The Cancellation of Parents

Parents Are Only Included If They Affirm, Accept, and Celebrate Radical Ideology

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

In a culture of gender identity ideology, when children express their wishes and feelings that they are the opposite sex, their parents are often left out of the loop unless they affirm, accept, and celebrate their child’s gender declarations and proposed pathways of medicalizing their bodies. Everyone is welcome in schools or places where a child’s health, life, and future are in consideration except the child’s gender-critical parents. If a parent affirms a daughter’s wish to present herself as a boy, or a son’s wish to present himself as a girl, then the parent is included as worthy of respect in activist-captured environments. But if a parent is critical of the ideology that says their child needs to take drugs that will make them medical patients for life and undergo surgeries that remove healthy body parts and healthy reproductive organs, then the parent is excluded and eventually canceled, with no further opportunity for their knowledge, experience, and wisdom to contribute to their own child’s life and future.

Parents, once well regarded, are a new group of marginalized people, demoted by activists who believe parents hold little value unless they stifle the instinct to protect their children from self-harm and agree to radical body interventions on their children, with no questions asked. If the parent wants their kid to have the root cause of distress evaluated and treated with natural alternatives instead of cross-sex hormones, mastectomies, and genital removal, then the parents are quickly condemned by those captured by gender ideology, and the parents are called transphobes, too ignorant to be listened to.

A process occurs before cancellation to pressure parents to agree to a new reality, and it includes parents being undermined and gaslighted. Before parents are canceled, they are often emotionally blackmailed. Parents are told their daughter or son will kill themself if they are not given drugs and surgeries. The parents are frequently called derogatory names. They may be threatened that they will have their kids taken away by social services or moved to a safe home with “glitter” parents who will affirm and provide the gender-changing “care” they “need.” In these new homes, the kids will get the clothes and supplies to present as the opposite sex, and they will get rides to the clinics and doctors’ offices where they will get the drugs and surgeries they think they want. Parents are told they must use pronouns that do not correspond to the natal sex of their child and that they cannot use the birth name they gave to the child because it is now the deadname.

In this activist-driven culture, the parents are often seen as ignorant. Parents are pressured to go along with the new program, new persona, and new plan for their child’s radical body modifications. Gaslighting sometimes occurs to erode the parent’s sense of reality and sanity, as well as to demoralize them. And suddenly, the lives of the child and the family members may become public. The social media pages of the kid are changed to reflect the new identity and presentation. The parents or non-affirming family may be mentioned directly or implied by derogatory comments about transphobes, uneducated, non-progressive people who are on the wrong side of history or just stuck in traditional, heteronormative perspectives where they have not yet seen the light of the new age and new world.

The parent who wants their kid’s body left alone and wants their child’s underlying comorbidities, trauma, pain, and other issues treated doesn’t seem to stand a chance today, when transing kids is popular and profitable. All the reasons that their kid might say they are trans or queer are dismissed along with the parent. Moms and dads quickly find themselves viewed as the enemy of an activist agenda and a money-making machine that doesn’t seem to care about the child’s long-term mental or physical health. The industry is set up to capitalize on gender identity-changing drugs and procedures, and it is running fast and furious to profit from making medical patients for life. Parents find themselves traumatized and seeped in layers and dimensions of grief. Very few people understand or are willing to look at what is happening to parents in our current culture of their devaluation by gender ideology.

Many cancellations are going on in the US in various sectors, and the trauma that ensues is explained in an article by George MJ Perry on August 25, 2024, entitled, “No ‘Morning After’ for Victims of Cancellation: When you are canceled, you have a form of trauma that is in the past, in the present, and in the future.”

No ‘Morning After’ for Victims of Cancellation

Very few people acknowledge the trauma that parents are experiencing in the medical scandal of gender identity and its push to medicalize the bodies of children and young adults to present themselves as the opposite sex. In the article, Perry mentions Dr. Christine Marie, who is lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to recognize media humiliation, misrepresentation, and victim shaming regarding narrative identity and well-being.

Although Dr. Marie does not specifically include canceled parents by gender identity ideology, parents relate to her statement, “When you are canceled, you have a form of trauma that is in the past, in the present and in the future.” She goes on to say, “One of the most tragic things about this form of trauma is that it’s forward facing … In PTSD or complex PTSD, your trauma is in the past and you have the present to work on healing. It’s very history oriented. You have to deal with triggers and all of the experiences that going through a trauma puts in front of you, but it’s not the same as still being in the moment of that trauma.” She adds, “The mental health impact of a person who goes through a cancellation is beyond what I believe the people who are doing the canceling can even fathom.”

