By Brandon Showalter, Christian Post Reporter 
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| Protesters demonstrate against transiting children outside Connecticut Children's Hospital in Hartford, Conn., on Feb. 14, 2021. | Courtesy of LGB Fight Back |
You need to read this
news article by the Christian post, trying times for many, especially believers
who choose to live by their faith convictions. Follow Christ no matter what and
carry your family along And if it seems evil to you to serve the LORD, choose for
yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers
served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the
Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve
the LORD.” Josh 24:15
Shattered mothers are
raising the alarm about how transgender ideology is ravaging their troubled
teenage and young adult sons who are caught in the jaws of a gender identity
crisis.
Some of their boys are
now taking cross-sex hormones, like estrogen and spironolactone, and are on the
path to losing their fertility as they put themselves at significant risk of a
variety of diseases and medical complications.
Nine mothers whom The
Christian Post interviewed in February spoke on condition of anonymity, many
out of fear that if their identities are revealed state social services
agencies might remove their children from their custody.
Names, locations and
identifying details in this report have been changed to ensure their anonymity.
Many of their sons are highly intelligent and academically gifted, while others
are on the autism spectrum or have mental health challenges like ADHD.
The politically and
religiously diverse group of mothers, who hail from everywhere in between the
deep-blue San Francisco Bay area to the ruby-red deep South, stress that all
they're trying to do is help their sons overcome their distress. But they have
few places to turn.
During the last few
years, they have, through extensive effort, managed to find each other. Over
75 mothers are now in this group. They have all been thoroughly vetted and
their identities have been verified, as is required to become a member of the
group.
Some of the mothers have
been actively involved in protesting outside of Children’s Hospital Los
Angeles, home to one of the largest pediatric gender clinics in the
nation.
CP got connected with
the moms’ group through these desperate Los Angeles-area parents.
Within the past decade
across the West, the number of gender dysphoric teenage girls has
skyrocketed.
In the United Kingdom,
it has been documented that there was a nearly 4,000-fold increase in girls
being referred to gender identity services in 10 years. Until recently, the
vanishingly rare condition known as gender dysphoria was seen predominantly in
young boys. Now, teen girls are the predominant demographic, a phenomenon that
journalist Abigail Shrier explored in her book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,
which was released last summer.
But teen boys are being
sucked into this peer contagion too, these moms say, though the dynamics and
contributing factors vary. And major medical institutions are backing the use
of cross-sex hormones in trans-identified males, despite serious risks.
Listed on the Mayo
Clinic's website regarding
feminizing hormones are the following potential repercussions: infertility;
deep vein thrombosis; pulmonary embolisms; high triglycerides, a type of fat
(lipid) in one's blood's; weight gain; high potassium (hyperkalemia); high
blood pressure (hypertension); Type 2 diabetes; cardiovascular disease;
excessive prolactin in your blood (hyperprolactinemia); nipple discharge; and
strokes.
Danae Johnson
Approximately three
years ago, Danae Johnson started to notice that her then-14-year-old son,
Jeremy, a freshman in high school at the time, had some troubling text messages
and pictures on his phone of kids who were dressed as the opposite sex.
At a mother-son dinner,
he announced that he was transgender. She found that news hard to take but did
her best not to freak out.
Johnson explained to CP
that in the Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., where they live, he’s lived
two different lives. He portrayed himself as a girl on social media and
communicated that it was a done deal, that he would transition. But he would
still be the boy he always has been at home and continued to play soccer with
certain boys he had known for many years.
When he suggested he
explore taking hormones, Johnson and her husband refused.
In recent years, he has
been diagnosed with anxiety and severe depression, which he attributes to
living as a boy when he thinks he should be a girl.
Jeremy was a smaller
kid, bullied ever since middle school, sometimes coming home with scrapes down
his arms, his mother said. He consistently makes good grades, is in all honors
classes and makes the honor roll. But being transgender meant he got to go from
being bullied and struggling to popular. Female schoolmates have been
particularly encouraging him in this new identity.
Johnson has lived with
this, struggling in virtual silence, telling no one other than her husband. Her
brother, whom she considers her best friend other than her husband, was the
first to find out after three years.
“My best friends know
nothing of this,” she said.
Jeremy’s younger sister,
Ashley, is “devastated and terrified.”
Some months after he
started identifying as transgender, he began threatening suicide. On one such
occasion, a panic-stricken Ashley told her mom that her brother was going to
take his own life as he had taken a knife blade to the basement.
