Shattered mothers are raising the alarm about how transgender ideology is ravaging their troubled teenage and young adult sons who are caught in the jaws of a gender identity crisis.  . . .

Nine mothers whom The Christian Post interviewed in February spoke on condition of anonymity, many out of fear that if their identities are revealed state social services agencies might remove their children from their custody.  . . .

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Many of their sons are highly intelligent and academically gifted, while others are on the autism spectrum or have mental health challenges like ADHD.

The politically and religiously diverse group of mothers, who hail from everywhere in between the deep-blue San Francisco Bay area to the ruby-red deep South, stress that all they’re trying to do is help their sons overcome their distress.  . . .

During the last few years, they have, through extensive effort, managed to find each other. Over 75 mothers are now in this group. . . .

Some of the mothers have been actively involved in protesting outside of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, home to one of the largest pediatric gender clinics in the nation.  . . .

Within the past decade across the West, the number of gender dysphoric teenage girls has skyrocketed.

In the United Kingdom, it has been documented that there was a nearly 4,000-fold increase in girls being referred to gender identity services in 10 years. Until recently, the vanishingly rare condition known as gender dysphoria was seen predominantly in young boys. Now, teen girls are the predominant demographic, a phenomenon that journalist Abigail Shrier explored in her book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which was released last summer.  . . .

And major medical institutions are backing the use of cross-sex hormones in trans-identified males, despite serious risks.

Listed on the Mayo Clinic’s website regarding feminizing hormones are the following potential repercussions: infertility; deep vein thrombosis; pulmonary embolisms; high triglycerides, a type of fat (lipid) in one’s blood; weight gain; high potassium (hyperkalemia); high blood pressure (hypertension); Type 2 diabetes; cardiovascular disease; excessive prolactin in your blood (hyperprolactinemia); nipple discharge; and strokes.

Danae Johnson

Approximately three years ago, Danae Johnson started to notice that her then-14-year-old son, Jeremy, a freshman in high school at the time, had some troubling text messages and pictures on his phone of kids who were dressed as the opposite sex.

At a mother-son dinner, he announced that he was transgender. . . .

Johnson explained to CP that in the Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., where they live, he’s lived two different lives. He portrayed himself as a girl on social media and communicated that it was a done deal, that he would transition. But he would still be the boy he always has been at home and continued to play soccer with certain boys he had known for many years.

When he suggested he explore taking hormones, Johnson and her husband refused.

In recent years, he has been diagnosed with anxiety and severe depression, which he attributes to living as a boy when he thinks he should be a girl.  . . .

He consistently makes good grades, is in all honors classes and makes the honor roll. But being transgender meant he got to go from being bullied and struggling to popular. Female schoolmates have been particularly encouraging him in this new identity.

Johnson has lived with this, struggling in virtual silence, telling no one other than her husband. Her brother, whom she considers her best friend other than her husband, was the first to find out after three years. . . .

Some months after he started identifying as transgender, he began threatening suicide. On one such occasion, a panic-stricken Ashley told her mom that her brother was going to take his own life as he had taken a knife blade to the basement.  . . .

Sure enough, he did it again later that spring. Ashley came up from the basement in tears, afraid for her brother as he was wielding a knife, making her think he was about to end his life.

Johnson took him to the hospital immediately to get him evaluated. On the way there, Jeremy tried to make it seem like he was kidding. . . .

Johnson is “100% convinced” the bullying drove him into the gender identity madness. They removed him from that school and put him in a local Catholic school where the bullying ceased. Yet despite the improved environment, the trans identity continued to bring him attention, so he maintained it. . . .

Now 17, Jeremy will be 18, a legal adult, in September. He hopes to transition once he goes to university. Johnson and her husband have both said they will not support him financially if he pursues that path, no matter which college he chooses to attend. But she fears that because he is so intelligent, he will still be able to figure out a way to do it anyway. He plans to leave their home this summer. . . .