I speak for many other parents when I say that we are not interested in being viewed as victims, although the ideology has violated us in multiple ways. We want gender affirmation care to be comprehensive care for our children, but currently, it skips engaging in differential diagnoses, exploratory therapy, and non-invasive treatment options for gender dysphoria. Gender affirming care is an activist-driven and profit-centered care model because it doesn’t make money to help kids accept themselves and their natural bodies. Most people have no idea what is going on in the world of gender identity ideology because they gave a blanket endorsement to the altered language that made radical ideology and activist-driven invasive, irreversible body medicalization seem kind and inclusive.

Very few people are willing to talk about the trauma that parents are experiencing at the hands of proponents and practitioners of gender affirming care and the activist agenda to censor, silence, and make us compliant to their demands. Miriam Grossman, MD, author of Lost in Trans Nation, acknowledges the trauma that parents experience. In chapter ten, “Mourning the Living,” she goes into detail about parental trauma and includes a list of “Parents’ Trauma-Induced Terror Moments, aka Triggers.”

The list is long. Some of the listed triggers that parents have expressed to me are: other people’s kids’ unaltered bodies, pressure to use non-binary or opposite sex pronouns, hearing our daughter referred to as he/him or our son as she/her, photos of friends’ kids or grandkids, Christmas cards, and seeing our daughter with facial hair or hearing her deep voice or seeing our son growing breasts and wearing makeup and dresses. And not on Grossman’s list but a trigger nonetheless, Facebook memories of our kids and us in years past when our bond and their bodies were healthy and intact.

Grossman outlines primary parental losses of personality, name, bond, voice, physical recognition, and shared interests. She also lists secondary losses. Past memories are rewritten, and photos are often removed or destroyed. Trust is damaged as all relationships the parent has are affected, and some are lost, often due to misunderstandings that occur when others judge, censor, and exclude parents from conversation and participation in the vital health and life decisions of their children. Trust is also violated by captured institutions, such as medical, educational, government, social services, media, legal, and many more, that all seem to collude with the push to affirm and medicalize our kids’ gender ideology without looking at their root causes of distress. A sense of stability is eroded, along with our emotional well-being, our sense of self, and our identity, livelihood, and hopes for the future as a close-knit family. Our dreams of the future are altered and tainted with grief when we experience the erosion of our previously close bond with our child.

Grossman says, “Unlike other victims, your trauma is not only unacknowledged, you’re to blame!” Every parent who has lost a kid to gender ideology and medicalization has been blamed by strangers and by some family and friends. Parents are scapegoats and convenient targets of blame, while the real perpetrators of the tragedy walk away in righteousness or quietly claim they were never a part of it. The parents must be blamed in order for the gender-modifying surgeries to continue unexamined. I suspect that when the gender identity medical scandal is fully exposed, some will still continue to blame the parents to take the edge off their guilt of enabling and participating.

Colin Wright also wrote about cancel culture in an article entitled, “Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Lived Experience Says Otherwise.”

Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise

“If you’re looking for common characteristics among those of us who get targeted for cancelation, it isn’t money or privilege. Rather, many of us simply have an inability to mumble slogans we know aren’t true. Over time, we become exasperated with dishonest propaganda that masquerades as social justice, and we speak out. It’s a habit rooted in the truth-telling, whistle-blowing impulse that, not so long ago, progressives applauded.” Parents will not continue to go along with activists who distort the truth, rewrite the truth, and erase the truth. And we stand for those who have lost their voice and strength or are fearful of scare tactics and possible attack.

Many parents have lived experiences of being canceled by some family members and friends. Then there are the ones who don’t overtly “unfriend and block” us on social media and tell us our relationship is over but rather gradually distance themselves until they quietly ghost us and hope we don’t notice. Of course, some don’t know what is going on or distance themselves because the topic is too overwhelming or disturbing to discuss. Thankfully, our lifetime character is still seen and respected by many others, and they remain in our lives and support us through the most difficult and darkest times we have ever experienced—that of losing a daughter or a son to gender ideology and medicalization—and the accompanying gaslighting and revision of history and truth. As long as we live and these precious witnesses live, the truth lives too. We hope to survive long enough to see parents valued again. Moms matter, dads matter, and parents matter.

Lisa Shultz advocates for the rights of parents and women. She is deeply concerned about the influence of gender ideology and the lack of comprehensive, ethical care for children and vulnerable adults.