A Warning For Parents - How To Lose Your Child To Gender Activists

A gut-wrenching, anonymous column published in the Telegraph on December 15 highlights a uniquely post-modern parental nightmare: "My son took gender-changing hormones behind my back, with the support of his boarding school."

The anonymous father first discovered that his 14-year-old, referred to by the pseudonym Jonathan, was "struggling" with his gender identity. As is so often the case, the boy spent "hours on end" on his phone in his bedroom, "which is a huge, huge regret now." Like so many other parents, they had no idea what Jonathan was doing.

Jonathan was talking to strangers online - strangers "who were encouraging him to transition" and "first told him that he might be suffering from gender dysphoria." Teen friends of his older sister, some who identified as trans, followed suit, as the father discovered when he reviewed his son's WhatsApp messages and discovered advice such as: "You need to get drugs before your hips fuse."

Jonathan's mother had permitted him to use an androgynous name at school, "believing in good faith that if we didn't come across as in any way 'transphobic,' he would listen to us when it came to more serious issues of gender identity, like drugs or surgery." It appeared to work. He listened. They told him he should wait until he was older before making a decision about taking trans drugs, and they locked down his smartphone.

But as is so often the case - the Substack newsletter "Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans" has scores of such stories - they did not count on their influence being subverted by the very adults they had entrusted their son to:

What I didn't realise was that his school would completely betray us. He was attending a prestigious boarding school in the Home Counties and, even though he was on a scholarship, it was costing us over £20,000 a year. We thought he would be given the best education possible and, more importantly, we thought he was safe. How wrong we were.

When Jonathan returned to school after lockdown, aged 15, he told the school GP that if he didn't get cross-sex hormones - drugs that would "feminise his appearance" - he would kill himself. She immediately checked him into the local hospital and his mother and I went up to collect him. It was terrifying.

While his parents attempted to help him, the school was working behind their backs, "aggressively affirming him as female, providing him with a girls' uniform and even putting him on the girls' sports team." At the same time, the school agreed that they would not assist Jonathan in getting trans drugs. Jonathan used a school computer and emailed a website to request the drugs. "One of the first questions they asked him was whether he wanted breasts." He said he did.

"I firmly believe that what drives a lot of these teenage boys is sexual urges," the father wrote. "And they're being groomed by older men online ... The clinic told Jonathan that he needed to have counselling first (we later learnt it was a one-hour session) before they would send him a box full of cross-sex hormones and blockers. Unbelievably, it was paid for by the clinic itself with something they call a 'scholarship fund.' He had pleaded poverty, so they sent him the drugs for free."

It was a neighbor who alerted him to the fact that Jonathan was taking cross-sex hormones; she noticed because she recognized the effects from other trans-identifying friends. He searched his son's gaming computer, and discovered that Jonathan had been taking the drugs for more than a year, with the full knowledge of the school:

We confronted the school straight away, demanding to know what was going on. To our surprise, they admitted they knew. The housemaster said that keeping it a secret from us had been the hardest decision of his career, but that he'd sought legal advice. He had been told it was the right decision as it was Jonathan's private health matter. We were extremely angry, especially as we had written confirmation from them saying they wouldn't help him.

Their son, now 18, failed at school, pulled £4,000 out of his child trust fund, and "flew to America to be with one of the men he had met online who had convinced him he should be a woman." He then cut off all contact with his family.

The father misses his son terribly. "My wife likens it to war," he wrote. "She says that previous generations sent their sons off to battle and you never knew whether they were going to come back in one piece. It feels like that. As for the drug-pushing websites, I believe we are in the presence of evil."

"They're damaging children and ruining lives. The people behind them belong in jail."

The culture wars, in short, are real wars, with real victims. Most often, the victims are the young and impressionable. It is a children's crusade. The story of this heartbroken father, robbed of his son by the LGBT cult, reminded me of the 2023 documentary Dead Name, in which despairing parents described how they had lost their children to gender ideology. Most simply wanted to talk to their children; to discuss the irreversible implications of these treatments.

Many thought educators and therapists would be their allies. But institution after institution turned against them. They were told they were abusive; that they were contributing to the demise of their children, even as their children - one featured in Dead Name was only four years old - announced that they wanted to begin carving up their bodies and changing their very physiology. The sense of betrayal - of being gaslit - that these parents experience is acute.

Now, this anonymous father is among their ranks.

Originally published at The Bridgehead