Back From the Brink: A Mother Steers Her Son Away from Transition

A teenager’s announcement that he was transgender hit his family like a “nuclear bomb,” his mother says. She reflects honestly on what led to that moment, the struggles her family faced, and her hope for his future.

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Karen, a Chicago mom, found herself grappling with a new reality when her teenage son expressed his desire to transition genders, an announcement that she likens to a “nuclear bomb” dropped on her family.

Amidst shock, guilt, and despair, Karen managed to steer the situation in a surprising direction. Recently, she shared her complex journey with The Epoch Times.

A recruiting professional with a gift for words, Karen has been married for 25 years and is the parent of a 21-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son. Part of the first generation of parents navigating the internet age, she gifted her children with their first smartphones, providing them unfettered access to the world’s information.

Now, she ironically describes the move as a “red-light district free pass.”

The family’s equilibrium shifted four years ago when Devin, Karen’s then-15-year-old son, told her that he identified as a transgender lesbian, expressing a wish to be referred to with female pronouns. Karen recounts the profound shock that followed his revelation, as Devin had never previously questioned or explored issues of gender.

As she listed the factors leading to her son’s crisis, Karen first noted his unconventional thought processes, which could be described as “non-neurotypical.” IQ tests placed him in the top 2 percent of his peers.

From an early age, Devin had trouble bonding with his age group. He was “never content with things at a simple level,” Karen said.

If the neighborhood kids were playing “horse” on the basketball court, Devin would suggest playing “pterodactyl.” If they were playing hockey, he would come up with a more complicated variant, leading the other boys to complain, “Just play the damn game,” she recalled.

‘A Death of a Thousand Cuts’

As a result, he was ostracized and bullied, leading to feelings of loneliness and isolation. He was slowly “being bullied more and ostracized more,” she said, calling it a kind of “death of a thousand cuts.”

Adding to the loneliness were financial troubles that forced Karen to go back to work full-time. Looking back, she surmises that her son did not want to add to the family’s stress by sharing his struggles and depression. “He didn’t want to be a burden,” she said.

It wasn’t until later that she found out he was eating lunch alone in the band room at school.

“At this point in time, he’s a freshman in high school, and his dad and I are finally taking a little bit of that parental freedom,” Karen recalled, “spending a bit more time going out in the evening, spending more time with friends.” Meanwhile, her son was spending more time at home, unsupervised.

Devin turned to the internet and gaming as an outlet, a decision that led to an increased sense of belonging and an intense fascination with “Magic: the Gathering.” The complex online game was a mental challenge and a source of friendship.

However, “Magic: the Gathering” was also a hub for transgender individuals. And one thing led to another.

A Reddit Welcome: Karma Points, ‘Grooming’

Through a hyperlink embedded in the game, Devin stumbled upon the social networking site Reddit. His quick acclimation to the platform was evidenced by his rapid accumulation of “karma points”—Reddit’s system for rewarding user contributions.

Devin reveled in his newfound popularity on the platform. As Karen put it, “He had found a place where he finally felt he kind of belonged.” He was welcomed, just one of many other “highly gifted, socially struggling kids.”

Reddit led Devin to a Subreddit community called “egg_irl,” a group dedicated to supporting individuals exploring their transgender identities. The community encourages members to break free from their metaphorical “eggshells,” urging them to stop denying their transgender identities and to embrace their authentic selves.

Egg_irl was a huge source of affirmation for Devin’s transgender identity. A transgender meme he created reflecting his gender confusion—“How can I like girls but want to be a girl?”—instantly gained him thousands of followers.

Devin basked in his growing karma.

His mother took a more cynical view, calling the effusive approval “love bombing,” a manipulative tactic.

According to Karen, the Subreddit community promotes a stepwise process towards transitioning: first changing gender pronouns, then names, and finally initiating hormone therapy. It’s a long-term plan, she explained. She discovered her son’s involvement in this process after the fact and managed to capture screenshots of numerous conversations between her son and other community members.

Karen suspected that through Reddit, Devin was exposed to adults who encouraged his participation within the community and “groomed and targeted” him. Viewing conversations he had through the forum, she said, it was often “pretty clear that the people he was communicating with who were encouraging him were not his age nor his peers.”

“It was very evident to me that many of them were adults, and he was 15 at the time.”

She also noted the abundance of “sexually explicit [and] really inappropriate” content present on the site, including pornography.”

