Transgender Pain for Mother and Son

As we read about a mother and son in Detroit seeking to “transition” to a “father” and “daughter” – and apart from politics – what is the human story underneath?

In terms of the “transgender” question, this is just the new word for cross-dressing, an update to the old word, transvestite. But now add to it hormone manipulation ...

In ministry in Boston many years ago, I learned the reality that men (or boys) who dress as women do so in order to become their own “women,” wanting the feminine but not being able – for various reasons – to trust or know how to relate to real women. And this is overwhelmingly in the absence of a loving and present father who knows how to treat the boy’s mother.

Which brings us to the mother in this equation. Three lesbians at Harvard, with whom I was studying in the 1980s, told me that every lesbian they knew had been sexually, physically and/or emotionally abused in their youth by some man, usually a step-father, live-in boyfriend, some other older male in the immediate or extended family, or outside of it, but quite rarely the biological father himself. The same reality is found in the male homosexual world, but with different dynamics at play.

When the biological father chooses to absent himself, this is the prior, and indeed, the deepest trauma and rejection. All the sufferings of those whom he abandons find their source in what precedes and leads to his departure.

The testimony of these Harvard women is anecdotal as it is dynamic, and over the years I have discovered how it is very prevalent. These violated girls and young women cannot later trust men, and in their midst, those who seek to become “trans” are seeking to become their own “men” as a means by to protect themselves from abusive men. This is also true for heterosexual women who identify with the “GLBTQ” world, who for their own and oftentimes similar reasons, seek a sense of safety in becoming their own “men.”

Thus, here, to what extent are the divorced mother and her son complementary sufferers? What might Dad have wrought, he who, in this case, is “okay” with their “transgendering?” The “transgendered” mother now calls herself the “second father” to the “transgendered” boy who calls himself a “girl.” Ontology reversed.