Dying Daughters, Dying Sons

The transanity cult and its victims

Welcome to my new subscribers. If you recently found me through Rod Dreher’s plug of my last essay, “All the Single Ladies,” thanks for reading! That piece and others are free, but I write a lot of paid pieces as well. Annual subscriptions are just $40/year, which is a much better value than $5/mo! This post is going to be paywalled, so that my paid readers can enjoy some well-deserved exclusive content after an unexpected, partly accidental dry patch. (Including a free piece meant to be exclusive that went wide. Oops.) And to all those paid readers, thanks so much, and forgive me. It’s been a full and challenging summer, and my subscriber stats have accordingly taken a dip. To try and make it up, the other day I went through my list of monthly subscribers and handed out some free 30-day extensions. Meanwhile, I’ve got more paid pieces in the works to roll out in the next couple weeks. Thanks for sticking with me, everyone!

This will be a heavy post with a focus on suicide. September is Suicide Prevention Month, so I’ll link a couple other things I’ve done on the topic. First, free to all readers, this piece is dedicated to my friend Mike Adams, who took his own life several years ago. Then, for paid subscribers, a more general reflection on suicide and depression.

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“Would you rather have a living daughter or a dead son?” “Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?”

In a former world, this question would be recognized as gaslighting. But in the brave new world, it’s standard medical practice.

Luka Hein remembers medical professionals asking her parents that question, when she was a mentally ill teenager being led down the garden path to gender transition. As a child of divorce and a victim of cyber-abuse, she was wounded, traumatized, and miserable in her female body. She just wanted the pain to stop.

Instead of making it stop, her doctors prescribed more pain.

It came in vials, full of testosterone. Luka was told that this would give her male puberty. She would grow a beard, her voice would deepen naturally, and she would “grow” male genitalia. Meanwhile her doctors would give her a double mastectomy. She was 16 years old.

In England, Ritchie Herron was given similar but opposite promises as a disturbed young man in his 20s. When he sought help for his mental illness, it took only two 30-minute meetings for him to be set on the road that led to vaginoplasty. As he gradually came out of the fog of pain-killers, his first lucid thought was “Oh God, what have I done?”

Eventually Ritchie decided to sue the people who made him those promises. Recently, Luka announced that she was doing the same. They join a small but growing army of men and women willing to expose their pain to the world for the sake of the truth. They speak not only for themselves, but for the many others like them who are unable to speak.

But why is their fight so lonely? Why are people still so afraid to stand up with them? To a great extent, I think it goes back to that poisonous question: “Living daughter or dead son?” “Living son or dead daughter?” “Your child: dead or alive?”