‘It Still Makes Me Want to Cry’

Her son’s revelation left Karen and her husband in a state of shock and despair.

“We were so blindsided. It was almost like you’re watching yourself, like you just ... can’t even ...” she said, breaking off in mid-sentence as  she described the “very, very awful experience.”

“It still makes me want to cry. The disorientation, and knowing that something really bad had happened and you didn’t protect your kid.”

She admitted feeling regret for what she now sees as a lack of parental supervision, and a profound sense of guilt.

“I was the invested mother, and I felt very betrayed, not necessarily by them, but by society. How this could have happened in my own house, and I couldn’t protect my own children. This is something I’m struggling with the guilt around.” Tears flowed freely as she spoke these words.

‘The Trans Cruise Director’

After their initial shock, Karen and her husband “tried to remain very calm.” The situation was complicated by the role their daughter, then 17, played in the unfolding drama.

Devin’s sister played a critical role by encouraging Devin to share his intentions with his parents. “[Otherwise], I think he was planning on keeping it to himself until he finished high school and was planning on going ahead and getting on hormones and moving away at that time,” Karen said.

In the context of Devin’s crisis, an incident that had happened years earlier became deeply significant.

Karen remembers that she was tossing the football around with her daughter in the front yard when the 7th grader commented, “Mom, I’m really glad that I’m cis.”

The next year, when her daughter’s self-labeling expanded to “polyromantic asexual,“ her mother continued to think of it as harmless. ”It’s kind of like when I was growing up in the 80’s, and didn’t want to do cocaine, but smoked cigarettes to keep my toe in the pond.”

Karen concluded, “If this is how my 8th grader wants to label herself, it doesn’t seem harmful to anyone.”

What she didn’t know at the time was that two of her daughter’s close friends transitioned “between 8th and 9th grade.” Her daughter, therefore, had first-hand experience with what her brother was going through and “stepped right up to the plate,” according to Karen.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I gave away a lot of my parental agency to her,” her mother said ruefully. “And she was very happy to take it away from me,” trying to ensure that the family responded to Devin in a certain way.  “It really created a wedge in our family.”

Under the Spell of HRT

Shocked and disoriented, Karen and her husband realized they had allowed the roles in their household to be reversed.

After connecting with other parents, however, Karen began to come to her senses.

“It took me a bit of time to come around,” Karen said, “to understand what was really happening.”

Her son had gone through puberty relatively early, with his voice deepening at the age of 15. As such, when he expressed his desire to transition, he had an elaborate plan in mind: he wanted to shave his body hair and considered ways to limit the growth of his feet.

Encouraged by his online community, he planned to start using estrogen and testosterone blockers. His next step was to consider orchiectomy (testicle removal).

According to Karen, Devin never explored the psychological aspects of his situation in a meaningful way. “From the very first day, he asked for hormones. He didn’t say ‘I’m uncomfortable in my body; I feel strange; I’m depressed. None of that.  He immediately wanted hormones.”

“He was definitely under the spell of HRT [hormone replacement therapy],” Karen said. “Hormones were going to make him. And he was finally going to belong to a community.”

After discovering Devin’s intentions, Karen’s initial reaction was to seek medical advice, but she was taken aback when the hospital advised Devin to join a support group for trans individuals.

Taking Back Control

Rejecting the hospital’s suggestion, Karen decided to homeschool Devin and initiated regular family meetings around the kitchen table. She encouraged open dialogue and the sharing of personal feelings among family members.

Concurrently, she engaged in comprehensive research to better understand and navigate her children’s transgender concerns.

Both Karen and her husband are academics and teach at the college level; as such, they were able to point out faulty research and biased reporting when they saw it. Karen was shocked at some of the literature she encountered.

“They would say, ‘A recent study found,’ then there would be no mention of the actual study. This was just happening, and this is where I really started to go, ‘What the heck is going on? This is just insane.’”

“It takes a long time to get someone to understand this,” Karen noted. “It’s layers and layers of connections that you slowly make over time, and it’s sort of like a train wreck, kind of like you can’t look away.  There’s something very compelling about it. At a certain point, it clicks in your mind that none of this evidence is really vetted.”

Back From the Brink

In one of the family’s sharing sessions, Karen showed Devin a video featuring endocrinologist Dr. Michael Laidlaw, explaining the physical harm potentially resulting from transitioning. The video highlighted that a person becomes a “permanent medical patient” after undergoing hormone therapy and sex-change surgery.

To her relief, the information swayed Devin and made him reconsider his decisions, according to Karen.

