Essential Kids bills itself as a site that is “all about providing inspiration and ideas for you to be the best parent you can be. Together with sister site Essential Baby, we’re part of Australia’s largest parenting community, connecting real mums and dads all over the country.” It racks up roughly 500,000 pageviews per month and is apparently quite popular, the way many of these sorts of sites are.
Like many other sites oriented towards advising parents, Essential Kids has signed on to the LGBT agenda. This is not particularly surprising—it has become so difficult for parents who do not want to sign off on sex changes for their children to get information that they have been kicked out of parents’ groups and are often forced to meet in secret. But this headline, published by Essential Kids earlier this month, is truly something else: “My 15-year-old transgender son is going through menopause – and I’m so proud of him.”
The article, which features a photograph of a beaming mother with her teenager, is a glimpse into a strange world that has become mainstream and normalized in just a few years:
My 15-year-old son started feeling nauseous and “a bit off” a couple of weeks ago. He skipped dinner and headed to bed early, but the next morning he still wasn’t himself. The nausea had lifted but it was replaced with sweats and hot flashes. It couldn’t have been something he ate because we’d all been eating the same food, and it would be bizarre if he’d caught anything because my house has been on a pretty strict lockdown for weeks, due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It was when we started googling the symptoms that the penny dropped: my son was going through menopause.
Read that sentence again, and slowly. Things have gotten so insane so quickly that we are almost becoming used to it. This mother means that her “son”—a biological girl identifying as a boy—is essentially going through menopause due to the drugs that have been prescribed by a gender clinic:
Children younger than 16 aren’t legally able to start medically transitioning, but they can take puberty blockers – drugs that temporarily stop puberty in its tracks. After years of living as a boy, my son was ready to take this step, until he can start taking testosterone when he turns 16.
The drug is administered via a needle that looks big enough to sedate a horse, and it was watching my usually needle-phobic son calmly accepting his first injection a few weeks ago with barely a wince that gave me a new appreciation for how deeply he is ready for his transition to progress. 8
For the first week, he didn’t feel any different. Once we remembered to go back and read the literature, we realised that was the time his body was adjusting to the drug Lucrin, which inhibits the body’s ability to make oestrogen. Once that oestrogen tide goes out, that’s when a short and sharp menopause can hit. Apart from that, the only side effect is potential bone brittleness from a loss of calcium, so we’re being vigilant about ensuring he’s keeping up his vitamins.
For my son, those menopausal symptoms lasted only about a week. He continued to feel physically a bit off, but emotionally he was elated because he knew that the change he’s been waiting for was finally occurring.
And what is the point of publishing this story publicly? Simple. This mother—and the team over at Essential Kids—wants you to know that if you do not enthusiastically pursue the same “treatments” for your son or daughter should he or she request them, then you are denying your child their happiness:
I see a lot of debate in the public domain about whether kids should have all of these choices about their gender, and what it’s doing to them, but I can only comment on my own child and his experience. Where he was once depressed, disengaged and – as doctors put it – it “ambivalent about living”, he is now happy, comfortable in his own skin, and optimistic about his future.
Why would anyone want to deny him that?
As a parent, it’s been a massive adjustment from having a pony-loving, curly-haired daughter to the masculine young man lives in my house and towers over me. But what I know about parenting is that I’m just the custodian to these children living in my home. I’m here to love them and do what I can to help them to grow into whoever they know themselves to be.
Because what the world needs is more people who are truly comfortable being themselves – and who accept and celebrate others for doing the same.
Now that he’s been through those symptoms once, my son won’t have to endure them again. He’ll have quarterly injections that will top up the puberty blockers until he’s old enough to start on testosterone – then that’s when the real changes will start to take place.
We can’t wait.
Maybe this mother’s child will not be one of the many who realize that they made the wrong decision and that “transition” did not bring them happiness or peace of mind. After all, the changes this teenager is currently undergoing will be permanent—decisions that are being made right now will determine, for example, whether or not she ever bears biological children. But maybe this child will be another one of those who find themselves destroyed by gender ideology with the permission and encouragement of her parents. Maybe, as one heartbroken “de-transitioner” said recently, she will also come to believe that “those surgeons should be in prison.”
