61 Comments
User's avatar
Kathleen's avatar

I had a less inquisitive or critical response to the live son/dead daughter question in March 2020. My response was "Don't try to pull that emotional blackmail bullshit on me," and I pulled my kid out of there.

Expand full comment
Gerda Ho's avatar

Good for you! The trans ideology is bases COMPLETELY on LIES, starting from the Big Lie that me can become women , going to the other lies , that puberty blockers are harmless and reversible, and the lie to frighten parents that if you don’t agree to “ gender “ affirming” care “ “. ( child mutilation) your child will commit suicide. There is nothing that is true to any of the gender ideology. It is the most dangerous ideology since a well known dictator’s.

Expand full comment
dd's avatar

Do you remember the therapist's response to you? Because the moment you said that, they likely realized you understand the BS extortion going on..............

Expand full comment
Kimberly Holt's avatar

When I got this question from my daughter’s affirming therapist many years ago now I did the second to last suggestion. I asked what the difference was between a dead daughter and a dead son and how affirming was a going to treat her other issues? If she committed suicide as a result of one of those other issues going untreated how would this affirmation have helped? A dead kid is a dead kid.

The therapist sputtered. She was clearly not expecting any push back. It took us another few months to extract from her care. Going to her because she was touted as a gender specialist is probably my biggest regret in parenting.

Expand full comment
Kimberly Holt's avatar

Should add that at the time I didn’t know that the elevated suicide risk was BS. I did know that the elevated suicide risk from the other issues was very real though. I’m still furious that she not only tried to manipulate me, but in doing so she put my daughter at further risk and triangulated between us damaging our relationship. Anyone who suggests this isn’t happening isn’t paying attention

Expand full comment
Discrete Music's avatar

You should be able to sue them for extortion. It’s for blackmailing you into signing and paying.

“Trans” is big money. These people belong in prison.

Expand full comment
Jane Says's avatar

I was very thankful that we couldn’t get into see any type of therapist (insurance issues) back then when my daughter made her announcement. I sacrificed my sleep and own mental health desperately searching for answers for almost two years. The GC forums and podcasts saved my sanity. My kid is an adult now, no telling what she will choose in the future, but I’ve kept her from harm so far. Here’s to hoping the gender ideology madness is finally ending.

Expand full comment
BeadleBlog's avatar

Your mother instinct helped get your child out of there. It's tough to go against the "experts" touting the newest thing, especially when so many people are cheering it on. You protected your daughter.

Expand full comment
Matt Osborne's avatar

What type of social movement threatens suicide if they don't get what they want? The answer is a harmful, dangerous cult.

Expand full comment
Solon Aquila's avatar

The use of this live son/dead daughter phrase should be treated as criminal extortion.

Expand full comment
John Robert's avatar

Has any parent ever needed a suicide threat to consent to an emergency appendectomy or a course of Cipro for an infection? Courts have intervened in cases where a parent refused consent to a medically necessary blood transfusion on religious grounds, but I don't know how far that principle extends.

Expand full comment
Meg Burns's avatar

While the general argument here is cogent, I'm in doubt about the nominal premise: that is, this “rather have a dead daughter or a live son" business. Was there really a fad of doctors and therapists saying this? Is it still going on? Have you heard this in practice, literally? It seems to me there can't be much of a critical mass of youngsters for whom it would even be applicable.

On a related matter, the claims about suicide are based on fuzzy, dubious numbers. People glibly claim to have wanted to kill themselves without ever having made the slightest move in that direction. (Did you ever think of suicide in your teens? It's very easy to say yes.)

And that long-term Swedish study is doubtful in yet another way. It's not a controlled study, because a truly controlled study would be unethical and near-impossible to devise. Instead of comparing like with like, they are comparing long-term clinical patients with the general population. Moreover those are clinical patients in a public-healthcare environment, where it's very easy to obtain psychiatric therapy and meds, as well as treatments for a host of other conditions, including ones that are iatrogenic. So here we're comparing a population that's about 98% under psychiatric care, with all sorts of diagnoses and therapies, with a "general population" that has a much smaller treatment profile. We logically *should* expect a higher rate of mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric illnesses among the clinical population. It's tautological.