Paulina Hinson

Paulina Hinson from the Las Vegas metro area has a son, Kevin, who identifies as transgender and a lesbian. Nearly two years ago, Kevin made a surprise announcement when he was 15 that he had gender dysphoria, even though he never showed any signs of such confusion.

Hinson said her son had been thinking about it and then started going online. He expressed his desire to take hormone blockers and begin a medicalized gender transition as soon as possible.  . .

At first, Hinson thought it was a phase that would not last long and that he was confusing some of his mental health issues with gender issues. In elementary school, he was evaluated after some recurring patterns of behavioral problems. But the professionals could not give a formal diagnosis other than ADHD.  . . .

Because Hinson realized the increasing ideological capture of the medical field with gender ideology, she feared taking her son to the doctor to explore further what might be ailing him. After his self-diagnosis, he sank into a deep depression and distress.

Though Kevin has a girlfriend, he believes he is transgender. So he also calls himself a lesbian.  . . .

Asserting biological facts has not broken his resolve, though Hinson continues to plant seeds of truth, hoping it will sink in somehow.

Kevin has said that when he turns 18, which is approximately 18 months away, he will go to Planned Parenthood — which is now one of the leading providers of “gender-affirming” services — to obtain cross-sex hormones.  . . .

Adding to her distress, Kevin is her only child, and it took years for her to become pregnant after suffering from a miscarriage.  . . .

As far as she knows, she and her husband are the only voices in their son’s life that do not agree with his beliefs about his identity. She hopes that because he has vocal dissenters in his life who he knows love him, it might enough for him to reconsider his plans.  . . .

“Children are being groomed online by adults,” she said when asked what the public at large misunderstands about the transgender movement. Hinson noted that the youth who are same-sex attracted or on the autism spectrum are especially vulnerable because they always felt there was something different or wrong about them.

“The answer that these kids are getting is that there is something wrong with them [their body] and that the solution is that they are trans,” Hinson explained.

“They’re being told a lie … The medical industry is devouring and grooming our boys to be medicalized for life.”

Hinson said she often hears in the parents’ group about how young girls are pushing and encouraging boys into a trans identity. The boys become like “their doll” to dress up, play with and have fun.  . . .

Before her son came out as trans, she recalled watching an episode of Bill Maher where Debra Soh, author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society, was a guest. . . .

She subsequently stumbled upon a podcast where Soh was a guest. Soh referenced a parent group. Hinson found the name of the group in the comments section and looked it up. One thing led to another, and she was soon connected to other mothers in similar situations. She said she was grateful to know she was not alone.  . . .

She recalled reading about Communist Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong’s rulership and how under his reign, children were instructed to turn on their parents and rupture the family structure.

“I feel like that’s what’s happening. It used to be a world where the parents had control. But it’s all taken away from us because our kid can complain to the school, and social services would be called because we’re not affirming them in this lie. We could lose custody. That’s a really scary, scary world we’re in.” . . .

Lisa McCoy

It is an especially scary world for Lisa McCoy, a Pittsburgh-area mother of two, a son and a daughter.

A few of her daughters’ friends had undergone some degree of gender-transition — three or four kids in every grade at her high school.

One of her daughter’s friends, a 15-year-old girl, has already preserved her gametes if she wants to have biological children later, freezing her eggs in a storage facility due to the effects of the hormonal agents she is now ingesting.  . . .

Before the COVID-19 pandemic walloped the world, the McCoys were shocked to learn that their 14-year old son, Michael, started identifying as transgender.  . . .

In the fall of 2019, her son told her on the way home from a party where he had been hanging out with friends from school that he was “bi.” By March, he wanted her to buy a dress for him to wear to a school event. But he insisted he was not a girl. He just wanted to goof around with his friends. The event got canceled due to COVID. However, a few days later, he sent McCoy a text message that read, “I am a girl, and my name is Melissa, but don’t tell anyone else yet.”

Michael has ADHD and “gets extreme” about things and latches on to them with intensity. If he wants to learn something, he will learn everything he can about it and exhibit confidence that it is a part of his identity.

