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Randolph Carter's avatar

Well this has been a depressing listen... The mother sounds like she was lying and indeed wants to "trans the kid", but good God the dad sounds like such an absolute unthinking self-promoting jerk. Makes me feel terrible for the kids. Are there any comparable "parents doing terrible things to kids for their beliefs system" categories? Maybe like people who have their teenagers exorcised by some shady shaman.

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Some Guy's avatar

Yeah. I felt sick after listening to this. It felt like the mom is crazy and the dad was trying to make a buck.

Update: just for my own conscience I don’t think it’s basically ever right to transition a kid. I can imagine some very unlikely scenarios where I would but I’ve never heard of those being real (like a kid is so nuts they self harm without parental influence if they can’t wear a dress).

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Skull's avatar

The kind of aberrant brain it would require for a child to sincerely, definitely have a better life after a full transition has to be so rare as to be nearly unheard of. If it exists at all. I do not believe that there is a human being on earth who would have a better life by chopping their arms off. I feel similarly about this topic. I think the people who claim they are happier are mistaken or lying. Yes, this is hilariously unfalsifiable. That's still what I believe.

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Some Guy's avatar

My bottom line is that you can never really meet the standard of “without reasonable doubt” or “unquestionably.” It’s kind of like how I feel about assisted suicide. If you really really want to do this to yourself, you already can.

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Armchair Psychologist's avatar

I suspect the number of people who are truly better off after “transition” is a very small number.

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Purrfur's avatar

It should be banned by law to medically transition a minor.

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Some Guy's avatar

Medically, yes. Socially I would only leave on the table in very rare circumstances.

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Kathleen Sykes's avatar

Poor kids. Unfortunately, you don't get to pick your parents. 😕

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Jon M's avatar

There are no trans children without parental participation. All "trans kids" that exist, do so by way of the adults in their life indulging them.

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Armchair Psychologist's avatar

This episode and some of the comments make me think about my own evolution in how I view my son’s gender-typical and -atypical behaviors. He’s 16 now. When he was little, I gave him baby dolls and let him wear his sister’s tutus; I wanted him to feel free to be as masculine or feminine as he felt inside. As he got older, it became obvious that he was a boy’s boy — total shape rotator, high in risk-taking and low in empathy, video game nerd, only ever hung out with other boys. I tried always to keep the door open for him to be more feminine; like, I’d offer to take him along if his sister and I were getting our nails done. In elementary school, he liked getting black and yellow nails; by middle school, that didn’t interest him anymore. Once my kid was well into puberty, it was easy for me to see that he has a very testosteronized brain 🧠 and I had to laugh remembering how I once thought he might grow up to be a more feminine kind of boy.

Anyway— in the last few months, he has gotten WAY into color guard, which, if you don’t know, is the group of kids who dance around the football field in fancy unitards and spin huge flags and toss them in the air. Color guard at his school (and probably everywhere) is a bunch of girls and one gay boy, and half of the girls are some version of trans/enby. (I call color guard the paramilitary wing of the Sex and Gender Alliance.) When my son got into color guard, I was confused, and frankly alarmed — was he secretly gay? We’re really close; how could he not tell me? Had I not created a safe home for him to be gay in? 😭 Or was he picking up a trans identity from kids at school and diving into girly activities as part of that? Wtf? I could not make this new, super-gay interest jibe with everything I knew about my very boyish boy.

I came to understand it after a long talk with him. Apparently, all of my efforts over the years to preemptively destigmatize “girly” things had actually worked, and my son was interested in color guard despite it being super gay, not because of it. He likes the fuckin flags. They’re enormous and he gets to spin them like a ninja and throw them really high in the air. The leotards and the dancing weren’t the appeal for him, they are just completely irrelevant to him — precisely because I had taught him boys are allowed to do “girly” things.

Back in 2009 I would have been delighted if you’d told me my son would grow up to be a person who feels free to do girly stuff without his masculinity being impugned. We’ve become so regressive in our thinking about gender (I don’t think it’s just me!) that in 2025 I couldn’t imagine my son doing a girly thing and still calling himself a boy. In his head, he’s living in the world I WANTED for him, the world where boys and girls don’t have to adhere to dumb rules about gendered activities. But gender ideology has made me so cynical I didn’t realize he saw the world the way I had actually wanted him to see it.

