What It's Like To Be A Non-Affirming Parent

Reading the new PITT Parents volume

This is the reaction of teachers, neighbors, doctors, therapists, bureaucrats, and Democrats when loving parents fail to affirm a child’s magical ‘gender identity’

Parents have been forced into an underground resistance lifestyle. At times, there are coded conversations. “It’s frightening that, in small town Canada, a mother of an obviously troubled teenager and her conceivably concerned teacher are being strong-armed by a government-backed ideology into conversing as if sitting in front of a Telescreen,” writes one exhausted parent of a gender-identifying child.

“We are the first generation of parents confronting this particular challenge: that, with the help of the government, schools, and the medical-industrial complex, our children can be converted to a new faith where one can and should choose their own sex,” write the editors of the new book Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans Volume II: More Tales from the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids.

It is the follow-up volume to their 2023 compilation of primary sources describing the experience of parenthood under attack, seemingly by the entire world around them. “This is the first time that democratic nations have encouraged a movement that aims to separate parents from children, in the home and in the classroom,” they write. Well-meaning people undermine parental authority. Friends become enemies. Parents become suicidal in the social isolation of church and state and community conspiring against them.

Raised in Russia, one parent writes that “if our family was deemed to have problematic beliefs, my parents could be taken away by the KGB. I told my son the same thing could happen here. If he said the wrong thing about gender ideology, CPS could determine that I am a bad mom and take him and his sister away. That has happened to several families where I live.” As in East Germany, the Gender Stasi (“Gender Party”) is everywhere, all-powerful, unaccountable, with a monopoly over what ideas are acceptable.

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

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The biggest shift in tone between the two volumes is the all-out embrace of resistance to “a castration cult.” The word “cult” appears 224 times in this book. “Gender ideology has cult-like features and attractions.” Parents are furious that “society is enabling a cult of self-harm disguised as a fantasy.”

A son “fell victim to a dangerous cult that separated him from his loved ones.” Another “has openly and publicly disowned us as parents in favor of membership in the trans cult. He practices absolute obedience to all of the cult’s dictates, which include alienation from and spite for ‘non supporting’ parents.”

The trans cult has appointed itself the sole authority, judge, jury and executioner, to pronounce good parent or bad parent. The only evidence it considers is whether the parent agrees with a child’s delusional denial of his birth sex. All the good we have done as parents counts for nothing.

“We live on a tightrope, trying desperately to maintain connection without facilitating harm.” A declaration of ‘trans’ identity is demoralizing, destabilizing, destructive. “Having a child lost to this hideous cult teaches you to accept uncertainty. Beats it into you with a brick.”

Parents are immediately forced into a drama triangle with their children at the first public appearance of the ‘trans child.’ “The myth that these children come from unstable broken homes, is just that. The cult has their grip on these children unlike anything I have ever seen or expected.”

“We spoke about how it was like our sons had been taken over and brainwashed,” writes a British parent who found secretive online support. “We met with a cult expert who agreed that this gender ideological movement had all the traits of being a cult. So, I started to research cults and only then did I realise what I was up against, and the enormity of the task that I had to take on.” That is a crushing realization.

Leaderless cults do exist, but the internet has empowered a new kind of cult leadership through TikTok and other social media platforms. “Technology has recently enabled destructive cults to arise that have no single authority figure,” one parent observes. “The authority is now ‘likes’ and upvotes. No single person determines what is presented to the cult member as truth, it is the judgement of an anonymous, terminally online and unwell collective.”

Anyone familiar with the work of Eliza Mondegreen will already know about the role of Reddit ‘communities’ in banishing doubt from the ‘trans’ initiate through rationalizations, struggles, and love-bombing — basically, cult behaviors online. This book contains several examples of parents who were stunned to see what kind of ‘friends’ their children had on Reddit.

“Deep inside, there is always that constant nagging feeling that we may be living a lie, that we may have made a mistake,” a detransitioner explains. “That’s why we need trans support groups” to believe they are ‘trans.’ “That’s why we push back vehemently and sometimes violently against any real or perceived opposition.”

