The site received a lot of attention last week, when Maya Forstater kindly linked to one of our articles on Twitter. There were some lovely and positive and supportive comments from readers. Thank you! The article, written by the daughter of a transitioner, referred to the breach of privacy and safety male transitioners can be to their daughters. Not all, obviously, but the Twitter mob decided to read it that way. Predictably, it brought a shower of extreme anger, name calling and abuse. For some of us, this is familiar behaviour.
A few examples of the nasty bits!
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It’s obviously not pleasant being called ‘trash’ and ‘scum’ for talking about your lived experience in your own terms. For children and partners of trans people, particularly late stage transitioners, you are caught between what you want to say and what you are allowed to say. Between what cannot be acknowledged and what must be said.
As the mob on Twitter lights the torches and sharpens the pitchforks, it often feels as if we are in a battle to prove that 100% of children of transitioners are happy or 100% aren’t. I’m not interested in doing that. It’s not a battle of the Google searches. And when someone tweets an article it doesn’t mean that they automatically agree with everything we say. I have my experience, the experience of my contributors, the people who have contacted me or supported me on social media. The experience of people who have written about having a trans parent, good and bad. The experience of those who have spoken about having children with a trans partner.
We obviously work within a context of happy and unhappy families. Lots of unconventional families work out just fine. Lots of conventional ones are miserable. But we are also working in a modern context where everything trans people do has to be lauded and the victims are ignored. And this leads to an unfair bias in organisations who should be objective.
Research into children of trans parents is limited and frequently biased. This recent study recruited trans parents via Gendered Intelligence and Stonewall, and interviewers had training from Gendered Intelligence. Both groups are very pro-trans.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295192.2020.1792194
I am grateful to the researchers for acknowledging the limitations in previous studies. There really is very little that we know about long term outcomes for children of transitioners. It’s great to see that some families are similar to control groups, although it’s worrying to see the word ‘transphobia’ used in referring to partners, as I’m not sure it’s really a thing you can define or measure. It’s such a tiny sample, and the respondents seem too diverse to reveal much. It’s interesting also to see how many family members declined to respond – including 13 of the children. And the definitions of the trans parent: “trans, transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid, agender and gender nonconforming”. How can you compare having a ‘gender nonconforming’ parent to a transsexual one? Equally, a cohort made up only of trans widows will give an entirely different point of view. At that age I would have only said positive things because I loved my father and wanted to please him. Where is the balance? I wouldn’t have even seen an online advertisement by either of these groups. It is interesting to note that, according to this study, it’s possible that up to 500,000 people are trans in the UK and potentially 49% are parents. If they only have one child, that’s nearly a quarter of a million children. We desperately need to know more. And to do that, we have to be clear about who and what we are looking at.
To be blunt: transition is usually sexually motivated. I’ve written about it a lot already, linked to clinicians and papers about it. You’ll find it on this site in my pieces about autogynephilia. That can be relatively benign and manageable, or it can escalate and become a source of distress. What can we say about a research paper that can’t acknowledge what all sexologists know? That uses terms like ‘transphobic’ and ‘cis’ as if that’s not part of a gender ideology most people reject? And if your husband decides to wear your clothes and call your marriage a lesbian relationship and you don’t like that, is it really ‘transphobia’? Is denying anything to your autogynephile husband ‘transphobic’? Who benefits from pretending that our fathers aren’t struggling with their mental health, and that relationship breakdown is the fault of the ‘transphobic’ partner?
I’ve spoken before about autogynephilia, and the shame and rage that is provoked when autogynephiles feel thwarted or rejected. Bizarrely, this now seems to be a normal part of our culture. Labour MP Rosie Duffield isn’t able to go to her party’s conference at the moment because her life has been threatened by trans activists. We get called ‘trash’ and Nazis just for talking. And the focus of this anger is women, because this culture is also incredibly misogynistic.
There’s lots of online abuse, but I want to share with you just a fraction of what was sent to JK Rowling, and introduce a sobering thought: how many of these people are parents?
From the responses to our own article, the answer seems to be at least a few.
Oh, the irony. We ARE your children… answering back for ourselves.
Politicians are threatened, academics have to have security escorts, women’s meetings are picketed by screaming crowds. Lesbians are publicly assaulted for rejecting male transitioners. The most awful abuse is thrown at one of the planet’s most beloved authors. Women are reported to their employers, they are sued for saying something on social media, they are reported to the police and arrested for saying that men can’t become women. They lose jobs and contracts.
