Gender Affirming Nightmare

A fathers dream transitioned by ideology

By Shannon Douglas Boschy

This article was originally published on June 18, 2023 by True North under the title OP-ED: My daughter transitioned. Here’s why I’m speaking out

On the sunny solstice afternoon of 2021, my eighteen-year-old daughter called me.  She seemed hurried, nervous, “Dad, I just wanted to let you know I’ve started HRT!”  

The words tumbled from her mouth. The floor became unsteady beneath me. I had hoped it was a phase.  A fad.  I had told myself she’d sort herself out through the vicissitudes of teenage girlhood; that changing names and pronouns, experiments with clothes and testy attitudes were only symptoms of difficult, awkward adolescence.  

It wasn’t as ubiquitous even then as now to hear from a friend, a relative, a colleague that a child or teen in their social orbit had changed pronouns or identified as transgender.  It wasn’t as common to hear a parent of tweens remark that they were surprised by the number of their children’s friends who had changed their names.  Nine of a dozen kids in a Dungeons and Dragons group; twelve of fourteen in a school arts program.  One Ottawa Public School Board teacher recently bragged on twitter that seven of her thirty students in her grade 5-6 class had confided in her about their gender identities.  In my family, my niece, now in her early twenties, reverted to identifying as a girl after some years, but her two half-siblings both changed their sex-identification in the meantime and started hormones.  My cousin’s child, non-binary.  New name, clothes, and hair.        

My daughter’s high school graduation ceremony had been just a few days before the call, following a mostly virtual year. Kids and their families paraded through the gym, one at a time. Applause and cheers echoed hollow from the gym walls.  I attended as an alien, having been mostly cut out of my child’s life years prior by what I have come to understand as official institutional policies that assume by default that certain parents are unsafe to children.  I was one of them. 

I cannot possibly convey how hard it is to share this with readers and the frightening implications of doing it.  I believe the price I will pay serves a greater good because loving parents across the country are paralyzed, intimidated into silence, threatened with repercussions for speaking up, for speaking the truth about what’s happening with gender and schools.  I lay bare my family struggles, my daughter’s long battle with mental health issues, with self-harming, with body image, with depression and anxiety, and the challenges she faced growing up, along with my own grief.  Writing this may well destroy any possibility of a future relationship with my estranged daughter and with my beloved son as well, but gender has destroyed my family already and so for the greater good, for those who cannot speak, I must. 

Three years before she called to tell me she was taking testosterone my daughter, then fifteen, told me that she couldn’t live with me anymore and was going to live with her mother full-time after a decade of shared custody.  She said she couldn’t be her true self, that she couldn’t live up to the expectations I had imposed on her, and that she felt unsafe.  I didn’t understand these words at the time, but today I do, as the vocabulary of an ideology that believes human beings, unto even toddlers, can realize an innate gender identity different from their biological sex.  An ideology now entrenched in public policy and laws in Canada and in developed countries around the world.  It seems to have come, like the call that sunny afternoon, out of nowhere, but it has consumed the lives of hundreds of thousands of families with its divisive, aggressive defense of its radical beliefs.    

Were it as simple as an expansion of the acceptance of personal liberty and expression, I’d be celebrating, but the wholesale medicalization of vulnerable children with drugs and surgeries that will render them infertile and, in many cases, will undermine their capacity for fulfillment in intimacy as adults, is a modern atrocity and I, indeed WE must speak and condemn it despite any social costs.  

I could write at length about the lack of science and the cultish sloganeering meted upon the vulnerable. “Gender Affirming Care saves lives!”  False promises of happiness with the discovery of “your True Self.”

Lies.  

Others better than me can tell you about the British Medical Journal report this year, about the scathing report condemning the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, about the evidentiary reviews leading to snowballing radical course-correction rolling from Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the UK through the highly politicized domain of Florida and the United States.  

I am unsafe for pointing to this.  For asking for evidence.  For referring to studies.  

My daughter estranged herself the day I asked if she understood the risks of hormones versus the benefits.  I asked if she understood that she would lose her beautiful hair, that her singing voice that had left me puddled with fatherly adoration since the first sounds she intoned upon this world, would be lost.  I asked if she understood that testosterone would lead to a hysterectomy in a few short years, to lifelong shots and significantly elevated risk of cancers.  I asked only as any loving dad.  

It was the day she fully embraced the narrative from the gender zealots, that any question of her choices meant I hated her, that anything but affirmation meant I denied her existence.  That I was participating in the trans genocide.  She turned on me.  On my desk now, the documentation to apply for a peace bond, the Canadian equivalent of a restraining order, because of the frightening threats that followed, uncharacteristic of her, likely from the massive doses of testosterone, the liquid rage she is injecting. 

It was the day gender ideology won against my family.  

To loving parents and grandparents, take heed.  Schools across Canada have explicit policies to keep gender transitions secret from parents.  They are mandated under the rubric of so-called human rights to divide child from parent, to assume that questions based in evidence, research, and science make a child “unsafe.”  They are empowered to radically act.  In BC, Child and Family Services have the authority to remove a child from parental custody for failing to sufficiently affirm a child’s stated gender identity.  Federal law, Bill C-4, passed late in 2021, makes it a punishable crime for anyone to question a child’s gender confusion.  

Two years ago, this was unheard of.  It was kept a secret at school.  Two years ago, most of us never questioned the basis of nature itself, that humans come in two sexes.  Two years ago, I was making summer cocktails for friends at a cottage when the phone rang.  

Shannon Boschy

Analyst, Former Ottawa School Trustee Candidate, 

A loving dad

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Why does Social Justice Create Injustice?

BREAKING NEWS: James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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