Transition/detransition is not the worst thing that can happen to your kid- forced pregnancy is.

I live in Ohio. Because Roe v. Wade has been overturned Ohio’s ban on abortions after 6 weeks has now gone into effect. Being pregnant for 6 weeks means that you have only missed your period for 2 weeks. For most pregnancy tests to be accurate you are supposed to wait 5–10 days after the day you were expecting your period. So the situation in Ohio right now is that a female person would have to find out they were pregnant and get an abortion scheduled and aftercare arranged within at most a week of finding out. If you’re not a parent and you have employment that lets you easily take off work, that’s still a hard thing to pull off. If you have kids you’re responsible for or a job that is quick to fire people for getting sick, a pregnancy that you are able to get an abortion for could still really fuck up your life.

If like me you are not on top of tracking your periods and they catch you by surprise on a regular basis, you’re just screwed. All the states adjacent to Ohio are also hick states, so abortion will not be a drive away, it will be a plane ride. (Edit: I was wrong about this! Abortion is still legal in PA, so I can visit Pittsburgh if something bad happens!)

I have female kids in my household, who are lovely kids. I used to be anxious about what I would do as a parent if my kid announced they were trans and wanted to medically transition. I used to think that would be an incredibly hard moment and I had a lot of compassion for parents navigating that scenario.

But now I am both a parent and step-parent. I’ve now had the experience of navigating a kid’s announcement of gender dysphoria. It was scary, and then it turned out besides being scared it was a pretty easy situation to navigate. All the adults involved communicated respect to the kid for identity and presentation decisions and concern for the kid’s distress. There was some communication of the seriousness of medical decisions but mostly we focused on the importance of the kid feeling loved and comfortable in our homes.

Since that is another person’s story and that person has the right to privacy I won’t give any more details. But in terms of my story, it was important in that I discovered I was accepting behavior from ROGD parents online that I would never myself put my kid through. Because of my own self-castigation and guilt about getting transition wrong, I had exaggerated the…