Dd ran away to be with trans lover and refuses to return

Almost 17.

Just finished the first year of A levels at 6th form college (late summer baby).

I do feel that the peak of the social contagion is behind us now, ‘trans man’ and ‘non
binary AFAB’ have tipped on the fashion scales and become more cringe than cool.

This is somewhat comforting but does make me worry about the vulnerable autistic teens who have been able to use trans as a bit of a social shield -the power of that shield is waning and that could be quite difficult for them to adjust to?

The not-quite-understood-yet boy version of ROGD is still seemingly on an upward trajectory (based purely on the posts I see in the gender skeptical parenting groups).

I honestly think my stepdaughter is getting bored with trans, it looks exhausting and limiting from where I’m standing - she’s 4 and half years into it (with a desist over lockdown and then a double down when school reopened). She insisted on starting 6th form using a (cartoonish!) male name and I don’t think she’ll want to back down on that due to the embarrassment factor so we realistically have at least another year to go (and will unpick the ‘GCSEs in one name, A levels in another’ problem when we inevitably get to it).

Underneath the emo-boy-but-make-it-baggy clothing is a really quite bad restrictive eating disorder that everyone else seems to be in denial about (and seems to be leading to the end of my marriage because I will not allow it to be brushed under the carpet of trans (I remember my own teenage anorexic friend’s struggles too clearly and have seen the impact it’s had on her even to this day, now in her mid 40s).

I strongly suspect that the underlying reason my DsD wants a mastectomy so badly is the same sort of motivation as many anorexics have for not eating, she wants to disappear and she’ll try and do that by shrinking or amputating bits of herself.

She hates me because I refuse to let her shrink herself to nothing in plain sight. I see her when she wants to be invisible.

Her parents aren’t at all abusive, just bewildered and emotionally ill-equipped for this battle. Her mum grew up under communism so can’t find much common ground in her own past to connect with her daughter over - English is her third language for starters!
Dad is a lot like @Moomoola’s DH - hiding in workaholism so he can avoid his own emotions.
I’ve said it before but being the father of a daughter is part of his own identity, so her rejecting the ‘daughter’ part of that has felt like a rejection of him as a father (when actually I think she idolises him and the cross sex identity is partially subconsciously motivated by wanting to be more like him and less like her mother (no teenage girl wants to be like her mother, even if her mother is a jolly decent human being! I know I desperately didn’t want to be like mine - now there is no one I’d rather take after!)

Fortunately, this whole, sad, sorry mess seems to have inoculated my two bio children against it - my eldest (DS23) is now actively referring to himself as Gender Critical and my youngest (DD11) makes wry little jokes highlighting the absurdity of it all.

A couple of weeks ago we were talking about aging and I told her I didn’t feel 45, just like 3 15 years olds in a trench coat pretending to be 45.
Her response?

‘Are you changing your pronouns to they/them then, Mother?’

😆

I read things like this and could weep for the young person in our family who went ahead with surgery at just turned 18. There's no way back, is there? And s/he really doesn't strike me as happy, some years on, but where is there to go except grit your teeth and call everyone else transphobic for noticing your unhappiness?

It may not be a comfort to those still struggling, like @Moomoola but I am sure that the huge explosion of trans among teenage girls is subsiding. I really don’t understand why there was this insistence amongst TRAs and allies that all of these children really were the opposite gender. It has all the hallmarks of every teenage obsession ever. And surely everyone can remember how intense those feelings are, and then just gone. I don’t care how masculine or feminine my girl presents, I’m a big loud bolshie woman myself ( and she is a delicate flower who loves pastels and ballet), but yes to wanting to birth your own children, yes to noticing sexual inequalities, yes to wearing cool clothes in summer, And yes yes yes to learning to love yourself.

@Zebracat thank you. My ftm is 19 too and is changing. No longer wants surgery, answers to her birth name etc. Still wears boys clothes and his a different name with her friends.

I refused surgery on the grounds of not being party to a potential furure law suit (my family are solicitors, we debate everything through a legal lense). She no longer wants surgery after going to university and giving up the Internet 'friends'. The feminity had crept in too with nails and brows. I say nothing.
However when my DC said she wanted to birth her own children I wept. Her boyfriend is bi sexual and this started when she met him. We have never met him but he has a lot to answer for including effecting so much of her education.

