Public Josie, Erin, and Emily: Trans Bullying Triggers Resistance Among Parents
by Mia Ashton
If your child comes to you out of the blue and tells you he or she is the opposite sex, you should affirm them, say experts in gender medicine. All of the major American medical associations say that if your child says he or she was born in the wrong body, you must agree with them, or you may cause them to commit suicide.
But a group of parents is pushing back. They say that affirming a child’s gender confusion is actually harmful. How do they know? Because it happened to their own children.
“Code names. Secret messages passed in the dark. Covert operations. Hiding from the authorities,” one mother wrote about the experience of working with other parents opposed to trying to change the sex of their children. “Are we talking about 1944 in Europe? Sadly, no: we’re talking about the present day, and our secret resistance is taking place all over the world.”
The parents feel the need to hide behind pseudonyms because their attempts to protect their children trigger trans activists to accuse them of child abuse. The picture of parents cowering in fear of trans activists is very different from the picture promoted in the media of parents who affirm that their children were born into the wrong body.
The parents investigated the evidence base for “gender affirmation,” puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones for minors who identify as transgender. They discovered that it was weak.
They call themselves Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) who write on their Substack about their experiences. This week, their new book, Tales From the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Children, reached number one on Amazon in LGBT books. Three of them, Josie, Erin, and Emily, hide their last names out of fear of harassment from trans activists and are the guests on today’s Public podcast.