Misplaced Blame
Demonization, Punishing, and Gaslighting of Parents Are on the Rise
I have observed the cut-off, no-contact culture for years among my friends who are parents. The reasons vary widely, including differing views on politics, COVID masking and vaccinations, and social issues. I notice an overall sense that many young people today feel their parents lack value.
Therapist Sasha Ayad describes the situation that many parents find themselves facing. “Adult children—many of whom were previously close to their parents—are now cutting off contact. They come to believe they’d been abused, neglected or traumatized. Not because of overt cruelty, but because of misattunements, missteps, or generational misunderstandings. The rupture is often sudden, shattering, and non-negotiable. And it’s driven by a narrative that treats cutting-off your family as necessary self-care.”
Ayad began to see a pattern. She writes, “These young people were participating in a social dynamic where trauma served as a kind of shared currency, an escape from scrutiny by demonstrating the virtuous victim effect, or a means to bond or gain sympathy.”
An article by Steven Howard, entitled Controlling the Narrative: Estrangement as Information Warfare, discusses estrangement ideology. “This ideology primarily positions the Estranged Adult Child as an empowered victim or survivor and frequently casts the parent or parents in roles of toxicity, abuse, or narcissism—redefining familial relationships in terms of a moral binary.”
Howard states, “Parents who seek engagement or dialogue, as well as neutral family members or external observers, are frequently dismissed, blocked, banned or invalidated, ensuring estrangement communities remain ideologically cohesive echo chambers. Any perspective challenging the ideological consensus is perceived as threatening, disingenuous or harmful, and is thus actively excluded.” I can attest to that, as it describes what happened in my family.
He continues, “Personal experiences shared on platforms such as this Substack are not exempt—dissenting voices, particularly those of parents, are often met with emotionally charged attacks, accusations or attempts at public shaming. Mirroring a growing trend in other associated movements, opposing voices are often accused of “hate speech.” Such enforcement reinforces conformity through fear of reprisal or invalidation.”
“Together, these tactics ensure that the narrative around family rupture remains ideologically sealed and emotionally reinforced. They render estrangement not just a choice, but the only morally intelligible option within the confines of the belief system.”
Differing opinions about “trans” initially unraveled and then decimated my family. Blaming fingers pointed at me, the mom of a suddenly trans-identifying young adult child, as the problem because I wanted the root cause of distress addressed, I didn’t affirm a cross-sex identification, and I didn’t endorse and celebrate medicalization with drugs and surgeries. Acclaimed actress Ruby Dee said, “The greatest gift is not being afraid to question.” But in today’s world of “affirmation only,” it is forbidden to question or express skepticism or doubt.
In addition to my questioning, I also didn’t stay silent; I spoke up and wrote about my perspective on gender ideology and medicalization and its far-reaching impacts on families and society. It did not matter that I was politically independent and non-religious; I was labeled a hateful, right-wing bigot and transphobe. Speaking up or writing counter to the “born in the wrong body” narrative is a sin from a trans activist’s perspective. Expressing grief at what is happening to our kids, family, women, and society in the name of gender ideology is mocked and belittled. And once someone boldly steps up to talk about any of it or write about their perspective, there is often a relentless quest to punish, an insatiable appetite for retribution for not agreeing with activists and their directives.
The first slaps of punishment for non-affirming, skeptical parents are limited contact with hard-core boundaries and rules that parents must comply with, or else the limited contact moves to no contact. It becomes clear that conversations related to gender are completely off limits. Any discussions about underlying comorbidities and root causes of distress are not permitted. If emotional blackmail doesn’t stop resistance to medicalizing a gender identity, weaponizing social media to publicly shame the parent ramps up. The parent’s reputation and livelihood are often targets to be undermined by any means to beat them into submission and agreement that the body must be modified along with name and pronoun changes.
A social movement that promotes itself as being full of love and righteousness reveals itself to be full of anger and threats of harm directed at anyone who disagrees or questions its ideology. The activists will go so far as to publicly bombard the parent with insults and threats, including wishing for the parent’s suffering and death. The “pro-trans” advocate seems to relish the collective mobbing and demeaning of someone they have never met, including suggesting that a non-affirming mother, who advocates to protect her child’s natural body, be replaced by a “new and better” mom.
Parental devaluation isn’t just coming from kids and transactivists but also from some areas of the media, the field of medicine, the legal system, and legislative measures. Parental respect and rights are diminishing within schools and courts. Parents often become the scapegoat for any issue their child has, regardless of whether the blame is misplaced. Social media influencers and a booming profit industry that pathologizes any discomfort a child expresses, and then promotes medicalizing the youth, often get a free pass while the fault finger points at the parents.
In the case of the “trans” social movement, blame is also placed on the body, which they say must be modified in every possible way, relentlessly, in a quest to pass for the opposite sex. Nothing must impede the endless pursuit to present as someone other than how one was born, so all safeguards that pause or halt the medicalization of the body are stripped from medicine and therapy practices. Some children will be harmed by having no protections for their natural development, but activists label those who do not want drug and surgical interventions as ignorant and bigoted.
And then comes the gaslighting. A writer who goes by Jason describes it well in his essay Through the Looking Glass. “What does it do to a soul to be told her lived experience is hateful? What does it do to memory when history must be rewritten to satisfy identity?” He also wonders what happens when a mother must pretend she gave birth to a child who is the opposite gender of the baby she clearly gave birth to. Jason writes, “The answer is gaslighting.”
“But what does it mean to sacrifice your own reality in the name of someone else’s truth? What does it mean to agree, under duress, that what happened to you was not real? This is not kindness.”
“And the reason you are being shamed, silenced, and gaslit—is because you still remember how to see.” I might add that parents are asked to forget or bury the truth and their memories, and if they don’t agree to rewrite history, wrath is heaped upon them in hopes that they will comply. It may sound harsh to those who have not witnessed it or experienced it, but it has happened to many parents worldwide.
