Thank you for the platform you provide. It makes me feel like I am not alone. Although I cry a majority of the time when reading the essays, they keep me from thinking that I am the crazy one. It’s heartbreaking, confusing, frustrating and deeply sickening to lose a child to this cult when I have worked so hard to raise a brilliant, gorgeous and passionate child. I know he is further gone with each passing day. I know it would be easier for me to cut the cord now rather than to pretend and watch his demise. I feel it’s utterly disrespectful for him to tell me that that son I once knew is now dead, when I am speaking directly to him. The daughter who I am now forced to accept is not who I signed up to parent and, frankly, I don’t want to pretend she is. I’m in a perpetual state of sadness and self-blame for not even knowing this was happening. I thought my son was in the good care of Brown University, an institution of higher learning. Who would have thought he was being brainwashed regarding his own sex?

I have recently decided to choose myself over his madness. I have been told to “f***off” for the last time by this person whom I used to love with every ounce of my being. I have zero support from anyone in my family and most of the people in my life never bring it up; maybe because they don’t want to upset me or they also hope it will just go away. I keep hoping for a reset to occur, but in my son’s (now “daughter's”) case, he just keeps falling further into the rabbit hole. The person I once knew since the inception of life I am told is dead, all while I’m still looking straight at him dressed like a freak with red lipstick in a tutu.