13 Comments
Jul 12, 2022Liked by Denton

I hope you’ll keep the door open to writing more. No need for it to be long and tortuous. As a parent equally trapped, it’s helpful to hear how others are making their way through it, what insights they develop. Whichever direction you go in, though, I think the important thing is to keep the conversation going. I hope that someday the friends I’ve lost — am losing — will see how wrong they are, but there’s no chance of that if we’re silent.

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If this writing is helping you I think you should keep writing. I find it very moving about the broader picture although I am not involved personally. I did however have a very young daughter with anorexia. I finally had to stop visiting her in hospital because I could no longer watch her commit suicide bite by bite. So I can relate to your anguish. It was not until I took that step, saying goodbye, that I slowly recovered and slowly slowly so did she. I'm not advising you, just telling you how the corner was turned.

I hope you can let go.

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Thanks for continuing your incredibly bold and necessary exposition of the horrors you continue to experience, and the exposure of the horrors of that which has become normalised and frequently unchallengeable.

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Interesting, thanks for sharing your thoughts

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Jul 15, 2022Liked by Denton

I know how wrenching all this is. My husband's cross-dressing life descended on my family way back in 1992, when our sons were 1 and 4. I was the single mom, eating peanut butter on toast for dinner, socking away as much as possible, as my (now COO of a tech company) ex used fraud (made up low salaries) to get out of paying child support. I developed many anxiety symptoms. Now, my sons have been brainwashed (also working in tech) and won't talk to me because I refuse to change my past and use female language regarding the father of my children, who says he's also their mother. Except he doesn't mention me. I recently published a memoir, In the Curated Woods by Ute Heggen, available all over the world as an eBook. The writing process was wrenching, but all the stories stopped churning around the turntable in my brain. Amazon kindle first chapter free! I do a lot of gardening and half of the book is my healing through nature. 50 photos of the flowers and butterflies. I've lost old friends recently too. I don't believe in the diagnosis at all. It is body dissociation and complex PTSD. There are too many de-transitioners for the "born in wrong body" condition to be real and permanent. You might check in at my blog: uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com I say don't stop writing. Work to make it more concise, be poetic as you can. Be satisfied with a well-crafted paragraph. It's the psychologists and the doctors who swallowed queer theory and conflate homosexuality with this identity crisis and invent more and more identities to have power over the discourse. Take care of yourself. There will be good new friends who think like you. I've found some. Ute

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Thank you for all of what you have shared, Denton! I hope that you can find some peace. You have probably already tried therapy, and I imagine that your practice of art is therapeutic, but I hope you can find something like that that can provide some solace. I don't know whether you have listened to the Gender--A Wider Lens episode with Lisa Duval, but I have a feeling that that episode would be helpful to you because it seems to me like your daughter resembles mine and shares borderline personality disorder features. Please keep sharing your ideas in whatever way you can that provides healing and helps you find some semblance of peace!

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