Zebracat· Today 16:40
Thank goodness she is
ok Zebracat

This seems very wise advice, though very difficult to stick to:
I do remember reading some advice which was to offer no opinions at all, but to properly listen to them, and ask lots of open questions.

On the other hand, your crime of finally breaking down into exasperation over the pronouns seems to have triggered the catharsis from which she emerged a free person.

The fact, though, that you had tried so hard to not offer opinions, just listen, and that you never let go finally when she was in that anguished state, seems to have given her the space she needed to trust you in the end.

I just don’t know how you managed.

She's revellingin the romance of elopement, rebellion, defying parents and their conventions.

She isn't about to get top surgery on the NHS ; long waiting lists. No money for private treatment. She is not on the streets, safe in a family home and attending school.

I would just bite my lip, step back from the prima donna's drama stage and wait for reality to set in. No longer has her own bedroom to escape to. Damn sure the other mother won't be providing laundry service, full meal service, pocket money; but she will be expecting help round the house, teens cleaning their own mess. Do NOT pay her a penny for DD's keep. Give it a couple of weeks and the hostess will show her the door.

GF with MH probs and hormone effects, will be moody; there are sure to be tiffs. Give it a couple of weeks to unravel.

I hope yours joins those dots at some point. Ours is 19 and has. How old is yours?

Well, the cloglady, I know all about being the evil one. I was so respectful of our girls real parents, worked so hard to promote them, excuse their crapness etc, that it was quite hard for her to process the abuse and abandonment. It was a learning moment for me when I realised I didn’t have to excuse the inexcusable. But she had been removed by Childrens Services.

Crikey, Zebracat - you appear to have made my eyes spring a leak!

I feel exactly the same way about my stepdaughter, btw - I’m currently the life-ruining, father-stealing, uber-terfy evil stepmother, and I’m actually content to play that role because if I soak up all the bad-guy-mess it gives her a clearer pathway to repairing her relationship with her parents.

Perhaps in years to come, she will look back and all the dot to dots will join up, and she will be able to see that I always loved her, even when she herself insisted she were entirely unloveable.

The issue for me is that I just dont see how parents can support transition.. Every tiny injury to my children hurt me, every little misstep or fall. I could no more pretend to be happy about transitioning than I could buy them heroin or encourage them to have cosmetic surgery. And I know other people have been in situations where they have bought heroin or new breasts for their child, and felt that to be the least worst option, but I couldn’t. I had to seriously consider it, and after much soul searching realised that pretending to be ok with either social or medical transition would be utterly beyond me. I did manage to avoid pronouns altogether for 2 years while we had this going on. Weirdly, as soon as I made that decision, dds conviction started to fall away. I’m not saying there was a link. We may have been lucky that the trans friendships were all online. She may have been the only transboy in the school when she was experimenting with that identity, and I still don’t know if she was properly transitioned at school. She had so many other serious issues to deal with, the school kept it very low-key, and so did we. I think to this day she has no idea how terrified I was. She has close friends who are trans, and medically transitioned, and I manage to hear about their lives without fake applause or showing how much I fear for them.
I do remember reading some advice which was to offer no opinions at all, but to properly listen to them, and ask lots of open questions. One day she came in from school and said she was keeping a list of all the transphobia she witnessed every day, and how often she was triggered. I asked her to tell me more, what sort of incidents were they. She looked astonished, I think I was supposed to say that was awful, and should we complain? I gently asked again, that she tell me more. And she said “well pronouns, mostly”. My resolve to listen respectfully sagged and I asked what dreadful damage had the nasty pronouns done.
She had a total meltdown, flew at me, screaming, went up to her room , screaming and saying she was going to kill herself. Of course, I had to follow, to protect her, and she screamed and screamed at me, said I was frightening her, said it was literal violence that I was in her room. I kept explaining that I couldn’t leave her alone so upset, that I was sorry I had offended her, but that I had to stay to ensure she was okay.
After about an hour, it was down to angry crying and I asked if she wanted a hug and she shot into my arms, and sobbed a bit, before saying that actually, she thought pronouns weren’t all that. Later that month she told another family member that she knew she was not trans.
Sorry this is so long, I’m writing in the hope it may be useful. I think we have to, diplomatically(!), go with our guts. I don’t know if I would have the courage to stand up to a Hitler or a Putin, or even operate secretly to help victims of a fascist regime. But I do know that I never could have looked myself in the eye again if I had been a cheerleader for this shitshow, despite the deep misgivings I had. And if she had left us, and she could have, she’s not our biological child, then that would still be easier to live with than allowing irreparable damage