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Sue's avatar

I had a very similar experience.

Also, “color guard is the paramilitary wing of the SGA” is a genius description - spot on! 😂

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Theodric's avatar

That must be a newer innovation - 20 years ago at my school it was the girly girls who played a non marching instrument. Then in college it was the horn section where half the girls were lesbians.

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Theodric's avatar

Best part of color guard, if he gets good at it, is being the drum major in college and getting to swing a baton and wear a giant furry hat.

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Your Mum's avatar

While leotards and dancing doesn't appeal to him, as a teen boy, probably being around lots of girls who are dancing in leotard is probably very appealing.

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AKI's avatar

Yeah, this was my glaringly obvious read!

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Kathleen's avatar

I love this for both of you 😂

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Cyrus the Younger's avatar

My dad went to a very ‘bogan’ (sort of Australian urban redneck) high school and told me how he had a dickhead woodwork teacher (who taught all the boys) and so he leaped at the chance when a teacher came in saying there were spare places in the home economics class (which was for all the girls) and so he got to chill out with the girls and do needlepoint or whatever. I can confirm he wasn’t secretly gay.

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Shannon Thrace's avatar

<3

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Skull's avatar

My child is mature and self-knowing enough to know he's actually a girl. But he is absolutely not mature enough to know what his name is. Yes, you can live your life as a lie. No, you may not be called Starfire. That would be a bridge too far!

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Jennifer's avatar

That moment stands out for me: it was the kid’s choice to get on a path towards taking hormones and having surgery, but his choice of a name was the ridiculous part.

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Ms No's avatar

It reminds me of Jazz Jennings, how he was allowed at age 2 to decide to be a girl, but since then his mother questions every single other decision he makes such as whether to go on dates, which college to go to, how much to eat, what to eat, what clothes to wear, etc etc. It seems like in his mother's eyes Jazz has only ever gotten one thing right.

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Must Pavlove Dogs's avatar

NO you may NOT call yourself "Starfire." Your name is "LUNA" goddammit!

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LCDR Fish's avatar

Probably watching too much Teen Titans on Cartoon Network.

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pb's avatar

Great point

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Jacob's avatar

A+ comment

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Gregg's avatar

I wrote almost this exact comment, but deleted it when I found yours. Exactly right.

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Somethingsomething's avatar

I think the hardest thing is with children is that they are so geared towards pleasing adults around them that they’ll shape their reality to please their parents. That came up a lot in the satanic panic scandal and we’ve had to change how we interview children to not lead them somewhere. It does make me wonder what the interview process is like when you assess kids and whether there’s pressures on kids to please the adults around them. I guess that struck me a bit about this kid changing views of gender depending on who he’s talking to.

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Skull's avatar

Daddy likes when I'm a boy and mommy likes when I'm a girl, it's hard to keep up but I have to do it

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Somethingsomething's avatar

Yup. I also wonder about leading questions in an assessment. I just be curious how they ask these questions that lead to this idea that these kids have to have affirmative care. I also wonder how they analyze what the kids say—meaning if a child wants to be a different gender, does that mean that they have gender dysphoria which should be resolved by transition? I don’t know if that’s necessarily a case. I know I have ADHD and I’m very like gender conforming, but the reality is when I was younger, I did have issues with my identity and sometimes wondered about my gender identity. I think because of my attention issues I just felt like I didn’t live up to expectations and so it made me wonder and I’m just glad that there was nobody to be like, maybe you aren’t a woman. There is so much bias baked into the whole thing.

i’d be curious if Jesse has watched any videos that train and direct clinicians to assess children because I wonder what it looks like .

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Ms No's avatar

My thoughts exactly

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Martin Blank's avatar

Exactly, kids are also very goal oriented at times, so if you lay out some hoops for them to jump through to “get happy”, they will be motivated to jump through.

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Wendy's avatar

The kid is a boy and would have grown up to be gay. Dad is a psychopath and to a lesser extent so is mom, using their kid as a pawn to fuck with each other and as a political football. Mom probably will chemically castrate the kid, locking him into transition and making him a lifelong medical patient. How enlightened and liberal of her to prefer a drugged-up kid to a gay one.

