 (APA, 2013) as a way of validating the experiences of a very small percentage of the population who suffer with lifelong feelings of discomfort and disconnection with their biological sex, all while creating billable codes for gender clinics and mental health professionals (see Drescher, 2013: “…it is difficult to find reconciling language that removes the stigma of having a mental disorder diagnosis while maintaining access to medical care”). I know this because one of the experts on the DSM-5 workforce on Gender Dysphoria is a long-time friend who is, himself, appalled at what has come from this diagnostic category that he, no doubt with the most compassionate of intentions, helped forge. It is disappointing that he is hesitant to come out on the side of best and safe practice and to publicly state that gender exploratory therapy is NOT conversion therapy; that, in fact, putting so many young LGB people on a fast-moving conveyer belt to medical transition is the latest iteration of gay conversion practices.

Our daughter was not “assigned female at birth”. She was born with the full complement of normal female sex organs and all the eggs that her ovaries will release over the course of her fertile years, regardless of whether or not she ever chooses to become a mother. We expected as much because prenatal DNA testing let us know unequivocally at ten weeks’ gestation that we were having a baby with XX sex chromosomes in every cell of her body. And no, she isn’t “intersex”. Her phenotypical features reflect her Southwest Asian genetic heritage and she is fine and healthy just as she is. Nothing about her body is or has ever been out of place. If the gender transition industry is anything it is profoundly racist and disturbingly sexist.

I believe that the medical fast tracking of trans-self-identifying children and young adults is a contemporary twist on American individualism taken to its point of absurdity. We are now in a situation where corporate wolves are passing effortlessly as progressive sheep. Even Planned Parenthood, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall that was confirmed with the recent Texas abortion ruling, may be hedging its bets by offering “Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy”. Institutions’ needs for staying relevant and projecting themselves into the future trump any fidelity to stated guiding principles. And a parent’s need to protect her child’s mind and body trumps any and all political affiliations. Our wallets and our votes will speak for us.

*   *   *

It is now September and my daughter and and I have been living in a city in the former Soviet Union as of mid August. She is connecting to her roots, her land, and her cultural heritage; to rich and lasting sources of identity that synthetic hormones and manufactured gender ideology were threatening to undermine and replace. She recognizes that going down the path of medical transition would have made her into a lifelong patient as well as holding her back from so much joy and freedom that she now has access to. She is coming to terms with the inevitable losses that growing up brings and discovering facets of herself that she never would have if we had taken your advice and initiated medicalization. Gender ideology would have had to become the central focus of her intellect and creativity for the rest of her life.

It helps that the local language, which my daughter is quickly absorbing and starting to speak, is devoid of gendered grammatical markers. I think she is relieved to not have to ask or answer questions about “preferred pronouns” and such. Here, no one is compelled to participate in a mass delusion that requires thought control and speech policing. They had more than enough of that during seven long decades under Soviet rule. Simply put, people have more pressing daily challenges and live highly interconnected social lives as a result. When you fall passers-by stop to help you up and dust you off. As other young people my daughter feels confident walking around the city on her own at all hours. She increasingly feels safe and at home in this city and in her body. And I grow more hopeful every day that removing her from a culture that would pathologize normal developmental struggles and push costly and irreversible medical treatments, will enable and reinforce long-term remission of gender dysphoria and trans ideation from her life.

I took the unpopular risk of holding my child’s ambivalence and keeping it alive rather than surrendering her to a process that would make her the docile object of bogus “affirmation” and “celebration”. And while I became the target of so much hatred and rage for many exhausting months (affirming and facilitating social and medical transition, by far the less conflictual path for parents who have the financial means, would have gained me temporary status as the heroic mother), she never lost sight of the fact that her father and I were the ones who truly had her back; that social-media groomers’, glitter families’, and gender clinicians’ approval could never be a replacement for her own self esteem and her family’s unwavering love.

Let me close by saying that things are changing in parts of Europe and in the UK. In the US a growing movement of parents and ethical clinicians, most of whom are lifelong progressives and active supporters of LGBTQ people and causes, are organizing and becoming vocal with their outrage and rejection of gender ideology and the unsupported diagnostic claims and harmful treatment practices it has given rise to. When the lawsuits start coming this will be exposed as one of the biggest medical scandals in history.

It is only a matter of time.

“Given enough time, atoms will arrange themselves and start to wonder why they exist... and masturbate.”

-- Anonymous

• Someone claiming reincarnation is real because here’s a link buried in Psychology Today, rather than playing 24 hours a day non-stop on all TV news networks, where the author of a book called “Spiritual Science” quotes Hamlet.
• Jesus is real because his brother James was real even though nobody can find or confirm Jesus, so how can you claim to have confirmed a familial “brother.” Also Pontius Pilate was real (duh), so the bible is true. Like how a drugged up Neil Patrick Harris was looking for “poontang” (his word) in Harold & Kumar, therefore Harold & Kumar is true.
• Essentially, “I know you are” to one of my own replies.
• Me going “LOL” to numerous cranks and trolls.