We don’t want to hear a word against it, from anybody or else we scream at you, we cancel you, we cut off relationships in some kind of survival tantrum. We live in a state of constant insecurity and second guessing about ourselves even though we’ll never admit it.

Exulansic, also a detransitioner, is credited in the book for revealing the truth about “gruesome operations” that form “rites of passage into the trans cult” as “recruits are encouraged to progress through these operations to demonstrate their worthiness and their ‘true’ transness.” Their children are the new saints and flagellants. “Suffering is celebrated and expected.”

Parents really do face “a whole belief system, very much like a fundamentalist religion or even a cult, that is absolute in what can even be asked.” As with most political religions, the cult of the ‘trans child’ is totalitarian, demanding perfect obedience to ideological prescriptions. People from all walks of life feel empowered to act as amateur mental health specialists the instant a parent refuses to ‘affirm’ a child, so widespread and totalizing is this belief. It is “ideological kidnapping.”

Thousands of loving mothers and fathers have lost their beautiful children, loved ones or relatives to this powerful, state-sanctioned Cult. It has touched millions more. Try imagining that this has happened to you, and you will see why our resistance is growing and will never stop until we bring down this so-called civil rights movement that is actually a cult.

“In our view, the explosion of interest in gender ideology — together with the popularity of the non-scientific, faith-based idea that people can be born into the wrong bodies — is the biggest threat to the safety of our children’s generation,” write the editors. “It is damaging our children’s psyches and provoking mental distress in wide swaths of our society. Our hope, by publishing our stories, is that this threat will fizzle out before it causes even more damage and seeps into the next generation.”

These parents look to cult deprogramming for answers. In the surest sign that they are on to something when they describe the phenomenon as a cult, deprogramming techniques — maintain connection, avoid arguing about the cult, sow seeds of doubt, spur critical thinking — seem to work well on the trans-identified minor child. Because like any cult worthy of the name, ‘trans’ preys upon the desire of every child for an identity of their own, separate from their parents.

“She has recast her entire past in the terms she learned online,” another parent writes. “You see, it’s not what happened, it’s how you assign meaning to it.” Every religious convert will reinvent the past as a journey to their conversion, even when a person converts more than once in life.

“What we’re really telling you is: I’m sick, I’m lost, I’m desperate, my life is spinning out of control and I’m scared because, deep inside, I know the flimsy house of cards I’m stuck in is inevitably gonna come crashing down,” the detransitioner advises parents.

Growing up is hard to do. “The underlying anxiety and depression associated with trans-ideology seem to be caused by an inability to adopt the social behavior expectations of what they feel is required for their sex,” a parent writes. “At the least, there is a sense of ‘unwillingness to participate’ in all the sociocultural expectations associated with their biological sex.” Rather than face up to being a man or woman, the child is looking for an escape.

The trans cult always advises a child to ‘escape’ their family. There are always would-be saviors willing to help. “You have changed from being the one person who put your child’s welfare and happiness above all else to becoming your child’s greatest enemy.” A red carpet of state services gets rolled out for the teenage runaway. “Within a week” of cutting off one daughter, “she managed to get her phone paid for and get health insurance. She will likely be able to continue with her ‘treatment’ on Medi-cal.”

Gender ideology even targets the homeless. How does “a penniless, unemployed, mentally ill young man like Ricky find the $50,000+ he needed to receive this depraved neutering procedure at taxpayer expense?” The District of Columbia has a progressive program to help. Another son “has not held a job for nearly six years and lives off of public assistance and the generosity of others — and has mainly virtual relationships.”

Learning to be in love is intrinsic to becoming an adult, and no ideology complicates romance as much as ‘trans.’ “Who will she find to be her partner?” A mother wonders of her daughter. “She knows we would be fine if she was a lesbian but she has only wanted to date boys and now men. She thinks of herself as a gay man now.”

The lies never stop at ‘gender,’ either. “You lied to us: a first. You stole from us: another first. Then you stopped communicating at all,” whereupon “you had become a stranger.” Parents find themselves the object of disinformation campaigns:

It turned out that my son had been claiming that he was being physically abused at home, his one girl friend was backing up these claims, and the school were going behind our backs to help him make an application for estrangement support with no consultation whatsoever.

