“They proceeded to tell me, I have no say over anything my daughter wants to go by or what's in her record or anything.”
Friend,
On a small, unassuming cul-de-sac in Alaska, the mother of two young daughters came face-to-face with a growing phenomenon: adolescent girls identifying as the opposite sex due to a social desire to appear transgender.
Critics call the social contagion theory “unfounded” and “absurd.” But for Susie*, she watched it unfold in her own neighborhood, inside her own home.
After returning to the U.S. from a four-year assignment abroad, Susie’s family settled into a house on a street where two out of the eight girls identified as transgender. At the local high school where their daughter would soon attend, at least another 10 girls identified as the opposite sex.
Shortly after moving there, Susie’s oldest daughter, who had just turned 15, also said she felt like a boy.
Susie didn’t believe that her daughter’s sudden transgender identity was anything more than a phase. She and her husband chose not to make any drastic changes. They settled on a “wait and see” approach.
But every institution surrounding them, from health professionals, to the public school, and a local LGBT support group, rushed to validate their daughter’s gender confusion, treating it as real.
Worse, they intentionally deceived Susie and her husband. The school used their daughter’s birth name and female pronouns in official communications. But behind closed doors, they used her made-up name and male pronouns.
“They proceeded to tell me, I have no say over anything my daughter wants to go by or what's in her record or anything,” Susie said. “The only thing I had a say over was what her name was on her transcript. … Their wording to me was that it was illegal for me to insist on a certain name or anything in the yearbook or on her ID.”
The situation is ongoing. Susie’s daughter tells her mom that she’s still confused about her gender, but the school sees no nuance in that confusion. Instead, school officials affirm her feelings as a boy, against Susie and her husband’s objections.
