The Silent Uprising: A New Book Reveals How Parents Cope With Children In The Gender Cult

And the secrets of their success

“There are three types of people that are threatening and, therefore, absolutely intolerable to the trans ideology narrative,” write Josie A. and Dina S. in the new book Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans: Tales from the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids.

Most inconvenient to the ‘trans’ narrative are “desisters (people who thought they were trans but then stopped thinking that way), detransitioners (people who “transitioned” to the other sex and are now reverting back), and parents who question,” they write.

“We are two moms whose lives were irrevocably altered by our own personal brushes with gender ideology.” Josie A. and Dina S. must remain anoymous. “We are scared that you will take away our kids, dox us, and destroy our livelihoods and, much more importantly, our families.”

“Think we’re being overly dramatic? Just ask anyone who’s dared to publicly question trans ideology.” Nevertheless, they persist in their quiet suffering, often with success, exhibiting the sort of parental skills that used to fall under the rubric of ‘tough love,’ once upon a time in North America.

When a parent experiences the sudden onset of ‘gender dysphoria’ in a child with no prior signs of ‘gender nonconformity,’ scales fall from their eyes. Like the character George Nada, played by Roddy Piper in the 1988 scifi classic They Live, these parents come to see the whole world through new lenses.

“As our so-called liberal societies become increasingly illiberal, anti-free speech, and anti-family,” the impact on their lives has been unstudied, censored, their experiences devalued as ‘hate.’

“Parents have been silenced for years, emotionally blackmailed and held hostage by threats to take away our kids, and that today’s narrative of trans as a biological fact has gone unquestioned and has been permitted to run amok, with unfettered access to our schools, government, and media for far too long,” they write.

“The mental strain can be overwhelming, even to the point of contemplating self-harm or suicide (ironically, the same threat often employed by kids if their parents do not go along with their newfound identity).”

But devoted parental love is a difficult fire to extinguish. Josie and Dina joined underground online support groups for parents in their situation. They soon realized there was a pattern to what they were going through.

First, parents would support their children and seek the best professional help they could find. But then they would begin to research the topic in greater depth, reading more and more until it dawned on them, sooner or later, that the support base for the child-sterilizing ‘affirmation’ regime is incredibly weak.

Not only were their kids caught up in a bizarre new form of magical thinking, so were members of their families, communities, clergies, school boards, governments, and child protection agencies. The long march of gender ideology through all institutions had taken place under their radar. Now they found themselves ostracized, unemployed, even potentially jailed for refusing to participate in the cult. Their love was pronounced “abuse.”

But parental love is hard to kill.

They called themselves “trans-educated rational parents (TERPs)” at first. It was a pun on TERFs, or ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’, that transgender advocacy originally blamed for all the ‘dangerous transphobia’ that supposedly exists in the universe. A new cohort had joined the growing, global underground resistance to gender identity ideology.

Similar to the revolution that occurred on Mumsnet in the United Kingdom, it was furtive at first. “Code names. Secret messages passed in the dark. Covert operations. Hiding from the authorities. Are we talking about 1944 in Europe? Sadly, no: we’re talking about the present day, and our secret resistance is taking place all over the world,” writes another anonymous parent in this book.

“As we wrote, our floodgates burst,” Josie and Dina explain. “We had so many stories to tell, and we realized how important it was for other parents that we collect these stories and make them available on a single platform, because mainstream media and news organizations were entirely unwilling to do anything other than promote a trans-activist agenda.”

Sharing their experiences as Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans, the anguished families they had come to know through this internet underground began to find their voices — and their courage. Many have lost contact with children at the age of majority. Others are still terrified that their children will follow an unhealthy path when they leave for college.

But there were parents who, against the odds, often against the ideological advice of family and licensed therapists and medical professionals and teachers displaying total ideological capture, ever-so-gently clawed their children back from the edge.

