I spent the weekend at the Montreal Book Fair to sign the novel I just published.
Sunday evening, I received an email from a lady who told me: “I didn’t dare approach you at the Salon.”
Then she tells me her story.
Exploration
Her daughter is 14 years old. Eighteen months ago, she told her mother: “I am now a boy.”
The announcement comes a few months after that of her best friend to her own parents.
Suddenly, the mother said, if I got my first name wrong, I was “transphobic.”
The school changed her name and gender without consulting her.
The mother has transgender and non-binary knowledge. She is not at all a stubborn reactionary.
Her daughter had a difficult high school: heartbreak, bad influences, self-harm, bullying, depression.
However, the confusion remained.
The mother: “You want a penis, remove your breasts?”
The girl: “Wow, no, but hair on the chin, maybe.”
In his entourage, several parents have children who say they want to “transition”.
The mother gets closer to these parents, reads on the subject, learns about this increasingly documented effect of social contagion and imitation.
- Listen to Joseph Facal’s column via QUB radio :
Her daughter, she says, suffers from a fairly common malaise during adolescence and believes she has found a quick “solution”.
She then enters networks which encourage her to “assert herself” quickly in this direction.
The mother meets a social worker who begins to make her case: you do not respect the “feelings” of your daughter.
Puberty blockers, says the social worker, have no consequences.
Absolutely false. This is why they are extremely controversial and raise strong reservations among those who care more about health than an ideology.
You have to let her explore, says the social worker.
But we do quite the opposite: instead of exploring, we quickly decree, we encourage, we facilitate the transition, without questioning the discomfort of being which is still there.
Her daughter said to her: “Mom, you don’t accept me.” But it is the young girl who does not accept herself. The mother only seeks to understand.
Photo Adobe Stock
Research
It’s not just the prospect of irreversible surgical interventions that frightens the mother.
It is to enter a system in the form of a corridor, in which children and “experts” repeat a scenario, a protocol, words and sentences learned in advance to facilitate the transition and disqualify any questioning, any caution.
We either shut up or applaud. Otherwise, we are transphobic, reactionary, we push them to suicide.
The complete opposite of exploration and openness.
Let’s listen to these parents, understand these children better, do more scientific research, let’s curb ideological enthusiasm.
What is happening is serious.