Schools ‘affirm’ children who have been bullied in their care. One parent writes that “my caring, loving and sensitive son was relentlessly bullied at school, and the school did nothing to stop it.” So-called ‘Progressive Discipline’ “was entirely ineffective.” Adopting the transgender identity, their child had protection, special status. “Gender ideology is the biggest bully of them all.”

“The schools have overstepped, by a mile, and pretending to seek my input is patronizing and infantilizing,” one parent writes. “I have been talked down to by teachers, school principals, doctors, mental health providers, politicians, talking heads on TV, and clueless acquaintances,” writes another. “Blaming the victim doesn’t even begin to cover this phenomenon of total disregard of parents’ loss when their kid is caught up in this ideology.”

Schools that celebrate a trans identity actually concretize it. “With their rush to affirm trans identities and follow flawed new guidelines, schools haven’t considered the deep embarrassment faced by a teen boy who insisted that he was a trans girl, pushed childhood friends away, and then realized he was wrong,” complains one parent. “A girl who doesn’t want to be an oppressor or a victim is not helped by the question of preferred pronouns,” writes another.

Covid figures large in many of these stories. Autism and mental illness and abuse trauma go unaddressed in their children while clinicians focus on ‘gender’ as if it is the panacea for all the child’s problems. Therapists and doctors extort parents with suicide threats. Children get sucked into the screens in their pockets, develop theories of themselves based on diagnostic criteria, withdraw from friends and family. Parents who understand what is going on face “blatant opposition from ignorant people who undermine their every effort, because the hubris of ignorant people makes them believe they know what’s better for a child than loving parents do.”

History is made by people in motion, and the Gender Party has certainly made people move, politically. “I never thought I would have to state out loud that I have been a registered Democratic voter my entire adult life in order to prove that I am not some sort of right-wing extremist,” says a typical PITT parent. “We are liberal and would like to tell all the institutions and politicians that gender affirming care just sounds nice and accepting until your child walks in the door and tells you that they aren’t your daughter anymore. Then you are forced to discover the reality of drugs and surgeries and it isn’t so simple.”

Another is quite blunt: “I will never vote Democrat again.” Multiply this effect times ten thousand families, and you get political history. “Grief over losing my son to the transgender craze will continue to keep me trapped in a vicious circle without escape, with no room to heal and no path forward to alleviate my suffering,” mourns the PITT Parent. They can express their true feelings, the thoughts they dare not speak aloud, in the privacy of a ballot booth.

Even in death, the cult of trans attacks the family. Forced to bury her own son, a grieving mother writes that “LGBT activists campaigned to have my son called his chosen female name and pronouns at the service, as well as to have them inscribed on his gravestone and printed on his death certificate.”

The trans activists gathered around the grave, drinking, chanting and throwing things in, one of them shouting his chosen female name angrily. My son’s father, who had enthusiastically supported him in his intention to medically transition, was a ring leader. I was confronted and shouted at on two occasions by two of the members at the wake.

Transgender ideology accuses the infidel of “erasing trans people” by opposing their ideology. “This seems to reflect a lack of personal identity and extreme ideological tribalism,” one parent observes. While no one is actually trying to ‘erase trans people,’ “we do want to eliminate the social promotion of what is a fringe ideological movement and its elevation to practically religious levels of belief.” To the cult, that is the same thing.

Whenever historians study a phenomenon, they want primary sources — first-hand accounts of the historical experience by those who lived through it. For example, the accounts left by survivors of Nazi death camps and Maoist re-education camps are invaluable resources for understanding how totalitarianism enforces ideological conformity.

These two volumes from PITT Parents are diary entries of the resistance movement. Despite the darkness and despondency they feel, these parents have fought back with courage, creativity, tenacity. Many have won, while others have lost their children, but the fight was worth it, despite the odds. This impression practically burns off the page like a bright flame. While the cult of gender will always exist, the power of the Gender Party can be broken. These parents know it. They will fight until they win.