Adult daughter dating trans-identified male, struggling to navigate family concerns

[BlueLegume]

Good morning all. I am normally rooted over on the Elderly parents threads. Just as I thought life couldn’t get more difficult it has. A week ago my adult daughter told us she was in a relationship with someone who identifies as male. This person was born female - daughter troped out the ‘gender assigned at birth’ nonsense. She has utterly ripped the family apart as she clearly has drunk the kool aid and cannot understand our concerns.

She has a great job, we are normal family where she says she has always felt safe and is loved.

Any advice welcome navigating this. Happy to answer questions but I will caveat this post with the following:

I am a sex realist. I hate the term gender critical.
I do not buy gender ideology. I think it is a term being used to expect society to accept trans etc off the back of the hard won rights for lesbians and gay men.

I do not believe anyone can change sex.

The ‘be kind’ mantra is a weaponised term to justify the nonsense.

Advice welcome.

@halfpastten thank you. A sensible post. However, I am not gender critical I am a sex realist.

I am aware of the compassion we should all show each other. It is a two way street except for this dynamic. My daughter’s partner had an eating disorder then self harmed then was diagnosed with autism then decided they were born in the wrong body and decided to transition . Somewhere along the lines things escalated and HCPs affirmed all of this as ‘gender affirming care’.

@Husky0830 i hope you get the support you deserve. Please feel free to keep using this thread as a source of information. Sadly you will be dubbed many things such as a transphobe and bigot.

What some posters seem to not get is as a mother seeing our children, adult as they maybe, be manipulated into a falsehood is awfully difficult.

If my daughter was with a partner with mental health issues/addiction issues I would feel just as protective.

I would not be shrugging my shoulder or ‘zipping my lip’.

I would be concerned. She is my child and she has been indoctrinated. There I said it. She is too nice and has been sold the lie.

"She is my child and she has been indoctrinated. There I said it. She is too nice and has been sold the lie".

Parenting is the most difficult thing I have ever done. Posters who tell you "there's only one way to parent or else..." are demonstrating a very rigid approach. And likely some of them won't be parents. It's a challenge to be on your child's side while watching them go into something that you fear is not right for them or that challenges our own values.

I hope that you've found some use from this thread @BlueLegume and that even the dismissive contributions have given some food for thought.

Thanks @MrsOvertonsWindow I’m generally over on the Elderly Parents board as I am entrenched in dealing with my elderly parents and my husbands.

I’m definitely tired of all these things middle age is throwing at me. It is exhausting 💐

edited to say I am dealing with my elderly parents and my husbands - I do not have multiple husbands - the one husband I have also has elderly parents who are difficult 🤣

Seconded with the middle aged exhaustion.

Also caught between aged parents on one side and children sucked into the ideology of transactivism on the other. Could have done without the transactivism as there are undertones throughout its adherents pushing children to test their parents and cut them off if they “blaspheme.”

Therein lies the problem. It isn’t a neutral situation or one where other opinions are tolerated. I see grandmothers convinced that the younger generation must see something they’ve missed or that it must be right because doctors on the NHS support it. Unfortunately I think they are wrong and the damage is very real and impossible to undo, but I have no answers because the adherents to gender identity ideology act as if they are in a cult and are almost impossible to reach.

It really is the most pernicious and damaging movement that has occurred in my lifetime.

@PriOn1 It really is the most pernicious and damaging movement that has occurred in my lifetime.

Spot on.

I am yet to hear a good stance on why suddenly in the past 15 to 20 years people can be deemed to be born in the wrong body.

Life is complicated. Teenage years see children develop into tomboys, effeminate boys, nerdy types, emo types, goths, sporty kids, girly girls, butch girls, the list is endless. We need all of these diverse personalities to have a balanced society.

What we seem to now have is middle aged men deciding they feel like being a woman and then trampling all over the spaces we real middle aged woman have, not to mention presenting in a manner most of us real middle aged women do not.

We have most sadly girls opting out of womanhood.

Gay men do not want to date a woman who says she is now a man and gay.
Lesbians do not want to date a man who says he is a woman and a lesbian.

That does not make them bigoted just sex realists.
Does anyone think common sense will prevail or has the Trojan Horse dressed up as ‘be kind’ succeeded. And yes it is a cult. It ticks all the boxes.

She’s a trans-identifying FEMALE, not male!

Apart from that everything you feel is right

@ThisOneLife so the person was born female but now identifies as male or sometimes non binary. So is the term trans identifying female the correct term?

If all this is all so normal how come the language is so confusing. I thought the term would have been trans man.

As in the men who say they are women are called trans women? Aren’t they?

Thank you for what I think is support in your last sentence.

The language is super confusing (possibly deliberately so) There are a lot of arguments about it and people complain bitterly if you get it wrong. For a long time the terms "trans identified female" and "trans identifed male" were not allowed on MumsNet and using them could get our posts deleted if someone complained. I don't know if the rules have changed. They were considered offensive because it was rude to point out a person's biological sex.

I still use the terms "transwoman" (meaning biological male, identifies as woman / wants to be female; "trans identified male") and "transman" (meaning biological female, identifies as man/ wants to be male; "trans identified female")

"Trans identified male/female" is in many ways clearer and it also covers non-binary and other non-standard identities which are all "trans", but as I said above it's deprecated.

Whether you put a space between "transwoman" and "trans woman" is a whole other argument. I don't because (a) I am old, and (b) the space makes things more confusing because "trans woman" and "trans identified woman" mean exactly opposite things.

I hope this helps and I do hope it doesn't get my post deleted!

Indeed and this makes me sad. But she is an adult and must make her own choices. All I can do is to be there for her and love her. And tell her so.