Just step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture. Who exactly are these angry people making others afraid to speak? For all the abuse thrown around Twitter, it’s all really a lot of kerfuffle to distract from the reality that for some of us these very, very angry people… are our Dads.
These are also our fathers:
Karen White: father of one child
Jessica Brennan: father of two children
Details withheld to protect the child
Douglas “Tai” Wakefield: two children
David Challenor, trans activist who influenced Green Party policy: three children
Mark Turton: one child
These are the most awful examples, yes, but if we are really going to look at how this issue affects people in real life we have to talk about the extremes. Because there are real children in those families. There are some obvious challenges someone could make at this point. Yes, these are awful cases, but aren’t lots of regular parents equally awful? Yes! Absolutely. But the point we are trying to get at again and again on this blog is that creating a legal fiction that these are women, and then utilising the police, schools, hospitals, refuges etc. in enforcing that fiction, doesn’t help children. Failing to acknowledge that transition is sexually motivated doesn’t help. Acting as if anyone who is trans gets a free pass for their behaviour doesn’t help. It doesn’t give us a chance that children of non-trans parents would have. It makes us afraid to tell our story. And it pushes our fathers away from things that might actually help, like therapy and treatments like antidepressants. And the mob on social media attacking anyone daring to talk about this obviously doesn’t help either. We need the authorities to stop listening to the activists on Twitter and chasing Stonewall accreditation and actually apply some rational thinking.
These men are evidently in deep distress. But while society focuses on them, what’s the impact on us?
When you have to stop daddy killing mummy, but he still gets to make coin from it:
These are also our fathers [extracts from transwidowsvoices.org]:
“…The ‘red mist’ descended once again and he tried to push me out of the moving car, I was tight against the door. I shouted “What do you want me to do?”…the response still chills me to my bones…”I want you to die, bitch!”, he screamed still pushing me tight against the car door while bombing along at about 70 miles per hour.
As you can guess that was the final straw. He came to the house twice more at my behest over the next year, otherwise he had made little attempt to see our children and when he did come he used it to remove his philatelic collection from the house. When he was there, a feeling of doom and walking on eggshells came over us all, while he went to his study and didn’t interact with any of us…”
“…After the transgender announcement, the neglect became worse, and it was very obvious how irrelevant our children and I were to my spouse in this newfound quest. And then the massive expenses began to rack up: clothing, wigs, electrolysis and waxing, voice training. Eventually I realized that this stressful situation, where I had no idea what my husband would demand to do next or what the next broken promise might be, it was physically killing me and I needed to leave.
I told my husband that I wanted a divorce. He told me I was making a terrible mistake. He explained how he would become this amazing person after transition, when he is free to be his true self as a woman. That the drinking and being an absentee spouse and parent, all of that bad behaviour was because of his gender dysphoria and would be cured by transition.
Fast forwards several years to today. My ex-spouse pays child maintenance but otherwise barely interacts with our children. Mutual friends tell me that my ex lives in state of hoarding and filth, and has become an alcoholic. That’s my ex’s life as their “authentic self”.”
“When I told my husband I was leaving he said he was going to kill himself. He said I was punishing him for his depression that was caused by the pain of not being able to live as a woman. He said I thought I was better than him, that I was a cruel snob, that I was being coached by “lesbian feminist bitches” and destroying our family and hurting our kids. For years after I got out, he kept trying to control me through threats of suicide. He said he could not live as his true self except with me. When that didn’t work, he recruited his brother who gleefully threatened and intimidated me daily for two years. I had escaped the sexual abuse but I was still desperate and bedraggled with three children now 4, 8 and 11.
I did the best I could to build a happy new life for me and the kids. I struggled with alcohol abuse, but I thought my kids were generally thriving. My younger two seemed like happy toddlers, my oldest acted out a bit but was easily enough distracted. I don’t know what, if anything, he took in of my husband’s sexual proclivities or his abuse. I still don’t. What I do know though, is that he has his own struggles with his gender identity which have made our relationship difficult.”
Daddy’s a lesbian now
Here too, a father using his two children as props in a TikTok video showing why lesbians should date him. The kids are so sweet and enthusiastic. Daddy seems to have lost any measure of where the boundaries are. The ‘little humans’ are included in the deal, apparently
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Baby Daddy
Imagine you discovered that when you were a baby your father fed you from his chest. He didn’t produce enough to feed you properly and you didn’t get enough nutrition. The drug being used was domperidone, which the FDA had warned patients not to use for lactation because the drug is excreted in breast milk and could harm the baby. You were effectively an experiment. All this to validate his sexual orientation.