As parent and child continued to share information and discuss the topic over time, Devin revealed six months later that he no longer wished to pursue medical gender transition.

He did, however, request his family continue to use female pronouns when addressing him, and the idea of changing his name persisted.

Karen avoided the pronouns by calling him “honey“ or ”babe.”

She has maintained family meetings and open communication and continuously educates herself about the subject.

“It will just blow your mind the longer you investigate this topic,” Karen said, referring to the government and large cooperations’ involvement in pushing the transgender movement.

“This is not happening at grassroots with a bunch of people who are suffering trying to gain rights,” she said. “This is coming from the Department of Education. These are mandates from corporations. This is happening from the top down.”

Throughout the past four years, Karen had countless challenging conversations with her son but never wavered in her faith.

Now, as Devin completes his first year of college, he has yet to legally change his name, and Karen perceives an increasing display of masculinity in him. Seeing Devin shave daily offers her a sense of comfort.

Daring Therapists

Like many parents, Karen tried multiple therapists before finding one who was willing to go beyond affirming her son’s choice.

That therapist eventually joined the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA), a network of therapists that Karen says are “willing to say, ‘I will explore, and I will not immediately affirm.’” It was Karen’s story, shared over a period of two years, that influenced her to join the association of “daring” therapists.

GETA’s approach diverges from that of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which characterizes surgery and hormone therapy as “medically necessary.” Instead, GETA’s clinicians advocate for exploratory psychotherapy before embarking on irreversible medical treatment.

Not surprisingly, gender exploratory therapy has been slammed as “a new form of conversion therapy.”

Weaponizing Suicide

One of the things her daughter had “weaponized” against her parents early on was the fear that Devin might commit suicide.

Throughout the course of four years, however, Karen was able to remain steadfast due to the substantial theoretical support she received. The idea that “if the child does not transition, they will commit suicide” is false and misguided, Karen said.

She cited Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, a respected American psychologist, who has confirmed that the idea had no scientific basis. Dr. Edwards-Leeper is a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in gender identity issues. Her research covers issues related to gender non-conformity and transgenderism.

“As far as I know, there are no studies that say that if we don’t start these kids immediately on hormones when they say they want them that they are going to commit suicide. So that is misguided,” Dr. Edwards-Leeper said, quoted by Genspect.

“What’s so sad is that this is really the crux of this whole experience for all of us. We are told that it really doesn’t matter what we think. If we do not proceed with this process, we are not only transphobic, but we could cause the suicide of our child,” Karen said.

Karen herself had been apprehensive about the potential risk of her son committing suicide.

“We are sort of manipulated into a corner, and to go against [this narrative] is very scary, and you can’t tell anyone either,” she said, adding that even school teachers are being told that if they don’t accept this narrative, they could be held accountable for the mental health of their students.

A long-term study commissioned by the Swedish government in 2020 showed that among 6,334 people with gender dysphoria, the suicide rate was 0.6 percent.

Karen emphasized that the claim that “children commit suicide if they do not transition” originated from a survey conducted by The Trevor Project, a non-profit organization. The study lacked scientific rigor.

“There is no real data that backs that claim, but every time you listen to a pundit on particular liberal media, they will use that data,” Karen said. “It was a self-report[ed] online survey done by the Trevor Project. And the people who were interviewed and who self-reported, we don’t even know who they were or if they really were trans.”

“This is what the entire world, the media, the legislature, [and] the doctors use as evidence [of the claim], when in fact it really isn’t so,” she added.

Nonetheless, it is true that many of the children who announced their intention to transition did indeed experience significant mental health problems.

The enormous stress affects their parents as well. “I remember one day standing in the basement trying to figure out which rafter to hang myself from,” Karen remembers.

One of the Lucky Ones

Her worries linger, but she feels that as the parent of a child who stopped short of hormone replacement therapy and surgery, she’s one of the lucky ones. “I know hundreds of parents whose families are devastated by this, so I know that I am very fortunate.”

Citing “one of the only studies that actually has evidence behind it,” a Dutch study from 2012, Karen noted that seven years post-sex reassignment surgery, suicide rates are 20 times the average.

Those statistics, she said, are “very unsettling to hear as a parent.”

“We are witnessing one of the greatest medical scandals in the history of our country,” she added. “We just haven’t seen it come to light yet.”

Pseudonyms are used in this article to protect the family’s safety and privacy.

Vivian Yin contributed to this article.