These are deeply selfish, fucked up people and neither of them have any business being parents.

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Jane's avatar
Mar 21Edited

Ugh, I skimmed the Texas court documents when this custody dispute hit the news a few years ago and was like, "This is a LOT, and I shouldn't know about any of it." I feel so sorry for all of the kids involved.

ETA: Katie did a fabulous job reporting on an insanely complicated case with the kind of balance that is all too hard to find in other news outlets. BARPod for the win!

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Dylan B's avatar

Starfire is a character in a cartoon called Teen Titans btw, might be where the kid got it from

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Caleb's avatar

I’ve seen so many cases where someone took a trans name from some kind of nerdy media.

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Armchair Psychologist's avatar

Living in worlds of fantasy.

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stever's avatar

I know someone who took his sister's name as his new trans middle name. Kind of thought that was pretty weird

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Ms No's avatar

I remember reading a reddit AITA where a girl was wondering if she was the asshole because she was angry that her brother, a newly minted trans girl, had taken her literal first name as his new name, and her friends and family were pressuring her to change her actual given name so he could have it

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Kathleen's avatar

This is a male-supremacist movement

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Cyrus the Younger's avatar

Isn’t AITA 90% invented rage bait? I muted it after a while because I felt like it was preying on my worst gossipy instincts.

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Theodric's avatar

No, but only because at least 40% is fishing for validation.

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NoVaCloudDev's avatar

That’s my understanding.

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Randolph Carter's avatar

This sounds like the beginning of a psychological thriller/horror film where the brother replaces the sister and them murders her or something

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Thia's avatar

That is epic level f***ked up!

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Nossoc's avatar

Eddie Izzard took his deceased ex girlfriend's name when he decided on Suzie to be his name for 'girlmode

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Shannon Thrace's avatar

This sort of thing is common

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Muffin Mama's avatar

Jesse- when is your book coming out? I hope you have a large section highlighting how parents are treated (by schools, therapists, and pediatricians) who try to remain neutral but whose teenagers are demanding medical interventions. I was at that conference where a dad got up and started crying bcs his ex-wife had his son and was transitioning him. Not everyone is Jeff Younger. And even if Jeff is a creep he should have had a say in whether or not his son is medically transitioned.

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Tristan's avatar

It really seemed crazy to me, the idea that she would transition a pre-schooler who doesn’t have dysphoria. And then to have all these institutions saying, “yep, that’s the thing to do.” So much complications for a kid’s life and identity and for what? What a fucked up moment we’re living through.

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Jane's avatar

It sounded to me like Younger had a very reasonable custody agreement from the outset and just kept making things worse and worse for himself, his relationship with his kids be damned.

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Trent Simpson's avatar

Jesse will finish his book when Sisyphus finishes rolling his rock up the hill.

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Armchair Psychologist's avatar

Don’t you put a curse on Jesse! ✝️

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Jerrie S. Pringer's avatar

You crack me up!

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Smooth Sayer's avatar

My son wore a lot of dresses between 2 and 5 years old. I told him that it is okay for boys to wear dresses.

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Ms No's avatar

Mine too. He looked adorable in dresses. He also was anxious that his favourite colour was light purple because that was for girls. I remember the relief in his face when I explained boys can like purple and it doesn't make them girls.

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Armchair Psychologist's avatar

My kid came home at 5 or 6 and said, “Mommy, the boys at school said pretty things are just for girls, and that’s not true, right?” 😢

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Walker's avatar

Made my son a kilt and called it a dude skirt.

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Cyrus the Younger's avatar

I wore a lot of my mum’s clothes and shoes as a young kid. I have no idea whether that was linked to my eventually realising I was gay, or whether that’s just something lots of kids do. I also liked dressing up in my dad’s giant fluffy bathrobe so 🤷‍♂️.

Either way, I’m extremely grateful my parents didn’t take this as a sign I was secretly a girl.

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lucy's avatar

My son (3) likes wearing dresses. We let him of course, although have to battle with him to wear trousers when it's cold. He went through a short phase of saying he's a girl. That naturally faded away. He didn't like getting a haircut but got over it about 10 mins after the cut was done.