In her essay The Tyranny of Compassion, Cheryl McClorey writes, “Truth isn’t rude—it’s respect. As Thomas Sowell put it, ‘When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.’ Truth is now framed as violence. Reality becomes taboo. You can see the crack in real time. The emotional dysregulation, the livestreamed identity crises, the outbursts that feel less like protest and more like collapse. What looks like rebellion is often a cry for structure. Because without a grounded self to push against, expression implodes. The performance turns manic.”
In many US states, if parents misgender and disagree that their daughter is a male or their son is a female, and they use the beloved given name, they are breaking the law. Their kids “officially” become the opposite sex on all documents, including birth certificates. History is rewritten, with pretending and performance endorsed in writing, and the parents are condemned for remembering and speaking the truth as mothers and fathers, for wanting the root cause of their child’s distress addressed instead of blaming the body as the problem. The state and the affirming circle around their kids agree that the kids were “born in the wrong body” and then berate the parents for being witnesses and holders of the truth, attempting to silence and break the spirits of the parents until they agree with the coercion. It still amazes me how many complete strangers, as well as some family and friends, conspire to undermine and gaslight parents.
Jason reflects on what parents are trying to say in his essay, Medicalization Is Not Healing: When Treatment Becomes Trauma. “We live in a world where medicine is increasingly the first response to the soul’s cry. Where surgery is framed as liberation. Where the body is treated as the problem, and ideology as the cure. Where the deeper you hurt, the faster the prescription. And when it comes to children, that prescription is not just pills—it’s puberty blockers, hormones, and scalpel.”
“We are witnessing a generation of youth being shepherded into a medicalized identity pathway for what may, in truth, be soul disorientation, trauma, sensitivity, or energetic misalignment. And once they step onto that path, the medical system begins to close in like a vice: puberty blockers, hormone treatments, double mastectomies, castration, name changes, and social reorientation. This is not healing.”
He writes, “Surgery was never meant to solve existential distress.”
Parents are demonized for questioning or saying no to surgical modifications of their kids’ bodies and for wishing to address distress without a scalpel. For desiring to protect the natural body, parents receive hate messages from the group that says it expresses love. Trans-identifying persons and their supporters say the body is the enemy, and so is any parent or person who dares to not affirm the modification of sex traits.
It is time to reconsider the misplaced focus on parents as the “enemy.” It is time to include and listen to those who wish to protect children, rather than those who perpetuate the medical scandal that rushes to medicalize and socially disorient our youth and young adults.
Be careful of complicity in harming the bodies and future health of children, teens, and vulnerable adults, as well as encouraging estrangement within families. Others observe that those who hide from the complicity are selecting a scapegoat—a common deflection technique—and the easiest target to blame is the parents. Be cautious of participating in the breaking of the parent-child bond and encouraging the dissolution of the family. In time, the misplaced blame becomes evident, but the lasting toll and damage to the family and the affected younger generation may be beyond repair.
Lisa Shultz advocates for parents’ and women’s rights. She is deeply concerned about the influence of gender identity ideology and the lack of comprehensive, ethical care for children and vulnerable adults.
I think parenting and child development "experts" were laying the groundwork for this long before gender ever entered the picture. My oldest child is 22 and I read every parenting book that came out because I was desperate to get it right. There was a message that kept showing up in these books that stressed me out so much. It was that just one mistake with your child, one unacknowledged emotion, just one time not paying enough attention, just one time saying the wrong thing could cause lifelong harm to your child and your relationship with your child. I had no idea how I was supposed to live up to that standard when the stakes were so high but the requirements were also impossible to meet. even as my children got older and I reached out for help with various parenting challenges the focus was always on not saying the wrong thing. I even started hearing that good, supportive parents could induce borderline personality disorder in a sensitive child for not realizing they needed a different type of parenting other than normal good parenting - that I could induce an emotional wound by calling out from a different room asking the sensitive child to unload the dishwasher rather than going directly to her and carefully wording my request. When families are repeatedly getting that message and now it's everywhere on social media, it's got to lay the groundwork for the patterns of going no contact and the reasons why that we are seeing now.
I have to wonder though what's going to happen to the generation of young adults cutting off their parents for minor in fractions they themselves become parents of teenagers who have different beliefs and different demands for how they are treated than their own? Will those parents who cut off their own parents for Not matching every belief they have and living up to every expectation give up everything they believe and want for themselves to meet every demand of their children and have exactly the same beliefs of their children? Or will there one day be news stories about the epidemic of parents going no contact with their children for not having the right political beliefs and having hurt their feelings with their unreasonable adolescent behavior?
There is a therapist I follow on Instagram who talks about building capacity. She says of course there are people who've had upsetting sometimes even awful things happen in their childhood but when we focus only on the idea that childhood struggles are the cause of our current adult struggles we Can miss how our current struggles may be due to a problem in our current environment that needs to be addressed. She also says we are not realizing that development and growth occur throughout adulthood and that our current struggles may not be due to something that happened in our childhood but a skill area in our adult lives that actually needs to be developed at an adult level. but the current script and trends of a arrangement and what constitutes trauma and blaming all current struggles on past experiences without looking at them in a more nuanced way combined with at least two decades of parenting advice that just one mistake can completely traumatize your child and cause lifelong harm to the parent child relationship and even create serious mental illness creates the perfect storm for this thinking to later get applied to affirmation and gender identity.
So true. This is also my reality.
I have tried reaching out many times. I am agreeable to having a relationship with my adult daughter where we "agree to disagree."
This isn't acceptable to her. I refuse to erase history. Her current reality depends upon people being willing to erase her past.