"I have over 200 death threats/hate messages saying that your daughter tried to kill herself because of you, you should just kill yourself instead."

While I’ve spoken to many parents whose children have been caught up in the ongoing transgender social contagion running rampant through the Western world and Anglosphere, this was the first time I’ve spoken to an actual teenaged desister. It was an illuminating talk.

Anna identified as transgender in the eighth grade along with a cluster of four other girls from school and art club. She was also active under a pseudonym in online trans communities where gender confused children interact with adults that induct and entrench children in transgender identities. She eventually realized that of course she is not a boy and of course she is a girl — how could it be otherwise? — while in group therapy at the mental hospital where she was placed after her suicide attempt.

There she observed that most of the other depressed and suicidal girls were also identifying as trans for a cluster of reasons adjacent to her own, though many were dealing with the legacy of traumas far more disturbing than any she had herself encountered. She also observed that the hospital, along with most of the American medical establishment, had made it a policy to treat these complex mental health cases primarily by affirming those caught up in a social contagion in their transgender identification — treating transgender affirmation as the cure-all for a range of psychiatric symptoms rooted in self-hatred and trauma that the girls had come to believe it could be — and abdicating their own professional judgment in favor of activist dogmas, and placing troubled kids on a fast-track to a lifetime spent on a medical leash.

This interview is part of a series of interviews on the transgender social contagion that will be woven into a series of edited videos and feature-length essays; this one will have a shorter version posted to YouTube and may get a feature length prose rendition all to itself. Paid subscribers have access to the full transcript and video of all these encounters, which, for those with the time, exert an interest in their raw and unmediated form distinct from the finished product. They also help to enable the completion of the final work. The goal is to create writing of such compelling power that it will shatter the embargo constructed around this issue by partisan political derangement and activist capture — perhaps a Quixotic goal, but one that is worth pursuing, hopefully with your aid.

Anna

I was really curious about all these identities because I had no idea that it was possible to be something else, be whatever identity you wanted. I don't remember interacting with a lot of adults. It was mostly kids my age and slightly older teens.

Brette 

There were a handful adults in there. I saw all the messages.

Wesley

How do you know they're adults?

Brette 

You click on their profiles, and they were adult dudes. I'm positive. There were at least five in there. I remember one dude sent you a dick pic.

Anna

Oh, there was that dude.