Gender ideology is toxic and creates divisions

[reprobatiusmumius]

I know I’m wading into a toxic debate here. But AIBU to find the gender ideology debate just so poisonous?

I have non binary identifying autistic teenager. I love and accept her but I refuse to get drawn into pronouns and calling her by a name she’s made up herself.

Why? It’s disrespectful to me, frankly. I conceived, birthed, nurtured and named her. I do not wish to capitulate to an ideology I disagree with, and so? My stance is, you do you with your friends. I am going to do me with you. That means I call her by her birth name and I’m not going to force grandma to say they / them which is grammatically incorrect. This is my stance.

It feels like a reasonable truce, having navigated years of chest flatteners, drawings with breast scars and other horrors, when all I want for her is for her to be happy in herself. In her current body. Surely, that’s not an unreasonable stance? And yet, I have been called out for bigotry, transphobia and told that if she walks out on me and never speaks to me again, that’s all I deserve. Not by her, I may add, although she tends to refuse my clothing suggestions- it’s fine- I give her money and she can wear what she wants (except clothes, like binders, that can physically harm her)

I’m sorry, but how have we got to a stage where parental norms, wishes and expectations are so decried, twisted and frowned upon that this debate has become “if you don’t agree then your child should disown you”? Seriously, I’ve got to the point where I’m so angry by the gremlins who have hog hold of her and convinced her something untrue that I feel like I want to go full Trump and refuse to engage in this debate at all, just ban it outright.

This is a debate where there is no allowance for nuance, questioning, watching and waiting and just accepting a rebellion (because that’s what I see this as!). I thank god they have banned surgical interventions on under 18s because the online trolls who push this agenda want to turn kids against loving and cautious parents who just WANT THEIR KIDS TO BE HAPPY as they are!

Sorry, I’m so angry- have just been outright banned by an Autistic with ADHD sub on Reddit for stating the same, and told my daughter should disown me. How did this become so toxic and how is any of this good for families?

The online pushers want more angry converts to their nasty little cult and it’s made me so angry. How dare they poison my sweet little girl and make out that I, her mother, am the problem, because I have an opinion that differs from hers. It’s hideous and I’ve had enough of the insidious compulsion to agree entirely or say nothing.

"Unfortunately, you don’t own your children because you birth them"

...is an opinion often put forward by a cult who want to separate a child from the parent/s safeguarding them.

If you become a parent you take on a serious responsibility. You are not there primarily to be their best or coolest friend (though nice if you can be), but to ensure they make it to adulthood healthy and with the skills to survive.

Letting them change their name may seem trivial but that can be the cult's way of claiming ownership of the child:

"that's your trans name"
"you're one of us now"
"you don't need to obey parents they don't own you"
"here's a breast binder"
"if they won't let you have puberty blockers we know a guy...."

"Refusing to allow a child to have autonomy over their body and their self-identification is in my opinion abuse"

Here's another mantra that has unfortunately been latched onto by cults and abusers and used to enable them to have access to children.

There is a group of middle aged men who claim that preventing toddlers from choosing to have sex with - you guessed it - middle aged men - is abuse and a denial of their autonomy and human rights.

Children don't have autonomy for good reasons and that is one of them. Letting kids make unsupervised decisions they are too young for is the real abuse

Thought better of it? Fair enough.

Accepting you're wrong is sometimes really quite difficult. But still, I think you can gain from this exchange. Go, lick your wounds, think about it all.

I'm glad you thought again about doubling down with that "comfortable with my position" shtick. Really, it's important for us all that "... in the bowels of Christ, [we] think it possible [we] may be mistaken". (Look it up if you don't recognise.)

Ah come on, surely the most important thing that tutors on an MA course teach is that at the end of it, uttering the magic words 'I have an MA' precludes all necessity for further debate on any issue....

There's lots of little wedges that separate kids from their parents in all this... changing of precious, well-considered, given names. Alienating parents by insistance on language and pronouns. Claiming to not conform to male or female stereotypes (meaning they think you must be conforming!). Declaring older women "dangerous TERFs". Grouping vulnerable teenage girls in the same group as much older men with sexual fetishes.
Be very, very wary. Keep away from Reddit where no balanced discussion or dissent is allowed.

Reddit is absolutely terrible on this topic. The sitewide rules prohibit any reasonable discussion because it will usually be interpreted as "hate", and most subreddits are captured by this ideology. Many of them are run by men who call themselves women or their allies and they ban all dissent as you have found out.

One exception to this is the r/BlockedAndReported subreddit, particularly in the weekly discussion threads. For whatever reason, Reddit admins are very hands-off there and there's a lot of gender-critical discussion happens in that sub. Might be a good place if you want to discuss this on that site.

Very relevant read here

<a class="break-all" href="https://archive.li/2025.05.27-070632/www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2025/05/exclusive-why-wes-streeting-changed-his-mind-on-cross-sex-hormones" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://archive.li/2025.05.27-070632/www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2025/05/exclusive-why-wes-streeting-changed-his-mind-on-cross-sex-hormones

Some key points, but lots in here ...

Cross sex hormone treatment affects each of the cells of the body”, Dahlgren explained. Research showed trans women (“natal males”) have a <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.li/o/dRF4t/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6636681/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">substantially higher risk of ischemic stroke, venous thromboembolism (VTE) – which includes deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism – and heart attacks. After eight years of oestrogen use, trans women had a risk of VTE nearly 17 times higher than other biological males, and 13.7 times than biological women. Studies have also suggested that females who take testosterone, have an increased risk of heart attacks.