We Broke Something

Kinnon MacKinnon’s op-ed in the New York Times ignores the hardest truth: children are still paying the price.

Yesterday, we published Roxxanne Reed’s devastating essay, The Cost of Detransition No Op-Ed Can Capture — A Response to the NYT and Kinnon MacKinnon. If you missed it, start there.

Today, I’m telling you a different part of the story — one you won’t see in the New York Times.

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In a perfect world, you wouldn’t know my name. I’d be just one of hundreds — maybe thousands — of parents waking up inside the same impossible situation. Parents who built their lives around a story they thought would hold, only to watch it splinter.

This isn’t a story about the countless Uncrustables I’ve rescued from the dog or the triple bunk bed I once assembled. This is about how we broke something, and have no idea how to fix it.

I’m a mother. I’m a lesbian. I’m raising five kids in the aftermath of a lie that started small, like a seed — and grew into something that consumed our family.

The Initial Lie

I didn’t set out to lie to the children. When she came into our lives, my oldest was about five and the second was three. We told them, in terms we thought they could grasp, that he was she but living as he. She passed well enough that even my ex — for a while — didn’t know. Most people didn’t.

She then had her breasts removed. She had a beard. Everyone called her “he.” When the younger kids joined us, she was simply “Dad.” At first, we didn’t use Mom or Dad much at all, but as the months became years and the adoption was finalized, the roles settled: I was Mom. She was Dad.

Activists will tell you it’s simple — a trans woman just wants her morning coffee, so why not give it to her with the name and pronouns demanded and move on? But the lie was a cancer cell. And like cancer, once the brakes are cut and the gas pedal is floored, it grows.

Our kids had already been through enough — foster care, adoption, name changes. They were still learning why two of them had both a Nini and a Nani while one had only a Nani. We didn’t explain the Dad situation. We let the lie grow quietly.

When we taught “boys have penises, girls have vaginas” — or, as my five-year-old once said, “chinas” — we skipped over the fact that Dad didn’t have one. She would leave the room during those talks, uncomfortable.

Cracks in the Story

When our oldest went to his first school dance, she — living as he — grew uneasy. He needed a suit, so I took him. The community picture event caused even more discomfort. “Dad” became strange about certain father-son moments, so I just filled in.

Mom Breaks Everything

Then came February 9, 2023 — the day my piece in The Free Press was published. I broke everything: my job, my friendships, my family. Not just with my spouse, but with my sister’s partner, who is male-to-female. My parents were furious. My sister hasn’t spoken to me since.

We went to church that Sunday. When we came home, reporters were in the driveway, standing between our minivan and the door. The three little ones sat in the backseat with Uncrustables and carrot sticks while I tried to make the cameras go away.

I survived that first day, then the first week, then the first year. I’ve been only marginally employed since. The fancy health insurance that paid for the IVF is gone. The “little” ones are now “medium.” And the marriage was over the day I hit publish.

How could it not be? The lie was exposed, but at home I was still calling her “he,” still calling her “Dad.”

Photo by Fons Heijnsbroek on Unsplash

No More “He”

Nearly two years later, she said “no more” to being “he.” Ben Ryan, Azeen Ghorayshi, and The Free Press again played a part. But her change wasn’t a glitter-bomb detransition moment.

With cancer, you cut out the tumor, check for clear margins, and use chemo to chase every stray cell. With children, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t chase down every “he” and replace it with “she.” They don’t understand.

Now they have three adult human females in their lives, none of us sure how to guide them. One of us has always been female but is gender-nonconforming. The youngest asks her almost daily: Do you have a penis? Are you a Dad or a Mom? Are you a he?

They don’t know what to call the woman they’ve always called Dad. And for her, being at the pool in a sports bra after a radical mastectomy while being called “Dad” in public is excruciating. But is it worse to ask them to call her “Mom” now?

Some Lies Can’t Be Reversed

A friend of mine, once Akiva and now Katherine, lives in Israel. She is the co-host of the podcast Stone Butch Disco. She detransitioned and wants her birth sex legally recognized again.

Israel treated her the same as a male wishing to transition to female, leaving her fate at the mercy of the Gender Reassignment Committee, the sole body authorizing trans surgeries and legal sex changes in Israel.

No original birth certificate or medical exam was sufficient to prove her femaleness; the bureaucrats insisted she must argue her gender identity. She brought her case to the Israeli Supreme Court and lost.

The legal argument against her is the same one that makes detransitioners so hated: the law enshrined the lie, so when reality challenges it, no one knows how to respond.

The Public Conversation Misses the Point

All of this has been weighing on me for a long time — the complexity, the confusion, the unanswered questions. And then, this morning, I saw an op-ed in the New York Times about detransition, written by a trans-identified woman named Kinnon MacKinnon. In all this time, not one op-ed written by a detransitioner has been published there. A dear friend said about the article, “Gender ideology involves existential issues we humans have always struggled with; the first of those is truth.”

The author — a trans-identified woman — refers to herself as the father (not dad- but father) of a 5-year-old in the piece. We know she is not. I also know, as my former spouse has detransitioned, that children cannot continue to be collateral damage in these debates. We live the fallout.

Children should never be medically transitioned, and they should never be lied to about reality.

We owe them the truth.

Babies Are Being Born

Friends of mine — Prisha, Daisy, Grace — have had babies after detransitioning. Did anyone advise them what to tell their children? Did anyone in the hospital offer trauma-informed care when their milk came in?

Do any of us have a plan for how and when to tell our children the truth?

Prisha told me there isn’t any guidance when it comes to children. She wonders what she will tell her stepdaughter when she enters puberty and starts to look different than her mother. “She will be the only girl with breasts in the house — unless I have another daughter, who may be more affected by the testosterone use than my son was. Then what?”

Prisha was able to give birth to a son about a year ago, but she could not deliver naturally due to the atrophy. There were effects from the cross-sex hormone use, but Prisha will not discuss these publicly.

We broke something, and we don’t know how to fix it.

But the New York Times should not continue to spread these deceptions. Even an op-ed in the paper of record deserves fact-checking. I’m doing it right now: the author is not a father — and her child, like all of these children, deserves the truth.

And still, the children keep asking questions we can’t answer.

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If you’ve read this far, you know these aren’t abstract debates — they’re real families, real children, and real harm. My work, and the work of the LGB Courage Coalition, is powered entirely by readers who value the truth over ideology. If you believe this work matters, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support keeps these stories alive — and helps us fight for the kids still caught in the lie.