Oh ffs. Is it still 2015? Did I just imagine the last 9 years? Or does CNN need to read the room?
Maryhope Howland gave birth to a baby she thought was a boy. But at 6 years old, the child asked her questions such as “Mom, am I a boy? How do you know I’m a boy?”
“Once I clued in, I said, ‘The doctors make a best guess based on your body … but only you can know, and we love you no matter what,’” said Howland, now co-lead for the Families United for Trans Rights, an organization of transgender kids and their loved ones.
No the doctors didn’t make a “best guess.” Children ask a lot of very basic questions like that, because they’re children, and they don’t know much yet.
Her child’s questioning didn’t stop there. It marked the beginning of a yearslong evolution not just for her daughter, who came out as nonbinary at age 8 and transgender at 10.
Oh shut up you imbeciles – children don’t “come out” at age 8 or 10. Children are children; they don’t know much yet.
It was also a journey for Howland and her husband as they navigated what it means to be trans, ways of affirming their daughter’s gender identity, their responsibilities as parents, and the grief associated with “letting go of one idea of what our life is going to be,” Howland said.
If they’d had a lick of sense they could have skipped all that. Let the kid wear and play with whatever he wants and don’t tell him silly lies about what sex he is.
“One of the hardest things for us to do as parents is pause when that vision gets interrupted and really listen to what our kiddos are saying to us,” said Nova Bright-Williams, a trans woman who is head of internal training at the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention and crisis organization for LGBTQ+ youth.
Yeah well men who claim to be women want company, aka recruits.
The Rev. Rachel Cornwell’s child, Evan, was assigned female at birth and had been showing aversion to the trappings of girlhood. When Cornwell asked Evan at age 4 if he were upset he was born a girl, Evan’s answer shocked her: “Yes, Mommy. I told God when I was a star in the sky that I was a boy, but God made me a girl, and now I just have to live with it.”
“It seemed that my child knew something very deep and true about himself, and that he had an awareness of how his identity was also wrapped up in his relationship with God,” Cornwell, a pastor at Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Washington, DC, and author of “Daring Adventures: Helping Gender-Diverse Kids and Their Families Thrive,” said via email. “We started to go to therapy as a family and just after Evan turned 6, he decided that he wanted to use male pronouns and a new name.”
So that’s that kid’s life messed up.
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10 responses to “CNN grooming parents”
There are not enough puke emojis.
(Also, I think you’re missing a blockquote tag in the paragraph starting “Her child’s questioning…”.
So I did; thank you!
Nobody seems to remember ‘believing the children’ after they’d been trained to report alien abductions and Satanic cult abuse.
John, they really don’t remember that it was children that reported the witches in Salem. Of course, that was not during the life of anybody living today, so who could be expected to know?
It’s only grooming if it’s teaching or promoting something you disagree with, don’cha know.
The whole “story” has the same feel as all the (human interest?) segments I’ve ever read or watched about religious faith. It’s got the same glowing credulity, the same uncritical, unquestioning manner that feels more like advertisement than journalism. The difference is that everyone knows Christianity is a religion, so a piece on how someone decided to enter a monastery or a convent isn’t taken as endorsing Christianity and doesn’t make readers, listeners, or viewers think it’s necessary for them to believe.
I started reading Anna Karenina this weekend, and a paragraph from chapter one stuck out as being particularly relevant to our stupid times:
I love AK. Need to read it again for the ?th time.
iknklast, #4:
And yet that doesn’t stop them from authoritatively transing historical figures who defied the gender roles of their time. It’s almost as though history only matters when they can warp it to their advantage.
The only things that matter to them are those which they can warp to their advantage.
John the Drunkard, Diane Ehrensaft, one of the leading psychologists pushing the idea of transgender children, the one famous for saying a toddler girl who pulls barrettes out of her hair is telling her parents she is a boy, and a toddler boy who unsnaps his onesie to make a “dress” is telling his parents he is a girl, was heavily involved in some of the earliest Satanic Panic false claims of child sexual abuse.