With the passage of time and the transmission of this hard-won knowledge, we found that many of our children also began to desist and no longer identified as transgender. This further accelerated and amplified the cycle PITT had created, as parents of these children spread their stories and the hope of desistance to other parents who, for so long, had been brainwashed into believing that trans was a permanent state of being and that desistance and detransition were mythical.

It is the worst nightmare of the activists: parents who compassionately guide their children to a healthy adulthood and a life without carcinogenic cross-sex hormones or life-altering surgeries. In the twisted inversive deranging logic of the transgender cult, this is ‘conversion therapy’ of ‘trans kids,’ and a supposed civil rights crime.

Weirdly, or not weirdly at all, the chemical ‘affirmation’ model these selfsame activists offer to ‘fix’ the problem of being ‘born in the wrong body’ is the same ‘chemical castration’ that was used in failed efforts to ‘convert’ homosexuals decades ago.

Many PITT parents intuit that their children are gay or lesbian or bisexual, or simply gender-nonconformists. Their success at preventing their LGBwhatever children from de-sexing themselves demolishes the activists’ pretension that ‘trans identities’ are all naturally occuring phenomena, or that parents do this out of hate.

Sex mimics exist in nature, but they are not the opposite sex; sex mimics are mimics. Science knew for decades that gender nonconformity in children is often linked with homosexuality as an adult — but then ‘science’ pretended to forget it. Autism and other neurodivergences are common in PITT parent stories about their children. So are abuse, early exposure to pornography, and actual grooming online. The ‘trans kids’ phenomenon was never, ever really one monolithic thing. It was always a constellation of different issues swept up into a single discursive category so that the activists could claim their children’s bodies for Moloch.

But they will not surrender their children. Love is too strong for that.

Stella O’Malley, a professional therapist who founded Genspect with Lisa Marchiano, found herself in tears the first time she listened to TERPs. “Their kids are certainly distressed,” she writes in the foreword, “but their other challenges, their neurodiversity or the trauma they have recently suffered, have been overshadowed by gender issues, and this doesn’t make sense to the parents.”

Many of these teens have repressed their sexuality, and plenty seem to be ignoring the fact that they are gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Lots of them are deeply disappointed by the reality of life. These kids are well loved and well cared for. But they believed the Disney films they grew up with and find the sharp shock of reality difficult to bear.

A mustache-wearing man in a Sleeping Beauty dress selling tickets to enter Walt Disney World® tells these parents struggling against the gender cult that they have been betrayed by yet another institution they once valued as an escape from the pain of daily life. Truly a First World problem, the rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) phenomenon emerges most often in children of liberal, educated, urban and suburban, blue America. Thus a great many PITT parents are not at all ‘right wing.’

Politics do not describe the ROGD parent. Kai Shappley, after all, lives in an openly-homophobic Christian conservative home. He is promoted by the ACLU and major media as an exemplar of the ‘trans child’. Gender identitarians are happy to cross these cultural divides whenever it suits them and then project supposed malign political intentions or religious extremism on critics of the ‘affirmation’ model.

Josie and Dina call what they encounter in trans activism “a cult-like religion and mind-worm.” PITT parents refer to captured health professionals as a “Taliban.” O’Malley does not use these words, but she notes that “one horrible aspect of this medical scandal is that parents are so badly shamed by medical professionals when they seek any option for their child that does not involve medicalization.”

Parents of detransitioners I know poignantly describe how they were cruelly dismissed and shamed when they raised their concerns to doctors and therapists. One mother described to me how she was in the doctor’s office with her precious child, and even though the doctor had promised high-quality care, after a forty-minute consultation, he suggested immediate medical intervention, without giving any consideration to the impact of the child’s ASD, OCD rumination, and extreme immaturity—or to the risky nature of these difficult procedures. The mother reported that it felt like she was in a horror movie where the doctor ripped off his mask to reveal that he was actually the monster all along.

As if to punctuate the point, last week the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) refused to hold “three panels with leading European psychologists about Europe’s move away from chemical interventions for children with gender dysphoria, raising questions about the politicization of American medicine and underscoring a clinical divide between the United States and much of the world.”

