‘I Feel Like I Am Leaving A Cult’: Mother Regrets Transitioning Her 4-Year-Old Son

 A mother of two young boys realized she made a terrible mistake after allowing her 4-year-old son to socially transition into a girl identity and described the epiphany she had as “leaving a cult.” 

The mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote two essays and recently appeared on a popular podcast to discuss her journey from a social justice organizer and “true believer” in transgender ideology to a skeptic who is deeply regretful for allowing her son to believe he was a little girl trapped in a boy’s body. 

“I’m texting a friend, and I’m like ‘we’ve realized that our older son is not actually transgender and we’re going to be rolling back the social transition and I feel like I am leaving a cult,’ because that’s what it felt like to me,” she said on the podcast Triggernometry with her identity disguised by a blur filter. 

The mother’s first essay in August 2022, “True Believer,” went viral on social media. In the Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans (PITT) Substack newsletter, she described how she and her wife raised their two young boys as “gender neutral” because they believed they were following the righteous path of “social justice.” 

When their oldest son, who was 4 years old at the time, asked if he was a boy or girl, they told him he could choose. Six months later, their son declared he was a girl and wanted to be called “sister” and use “she/her” pronouns. Both his mothers affirmed his new transgender identity by allowing him to socially transition; they changed his name, allowed him to wear girl’s clothes, and allowed him to believe he was truly a girl for approximately one year.

It was when her youngest son, who was just three at the time, said that he also wanted to identify as a girl that she began to wonder if she had made a mistake with her eldest boy. As her worldview began to unravel, the mother expressed deep regret for the actions she and her wife took, acknowledging that they “led” their child down a path of lies that could have resulted in severe psychological damage and life-long, irreversible medical intervention. In the end, she came to realize that parents, not children, were meant to be in the lead. 

The mother followed the Triggernometry interview with another essay for PITT, titled “A Return To Reality,” where she went into further detail of her new outlook.

“In the interview, I refer to the moment in time when I finally could see my belief in gender identity as a belief for the first time,” the mother penned. “It was this moment when I feel I moved out of experiencing this belief as absolute truth, and was able to ‘see’ it from the outside looking in” (emphasis hers).

She described the moment as feeling like “a pin came out of my head,” causing the whole belief system to collapse and returned to the cult analogy.

“How else could I describe being in something so deep, that I could not see outside of it?” she said. “At least when you are religious, you realize you hold beliefs, you understand you have a faith, and you consciously practice it. This was different. I had been in something that I did not know I was in. And in that moment, I came out of it” (emphasis hers).