Really good link, thank you Moomoola. Scrolling, I completely agree that there is a lot of horse brushing going on. Since when was it not creepy for any unknown adult to tell children that their parents don’t understand them? To add to the Helen Joyce quote, the parents involved haven’t just bet their lives, they’ve bet their child’s life. Of course they’re all in. I’m thinking Susie Green deserves a mention just around now!

Moomoola · Today 15:03
This, from another mum is very clear. Its taken me a long time to realize this is actually a thing. Please share!

Https://www.gendermapper.org/post/the-secret-tactics-of-glitter-moms-a-tale-of-betrayal-and-grooming

Gosh, I have just read that Moomoola. How extraordinary that these Glitter Mom kidnappings really are a phenomenon. This is exactly like what has happened with your DD. In this story it is more than just support, it is horse brushing and encouragement by the sister . I wonder if in DD’s case X’s mother has been actively like this too?

It us awful that cycling cheat Rachel McKinnon is also brushing young horses in this way.

Hi Moomoola, nice to hear from you. How are you?

Have you got some nice things planned to do with DS over the summer holidays? That way, hopefully, you’ll have a good time with DS, boost his self-esteem a little bit and maybe have some good pics to share with DD as & when. Also give you something to focus on - I imagine ‘letting the rope go slack’ is very hard, and any distraction might help!

🌻🌻🌻

No, that's very true actually @beastlyslumber . There were no adults in my life encouraging my bad decisions and certainly not teachers, doctors and other people who we are taught to trust. You made a good point.

@beastlyslumber lots to agree with there.

Yes, some of the motivations may be the same, facelikecattle, but actually the big scary difference is that teenagers going down the trans path are very much on a path which leads to hormones and surgeries that will devastate their mental health and their physical health.

When I was an obnoxious teenager, no adults were telling me that I was right to hate my body or that I needed dangerous, untested treatments to deal with my issues. Even with anorexia or self-harm, no one was telling teenage girls that their bodies were wrong and that they needed to starve or cut themselves in order to feel better about themselves.

Obviously it's a fad and a fashion and if ignored and left to their own devices, teens would quickly desist. But they are being given so much attention and taken so seriously, and that makes it dangerous. The whole massive industry devoted to medicalising teens' trans identity makes it different and scary compared to what's gone before.

There are some amazing responses here and I think it's good to compare it to the usual pattern when kids leave home. It's true that you don't tend to hear from them all that much and that's ok. I wonder if this whole trans thing is just the new way to shock parents and be different. I was a teenager in the 90s where our generation was very much into heavy drinking, casual sex and soft drugs. I remember my mother telling me one morning that she had a nightmare about me taking drugs and woke up scared. I didn't take drugs (but probably would if I could have got hold of them) but did drink a lot and have sex with some dodgy blokes. I was like this and so was most of my generation to a greater or lesser degree. Now we are mostly boring people in our 40s.

I think it's the same for every generation. The whole sex, drugs and rock and roll of the 70s; the 60s and their free love and LSD,' the 80s and glue sniffing. This is all just off the top of my head and not even in a coherant order, but every generation has their idiotic decisions that the teenagers love and the parents worry endlessly about. Most of us survived these things largely unscathed.

Also every generation fights for a cause that they put all their energy into, mostly that is good causes like the environment, but other times it is misguided, like the trans movement.

I think the trans thing wil go the same way as all other generational fads, most kids are just going along for the ride and won't get that deeply involved, they will be male/female/cat/tree and shout that nobody understands them. Then they'll need money so get a job, their brain matures and they won't have the energy or inclanation for being so passionate about good causes any more. Then the subsequent generation will look on them with scorn, call them "old" and "boring" and find something new to shout about.

