Mom Speaks Out About Societal Pressure Pushing Teens Towards Transgenderism

A 'non-partisan' issue has caused 'a whole generation of amazing kids' to lose their way

Pronouns on a jacket. Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images

“Like a dystopian novel.” That’s how Ava described her family’s life since her teenage son’s announcement that he is transgender.

James was a kind, smart, and “gentle boy” with excellent grades who wanted to go to MIT. Now he is failing his classes and yells and curses at his mother when she refuses to address him by his preferred pronouns.

His mother spoke with The Epoch Times about her family’s struggle to help their son. She urged parents to speak out against the growing sexual culture war, because the issues involved can affect any child, in any family.

Ava is a Chinese-American mother who immigrated to the United States as a child. Until recently, her life was tidy as she and her husband juggled successful careers with raising their two children, 17-year-old James and his 15-year-old sister.

Ava described the couple’s parenting style as “very involved,” and noted the commonality between her Chinese culture and her husband’s American background: “Filial piety was a very big part of our family cultures. The parents and grandparents do everything for the children and in return, the children are super respectful to their elders.”

‘Mommy, They Just Don’t Know Me’

Their son James was born in 2006. According to Ava, he was a gentle child who was kind by nature and did not like “rough-and-tumble” play.

James showed signs of being very bright. “He learned how to work a DVD player when he was two, so he could watch his documentaries about steam engines,” Ava said.

James started reading at a very young age. Throughout kindergarten, elementary, and middle school, he consistently scored in the highest percentiles on standardized tests. He was a year ahead in math.

However, his mother noticed that James had trouble making friends. His early life was a bit of a social whirl—parents saw the polite, smart boy as an ideal playmate for their kids—but he had difficulty connecting with other children. He would later be diagnosed with a mild form of autism.

James attended a very exclusive school for the gifted. Students who got into the school tended to stay, growing up together through elementary and middle school.

Despite the close atmosphere, James was bullied by two classmates. He appeared to be resilient, even inviting the bullies to his birthday party: when Ava asked why, he responded, “Oh, Mommy, they just don’t know me.” James kept “pushing so hard to make these bullies like him,” Ava said.

Looking back, however, Ava feels the bullying was significant. So was the loneliness that developed as her son began losing friends “one by one” and not making new ones. Ava watched sadly as friends the family “recruited” to attend summer camp with James over the years moved on, leaving him “an outcast.”

It didn’t help that her son was a late bloomer, smaller than his peers.

When James was in sixth grade, Ava started noticing that he would forget to turn in his homework. When he did turn it in, he sometimes forgot to put his name on it. As a result, he sometimes did his homework all over again.

Testing revealed that James had a mild “executive functioning dysfunction” (similar to ADHD) and “social anxiety disorder.”

However, James’ learning capabilities remained strong, and he was still performing well in school.

Distance Learning: ‘A Disaster’

Then COVID-19 happened, and everything fell apart.

Ava blames the pandemic as another major factor that affected James.

He had been admitted to a prestigious high school. However, due to the pandemic, his experience of freshman year was distance learning. He only physically went to school about eight times that first year, Ava said, which greatly affected his learning.

“It was a disaster. He doesn’t connect with the classes, turns off the camera a lot of times and [was] doing very poorly,” Ava recalls.

He didn’t make new friends at the new school, “because there’s no interaction ... He is on the internet all the time,” Ava said.

‘I Wish I’d Never Sent Him To A Therapist’

Things got even worse in 10th grade.

The couple felt something was wrong with James’ behavior. “Someone suggested that we get him a therapist,” Ava recalled. “In retrospect, I wish I'd never sent him to a therapist.”

After seeing the therapist, James “started feeling empowered,“ Ava said, ”and pushed back a lot on us … he really started to assert his independence.”

Despite accommodations for his mild autism, James was still failing. He was often absent and spent his days playing online.

Concerned about her son’s internet use, Ava began locking down the family computer network. “I became an IT expert,” she quipped.

However, her son was usually a step ahead of her, finding a way around the controls she set up.

Online Influences

Ava checked James’ computer and phone from time to time, reading posts and tracking his internet habits.

Last October, Ava was shocked to discover that James had told his online friends he was transgender.

He had been frequenting a Subreddit community called “egg_irl,” in addition to the Subreddit “teenagers” community. In the trans community, “egg” is slang for a male at birth who is really female. “Irl,” in real life, when the egg “cracks,” she accepts her trans identity.

“He spends all his time on Reddit. And I think that’s where he [was] groomed,” Ava said.

For the time being, she kept quiet about her discovery. When James began stealing his sister’s clothes, however, she confronted him.

He was reluctant to talk, saying only that he had watched YouTube videos that convinced him he was transgender. “YouTube knew I was trans before I did,” James told Ava.

“For the next several months, we didn’t really talk about it because he [was] so uncomfortable talking about it. He didn’t want anybody else to know,” Ava said. That included her husband and daughter.

Ava blames online influences. She also feels pornography—which she found on his iPad—may have played a part in his gender confusion, adding that she believes there is a “sexual component” to James’s mental health condition.

Social and Societal Pressure

During James’ junior year, Ava said, “it all escalates.”  He was befriended by another teen who was undergoing gender therapy. He had been taking cross-sex hormones for a year. The new friend invited James to go to a clinic with him.

“My kid comes back with forms for me to fill out, all the insurance information so that he can participate in this youth transgender program,” Ava said, adding that she was horrified and refused to sign anything.

Ava began a long trek in search of a professional who could help her son.

