I Was A 14-Year-Old Trans Casualty Before I Realized My Parents Were Right All Along

I was put on testosterone and underwent a double mastectomy when I was just 14 years old in order to affirm my identity as a “transgender boy.” By the age of 17, I had been off of hormones for about 6 months and was hiding the fact that I had been wearing prosthetic breasts to school from my mother.

I was beginning to grapple with a reality I wasn’t ready to admit, even to myself: I wanted my healthy breasts back.

Then, one day, my mother found them in my backpack.

She confronted me. Instead of opening up, I immediately became defensive. I didn’t want to talk about it. I certainly didn’t want to admit that the caution that my parents had initially expressed, which I and the therapists I had been seeing perceived as non-affirmation and bigotry, might have been justified.

Now, years later, I understand why that conversation was so difficult. Conversations about private body parts are almost always embarrassing to discuss with your parents. But what I now understand is that I had spent much of my adolescence immersed in an ideology that taught me to see my parents’ questions not as expressions of love, but as acts of betrayal.

Much of the so-called trans rights movement views cautious parents as enemies, rather than as the people who care more than anyone else about protecting their children. Few stories illustrate the devastating consequences of this reality more clearly than that of Maddie Durbin and her family.

A new Independent Women’s Features documentary tells the story of Maddie and her father, Liam, who were estranged for six years after gender ideology drove a wedge through their family.

Maddie became immersed in LGBT activism as a teenager and later entered a highly affirming community at college while privately struggling with depression, chronic pain, isolation, and other unresolved issues.

When her parents tried to slow her transition — or at least talk about it on a deeper level — Maddie didn’t see older and wiser parents who loved her deeply. She saw hateful people standing in her way. She has since admitted that when they showed her medical research and stories from detransitioners, she dismissed the information without even looking at it because she had been taught to consider it “transphobic and hateful.”

Eventually, she cut her parents off completely.

While I never cut off my family, I recognize the underlying belief as a dangerous pattern that I also encountered in LGBTQ+ communities.

The culture surrounding gender ideology can be intensely black and white. In my experience, you either affirmed someone’s gender identity, or you didn’t. People who affirmed you were safe and good. People who questioned you — even people who loved you — were evil.

It creates an almost cult-like us-versus-them mentality. And because parents are so close to children, they all too often become the easiest “them.”

I “came out” to my parents in November 2016. Their resistance and caution lasted only a short time. Before I even turned 13, I was seeing an affirming therapist. That same therapist told my parents the tagline that is all-too-familiar — “would you rather have a dead daughter or a living transgender son?” My parents reluctantly went along with my transition, if not out of fear, then out of coercion.

That initial hesitation caused enormous tension between my newfound ideology and my parents.

I resented them for years because of it. I believed that if they had accepted my identity sooner, perhaps I could have avoided more female puberty. Even after they conformed, I and those around me remembered that they had once questioned me.

Maddie’s parents took a different path, but the dynamic was remarkably similar.

Her father remembers her sounding “rehearsed and mechanical,” repeating that if her parents wouldn’t accept her identity, she would have to remove them from her life. Maddie ultimately changed her phone number, left college, and severed contact. Her father wouldn’t hear from his daughter for six years.

While Maddie wasn’t a teenager, this behavior begins as soon as they lure you in.

Teenagers naturally pull away from their parents. They become embarrassed or defiant. They feel misunderstood. They want independence. Topics involving their changing bodies can carry enormous amounts of shame and secrecy.

Politics widened that already growing gap in my family. I was a leftist, while my parents were more centrist. I was convinced that they simply weren’t “woke” enough to understand me.

Then the strict us-vs-them mentality of gender ideology coached me into viewing them as the enemy.   In my mind, I wasn’t just disagreeing with my mom and dad. I believed that they were against me, even after they had agreed to my transition.

That changes how a child interprets parental love. It also makes it much harder to go back when doubts begin.

Maddie eventually did. Nearly six years after leaving, she called her father and told him she wanted to be part of the family again. Liam recalls crying so hard while driving when she called that he could barely see the road. His daughter had spent years believing he was standing against her. He says he had spent those same years wanting nothing more than to get his daughter back.

I understand my own parents differently now, too.

The house of cards begins to collapse once the worldview you thought was so infallible starts to unravel.

Their questions weren’t hatred or rejection. They came from a place of love, realizing that the weight of such an enormous decision should never be placed on someone who doesn’t know who they are yet.

Maddie lost six years with her family before she could see that same truth. No parent should ever have to choose between asking difficult questions and keeping their child in their life.

A movement that claims to protect vulnerable children should never require those children to distrust the people who love them enough to ask whether something they desperately want today might hurt them for the rest of their lives.

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Claire Abernathy is an Independent Women ambassador and detransitioner. Claire and her mother’s story was told together for the first time through Independent Women’s Features’ “Identity Crisis” series.