On doubling-down, digging in & truth bombs

OK, that really is it now......

I keep changing course, constantly. One week I say I’ll be bringing my artwork in, the next time I check in I’ve been distracted by something else; some other insight or piece of news, and I change tack again. Well I’m sorry but I’m going to have to ask you to indulge my off-roading one last time. This is kind of important to me, in terms of understanding the point we’ve reached in trying to reach out to our trans-identified daughter. Our continuing estrangement has been going on for an exhausting and traumatic 4 years.

Over the last few months I’ve been reeling, from losing friendships that mean a lot to me. I find lots of people on social media channels saying “Well if friends can’t support you, or listen to your concerns, they were never friends in the first place. Just ditch them and move on. Life’s too short”.

Well I’m just not that hard I’m afraid. I don’t really have friendships of convenience or superficiality. Of course I have a kind of friendship “spectrum”, like we all do (don’t we?) – some are longer-standing than others, some are friends through a shared interest, and so on. But I can never fall out with a good friend and just move on, without feeling bereft somehow – that surely some kind of consensus or peace could have be found, despite disagreements on any number of things.

These friendships that dissolve hold a very small mirror up to the poisoning of relationships that happen when differences of belief become huge, unbridgeable chasms. When a belief held by one person is in opposition to the belief held by the other, conflict isn’t always the inevitable result. I happen to believe that you can’t change your sex, our daughter believes you can, or that by saying and thinking you can, you can. That’s it, in a nutshell.

Despite that, we’ve always supported her, cared for her welfare, loved her, worried about her, defended her, encouraged her, consoled her, valued her nature and her care and thoughtfulness, her humour and her independence. The cult, and the abusers and groomers that have surrounded her for the last 4 years have literally sucked the life out of her. She continues to monster us, accuse us of neglect, harm, abuse and seems to have lost any of those wonderful things that made her the person we knew for 20 years.

But back to these friendships I’ve lost. If each year could be metaphored as a soccer score, 2021 was 5-0 to me! Yay – I had 5 really difficult, meaningful, respectful conversations around the cult of transitioning, related to our daughter’s plight, and they went well. I could walk away, still friends, feeling that I had been believed, feeling that our lives were no longer ghosted, our experience no longer dismissed.

Years prior to that had involved heavy defeats on my part, mainly as I was still immersed in some exchanges online from trans activists, supporters and allies that often turned really ugly. Narcissists and misogynists, when challenged can be particularly offensive. These people were just bobbing up to the surface as a result of following my education, being curious. Nevertheless, I grew a thicker skin and just carried on. It helped that I had a female twitter name, as it instantly drew out the cold hate and depressingly dark agendas of those on the trans side I tried to enter conversations with. My education was proving to be not the one our absent daughter assumed I’d be getting.

This year 2022 it’s been a devastating 3-0 to the opposition. And we’re only in July.

1-0 to them/they

I described in my feature story We Used To Have A Daughter how I lost a long-standing friend; an anatomy lecturer whose university medical school and private life had obviously been primed and captured by gender propaganda somehow. This had blinkered and dulled his critical reasoning to the extent that, when faced with a living, breathing testimony of how the whole gender ideology cult had destroyed the relationship we once had with our trans-identified daughter, he simply said “Well, I’m not saying I don’t believe you, it’s just that I’ve not seen the evidence of it myself”. Well why would you? A uni lecturer and all!

Throughout our extended 2-hr coffee break, he appeared uncomfortable and unsettled, perspiring in a way that was a little embarrassing for both of us to acknowledge. I was devastated by his well-meant but dismissive response, and felt alienated and un-believed. In the moment, I was upset myself, that the words I was speaking were making him have such a reaction. But simultaneously, our trauma was being reframed or deconstructed by his use of language, as something that held no power, no impact on our lives. As if we must have somehow imagined things that weren’t really how I described them.

I had trusted him enough with something that I now see has the power to damage people in a way that I hadn’t previously considered. I had confronted him with something he couldn’t afford to allow in. It would cost him too much. His sense of himself as a good, well-meaning person was threatened.

So he doubled-down, in his own way – he successfully batted-away the truth attack because recognising the truth of what was being told to him would completely unsettle his own pride and sense of self as a generally “good and kind” individual who believes in world peace and tolerance and live-and-let-live, and all the rest of it. His ego was still intact. He could still consider himself an intelligent and well-meaning person, and so he moved on - while I stayed locked-in somewhere in my head for a couple of weeks trying to process his incredulity.

That was hard to break out from, that sense of despair that I had trusted him enough to talk about something so personal and deeply-felt with. One of the hardest things to cope with, for my wife and I, is just how little it takes for well-meaning people to disbelieve you.