Check out this couple:
The woman is on testosterone and has given birth, but has decided that her male partner is going to be the ‘mother.’ They have problems breastfeeding. They need to supplement with formula because the child is trying to feed but not getting nutrition from the breast. They can’t get a birth certificate because they refuse to reveal the sex of the baby. The segment ends with the AGP father clutching the child (who he has named ‘baby’ in the Nawat language) and crying, “Trans women can be mothers. I am your mother.” Can we see some joined-together thinking about this? Are we showing this for freak value or has this just become normalised? Two self-obsessed gender ideologues who won’t even reveal the baby’s sex and think that love will make everything ok. Spoiler alert: it won’t. This isn’t a Disney film.
Pretend We’re Dead
How about if your father decided to simulate a pregnancy and a stillbirth to express his gender feelings around pregnancy?
Gabrielle Darone, “Princess Mom” on Twitter, was still living with his estranged wife and two children at the time these were posted and was looking for someone to help with the fake stillbirth. He was also being supported online in a breastfeeding group because he wanted to induce lactation and donate the milk. The milk laced with Domperidone, the drug used to induce lactation.
It may seem like I am ‘nutpicking’ when showing you these posts, but “Princess Mom” had support for this. People who commented negatively in the breastfeeding group were banned:
Consider how it might feel to be a child watching your father fake a pregnancy and then a simulated birth of a dead child. I think psychoanalysts might have some interesting ideas about what that could mean symbolically. But while the father here is claiming that faking a stillbirth is essential to his mental health, he believes that his kids are Teflon and really won’t have any long term problems from it. I need to repeat that this is all sexually motivated. This is not some innate behaviour. He doesn’t have a ‘female brain’. He’s enjoying the fantasy. And his children are watching.
It really feels as if our concept of normality has gone awry. Within this confusion reside some very unprotected children who are being coopted into their father’s sexual fantasies. But while trans people are portrayed as so fragile even using their old name or using the wrong pronouns will send them spiraling into suicide, if you are a child of a trans person your job is not just to accept everything but to be a fervent ally, or, as the help groups call it, ‘queerspawn.’
You left me for a fetish
A reminder that Stefonknee Wolscht has seven children and left them to dress up as a six year old girl. On his daughter’s wedding day he attempted suicide because while he had been invited to the wedding, he had been asked to wear normal clothing.
Nowhere to turn to
Schools
Although there are some hopeful signs that this may be reversing, Stonewall is still advertising its schemes in schools.
https://www.stonewall.org.uk/stonewall-school-college-champion-membership
This is a completely pro-trans philosophy and we can’t see any room here for children of transitioners to feel safe talking about their issues with staff or other pupils.
Police
Stonewall and other lobby groups have also had a powerful effect on policing. Just calling our fathers ‘he’ or writing about our experiences could be considered a hate crime, and potentially ruin our chances of employment or have us arrested and charged.
Refuges
Just discussing the issue of males in women’s refuges will get you fired in the UK:
It’s difficult to find guarantees that looking for refuge in the UK won’t put you in the way of child sex offenders like Katie Dotowski:
Who’s benefiting from the silence?
Of these potentially hundreds of thousands of children, who of them are helping their father make a lesbian dating ad, or watching their father grow a pretend dead baby? How many are being fed milk laced with domperidone? Whose father is dressing up as a little girl? Whose father has taken their first name, because it’s a name he’s always liked? Whose father is in prison for sex offences? Whose father wants to take them for a mutual bra fitting or a make up session? All of these things have happened to at least one child of a transitioner. And who is watching out for these kids, when there is no safeguarding for them? And who is listening to these kids, when everything they say is considered a hate crime?
For years, when I talked about my father I would separate his transsexuality from his personality – he was just a narcissistic drunk who happened to be trans, I would say. If trans activism hadn’t become so violent and obvious I probably wouldn’t even have created this site, because I genuinely avoided the issue completely. But then I did start paying attention and what I realised was that my father’s behaviour wasn’t unusual. It wasn’t just about him and me. His abusive and dismissive behaviour to his two wives, his emotional blackmail, the way all the money went on his clothes and beauty treatments. It was a pattern, and the more parents transition the more you see it. If you look you can see it again and again. Men who view their children as props, as objects for validation. Men who prioritise their sexuality over everything. Men who turn nasty when things don’t go their way.
Being quiet around safeguarding has never helped children. It’s time for transparency, for clarity, and honesty. Not all trans parents are abusive. That’s not what’s being said here. But sometimes they are, and when they are we need authorities to listen to us and our mothers and we need society to stop accepting only the word of our fathers and insisting we shut up.
Children of Transitioners 
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