Expand full comment
Colin Wright's avatar

A large majority of detransitioners I've spoken to have told me their doctors posed that false dichotomy to their parents. It is quite prevalent.

Expand full comment
Gerda Ho's avatar

Disgusting lie among all the other lies!

Expand full comment
Meg Burns's avatar

I don't doubt the prevalence of those anecdotes, my inquiry was for substantiation.

Expand full comment
Sandra Pinches's avatar

Well thought out comment!

Here in Portland people generally seem to accept as an article of faith that kids who aren't permitted to transition will kill themselves. Most adults with whom I have discussed this subject have become very irate with me when I challenge this belief. They make huffy statements along the lines of, "I will not stop supporting and protecting children from suicide!!" (As if I were advocating lining the kids up for mass executions). I continue to be astonished at how readily people accept whatever they are told by "authorities," and how difficult it is to dislodge those beliefs once they are established.

Expand full comment
Solon Aquila's avatar

And they all also “know” that puberty blockers are reversible and that kids who get surgery lead happy lives.

All lies. All for money.

Expand full comment
Meg Burns's avatar

but is there evidence

Expand full comment
Sandra Pinches's avatar

Is there evidence for what?

Expand full comment
Meg Burns's avatar

My question above. We have an urban legend here that is dubious. Now, if it's coming from some AMA recommendation, that's one thing, but all we get are social media memes, spread mostly by people with obvious agenda.

Expand full comment
Sandra Pinches's avatar

Are you asking whether gender doctors actually told young patients' parents that medical transition is necessary to prevent suicide? A series of professional associations including the American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and others have issued statements that "gender affirmative care" is "medically necessary, life saving care." The idea that "trans gender" people have a 40% suicide rate without medical transition has also been repeated by certain gender doctors, I think including Jack Turban, but I don't have a reference.

Expand full comment
Meg Burns's avatar

My guess is that there can't be more than a dozen physicians with solid expertise in these things, so the question should really be whether any of them have ever made that remark. My guess is that no one has, and it's probably just a strawman accusation. But I'm open to additional information if and when it appears.

Expand full comment
stoicjedi's avatar

I know of at least 10 other parents in my local area who were told this the first time their child visited a "clinician" within 30 minutes. No joke.

Expand full comment
Margaret G's avatar

Rachel Levine, the transwoman who is Biden's assistant health secretary, has loudly proclaimed this "live son or dead daughter" argument as valid as he robustly promotes "gender-affirming care".

Expand full comment
Sandra Pinches's avatar

He is such a destructive man! And so is Biden for putting these disgusting activists in positions of power and influence.

Expand full comment
Worried Mum's avatar

Yes, it happened to me. By my son’s therapist in front of my son… literally. And to others in my support group for parents.

Expand full comment
Karen Lynch's avatar

I heard this from a friend whose daughter was transitioning about 8 years ago. I fear that as time goes on your question will be posed by many who have had little experience with this movement, and the fact that this emotional blackmail has been/was often used will be “memory holed.”

Expand full comment
Sandra Pinches's avatar

In the Swedish study, the rate of deaths ruled to be completed suicides among the post-transition group was higher than what would be expected even when other mental disorders were accounted for. There is the additional risk factor of the patients being mostly middle aged men, which is a population at high risk of suicide.

In the current population of gender clinic patients, there is a high enough rate of comorbid depression and other problems to account for the range of self-harm behaviors the same patients engage in, according to what some observers have said, but we need a lot more formal study on that subject. It is not clear that people who are admitted to gender clinics have a condition called "transgender," let alone that this condition is a mental disorder, or one that has suicidality as a typical complication.

Expand full comment
Christine Janis's avatar

The first time I ever heard that phrase was from a relative about their child

Expand full comment
Christopher Moss's avatar

Yet we do now have large studies showing the "transition or die by suicide" line is a myth.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38367979/

"Conclusions: Clinical gender dysphoria does not appear to be predictive of all-cause nor suicide mortality when psychiatric treatment history is accounted for. "

and

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10508-022-02287-7.pdf

"Conclusion: The proportion of individual patients who died by suicide was 0.03%, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the proportion of transgender adolescents who report attempting suicide when surveyed."