Reporting for the Free Beacon, Aaron Sibarium writes that AACAP followed “the advice of its ‘Gender Identity Committee,’ whose co-chair, Aron Janssen, has described restrictions on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as an ‘effort to oppress.’”

Proposed panel participants were not ‘anti-trans,’ however. They are moderate supporters of the ‘trans child.’

“The speakers planned to discuss the data that led Finland, Sweden, and England to abandon the more laissez-faire treatment model now dominant in the United States,” Sibarium reports. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, who oversees one of the two pediatric gender clinics in Finland, wants to reign in the use of puberty blockers, though she is still supportive of the practice in some children.

“The academy’s unwillingness to host Kaltiala and other likeminded clinicians suggests that even this moderate stance may now be a bridge too far for America’s premier child psychiatry association, where even senior officials are raising concerns about ideological capture,” Sibarium says. “The exchange illustrates how a small group of activist doctors can suppress the viewpoints of clinicians who disagree with them, creating the appearance of medical consensus where none exists.”

As with any new religious movement, the cult of the trans child is divisive. At The Spectator, Robin Atkins writes that following a split in “a private group of mental health professionals that I administrate, I witnessed how the critical theory ideologues are destroying mental healthcare.”

Atkins enforced a strict no-politics policy. When a member of the forum wanted to post notice of “a political advocacy event with one particular political view on several bills regarding sexuality and trans ideology in the school system,” he deleted the post and ignited a firestorm that saw half the membership quit.

The mass exodus suggests that a large number of mental health professionals currently value political advocacy over peer and client relationships. In other conversations, therapists have admitted that they try to sneak critical race and gender theory into their sessions with patients, even if their patients are resistant to the idea. Some have even said that they encourage their patients to engage in certain types of political activism as a form of “empowerment.”  

Therapists get much blame in this book. If we take Atkins’s experience as a representative sample, half of the therapy profession seems to consist of evangelists pursuing conversion of the unwary. Little wonder these parents are working under the radar.

The cult of trans does not conceive of itself as a cult, but it is one. The cult of woke in general, and the cult of trans in particular, absolutely qualify as faith movements. That all-too familiar thought-terminating cliché of the cult, ‘trans ___ are ___’, is an explicitly gnostic faith statement. Examples abound: Diane Ehrensaft, one of the most important figures in the academic establishment of the ‘trans child’ (and a late figure in the Satanic Panic) is very open about her spiritualistic indoctrination: children have “gender angels” inside them, while the transphobic world is haunted by “gender ghosts” tempting them to detransition. TikTok and Instagram are filled with pseudospiritual mumbo-jumbo: “God is trans.” Heaven is a perfect match between body and gender. The faces of ‘trans men’ in tearful rapture, making their ritual first topless beach or pool visit, betray a flagellant cult. The ‘euphoria boners’ of 60 year-old ‘trans girls’ taking their first public walk in a miniskirt betray that the chief beneficiaries of this new sacred class include an awful lot of paraphiliacs.

Again, there are many different things going on, all swept into one discursive category to jump-start a pediatric transition industry in our time.

Calling gender identity ideology a cult is not being hyperbolic. ‘Cult’ is descriptive. It is honest. It is fair. “I was raised in a community that many people, including myself, would classify as a cult,” writes one PITT parent who recognizes a cult when she sees one. “I was a true believer,” writes another, now regretful, ‘affirming’ parent of an ROGD child. “The arguments in favor of early transition have an excessive burden on belief and faith and are not based on evidence,” writes an attorney-parent. Another parent tells doctors to “stop gaslighting our children!”

Meanwhile, here on planet earth, the so-called ‘settled science’ of pediatric transition is becoming quite unsettled.