I think this is something you just have to ride out. You can be grateful that she's not in the generation who smoked heavily, where loads died of lung cancer, nor is she drinking loads, sleeping around or taking recreational drugs. I'm not saying that it's good what she's doing, but I don't think it's that different to what you did and your parents before that.

Stoicism is a great philosophy, and it's interesting how you see it in different cultures. But it's easy to fall into fatalism, and I think that's something to just be aware of when studying it. All the same, it's helped me a lot.

I think there's a lot in stoicism - accepting what you cannot control.

My children are younger. One day I was in another room and heard a noise. Then older kid says "you've broken the TV". They didn't sound hurt so I didn't immediately rush through. My youngest comes through utterly distraught and tells me what happened.

What I was amazed by was having even a short gap (under 30 secs) where I accepted the TV was broken (thankfully insured!) before he came through meant I was able to respond calmly and kindly to a child who had accidentally damaged something and was honest and brave in coming and taking responsibility for it. My first response could be "are you hurt?".

That gap allowed me to respond in a way I was proud of. If I had been in the room, trying to get him to stop being wild or admonish him to be careful and been too late, then my impotent frustration would made it difficult to be that clear and calm. I'd have told him off, perhaps angrily and his attention would have been on my reaction not on what he had done.

Back to your daughter. If she had already taken testosterone - or even something non trans related like gotten a facial tattoo - and then regretted it, then I think you could, like my young kid with the broken TV, find that you could respond with compassion to a wrong choice already made. Because there is acceptance that it can't be undone so your focus moves instead to maintaining a good relationship and problem solving with them how we move on from here.

But because instead of having already occured, you are seeing her teetering on the edge of a decision you think she'll one day regret, you are full of frustration because if she'd only do what you tell her too then she could save herself that pain. So you (and your husband) are distressed and trying to do all you can to get her to see it's a wrong choice to prevent disaster. You have the illusion that it is something you can stop if you just say the right thing etc.

Accepting that it is a choice she could make whatever you say or do. Forgiving yourself for not knowing what the magic words are(if any) to stop it. Focusing on adapting to the parent of an adult relationship and it's sorrow that we can't protect them from everything forever, even themselves. Staying a reliable place for her to come back to and acting within your own integrity which might mean not cheering her on self harming her body, whatever society says. I think that's all you can do.

A quote from Harry Potter that comes to mind, related to the estranged young adult Percy Weasley who hasn't resumed contact with his parents even after its clear they were right is: "Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right."

Good luck with it all.

I am sorry OP this is still going on. I remember the original posts.
My DD wanted 'top surgery' at 17. However she had a change of heart last year at 19. My DD has a bi sexual boyfriend (natal male) who has pulled her strings since she was 14. We have never met him and I have warned her he poses a health risk if he is sleeping with men too. He was encouraging surgery. 'Be your real self' shit. She now realises if she wants an easy time when she has her children (new desire last year and frozen eggs dismissed as risky and wasteful of NHS resources- she didn't realise she would have had to pay!)
What I do know since going to university my DD has dialled down the ftm desire. Yes there is a male name and clothes but the request for hormones and reassignment has disappeared. She has even 'admired' some very heterosexual peers. We had five years of glitter families, drag race, Internet stars (f*cking Miles), requests for Mermaids and huge school refusal. Everyone was transphobic and she self harmed.
She is studying a medical subject so I am hoping that this cult is covered in her syllabus. We had one interesting incident where she went to join the university LGBTQ society and it had closed due to lack of members! Perhaps the need for a label is waining in Gen Z? My understanding is the waiting list for surgery is 6 years. Unless someone pays privately (and few surgeons will carry this out on someone under 25 due to future claims) there is time for your DD to have a change of heart. I would be interested to know if the gf is having surgery or just pushing it on your DD?
Interestly my DH has never called our daughter by her male name. His response is just no. I call her a jokey version and our DS who is older ignores it all. The best thing I ever did is say I can't support this but I love you. I won't be responsible for the fall out if you take hormones or have surgery. It is a difficult life as a transperson. I think my young adult is now seeing that.
I believe wear what you like, call yourself Fred but leave your options open. It is perverse few mtf people have surgery (less than 2500 per year) but it is pushed in young girls. I wonder why that is?