My Teen is 100% Mature, Rational and Secure in his Identity:
How Yours can be Too
By Halley Morgan
You may think I’m one of those moms who is clueless about teens. You may think there’s no way I can proclaim such absurd things about my kid.
But it’s not me who declares my son so rational, so secure in his identity, and so ready to make decisions that will alter his life forever.
It’s his teachers, therapists, doctors.
For other parents of kids like mine, it’s family court judges, guardian ad litems, court-appointed mediators and psychologists, lawyers and other officers of the court.
What is the reason society tells me and parents like me that our kids know themselves so well?
Our kids have declared they were born in the wrong body. They knew it all along.
With this declaration comes an abusive threat: If you do not affirm that I am trans, I will kill myself, a threat not supported by high-quality scientific studies.
So, now you know why I’m not a clueless parent thinking my kid is so well-grounded.
Now, I know what you’ll call me — A Transphobe.
I’m in a growing group of more than 100 parents from all sides of the political spectrum.
It’s true that our sons very, very intelligent — 85% of our sons are gifted, exceptionally gifted or profoundly gifted (IQ over 160). But they are not particularly mature in our minds. We don’t think they are secure in their identities. Not yet.
A few of the kids never leave their rooms, 15% have been diagnosed with autism, some are suffering from eating disorders, all are socially awkward and a significant percentage would spend all day on their computers away from the real world if they could. And yet society says that what they feel now is what they will feel forever.
What our sons need is compassion, support and treatment for their other mental health challenges.
Their families need support too, not attacks at every turn and in some cases, successful efforts to take their kids away.
What our sons need, most of all, is doctors to stop providing them with experimental and highly dangerous treatments.
When our teens say they are transgender, treatment for other mental health issues stops — to provide such treatment, we are told, would be “conversion therapy.” On the other hand, to not treat with experimental medicines, they tell us, might result in a “dead son” instead of a live daughter.
Teachers immediately call or sons whatever name they decide. And then a different one too if they want. All without our permission.
My son’s new doctor, knowing he had ADHD but not gender dysphoria, told him that his executive function would get better at he gets older. She told him straight out that the frontal lobes of men’s brains do not fully develop until 25.
The doctor was worried about the long-term effects of Adderall. And rightly so.
It’s a near certainty that this same doctor would have forgotten all about that brain and sent him to a gender clinic to start on experimental drugs to change his life if she knew he had said he was born in the wrong body.
You say there are “guardrails” that would stop that?
Tell that to the parents in the group whose sons showed up at health centers at their prestigious colleges as freshmen only to be prescribed cross sex hormones after two visits. Universities are complicit in the medicalization of their students.
Tell that to the de-transitioner who was told what to say to go another step and have breast implants and testicles removed after a few visits at a trans-activist clinic.
Tell that to another de-transitioner who was rushed through hormones and top and bottom surgery (the lingo that’s used for testicles and breasts) within the course of one year.
I suppose the reason for all this affirmation is that in addition to being so mature, our teens are not prone to the influences of the internet, not likely to be subject to social contagion.
Society has decided our kids are better able to understand the life long effects of experimental treatments for gender dysphoria than to know how to drink alcohol responsibly.
And our teens are evidently more mature than other teens like them in Finland, the UK, Sweden or Arkansas.
Last June, Finland revised its guidelines for the treatment of gender dysphoria to prefer psychological treatment to drugs.
In December, the High Court in England and Wales decided that under 16’s are unlikely to be able to consent meaningfully to puberty blockers.
In April, the hospital at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden announced it would stop prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to people under 18.
And on April 6th, Arkansas passed laws prohibiting prescribing puberty blockers or cross sex hormones to kids which was uniformly met with proclamations of Republican evil — yet praised by our group of parents that, again, span the conservative to very liberal political spectrum.
But because our sons are not in those countries, and not in Arkansas, saying that they are really the other gender results in medical professionals trying to make it so (something they really can’t do).
So doctors, please, before you declare any youth under 25 able to consent meaningfully to lifelong, harmful treatments, consider first their co-morbidities and examine the scientific evidence as to whether or not your treatment will do more harm than good. And please, please consider whether these teens truly are so wise.
Otherwise, your patients will be the ones left holding all of their other co-morbidities with a badly damaged bodies and minds for the rest of their lives.
