More and more parents are stepping out, admitting that their children “identify as transgender” and wanting to do something about it. Schools encourage gender confusion, and doctors reportedly won’t even run preliminary tests if a child asks for life-altering “treatment.” But before you sign your kids up, listen to the real-life stories of people who deeply regret their “transition.”

“I am a real, live 22-year-old woman, with a scarred chest and a broken voice, and five o’clock shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman, that’s my reality,” admitted Cari Stella in a deeply personal YouTube video. She objected to transgender journalist Julia Serano’s insistence on calling her “transgender.”

“Gender was done to me, gender was traumatizing to me, I don’t want anything to do with it anymore,” Stella declared. She admitted that “when I was transitioning, I felt a strong desire — what I would have called a ‘need’ at the time — to transition,” but her transition only hurt her more. “It can be damn hard to figure out that the treatment you’re being told is to help you is actually making your mental health worse. Testosterone made me even more dissociated than I already was,” she said.

Another de-transitioning woman, Carey Callahan, accused Serano of “erasing” her, by insisting that because people like Callahan had transitioned, they were still transgender. “If self-definition is a human right, I don’t know how much louder we can shout to the world we’re not trans,” Callahan said. “And for me, if you say that I’m on the transgender spectrum, what you’re doing is you’re erasing everything I’m telling you about my life and my story.”

“I had trauma that led to me disassociating from my female body, and … the longer I chased that disassociation — the more I asked people to call me special pronouns, the more I tried to change my body, the more I ensconced myself in a community that would affirm a trans identity, the worse I felt, Callahan admitted.

She argued that Serano’s insistence that people like her are still transgender is unfair and dishonest. “It’s a central story in my life, and you’re erasing it to make me fit into your ideology.” Callahan added, “Your set of ideas of how the world works is not worth acting like I don’t exist, or acting like you get to define my gender for me. No, that’s not how that works. I’m a real person, and you have to deal with my existence.”

Callahan attacked Serano’s suggestion that people who de-transition are driven by transphobia and that they are somehow made up by conservatives. “I am not conservative. I have always voted Democrat except for the time I voted for Nader.”

“I’m not trans. Transphobia was not the context when I de-transitioned,” Callahan declared. “It sucks to be an inconvenient person, but it’s very instructive to see how willing people on the left are to act like inconvenient people don’t exist.” Chillingly, she concluded, “watching how the left accepts shutting down critical thought on these matters has creeped me out.”

Next Page: Parents are struggling with preserving their kids from the “cult” of transgenderism.

Callahan is not alone in being creeped out by the uncritical groupthink about transgenderism. The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher shared this excerpt from a comment on one of his articles (emphasis his):

As a parent living the nightmare of having a teen who suddenly announces she’s transgender, I can tell you there are NO doctors who will do anything but agree. There is NO science behind this. There is NO way to medically “diagnose” her. Her therapist knows that she is not transgender but fears there’s no way we can stop her. Three of her closest friends have already had full transition, paid for by their parents, so it is difficult for her to understand why we won’t do the same. It is no different than having your child captured by a cult, only this time the cult is a societal bandwagon which wants to do permanent physical harm to her perfectly healthy female body, all in the name of “love”. As one of Rod’s sisters in the ancient faith, I ask for your prayers.

Dreher also included this conversation with a worried mother in Baltimore.

She said, “I know people accuse you of being alarmist all the time, but let me tell you that they aren’t raising teenagers in this culture.” The woman told me that at her kids’ high school, a shocking number of students are going to their parents asking to be put on hormones and asking for surgery, because they are transgender. This is the cool thing, and the school is falling all over itself to be supportive, and to encourage an “ally” culture. “What about the parents?” I said. “They’re going along with it,” she replied. “Why on earth?!” I said. “Because they don’t want to lose their kids. Because everything in the culture tells them they should. Because they think that’s how they love their child. And these parents usually become the fiercest LGBT advocates.” She told me that the high school kids are now sorting themselves by where they are on the gender spectrum. She added that her brother is a liberal Democrat, an atheist, and a biologist. He tells her that he’s extremely worried about this trans thing. The science simply isn’t there to justify these radical interventions, but scientists are terrified to speak out because of the general atmosphere in academia around these issues now.

Concern about transgenderism isn’t limited to the right. It isn’t limited to parents who are terrified their children might mutilate their young bodies. The very people who were supposed to benefit from the movement are de-transitioning, and their stories are horrifying.

Callahan recalled her days working at a clinic full of transgender people, and what she remembered thinking: “I realized ‘wow, I’m miserable doing this, and I’m not the only miserable one I see around here. Maybe I should try a different way of relating to these feelings,’ and treated them like trauma symptoms, I felt better.”

There are multiple answers to the phenomenon of gender dysphoria, and these examples should give us pause when our children say they were born in the wrong body. Sometimes, saying “no” is the best thing we can do for our children.

See the video of Callahan on the next page!

Here’s Carey Callahan’s video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-wRVebn-58

And here’s Cari Stella’s. (Warning, she does use some profanity.)