2-0 to them/they

It happened again with a female colleague whose company I enjoyed and whose friendship meant a lot to me. We worked together occasionally over a couple of years and always met on good terms. She had also known our daughter from the Summer before she left home for her new trans life, a few months before estranging us in 2018. Whenever we would meet she would always enquire with a breezy “And how’s your lovely daughter?”

Because that question always hits really hard when you can’t begin to describe the situation she’d put herself (& us) in, I got used to employing the programmed reply: “She’s fine, doing well thanks” and hoping that I wouldn’t be asked for further details. For 4 years that was my swerve of choice.

This was a social sidestep I’d learned early on, to just keep the flow going, keep up appearances. I don’t have the right to just dump on people with my own experience, so I got used to weighing it up in an instant - the cost/benefit of saying “she’s not in a great place right now actually” and be pressed to explain further, or self-censor yet again in order to keep playing the social game - keeping it all patted down.

Well on this occasion, I’d had a terrible day and without realising what I was doing, I opened a tiny crack and let a little bit out, along the lines of “Well if you really want to know…” That crack got instantly wider: “What do you mean, she’s taking testosterone? That’s a drug for weightlifters isn’t it? Whatever for?” And before you know it, you’re explaining an impossible situation to someone who sees themselves as a well-meaning ally to the oppressed, and is being confronted by something far too huge to comprehend. “Of course, we always stand up for our trans siblings, these people are misrepresented and marginalised, we have to be allies!”

Before you know it, their previous perception of you has been fractured forever and you are, of course, a bigoted transphobe - a cruel and conspiracy-fuelled father to your child. And so my friend doubled-down – not at the time, at the time she was all concern and confusion and reeling from things she couldn’t believe or take in, but she still felt she had to show some empathy. Afterwards, she must have let it all sink in, talked to her friends and her diversity officer brother-in-law, and agreed that she should never work with me ever again. She is a teacher, and a well-meaning woman.

The Elephant In The Room (v.1)

3-0 to them/they

I could describe many more failures of this sort as they’re becoming more and more frequent. Like the time when one of my employers telephoned me with the opening remark “Now, you do realise that we are a FULLY INCLUSIVE organistation, don’t you?” before going on to tell me that a co-worker friend had complained of feeling upset because I had made some unspecified remark about the detrimental effects of gender ideology on the mental health of the younger generation. This single remark occured during a car journey we’d recently shared. It wasn’t clear whether my co-worker friend herself had made a complaint directly, or whether the complaint came through a third party, on her behalf.

Over the telephone conversation I had with the manager, I was asked for my “version of events” (I was not told theirs) and afterwards it occurred to me that, in the background and out of my sight, a trans LGBTQ+ officer (& co-incidentally, a one-time-friend of our daughters) had urged the young woman I was friends with, to report this terrible incident of transphobia to her supervisor.

To this day, I don’t know if this telephone conversation was a “disciplinary” procedure, or a genuinely made, informal enquiry intended to smooth things over. I offered to apologise if I’d said something awkward or unsettling, but was not told of precisely what it was alleged I had said. Only my memory of the event was discussed, other than “You made this person feel uncomfortable enough to make a complaint”.

I did get the feeling that my manager wasn’t too keen on having to make this call in the first place, and I also felt that she somehow felt compelled to raise the issue at the behest of someone else. Another friendship evaporated, and trust goes with it, all because I said something that challenged some cosy world picture. I felt betrayed again – betrayed by my own judgement this time, and betrayed by someone I’d considered a friend and who’s company I’d enjoyed.

The Elephant In The Room (v.2)

Injury time

The first 2 scenarios I’ve broadly painted, reminded me this week of the power of doubling-down. I mistook my lecturer friend’s discomfort as being upset by what he was hearing, but I realised some time later that the discomfort shown to me was an attempt to keep his defences intact. No-one was ever going to tell him that he might be wrong about something he clearly felt he knew something about. In order to protect a perceived attack on his self-esteem, he doubled-down by finding a useful swerve that dodged the truth bomb.

I’ve been seeing a lot of doubling-down recently in cases where the pushback against the worldwide indoctrination of gender ideology appears to be making progress; for example when a celebrity almost gets it, and delivers an unexpected truth bomb. It seeps seamlessly into the online communities of social media and then they realise that their career and fan-base could never withstand the TRA onslaught.