Weeks before this, Michael struggled with schoolwork, was battling depression and anxiety, and met with a counselor. McCoy thought the text message was just a bizarre episode of his struggles and didn’t take it seriously. Later that night, when she called him by his given name and not his chosen female name, he exploded.  . . .

Many mornings he would come downstairs and say things like, “You’re going to kick me out of the house when I’m 16 because that’s what anti-trans parents do,” or “I’m going to commit suicide because most of us do.”

She soon instituted a phone ban at a specific time of night but did not want to remove him entirely from engaging with his friends. She later discovered that several of his friends were teaching him how to apply makeup. This was not mere silly goofing around but friends affirming him as the opposite sex, she said.

Several weeks ago, McCoy recounted that she made a mistake she regrets. She happened to mention during a discussion with the school psychologist that he was struggling with gender issues.

“So the school put a plan in place that the counselor will meet with him every week to help him transition,” she said.  . . .

“We have a kid who is confused, and the world is trying to say ‘this is who you are.’”

Now 14, Michael is a late-bloomer, having only recently begun a growth spurt and starting to sprout facial hair.

McCoy told her son from the beginning that they would not take part in medicalized gender transition because she considers that child abuse . . .

Soon after her son came out as trans, she connected with a 31-year-old male who has undergone a gender-transition who helped her understand many young people’s mindsets. She joined a group of mothers of children and teens who were transitioning and was alarmed to discover that some of the mothers were in favor of it. One woman’s daughter had undergone a double mastectomy two weeks earlier.  . . .

McCoy is an evangelical Christian and describes herself as politically liberal but morally opposed to abortion. Growing up in a non-Christian home, she is familiar with the world of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals and was acquainted with how they were excluded from evangelical circles.

In addition to the pro-trans yet struggling moms group, McCoy is also part of a community of evangelical Christians dealing with this issue with their children. For the most part, none of them have told any of their church members about what is going on in their families.

Many churches simply do not know how to deal with it or don’t know how to approach it effectively. So they pretend it does not exist, McCoy said. She reached out to many local youth pastors and found that only one had done any serious thinking about it.  . . .

McCoy fears that if her son persists in his desire to transition, she will not be allowed to grieve because society insists it’s something to be celebrated. And though the threat of suicide is indeed a manipulative tool used to intimidate parents, the possibility that he just might end his life remains terrifying.  . . .

The general public believes that kids who desire to become the opposite sex have struggled their entire lives. But this is not true, she contends. She argues that this is a body dysmorphia akin to anorexia, and it’s as though society is teaching anorexics how to starve themselves further.  . . .

Scrutiny facing the transgender movement

Some scrutiny of transgenderism is finally manifesting more visibly given emerging public policy debates related to trans-identifying males in women’s sports and a U.K. court ruling in the judicial review late last year against the Tavistock gender clinic in London. Both have raised questions about the implications and consequences of gender identity ideology.

In the Tavistock ruling, the court held that children younger than 16 lack maturity to give informed consent to puberty blockers and criticized several practices within the clinic. However, the U.K.’s high court ruled in a subsequent decision on March 26 that parents are allowed to give their consent for their children to take puberty-suppressing drugs as part of gender identity treatment without having to obtain a judge’s permission. . . .

But McCoy does not expect to see a substantial societal shift in the United States on the subject until the public realizes what is happening to boys.

“I think that if our society, if the men in our society, understand that we are castrating young boys, they’re going to understand more. Because [if] a whole bunch of young girls who are being sterilized, we don’t care about that because young girls aren’t a big deal,” she said, noting how women continue to be devalued in society.

“But young boys? If we’re taking young men and destroying their masculinity, I think that’s going to start to capture something in our society.”

Share your prayers about this movement surrounding transgendering the boys in our nation!

(Excerpt from The Christian Post. Article by Brandon Showalter. Photo Credit: Getty Images.)