The mother of a four-year-old boy says she now regrets allowing him to transition to a girl, views her decision as a mistake, and claims recognizing the mistake was like “leaving a cult.”
Rose, a pseudonym used to maintain the woman’s anonymity, and her wife raised both of their sons as gender neutral. But, when the four-year-old said he felt like a girl, she pushed him into a female identity.
“When you are in this belief system, you truly believe in this existence of an innate transgender identity,” she said during a Feb. 5 interview on the Triggernometry podcast.
“For us, it was almost like if we can be gender neutral, if we can be more open and flexible, we could maybe avoid a transgender child ever having gender dysphoria,” she explained. “That’s kind of where we were coming from, was really wanting to not do harm to my child.”
She added, “It’s kind of the opposite of what many of us now see as something that does do harm.”
On average, two percent of the global population now identify as transgender. The countries with the highest number of individuals who identify as transgender are Germany and Sweden (three percent in each country). Among U.S. youth, 1.8 percent identify as transgender.
Rose’s interview comes as multiple states are pursuing legislation to criminalize transgender surgeries for adolescents as transgender issues escalate the U.S.’s culture war. Schools are even debating whether to tell parents that their child identifies as transgender.
In a substack column posted in August 2022, Rose said that her own identity as a lesbian influenced her decision to validate her son’s change in gender identity.
“Because of my own experiences of perceived victimhood with my own parents’ rejection of my sexuality, I wanted to make sure I would honor my children’s ‘authentic selves,’” she wrote.
“We raised both our sons as gender neutral as possible, with gender neutral clothes, toys, and language. While we did use he/him pronouns and others in their life called them boys, we did not call them boys, or even tell them that they were boys,” she explained. “We made all language gender neutral. In everyday reading of books or descriptions of people in our lives, we did not say ‘man’ or ‘woman,’ we said ‘people.’ We thought we were doing the right and best thing, both for them and for the world.”
She also expressed a deep amount of regret for allowing her son to undergo this process.
“I am no longer a true believer,” she stated. “This experience for me has felt like leaving a cult, a cult that would have me sacrifice my child to the gods of gender ideology, in the name of social justice and collective liberation. I have left this cult, and I am never turning back.
“When I look back at this, it is almost too much to write about. The grief and the shock of what we did is so deep, so wide, so sharp and penetrating,” she wrote. “How could a mother do this to her child? To her children? I truly believed that what I was doing was pure, right and good, only to later realize with horror what it could have lead to for my child. This horror still shakes me to my core.”
Rose now says she fears for a culture with sensitive, feminine boys who spent their early years believing they were girls. She also expressed fear in the power of the state, which she says is seeking to destroy the parental child relationship.