I’ve seen it in the apologies that are made to the cult, in fear of the cult backlash. We saw Macy Gray this week, speak a truth about the immutability of sex to Piers Morgan, and be forced back on our screens a few days later for Macy’s confessional - to tell us all that’s it’s been an education and that being a woman is now a vibe that some people might be into. I don’t believe Macy believes a word of what she said by way of explanation or apology, but she did her best to rescue what would have been personal and career jeopardy. I believe she was reeling at the backlash, in emotional survival mode, simply did what she needed to do in order to ease her distress and keep the wolves away.

I don’t think it’s right for @MattWalshBlog to criticise Macy for doing this. Most men simply don’t understand the vitriol and abuse that comes their way from the misogynistic bullies who build the base of this mens-rights movement. You get away with it if you’re a man. As others pointed out, neither David Chappelle nor Ricky Gervais had anything like the storm of trans outrage come for them, being men. So Macy Gray (and Bette Midler too) had to be this weeks targets for having the temerity to speak out.

In the meantime, Matt Walsh can carry on enjoying his detached male entitlement. I wonder how he’d find being father to an estranged, mentally-unwell, trans-identified daughter, and you can’t be open and public about it, can’t put your own name to – even though you know their abusers, and how she was preyed upon and swallowed up by this cult. Would he risk destabilizing her mental health further by speaking out? Would he risk his reputation and family like that? Be arrested for a hate crime, or for conversion therapy? Would he be the proof-of-everything-evil that the trans activists would gleefully parade for all to see, shamed publicly as a parent-criminal who exposed his child’s identity? Shamed and exposed as the abuser?

I’ve been forced into taking this hit, because well-meaning people won’t speak out.

It’s been apparent for some time now that indifference and indoctrination have a synergistic effect on the young trans persons vulnerability. The indifference of kind and well-meaning people who wriggle out of it and run away or have no capacity to think for themselves, provides a damaging social sphere of indifference within which indoctrination is already taking place. The 2 compound each other.

Here in the UK this week, we had another couple of well-meaning men wishing we could all just get along and put such silly old tripe behind us

Although, more hopefully, this man gets it. Butchers and Liars pretty much sums it up.

Penalties

The 3-0 loss this year brings home to me the huge cultural power and workplace privilege that trans women in particular, wield in their roles as diversity “ambassadors”, or DEI role models, or even (as in my case) LGBTQ+ reps. It’s given me a lot to think about in relation to a question I wrestle with all the time and it gets me into a lot of trouble. But I firmly believe in saying what’s right, and what’s necessary, rather than saying what’s kind. I wouldn’t be saying any of this at all if I hadn’t had to take the hit, for everyone who has no skin in the game and can’t be bothered to look.

The question being: Well what about the “nice ones”? What about all those trans women up and down the land, who just want to live their lives, they’re not hurting anybody, or stealing anyone’s rights, the ones who just want to live their lives as women. This is what all reasonable and well-meaning people believe, surely.

The answer (my answer) being: Fine. I’m happy to let anyone live and let live. I have NO interest in messing about in other people’s lives, judging their life choices, their presentation, or their right to happiness and personal freedom. I have no problem at all with any adult who wants to change sex/thinks that they can change sex/attempt to change sex. Just STOP trying to make everyone else believe it can be done.

The truth is that many trans people, even and in some cases, especially the “nice” ones, will groom younger people, will plant seeds of doubt, will let them into secrets about their lives, will open up their wardrobe of gowns for teenage Likes – because the groomee is a “special” one. The groomer has transitioned from Receiver to Transmitter.

Many feel they are well-meaning and role model material because they feel they are helping the young person to “be their real selves, their authentic selves”. In public, many will be stereotypically sweetness itself, often tearful at the cruel world that tugs at the heartstrings of kind and well-meaning people. But they’re being gaslit. In private they join online groups and anywhere they can find validation by urging young people to seek out their authentic selves. The cult propaganda has been so powerfully used to promote the victim narrative that we find it impossible to pierce it or to challenge it.

They will question whether this young person has been incorrectly assigned the “wrong” sex/gender at birth. They’ll encourage talking well away from the parent’s prying eyes and ears, because the family can be queered like everything else. There’s a reason for barriers to this or that, a reason for exclusion. We’ve all been queered to disbelieve it.

So, young people, “Free yourselves! Be the best version of you, that you can be!” “DO what I never had the chance to do before it’s too late”, if you don’t the international consortium of evil transphobes and bigots will be ruling the world. Our daughter was welcomed like this, by trans women, nonbinary role models, and some amorphous family of queer folx into her new queer trans family. The grooming was exemplary while the safeguards had been non-existent. Well-meaning people weren’t looking.

Young people will be used like this, for validation. They befriend and co-opt “girly” female friends for the reflected glory of being just like them, they will use vulnerable young people and encourage them in their transition because that transition validates them, shows others that other lovely young people are just like them. It’s a social contract we pretend we don’t see.