It is plain that we have taken an utterly irresponsible approach to these kids by willfully ignoring their psychiatric co-morbidities. Instead of asking why they want to transition, we have subjected them to experimental hormonal and surgical mutilations, adding sterility and sexual dysfunction to their woes. This is human vivisection on a grand scale, and it is hard not to notice that the majority of these kids were likely to have grown up to become happy gays. I thought we weren't supposed to be conducting conversion therapy?

Expand full comment
Karen Lynch's avatar

Thanks for posting!

Expand full comment
Gary Weglarz's avatar

As a retired LCSW (retired 2014 out of Alaska) I missed the madness you and other fellow social workers are dealing with today - both within the profession and within our professional social work organizations. I applaud your courage Pamela in standing up for both ethical analysis and practice. I'm appalled, and I must say it seems almost surreal at some level to see how many of the professional licensing bodies and professional organizations within the various "helping professions" have seamlessly embraced affirmation only thinking and practice - throwing rationality, critical thinking and ethics to the wind. Thank you for your work.

Expand full comment
John Robert's avatar

The genius move by the radical trans ideologues was to make the issue a matter of "social justice", not medicine. I have to suspect that's what recruited so many students and young professionals to The Cause. I know the half-baked notion played a major part in seducing gays and lesbians to acquiesce in the parasitic attachment of the T to the LGB abbreviation, not to mention all the alphabet soup now strung along at the end and with all the political controversies as to what should be appended. What on earth is the A for "asexual" doing there? Or the I for "intersex" (now, "disorders of sexual development")? (Are we still allowed to say anything is a "disorder" anymore, or would that make someone "experiencing" the condition feel "unsafe"?) Why is there still no entry for S&M, for example? But I'm reluctant to mention it publicly for fear the suggestion would be taken seriously.

Expand full comment
Gary Weglarz's avatar

I quite agree John. And then there is the whole issue of the top-down imposition of this madness through all the Western institutional structures quite simultaneously. Jennifer Bilek's work uncovering the massive funding of NGO's and other entities by a cadre of billionaire trans-humanists - for the express purpose of pushing transgender-ideology - is another important puzzle piece. After having spent a 40 year career as a social worker it is rather strange to have to reflect on the fact that were I still employed in the social work field today - I'd be drummed out of the profession in short order - branded as a heretic and trans-phobic bigot for the Orwellian thought crime of believing the material reality that biological sex "exists."

Expand full comment
GenCrit in N. California's avatar

Gary, I hope that, as one of the clinicians who recognizes this dishonest ideology for what it us, who is in the relatively safe position of apparently being retired, I truly hope that you are or will be speaking out about it, since so many others in your former field don't have that safety, and all of us gen-crits need everyone, including every past or present clinician, to speak out and help put the brakes on this. All of it, so the fewest possible people are irreversibly harmed.

Expand full comment
GenCrit in N. California's avatar

*is, not us

Expand full comment
John Robert's avatar

Here's a couple of articles that name names of some of the fat cats funding the trans lobby. What's really upsetting is how some advocacy organizations formerly known for their pro-gay stance now give every appearance of having been bought off, to support the most radical elements of the trans movement.

https://open.substack.com/pub/geraldposner/p/the-transgender-money-pipeline?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7x0yn

https://www.justthefacts.media/p/the-frankenstein-files

Expand full comment
Sandra Pinches's avatar

S&M is being taught in some public schools now, as part of sex ed.

Expand full comment
John Robert's avatar

Satire or sarcasm is getting impossible. There's just too big a chance it will be taken literally. And seriously.

Expand full comment
Sandra Pinches's avatar

The woke cultists resemble the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. No sense of humor at all.

Expand full comment
GenCrit in N. California's avatar

Agreed, however I'd like to add that LGBs, or at least the Gs, solicited the help of "trans"-identified people to help their fight against AIDS, and then for lesbian and gay marriage. It was literally promised by LGB orgs that if the Ts helped them win marriage rights, the LGBs would help with T rights.

