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

[Moomoola]

Hi, I was posting in the teens section and got some good ad vice and a suggestion that I post here.
here’s a link to that thread www.mumsnet.com/talk/teenagers/4699011-sil-cancelled-visit-as-our-dd-wants-to-be-a-man?page=1
im using ‘dd’and ‘she’ to keep things simple.
basically dd at 15 decided she was trans and I took her to get some boys clothes and didn’t pay it enough attention. To my naive mind it’s not (or wasn’t ) an issue.
Shes now 17 and started to date a girl ( x) who is 17, who’s parents paid for male hormones since 15. That was some concern as obv. X will have been through a lot. Dd mentioned that x has some mental struggles, the mum hides vodka. Dd is pretty naive, has had a few challenges and can be gullible.
in the last 3 months dd was clearly struggling.
just befor Xmas I made her a cuppa and she had vanished. We tracked her down to x house which she refused to leave. It was ibvioly coordinated as there was a lot of phone alerts and the dad had obviously come to collect her.
I asked the mum to send her back as it was Xmas day and we were concerned. I get a text back from dd saying the mum doesn’t want to be involved and why did I deadname her.
The mum obviously didn’t need to show the text to dd. There are other red flags that the mum is stirring. We got texts from dd saying we are abusive transphobes. If we try and talk rationally that’s conversion therapy. We are concerned that dd is being encouraged to write these. The grammar is sometimes too good to be dds. Any ‘friendly’ texts seem to be late at night. Though I may be overthinking that.
live managed to see dd twice so at least we are talking, but it’s as if dd is hardening herself from us. She has decided to live with x and her mum and is in love and considering top surgery as she has dysmorphia. At least she is still going to school.
we registered it with the police who said this is happening a lot and it’s a pattern.
we are not concerned about the trans thing as such, though obviously that’s part of it, we are very concerned that since dating x, a seemingly happy dd got increasingly depressed and convinced we were transphobic to the point that she had to run to xs house where she feels supported, and we feel she is being love bombed, isolated from us and coerced into thinking she also needs hormones etc.
we are getting nowhere. I seem to be living in a dystopian world where everyone has fake smiles and suggests we call her by her new name and everything will be marvellous.
live contacted Bayswater group, and I’m posting here as suggested by a pp in case anyone can suggest anything else I can do. For dd but also Dh and ds. Dh obviously distraught the more he reads and ds is spending more and more time alone on his phone.
Many thanks.

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!

🌻🌻🌻

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.

Hello hag, so nice to hear from you - and all everybody.
im just trying to find somewhere that won’t be just us 3 rattling around. Sounds like a new thread!

Hi scrolling my post didn’t post.
i wanted to say how relieved I was to read this. DH isn’t mad and over the top. I’m not going bonkers. I have something to show the teacher friends who look at me pityingly, as they say ,’use the pronouns! Why would x mum do that? Are you sure you’ve not been a teensy bit transphobic?
i think absolutely X mum involved.

this by Helen Joyce ( mentioned previously, but pertinent I feel)
The specific people who are going to be most angry are those who have made irrevocable choices on the basis that the rest of us would go along with those choices. Most of all the parents who transitioned their own children, because if you transition your own child you are in effect making a promise to that child that the whole world is going to step in line for the entire rest of that child’s life, and now there’s people like me saying, actually that’s not going to happen. You can tell your boy that he’s your daughter if you like but he’s not going to be able to play in women’s sports, and I’m going to fight tooth and nail to get him out of women’s changing rooms as well. Those people are all in. They’ve bet the house. They bet their lives on an ideology that we’re now fighting back against. They’re going to fight to the death on this.
which is also what a friend of a friend who is up on all this said. It’s got all the behaviours if a cult. And if you’ve joined a cult you are going to defend your choice to the hilt. Especially if they’ve isolated you and given you a new name and identity.

please share the link!

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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?

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?’

😆

@TheClogLady my DD had a stage of restrictive eating and binge eating at boarding school. She will hit the cake if upset or stressed. At one point she was trying to shrink her chest which is large but fantastic. I had a frank conversation about the benefit of breast feeding when you are a tired new mum. She is analytical and studying a medical subject so she got it. She still wears a sports bra out but when you have had men learing at you from 10 no wonder she tried to change herself. I am a bolshie big woman too and I know under all her unhappiness (she was attacked and bullied at school) she wanted to be heard.
I took me a year off work to help her. My DS like yours is 23 and just 'whatevers' it.
I have noticed such a difference without a particular set of Yr 10/11 school friends that she no longer sees. That would be 4/5 years ago. Toxic.

Whaaa I’m deleted! Why?
was basically was saying how blooming amazing you all Are.

Oh Moo, I'm sorry you were deleted! It's not okay to censor mothers who need support!!