My gut is this all means very little (or means he thinks his big sister is cool) but if it doesn't then I'll do my best to support him without unnecessarily leading him down a path that would make adolescence much harder and adulthood potentially a place of grief (infertility). It must be hard for parents where the dysphoria is persistent and distressing.

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Kathleen Sykes's avatar

I feel like if you don't make things like this a big deal one way or another, you're doing your kid the favor of not turning it into a complex later on in life.

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Ms No's avatar

It must be very hard. Kids especially at primary school age really don't want to be different, they have a very simplified idea of their identity and want things to just make sense, they don't understand how great it is to be unique, and they can be so distressed by feeling different... even here in progressive Berlin where there are tons of boys with long hair, a friend of mine has a 7 yo son who loves glitter and dressing up, she is so anxious that he will feel different and left out that at parties she tries to get everyone else to glitter up as much as possible so he doesn't notice he is unusual. I think that parents with gender-distressed can be in a bind that feels completely impossible and I have a lot of compassion for them.

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AKI's avatar

What an embarrassing solution.

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M Yao's avatar

My daughter was convinced at 6 that she wasn’t a girl because she liked playing sports.

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Melca's avatar

At 6 I hated all things girly and was convinced I was a boy, too. I argued with my mom about it. That was back during the Jurassic when they did not trans kids, however.

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Hilma's avatar

Katie, I have tried a dog dancing class!! It was with my sister and her unruly dog and we were basically crying with laughter. The instructor did dog dancing on a competitive level (??), and she showed us her routine inspired by Toy Story. It’s basically doing dog tricks while moving around to music and trying to look coordinated.

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Cliff Dore's avatar

The image that leapt to my mind was of Katie doing a Raygun kangaroo type move while Moose is trying to hump her leg.

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Walker's avatar

I would watch this sport.

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AKI's avatar

The Modern Pantathlon?

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Ryan Taylor's avatar

I love hearing stories of parents more screwed up than my own

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Midwest Molly's avatar

I love hearing stories of parents who screwed up more than me.

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Smooth Sayer's avatar

That was going to be my reply.

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Armchair Psychologist's avatar

Same 👍🏻

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Alex's avatar

Thanks for the deep dive, Katie. Sounds like the dad may be a deadbeat, a grifter, and an abuser, but on the other hand, the mom clearly decided to trans the kid for her own private reasons. The fact that she's a pediatrician makes it even worse. Lastly, I think we underestimate how radical an intervention "social transition" is. I suspect the long-term research will eventually show it to be very harmful, even by itself.

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Your Mum's avatar

I think the Cass report said that social transition is not a neutral act. I think there's a big difference between telling a child that it's OK to be gender non-conforming and telling them - and others- that they are actually the opposite sex.

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Alex's avatar

A world of difference. The latter is extremely destabilizing to a child's sense of self.

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Frances Burger's avatar

Mom being a pediatrician has always stood out for me. I wouldn't be surprised if she eventually publishes a thesis on her twins similar to Money's on the Rheimer Twins.

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Alex's avatar

Yes, that's a critical angle--twins have always been valued as experimental subjects. But experimenting on your own children in this way is truly revolting.

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Ms No's avatar

Sounds like this kid's gender identity is just whatever earns him the approval of whichever parent he's with. So many children learn to create a false self in response to perceived parental rejection. The fact his mother wants to trans him despite his lack of dysphoria is very worrying. The dad's grifty, neglectful attention-seeking behaviour is even more worrying. The poor kid, I can't even imagine the amount of therapy he's going to need when he grows up.

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dollarsandsense's avatar

Unfortunately, it’s the therapeutic industry that has gotten him in this situation—he should probably avoid therapists in his future life!

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Ms No's avatar

I know what you mean, but there are good therapists and bad therapists. They're definitely not a monolith.

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AKI's avatar

I doubt this kid is going to make it to thirty.

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Peter's avatar

Jesse doesn't sound as hot as he did last episode.

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Bubby's avatar

These poor kids...what a dysfunctional set of parents.

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Amie Barnett's avatar

I thought that a child’s alien brain is programmed to appease whoever is giving them food. This food giver suggests I’m a girl. I’m a girl. This food giver suggests I’m a boy. I’m a boy. Now a judge is calling that gender fluidity. Poor kid.

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Ms No's avatar

100%

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