I’ve spent a miserable 4 years on twitter talking with these people (under an assumed female named account which I still use) and they wreck lives. I have the accounts, the words, straight from their own mouths. It’s so odd how they treat social media as a “private” space within which to overreach. Our own daughter was groomed by 3 of the “nice ones”, 3 of these well-meaning trans people when we weren’t looking. I’ve done my education for 4 years, just as my daughter asked me to do. These kind and well-meaning, brave and stunning people are false idols, but they’re also trans heroes to our daughter.

The Elephant In The Room (v.3)

Result

It’s fruitless and self-defeating to hold onto so much negativity in the end. Denton’s space here has saved me from a breakdown. I’m happy to accept that anyone is who they say they are – provided they don’t force that onto others, or demand compliance, or advocate for the sterilization and surgery our children have to suffer at the hands of responsible and well-meaning people. Neither, for that matter do I give an ounce of respect for any male-born person who seeks to erase or appropriate women’s spaces, boundaries, privacies, awards, sports, dignities, bodies.

One of the more illuminating aspects of my education last year was the opportunity to take part in a zoom conference with cult expert Patrick Ryan. It was such a relief to be (albeit online) in the company of others who understood the issues and who also had children and young people threatening transition and/or estrangement. When so many trans women are given so much power within the cult hierarchy, both as influencers and elders, is it any wonder that young gender nonconforming people look up to them? It highlighted for me the growing understanding that people ARE starting to look at the worldwide cult as it grows and that many people are still disbelieving of the very male forces of money and power that drive it. Many people are also understanding how devastating transition is for young women especially, as evidenced by the growing number of detransitioners worldwide.

Patrick Ryan

In a similar vein this week, Eliza Mondegreen @elizamondegreen produced a brilliant thread on Phobia Indoctrination. It’s a very useful précis of the whole process by which susceptible and vulnberable (& often also, very intelligent and well-meaning) people can be primed into the kind of victimhood that paints trans and nonbinary people as a sacred caste, and disbelievers and doubters as heretics and enemies.

Eliza credits @CultExpert for the long-form of this:

Eliza Mondegreen @elizamondegreen

Phobia indoctrination 🚩🚩🚩

Eliza Mondegreen @elizamondegreen

Again, this is called phobia indoctrination 👇👇👇 Phobia indoctrination instills irrational fears in members of a high-control group and uses those fears to manipulate members so they won't question the group's beliefs or try to leave. https://t.co/TqNdC5Knjy

I’ve realised I’ve reached a turning point today. Our daughters identity is wholly contingent on our erasure, as her parents. Without us, her oppression narrative is held securely. With her mum and dad in her life, her identity crumbles to dust, because she knows that we know the truth. And that truth obviously cannot be allowed in, because that would immediately invalidate her trans identity.

I understand also that she is very “stuck” about this. Through her tortured artworks she has depicted endless situations of shame, or regret – understanding the damage she is doing – but also feeling this to be in conflict with her transition towards the person she imagines/wants to be. She calls this shame “ours” (her parents) because she is externalising the pain.

I believe that this creates a tension and inner conflict; something akin to the idea of “splitting”, that forces black&white thinking - people are completely 100% good (veneration of cult elders and influencers), or completely evil (transphobic parents, TERFS etc), mirroring the kind of “comply or die” mantras of the movement at a macro level.

Ironically, it’s a very split binary way of thinking but this is what I think is happening. All that inner pain and torment has to be externalised, somehow. And so we become the targets and the vessel of a kind of projective identification, psychically attacked in order to uphold the identity at all costs. We are monsters, they are the holy child. Unless our daughter can be helped to insert Truth, between Shame, and Forgiveness, how can she ever become “un-stuck”?

I see all the things Eliza’s thread above discusses; laid out bare in our own experience of our daughters’ transition and immersion in the cult. Phobia Indoctrination for me, is the binding glue that cements indifference to indoctrination, and in our daughters case, this is further cemented by sex denialism and queer theory. How the hell do we get young people out of this? Step forward please, all kind and well-meaning people. And men, who just wish it would all go away.

I won’t be writing any more of these tortuous articles because it’s costing me too much. I’ve said everything I feel I need to say in my main story We Used To Have A Daughter, and my 4-part series on Transing The Young. There’s no point in repeating anything endlessly.

Instead, I’ll be getting my artworks out there and trying to step up my activism in real-world interactions, hoping that I can prove something to myself at least, that actions and images speak louder than words (come on writers, prove me wrong!) Please share, or support my work going forward with a paid subscription, and many thanks for sticking with me so far.