“If you do this again,
I’m going to have to take you to the emergency room because threatening to kill
yourself is not something we take lightly,” Johnson recalls telling her
son.
Sure enough, he did it
again later that spring. Ashley came up from the basement in tears, afraid for
her brother as he was wielding a knife, making her think he was about to end
his life.
Johnson took him to the
hospital immediately to get him evaluated. On the way there, Jeremy tried to
make it seem like he was kidding. They spent several hours at the hospital
where he was examined by four professionals, all of whom told Johnson that he
was doing this for attention and that he was not genuinely suicidal.
Johnson is “100%
convinced” the bullying drove him into the gender identity madness. They
removed him from that school and put him in a local Catholic school where the
bullying ceased. Yet despite the improved environment, the trans identity
continued to bring him attention, so he maintained it.
“It has created multiple
layers of stress with our relationship with him,” Johnson said. "And what
it has done with his relationship with his sister, she’s felt like she’s had to
be the more grown-up one and that she’s had to come tell us when she’s catching
things.”
“I wake up almost every
morning, after waking up at about 1 o'clock in the morning until about 4 or 5
a.m. wondering, ‘How do I help guide him?’”
The previously good,
trusting relationship they had is gone. When she tries to monitor his online
interactions, it's tough to put on a face to communicate to the world “that
everything is hunky-dory” when it's anything but fine.
“My heart’s heavy, my
shoulders are heavy,” she elaborated. “I don’t sleep well.”
Her husband is
reportedly also heartbroken as he was always looking forward to doing the kinds
of things fathers and sons do together, like going to a bar to get the first
beer together when he turns 21.
“I feel like I don’t
have a son anymore,” the mother remembers her husband telling her.
“And it’s hard for me to
not just mourn what I’ve lost from a son, but [also] looking at what my husband
has lost and looking at what my daughter has lost in a brother.”
There is no endpoint, no
A-to-Z timeline, she added, likening it to a wheel that keeps going around as
“everything is on replay.”
Now 17, Jeremy will be
18, a legal adult, in September. He hopes to transition once he goes to
university. Johnson and her husband have both said they will not support him financially
if he pursues that path, no matter which college he chooses to attend. But she
fears that because he is so intelligent, he will still be able to figure out a
way to do it anyway. He plans to leave their home this summer.
When Johnson discovered
the secret group of moms of gender dysphoric boys, she felt encouraged for the
first time since her son’s announcement.
This newfound hope first
arose after stumbling upon an essay by therapist Sasha Ayad of Inspired Teen Therapy. Ayad’s writing perfectly captured
what she had experienced with Jeremy. Though Ayad was unable to be a therapist
for Jeremy, she did point Johnson in the direction of the secretive
group.
Johnson recalled that
she had learned more in one month in the moms' group than in the “three years
of hell” she has spent trying to navigate and learn more about this on her own.
She is confident that she and others in the group will somehow bring about some
meaningful social change.
“We all have one common
goal, and that’s to save our sons,” she said. “Because we recognize the harms
of these [hormonal] treatments and surgeries and using our kids as guinea
pigs.”
The mother said she
fears that her son will wind up sterile and surgically disfigured.
“And I mourn. What if I
never have a son again?” she asked. “What if I never get that back?”
“I pray a lot at night.
And there are nights where I’m angry,” she continues, adding that she often
wonders how God could have allowed this to happen to her family.
Johnson, who is
Catholic, recently spoke with her cousin, who is a priest. During that
conversation, she was able to let her guard down. He consoled her, but the
stress is ever-present.
“I feel bad because
there are nights where I have so much anger in my heart. It’s no longer
praying, but yelling and questioning: Is this all for naught?” Johnson
said.
“We’re up against the
whole culture, and it’s a losing battle. We’re up against other parents and a
culture that tells us that nothing matters anymore, that it’s only about how a
person feels. The parents [who object to gender-transitioning of their
children] are being demonized.”
While she continues to
stay relatively quiet and not many families know about what’s going on in her
life, those who do know insinuate or have told her outright that she is not a
loving mother since she disagrees with her son’s belief that he is
female.
Some of these parents
have invited her son over to their homes behind her back and given him their
daughter’s clothes to wear while they are with him, Johnson told CP. These
parents also call him by his new chosen female name. Johnson and her husband
refuse to call him anything but Jeremy.
“I know my God doesn’t
make mistakes when He’s forming children,” she said. “It’s demonic. And there’s
a devil out there, and the devil, right now, with our culture, is winning.” Read more here
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