News from the UK:

The parents of an autistic teenage boy were warned he would be taken into care after they objected to him being given powerful hormone drugs to help him change sex.

Doctors at an NHS clinic had recommended he be given puberty-blockers – which delay adolescence – after the youngster declared he believed he was female.

But his mother and father, fearing the potential side-effects of the drugs, stopped him going to the clinic. And they suspected his abrupt decision to change sex was a result of his autism.

After the boy told the school he had been barred from treatment, a teacher told his parents that they should find alternative accommodation for their son or else he would be put into temporary foster care. And the school reported the couple to children’s services for being ‘emotionally abusive’ to their son by not supporting his wish to change gender.

A month later, the local authority placed him in a child protection plan after social workers concluded he was likely to suffer ‘significant harm’ under his parents’ care.

The Mail On Sunday reports that at least three children in Britain were put into foster care by the state last year because their parents wouldn’t agree to transgender treatment. The boy was struggling to cope with school because of his Asperger’s and autism. When he started to self-harm, his parents asked his doctor to refer him to children’s mental health services.

When the child met with a child psychotherapist, he said he believed he was female. According to the parents, that was the first the boy had ever said of such a thing. They assumed that it was another of his autistic obsessions (parents of kids on the spectrum are well aware of how these kids become obsessed with particular topics, and then drop them as suddenly as they acquired the obsession). Too late! The state therapy bureaucracy already had its claws sunk into the boy.

Read the whole thing. 

Americans need to wake the hell up. We need legislation right now to protect families from these fixers. Congressional Republicans, where are you?

Readers, I strongly urge you to follow 4th Wave Now on Twitter. It’s the Twitter feed of a politically non-partisan website for concerned parents of gender-dysphoric kids. Here’s a link to an interview with Denise, who founded the site when her daughter Chiara told her a few years ago that she was a trans male. Chiara has since desisted, and has started the Pique Resistance Project, a movement of detransitioners/desisters. The interview is actually with both Denise and Chiara — neither of whom are right-wing in any way, shape, or form. Excerpt:

Denise, as every parent knows who has experienced something similar, hearing your daughter suddenly declare she is transgender and tell you she needs hormones immediately is very stressful. How did you cope?

Starting the website—which was initially a cry into the wilderness, just hoping to find and speak to other parents who were skeptical of their teen’s desire to embark on medical transition—was crucial in helping me to cope with the situation. I suspect there would have been more arguments and difficult times between Chiara and me if I had not had the outlet of writing and finding others online who were in the same boat.

Pretty much all my “in real life” friends at the time were lifelong liberals/lefties like me, who saw (as I had) everything to do with trans activism as purely and simply the next civil rights movement; they hadn’t had a reason to look into some of the more controversial aspects because their lives hadn’t been touched by the issue. So, for the most part, I couldn’t talk to them openly about what was happening in my family.

Here’s a bit from Chiara, who identifies now as a lesbian:

Was there a lot of talk about suicide online? If so, did that influence you in any way?

There was a large amount, the most notable being the case of Leelah Alcorn, an MtF teenager who committed suicide in 2014. Her death affected me, along with many others, as it was sensationalized and widely held up as a warning to parents: “This is what happens when you don’t let your kid transition.” This mantra continues to be repeated online and everywhere, and perpetuates the idea that suicide is the “only way out” for kids whose parents will not accept their gender identity—this is a false statement that should under no circumstance be peddled to impressionable young people.

What made you feel unhappy about being a girl?

I was dealing with trauma, which caused me to want to escape my body. This, in addition to my resistance to accepting my same-sex attraction, resulted in a rejection of being female.

How did your dysphoria manifest itself? What “triggered” it for you?

It came on in the span of a couple months, but was still a fairly gradual process. The main triggers were my increased usage of social media, which facilitated my exposure to trans ideology and activism, as well as my social isolation and beginning to learn about and come to terms with past trauma. My dysphoria caused me to adopt an appearance that was as masculine as possible—I cut my hair short, wore men’s clothes, bound my chest, and packed off and on for over a year. I even used the men’s bathrooms in public, and felt good about myself when I passed successfully.

More from Chiara:

You mentioned that you had no desire to transition until you heard about others doing so. Did your dysphoria increase the more you learned about gender identity and transition?

Absolutely. The more information I consumed on the topic, the more adamant I was that transition was right for me. Other people’s hormonal and surgical results appealed to me at the time, and I desperately wanted that for myself. It was a vicious circle: the more I watched, the more my dysphoria grew, and the more my dysphoria grew, the more I needed to “escape” in the form of this addictive media.

Parents! Wake up! The smartphone and unfettered Internet access is not your child’s friend.

Read the entire interview. Educate yourself. The mainstream media is not going to do it for you.