A State of Parental DysphoriaThey say it takes a village to raise a child. What happens when that ‘village’ tries to convince your autistic daughter she was ‘born in the wrong body’?
Anonymous
6 Jul 2023
I suffer from parental dysphoria.
Parental dysphoria is a new condition, growing in prevalence as the transgender trend that is indoctrinating our children picks up steam. Specifically, it’s the discomfort with your sense of self and view of reality that results from your child’s sudden announcement that he or she is transgender. Parental dysphoria commonly results from the immense societal pressure to unquestioningly support your child’s “gender journey,” up to and including social transition to the opposite gender (or non-binary identity), wrong-sex hormones, and surgeries.
Parental dysphoria involves the extended state of having to stay silent about something that you know will lead to tragedy, because you don’t want to lose your child, your friends, your extended family, and your marriage—everything you’ve worked to build. You do this to preserve some small chance of having an impact, to keep your child close enough to eventually help them find their way out of this delusion. It’s living with fear—fear of loss, fear of estrangement, fear of losing your own mind, fear of losing your integrity by denying your own instincts. Those who suffer from this condition, myself included, know this to be the most awful feeling you’ve ever experienced in your life.
If you suffer from parental dysphoria, you wish to say, “You were not ‘born in the wrong body’—that’s impossible.” But you also know your child wants so badly to believe this that you aren’t sure whether to lie or tell the truth about how you see things. So, instead, you say very little and pray every day that your child will find peace in their own body before it is too late, before your child denies and destroys their own sexual function and fertility, and poisons their body with synthetic hormones.
It’s the tears you choke back as you do your best to support your child despite their best efforts to push you away. It’s holding your breath, not even knowing how you can carry on. It’s a feeling of hopelessness you have never felt before.
It’s the horror of being told by your other child, the one who serves as the pronoun police in your home, that you are the one who isn’t loving and supportive. It’s the shame of realizing that you’ve lost your ability to be the adult in the room. It’s feeling that the liberal, progressive values you instilled in your children are being used against you in a way you could never have seen coming. It’s disheartening, destabilizing, and destructive.
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Teachers and schools have not only betrayed their most vulnerable students by encouraging them down a path of self-sacrifice but have also destroyed the sacred bond they hold with parents to ensure the healthy growth and development of their children.
To experience parental dysphoria is to be told you are wrong when you know your instincts come from the deepest place a mother can ever draw from—the instinct to protect her own child.
Our children, our friends, and our society are being groomed to believe a harmful ideology, and they aren’t even aware that this is happening. Even though it’s hard, I choose to treat my parental dysphoria rather than to live with, “affirm,” or “validate“ it. That means I must keep speaking up. I must never stop believing that my child’s dysphoria can be healed, as can my own; that this cultural phenomenon will pass, as all trends pass; and that our children will come back to us, hopefully all still in one piece.
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The situation is especially bad for parents of children on the autism spectrum, parents like me who were trying to protect their already vulnerable child.
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Children on the spectrum are especially vulnerable to a theoretical concept that suggests a person can be born in the wrong body and that identifying and transitioning to the opposite sex could relieve the individual from all the mental pain and physical discomforts they have been experiencing. Gender ideology conveniently avoids the obvious, that an individual’s biological sex cannot be changed and that medical interventions are purely cosmetic and come with health risks, many of which are still unknown due to lack of research.
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As a child growing up in Canada, I benefited from the “village.” Before I started kindergarten, my retired neighbor read to me in English because my immigrant parents could not. The first time I ever put on a pair of ice skates or visited a museum was on a school field trip, and it was the librarian at my local public library who helped me fill out an application for a library card. These experiences complemented the efforts of my parents to positively impact my overall development.
Things are so different now. My child and I experienced a radically different village, a threatening one that actively sought to work against my efforts to protect and nurture my autistic daughter in her teen years.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/07/06/a-state-of-parental-dysphoria/