But now some LGB activists are re-writing that history and claiming that Ts forced themselves on or took over LGB groups, pretending LGB orgs have been victims of T activists all along. That just wasn't the case. LGB groups solicited the help of Ts, and promised to help Ts in return. Now Ts have indeed overtaken everything in LGBTQ-etc. orgs, and some LGBs are complaining about it; but, honestly, those LGB orgs brought it on themselves. And now all of us LGBs are suffering for it.

I keep bringing this up everywhere because it's important to be accurate about our history, and not claim a victimhood narrative that doesn't tell the accurate story.

This, in part so we don't repeat that history. Which is exactly what LGBTQ orgs are doing by endlessly helping Ts.

Expand full comment
Solon Aquila's avatar

In the USA, 40% of kids appearing at the McGender clinics are already in treatment for at least one mental illness, taking handfuls of pills. But all this is ignored if that morning they ran into some “trans” activist and got talked into going to a clinic.

They get their first hormones that same day.

Expand full comment
Ted's avatar

As an LCSW, you are already well aware that emotional blackmail is a baseline norm and always has been. Counterproductive and maladaptive, to be sure, but ubiquitous.

What is different now, is that so-called "licensed professionals" are using emotional blackmail as a coercive mechanism and are actively coaching the dysmorphic in its use as a manipulative technique.

I'd very much like your thoughts on whether the current zeitgeist now renders emotional blackmail adaptive.

"Maladaptive" has meaning beyond a simple label. The role of professionals is to assist individuals with adaptation to whatever milieu they operate within. Adaptive learning and behavior is contextual, with adaptive methodology varying according to environment. Thus, what selects for adaptation to a violent urban environment may be maladaptive in high-trust environs. I offer levels of hypervigilance as a case in point.

Still, a therapist may proffer iconoclasm as adaptive under one set of circumstances, and submission to group standards in another, both recommendations made to the same client.

Has the emotional and physical environment metastasized to a point where emotional blackmail is now an adaptive response to environmental stimuli?

Expand full comment
for the kids's avatar

Yes there were people saying this, see Helen Lewis's recent critique in the Atlantic of Andrea Long Chu's bizarre article.

There were also articles in the NYT intimating this, eg starting with:"Early in my medical training, I read a landmark case study about a 12-year-old boy who wrote a suicide note to his mother saying he would rather die than go through puberty. ...." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/opinion/transgender-children-medical-bills.html

Note that the recent Finnish study by Ruuska et Al (2024) found the suicide rate to be small (but it's still terrible) and correlated with comorbidities rather than other things like getting medical treatment.

Expand full comment
Kathleen's avatar

It was a caregiver in a behavioral treatment center. She said nothing. I don’t think she expected my response. I can add that when I said I was taking my daughter home, I got pushback and they delayed the discharge by having a patient advocate try to persuade me to get with the program.

Expand full comment
DIANE M PERRY's avatar

Gender Affirming surgery is Elephantoplasty:

https://youtu.be/SnDm3HaCQeg

Expand full comment
Solon Aquila's avatar

Glenn Beck? No thanks.

Expand full comment
Eugine Nier's avatar

Had more people taken him seriously earlier, we wouldn't be in this mess now.

Expand full comment
John Murphy's avatar

Smart answer... I hate the messenger so I will not accept facts and truth.... smh

Expand full comment
Discrete Music's avatar

When I think of Glenn Beck, “facts and truth” aren’t words that enter my mind. Some has-been right-wing shock-jock?

You ho ahead, click, read, and nod. I’m gonna pass.

Shake your head all you like.

Expand full comment
GenCrit in N. California's avatar

I make a point to listen to and read from sources from across the ideological spectrum. At least I then know what they're saying, and usually get some useful information or arguments out of it: theirs or mine. Or info worth fact checking. Then no one can say I haven't heard and considered all points of view.

Expand full comment
GenCrit in N. California's avatar

And I can continue to tell people, truthfully, that I read from sources from across the ideological spectrum.

Expand full comment