A ‘systematic review’ is the highest standard of evidence in medicine. Wherever a systematic medical review looks at this issue, the brakes get slammed. Sweden has slammed the brakes. Norway has slammed the brakes. (Stop the presses: Denmark has just slammed the brakes.) The English-speaking world is seeing cracks form in the false ‘consensus’ too, especially after the Tavistock shuttered their GIDS clinic.

The stories in Tales from the Home Front bear an uncanny resemblance to another book, No Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. A systematic review led by Dr. Hilary Cass has confirmed the worst rumors of abuse and neglect in a runaway system of medicalized ‘affirmation.’ Staff hurried to put children on puberty blockers, ignored clear evidence of harm, and refused to countenance any doubt. They were all too sure of themselves — and in the view of the clinic’s worst critics, the Tavistock case is mild compared to what has been going on in the United States or Canada.

“I suffer from parental dysphoria,” one PITT parent writes. “It is hard to protect your child when the other ‘villagers’ are holding your arms behind your back,” complains another. The parent of a child’s best friend undermines a TERP’s authority by helping the child inject hormones in their home. “I will never trust those same people ever again,” writes an embittered parent of her community. “I have received more negativity and attacks on my character in the short time my daughter has been saying she’s a boy than I have at any other time in my life, from those who know me and from those who don’t,” writes another.

Wry humor pervades their accounts, interwoven with hope. “What would actually be most helpful to our family right now, and to many other people who are in or are soon to be in similar situations, is your open-minded, slow-paced, and careful consideration that maybe much of what you’ve heard about gender identity and transgender youth is actually wrong,” a PITT parent explains to a too-helpful stranger.

“Eventually, this craze too will burn out, but not before leaving many thousands of people badly injured who were unlucky enough to be emotionally vulnerable and suffering from one of the perennial anguishes of being human at the moment when a new magical solution swept through the popular imagination.”

Ex-believers must be shunned, so children who leave the cult face their own form of bullying. “Desistance has come with a new set of problems” for one boy, now an ”apostate from woke ideology. He can’t talk about this with most of his peers or in classes, and it frustrates him.” Damningly: “He feels that the LGBT community, which should be there to support a bisexual man like him in his love and in his difference, is not there for him.”

Do you hear that, Stonewall? ACLU? GLAAD? HRC? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Schools receive special ire. PITT parents are living with the consequences of the ‘woke educators’ seen on Libs of TikTok. Their children are victims of grooming. Some have trouble in adolescence, perhaps a falling-out with a peer group, and seek sanctuary in magical thinking. Children use well-meaning ‘affirmation’ policies to inhabit secret identities at school. Principals and educators freely undermine parental authority and ignore boundaries. Indoctrination, pressure to conform, condescension, arrogance of authority, struggle sessions, the ostracism and shunning of heretics — these are not coming into the campus from the right wing, anymore. They are outspokenly ‘progressive’ values symbolized by a ‘progress flag’ that is meant to replace core civic values in the western world, first and foremost the sanctity of family life: “parental disempowerment,” in the words of another PITT parent. Rather than comfort the marginalized, the trans cult uses the myth of “minority stress” to marginalize parents, inspire pain and stress, and make them spill infinite tears on sleepless nights.

Love has been forced underground, but love always wins. Parents are learning to keep their ROGD children away from ‘affirming’ clinicians and therapists. They are taking away the phones and unplugging their kids from the internet, setting firm boundaries, asking questions that lead their children to insight, showing them that detransitioners do exist, finding allies in the fight, and getting organized.

“There is nothing to do now, just be,” a parent tells their child, who comes out intact. “It wasn’t easy, but it worked. Our child’s need to identify as trans subsided as he became more comfortable in his body and mind.” Only a psychopath could possibly read this book and call it ‘hate speech.’ The usual psychopaths will do so.

Tales from the Home Front is an important book. It belongs on the same shelf as Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, Abigail Shrier, and Hannah Barnes as complement to their painstaking research. Historians privilege text, and when the history of this travesty is written, they will want first-hand survivor accounts — primary sources — to explain the medical and human rights apocalypse that took place in our time.