It is confusing and I also think it’s deliberate. Many people don’t think a man should be called a woman even if it has trans in front of it so;

Trans identified male = Man
Trans identified female = Woman

i personally try to use the above when I can.

MumofYoungTransAdult has it right. See above.

From OP: As a middle aged heterosexual woman, if I was single and looking to date I want a biological man not a woman pretending to be a man. But that is you and has no relevance to what your DD wants and feels. Love is a form of madness, we all know that - she, like all of us have been or are, swept away with this relationship. It will go where it will go, and arguing your case will not achieve anything except likely entrench it more firmly.

One way to achieve good relationships with AC is to make sure that they know you respect them as well as love them. I do think you need to respect her decisions - you do not have to agree with them - you just have to stand back and bide your time.

I wonder if you are concerned about how you will look to your friends and family if you are not seen to take a firm stand over this? I can think of no other reason for your stance, knowing as you do that it will destroy your relationship with your DD.

The road of trans people is a rocky one and she will need you by her side.

This. “Ripped the family apart”. Get a grip.

@imisscashmere 19 pages of a thread and that is the only comment you pick out?

I have moved on from that and if you had read the thread properly you would see that.

Haven’t read the full thread, but my eldest went through a wanting to be called he stage (it’s a bit uncertain now and I just avoid pronouns just in case), there was also a period of dating a six foot, broad shouldered person in ill fitting dresses. I’m not a believer, but we took the view that our relationship with our child was more important than having to be dogmatic about how other people like to present themselves and we try to just be nice and polite and tried to use the right names, but avoided pronouns.

It wasn’t ideal from our point of view and our eldest is in a different relationship now, which seems more mainstream, but we don’t enquire about pro nouns.

We took the view of suck it up and accept that this is how they wanted to live there life and we could be part of it or not. and it wasn’t as though they were in a relationship with a reform voter or worse a Birmingham City fan!

Occasionally I've seen surveys that ask if I know what those words mean. I never know what to say because I know what I mean when I use those words but I don't know for sure what anyone else means! Different people think they mean different things and I have to work out what they really mean from the context or from what I know about their own views and usage.

I don’t believe in their ideology so I’m not going to call a group of women “men”. Ditto the men.

Trans identified male is a GC term. So most people completely reject trans as the modifier that genderists think it is.

Trans identified male = transwoman = man

To put the space between 'trans' and 'woman' suggests that a transwoman is simply a sub-category of "woman,' like "black woman" or "tall woman."

It's gender ideology extremism. And therefore bollocks (quite literally in 80% of the cases).

Just came across this essay from 2023. I found it interesting and quite pertinent to where we are as a society at the moment. Hope it’s ok to post moderators if not please remove it.

https://www.feliciarembrandt.com/p/the-parasitic-worm

@Missj25 I was trying to explain to another poster why sensible people are unhappy if their child starts dating a trans person. We all want our children to be happy and have healthy relationships. Trans people come with a lot of baggage and the activists with a determination to separate their partner from anyone who sees the world differently. They are full of hate but ascribe this to anyone who disagrees with them. No disagreement is not "hate" - but forcing your views on others is controlling and bullying.

There is also the narrative here that you must accept anything from your child or lose them. Well in some cases maybe it's not much of a loss. Of course most people will try to cling on to some sort of a relationship so their child has a way back when they realise how much harm they have suffered. But you cant force a relationship on someone who has decided you are hateful and evil for daring to have a different view to them. Maybe they will grow up one day, maybe not.

@BlueLegume I was the wife of a person who decided he was a woman. The story is long but essentially I (an now staunchly GC person) was pulled in and caught up I the absolute chaos and trauma of the whole thing. I can tell you honestly that if my parent had at that point put me in the middle of their own values and beliefs and my partner's, it would have absolutely destroyed my relationship with them.

I don't disagree with your views, in fact mine are similar, however I would stop at nothing to support my children and ensure that our relationship was not fractured by an external situation, and for that reason I'd be honest with them about my views however address their partner (not speak about them, but address them directly) as they chose to be addressed. Believe me when I say I needed my parent more than ever after that experience.

There is also the narrative here that you must accept anything from your child or lose them.
It's not about losing them. It is about wanting to support them through life's challenges and showing unconditional love. This has been my approach to my DGC (now adult) - they know their choice makes no sense to me but they also know that my love for them is rock solid and I will always be there for them.

You can lose a relationship with your adult child for many reasons. My FiL is cut out of DH life for his behaviour, and there are loads of Mumsnetters who have cut off a parent for a huge variety of reasons.
As a thought experiment, what would you do if DD had a relationship with a local drug dealer? Would you want to maintain a relationship if she refused to leave him?

@turkeyboots great question and one all parents of adults have to consider. I suppose it is down to where our boundaries are with the partner our adult children choose to be with.

For the record since this thread began my daughter and I have spoken at length. She knows she is loved and she reciprocates the same love. There has also been an acknowledgment purely initiated by her that where she lives and works and socialises is very much a queer leaning space so she admits she has been drawn into something that if she lived elsewhere might not have happened.

The sad thing is she genuinely assumed all would be hunky dory as apparently all of her other trans friends parents are ‘cool’ with it. She is not and has made it clear she is not trans and has no intention of walking that path.

I would describe her as a suicidal empath generally in life. She is full on pro Palestine anti Israel - every flag or pin badge going.

If it wasn’t potentially outing if I gave you the bigger picture of her upbringing, education and background you would roll your eyes. She definitely seems to feel she is in the middle of a real fight. Lots to think about as to how the family now looks - as it is trying to maintain a light touch but regular contact.

That sounds so positive. It is not an easy balance as I know only too well with my DGC but I just need to keep the love flowing, as do all the family.