I am sorry you were deleted. I think there may be some new people doing quite a bit of it.

Moomoola 🍷🍫 try again? Hope you’ve been able to enjoy some fun stuff this weekend

me again!
Thank you so much for sharing your own stories.
I have re read them mnay times, was feeling too crap to post, and you are all so amazing. Obviously your stories are very emotional, I'm so sorry for everyone that is going through this insanity, especially you and your family, dodo cripes.
zebracat I think there were a lot of ordinary people who stood up to hitler/putin in their own small way - and I think you've done that. I'm so pleased for you and your daughter, and clog how amazing are you to play the evil terfmother to help your SDs relationship with parents.
name5im so pleased for you. You mention that you took a year off to help her - I'm sounding a bit daft, but what did you do? I'm really struggling.
clog your pronoun comment made me laugh. I hope your DsD comes through.
It's no wonder girls are so confused and want to change their shape - suddenly sexualised with large bosoms, or teased to feel inadequate for small ones.
2bazookas what you say sounds sensible - but its not unravelling. its now 7 months.
I'm very concerned that even if she is unhappy, to leave a partner when you live with them is v. difficult - I know!

I texted DD to invite her to a gig. and Fathers Day, but nothing. We took DS out but I think we all found it hard - DH did.
Then monday I got this -
'I know it's been a bit of time but I still need time. I know it's quite hard but it would be helpful if you could respect that'

I just dont undertsand. It's SO different to the excited jolly text I got on herbirthday describing the night out shed had. its like jekyll and hyde. I havent answered. I want to say,

'ok, but I'm concerned for you - X still lives with their mum, and their dad is around to help support X too. We would like to support you. It would be great if you and I, and X could get together and chat any misunderstandings through. Obviously II enjoyed our chat before, and of course I'm interested in getting to know X!
I am concerned that you are taking testosterone. It's a massive step that hasnt been documented fully - do you remember how much research we did into acne drugs, and they were proven safe over 1000s of studies before they were given to anyone. Doctors are only now realising that testosterone (steroids) have given heart attacks to quite a few atheltes that took it in the last 20 years -
here's what the NHS says https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/anabolic-steroid-misuse/
Obviously X is taking T, and that is their choice, but unfortunately the longer term effect on young women is unknown because young women have never taken it in such quantities for so long - you will essentially be experimented on - and be helping the companies that sell it get very very rich.

Also , you would like us to give you more time - again - and say it would be helpful if I could respect that. I can, and can you respect me? We are all finding it hard not to see you, and support you, and of course, to be kept hanging on and told you need more time, over and over again is very difficult. - can we discuss how much time you need and how we can overcome the problems in our relationship? I am completely happy to listen and learn from you.'

Of course that is probably the wrong thing to say completely. Its certainly a long text! and shes dyselxic. Advice most definitely needed. I cant warn her off testosterone without insulting X.

DH is convinced shes being isolated because X and mum are persueding her to take T. and want it to be too late for us to stop her. it sounds mad, but so far hes been right.

I went to the cafe - shes not working there, she lied to the family therapist people. That was a blow, and now this text.

DH says we need action - I need to go round to the flat. He accuses me of having my head in the sand - I'm just researching and not acting. He says I should go back to work, I say, yes! Then he says, 'then you can say goodbye to DD'
We are arguing, and I am struggling not to feel overwhelm and depression and am drinking too much. It's mums first birthday without her today. It's like having 2 people to mourn.
sorry for the essay, struggling, as is DH. Thanks for your patinece.

Definitely 'yes yes yes, to learning to love yourself'

Moomoola, I thought of you in a slightly random context at work recently. An item of jewellery was handed in and when the owner came to claim it, it was a very emotional young woman. She explained the item had massive sentimental value as it symbolised health and happiness, and her parents had given it to her when she left her home country "to come to the UK to marry a stupid man". She is no longer with the stupid man, and the jewellery reminds her of her parents' love even when she made bad decisions.

beowulfa what a lovely story - and what a good idea. I didn't give DD anything for her birthday - too emotional. Health and happiness is a very good non political and loving symbol - and she previously taught herself Chinese, so that may work on another level. Thank you for the idea.

Moomola, I am very sorry for what you are going through today on your mother’s birthday, the first without her here. You must feel very sad.

It would not be a good idea to send a letter like that today given how upset you are for so many reasons. Also, the one you were thinking of might possibly make your DD bristle and defend, I think.

Why not just say, “Lovely to hear from you. I do respect your need for more time for yourself. Hope you are OK. Let us know if there is anything you need. We miss you and love you.

We are all here thinking of Mum today and going to the garden centre to buy something beautiful to plant in her memory, and then out for tea there. Of course, join us if you want.”….. (or something else in memory of your Mum)