She called the family’s pediatrician, who referred James to a child study center that could treat gender along with his autism.

However, “the waitlist was six months long for an autism specialist,” according to Ava. “But the gender clinic has someone to see him right away.”

“Even though I’m uncomfortable, I want to show my son that we support him,” she said. “So we go see this psychologist at [the] gender clinic. She is Harvard, Princeton-trained and very much practicing the ‘affirmative model’ and bought into all this gender ideology.”

Although his parents drew a clear connection between the bullying their son had experienced, his autism, and his gender confusion, the psychologist discounted their perspective and went directly to a transgender diagnosis.

The couple took James to several doctors, none of whom “felt right.” Most of them simply affirmed James’ gender identity, and Ava did not feel that they listened to her concerns.

She was encountering intense social pressure that encouraged her son’s confusion and frustrated her attempts to help him.

One doctor seemed reasonable and professional at first. When he suggested that Ava and her husband begin using their son’s “preferred name and pronouns,” Ava responded, “With all due respect, I vehemently disagree.” As if he had not heard her, the doctor came back with consent forms for hormone treatment.

After a string of doctors who deeply disappointed her, she began a quest to find a therapist she could trust.

‘Dying Inside’

Despite the couple’s efforts to help James, his desire to become a woman was more and more compulsive. Ava caught him using her driver’s license to try to purchase hormones.

“He’s tried six different pharmacies online to try to buy [those drugs]. And as far as I know, he’s not been successful,” Ava said.

The formerly mild-mannered child was increasingly agitated, becoming hostile to his parents and cursing at his mother.

One day in May, James spent four exhausting hours trying to convince his mother to call him by his chosen name and “preferred pronouns.”

The conversation culminated with James repeatedly yelling at his mother “at the top of his lungs” and calling her “a little [expletive].”

Because Ava was “inflicting pain on him” by calling James by his proper name, she said, “It’s taking everything that he’s got to restrain himself from punching me.”

“I said, ‘go ahead and punch me!’ And then he backs down and says, ‘But I love you too much. If you were anybody else, you’d be dead right now.’”

“I was shocked. My heart is completely broken,” Ava said.

Not to mention a little scared. “He is much bigger now. He [wouldn’t] let me leave my own bedroom.”

The next day, James tried to reconcile with his mother. When he saw her solemn expression, he went over to her and gave her a big hug.

“Part of him is still looking for my approval. Part of him is not completely lost yet. I am dying inside. But there’s this tiny glimmer of hope, that’s slowly getting extinguished. It’s so heartbreaking,” Ava said.

Making and Rebuilding Connections

Ava admits she doesn’t have all the answers, and she does not know how her own family’s story is going to end.

However, she can offer a few suggestions, gleaned from her own experience and research.

For parents in a similar painful situation, the support of other parents is critical. Support groups such as Parents of ROGD Kids and Our Duty, which don’t simply parrot the prevailing narrative, have been helpful, Ava said.

One thing Ava has learned from listening to other families: it’s critical that parents connect with their children. Many gender-confused children have become disconnected from their families, and seek to replace that relationship by connecting online. “They gain this connection through the internet, and they adopt this ideology as a replacement family connection,” she said.

About her own son, she feels that “somewhere along the way he’s become disconnected.”  She took a two-month leave of absence from her career in order to help rebuild her relationship with him.

She is trying to change the way she interacts with James. She herself was raised in a negative and critical way, she feels, and she has carried that over to her own parenting. “It’s so hard to change the way I engage because that was the way I was raised,” she said.

In order to do that, she has worked to change the language she uses with her son. With one exception:  despite her son’s pleading, she refuses to call him by his preferred name or pronouns.

Building Critical Thinking Skills

Along with re-building family connections is the need to foster critical thinking skills in gender-confused children. It’s important to expose them to content that develops critical thinking, Ava feels.

The content need not have anything to do with gender. However, “hopefully, within the gender space, he can then, himself, conclude that it’s not the right thing. That’s what you hope for.”

“The solution is going to be different for every kid,” Ava stressed. “But I think it [has] something to do with connection, it has something to do with getting the right therapist; it has something to do with replacing the activities that entrench him further in his thinking—replacing that content with other activities.”

Educate Yourself and Others

For her own part, Ava read exhaustively and developed the courage to share what she learned.

Following a trail of referrals, Ava finally found a psychiatrist who seemed helpful. Her hopes were dashed when he told her “I don’t know that I’m not going to recommend transitioning.”

With courage borne of desperation, Ava told him: “I know what the basis for the recommendations are, and it’s a fraud. I’m going to send you some materials and you can look at it and critically judge the materials. And if you learn something, tell me, because I want to know everything there is to know.”

She sent the psychiatrist a wealth of information on the subject of gender dysphoria—studies that she had found to be personally helpful, with an explanation about what she thinks.

Although she said, “I don’t know where this is going to go,” Ava is optimistic about the new psychiatrist: he took time to read the information she gave him, and she feels that he is “a very thoughtful psychiatrist who wants to get it right.” For the time being, he is her best hope, she feels.

A Non-Partisan Issue

Ava feels it is important to share her family’s experience. “We just need to get this more into the open, so that we can talk about it and start making changes.”

This painful issue is affecting a “whole generation of amazing kids,” who have lost their way, she said.

The issue is non-partisan, she stressed.

“This doesn’t hit one particular kind of politics. It’s all over left-wing families, right-wing families, [and] moderate families. It’s hitting everyone.”

Pseudonyms are used in this article to protect the family’s safety and privacy.

Kerry Xue contributed to this article.