What Should Parents Do if a Child Says He’s Transgender?

Guys, I have the best episode for you today. I talked to Dr. Miriam Grossman, she’s the author of Lost in Trans Nation, a Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness. And these are the questions that I asked her. I said, what should parents do if their child says, mom, dad, I’m trans. What does effective therapy for trans identifying kids look like? I ask her, what do you do in your practice and is it effective? What causes gender dysphoria? And should we even be using the term gender or should we reject it? How can parents prevent the dreaded moment of their child saying, mom, dad, I’m trans. And what are parents’ legal recourses for schools that indoctrinate kids with gender ideology? I also ask her how the institutions like the American Academy of Pediatrics became captured by radical gender ideology, this unscientific harmful poison. And I ask her what role social contagion plays in rapid onset gender dysphoria? Alright, she just came out with a new book. I have been reading this book all day. It’s outstanding. It’s called Lost in Trans Nation, A Child Psychiatrist Guide Out of the Madness. It’s written by Miriam Grossman, Dr. Miriam Grossman. She’s with me now. Dr. Grossman, thanks for joining the show. 

Oh, thank you so much for having me, Liz. 

I get a lot of requests for people who wanna come on my show to sell their book, and I’m kind of picky about doing a full episode with people based on their book. It really has to be a book that I, that I personally like and have read for that to happen. This is outstanding. I mean, I want every parent in America, Republican and Democrat, religious, not religious to read this book. This is, it’s, I don’t wanna gush, but this is a much needed antidote to what we’re facing in schools and on TikTok and with our kids. One of the sentences that you said in the beginning really stuck out at me. You said that you never intended for your practice or you never expected in your practice. When you, when you first became a doctor to run into gender identity because they were so rare, but now your practice is entirely youth and youth who suffer from gender and their parents. What’s that like? 

Well you, you’re, you’re correct. I never imagined that I would see even one individual because this condition of gender, we used to call it gender identity, was so very rare. I’m talking one in tens of thousands of people that it was just something we read about in textbooks. And yes, so now that is all that I do. And what is it like? it is both very gratifying and very frustrating. So it’s gratifying. And that I find that with education and with proper of the young person and helping their parents to navigate this, you can definitely see change. And you can over time see young people move out of this and they, and return to accepting and being comfortable and happy with their biology, with their bodies. And when that happens, of course, they’re avoiding all the dangerous medical interventions, the blockers and cross-ex hormones. 

And of course, the surgeries, which as I e explain in the book, you know, have, have very sometimes very dire consequences. And, you know, you become basically a lifelong patient because in order to keep up the, the appearance of the opposite sex, you know, you need to be a lifelong consumer of pharmaceuticals, basically, of either estrogen or testosterone. And so when I’m able to help families and help young people avoid that, it’s extremely gratifying. On the other hand, there are situations in which a child, and when I use the term child, I’m talking also about teenagers is just very indoctrinated and they are unable to consider any possibility of, they will not examine the ideas that they believe in, that they’ve been indoctrinated to think. They believe that there is only one solution to the way that they’re feeling. 

And of course, the way that they’re feeling may also include symptom symptoms of anxiety and depression and being on the au autism spectrum. You know, a lot of these kids have been traumatized, they’ve been abused, and yet they’ve been led to believe by this gender ideology machine belief system is what I call it, to think that there is only one solution and they cannot tolerate any moving into any sort of gray area. You know, like maybe would you consider that perhaps we could look at it a different way. There might be other reasons for you to feel this way about your body. There might be reasons for you to reject your body. Maybe it’s because you had a hard time, you know, in, in middle school, maybe your body developed early and you were bullied, or you were, you know, you, you just hated those changes of adolescence, and you were anxious and depressed as it was, and you had family issues. 

And every, you know, these are very complex patients, but what I’m trying to say, Liz, is that sometimes kids are just so indoctrinated that it’s nearly, I, they won’t, they just won’t tolerate talking to someone like me. And I’m the enemy. They consider me the enemy. I’m transphobic, I’m biased, I’m, you know, I’m spewing hatred. One of my patients told me that I’m spewing hatred. What I’m doing is I’m trying to I’m, I’m trying to help kids so that they’re not put on this assembly line, which is really what it is, assembly line toward irreversible physical changes. And we have no evidence that those medical interventions are even going to help in the long run, which is why, by the way just recently there was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by 21 experts from nine different countries, and they said in that, op-ed, what are you doctors in the US doing with these kids? 

There is no evidence that you are helping them in the long term. so this is really a momentous thing when doctors from other countries will stand up and sort of point their finger at us here in the United States and say, you know what you’re doing there? There’s, there’s no, there’s no medical foundation for it. But parents don’t hear about that. Parents don’t realize when they go to their pediatrician or their gender therapist, that there is this huge debate that’s going on. So, one of the purposes of my book, aside from telling parents to trust their gut and to not put their child in the driver’s seat, they’re the adult in the room. They know their child best, and they should get informed and educated about what all of this is about. 

That’s one of the things I found very appealing about your book, is a lot of parents want a practical guide for how they should handle this situation. Parents in this generation, or parents of young children, including teenagers, they’re the first parents that have had to deal with this particular issue. So what do you tell parents? What should parents do if their child walks into their house one day and says, mom, dad, I’m trans. 

Well, first of all, I’m starting years before that in terms of preparing pa parents. I wanna prevent that from even happening. I’ll answer your question in just a moment, but first I wanna talk about how I feel strongly that parents can immunize their families against these ideas, these ideas. Once again, they’re presented as facts, for example, that a child might be born in the wrong body. There is no medical foundation for that. There’s no medical foundation to say that sex is on a spectrum, and there’s 57 kinds of gender identities. This is all a belief system. So I’m telling parents to start early when their kids are still little, and helping them understand that from the first moment that they existed, not when they were born, from the moment of conception when they first existed, they were either a boy or a girl. 

And that is true for their entire body. It’s not just, you know, their genitals, it’s their brain and their hearts and their liver, the entire body. it has cells that are either male or female. And it has nothing to do with what a doctor or midwife or nurse in the delivery room happens to announce this is a girl or a boy. I mean, that is ridiculous. This phrase, sex assigned at birth is just bogus. And we are hearing that over and over again. And when kids, when adults, for that matter, hear something over and over again, it has an effect on us. We start to believe it. And that’s why, you know, I testified in Congress a few weeks ago and on the subject, and one of the things that I said is that sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is established at conception when the egg and the sperm unite, that creates either a male or a female, a boy or a girl. 

And that is permanent. Now, the fact that a doctor has to come in and testify in the United States House of Representatives to that fact, which everyone learned in 10th grade, biology is pretty appalling, I think. But I want parents, I have in the book all the biology that they need to know everything that they need to understand so that they can slowly as the child grows up, introduce biological truths. And they can also tell their child, you know, there are many different kinds of girls and boys. There are girls who climb trees and girls that wanna be engineers and girls that aren’t into makeup. And that’s fine. And there are boys that, that, you know, that hate sports and that love designing clothes or what have you. It doesn’t matter. Okay, so I’m giving parents a lot of tips, but to answer your question, what do you do if you are unprepared for that? 

 for that announcement, that big announcement, mom, dad, I’m not your son. I’m your daughter. I have a chapter that that presents a conversation, a model conversation between a parent and their child who’s announcing that they are transgender, they wanna be called by a different name, different pronouns, and they wanna go to a gender clinic. So I slowly and carefully go through that conversation and how, and how it should, how it should look, and how it should sound. So how is it, how does the parent handle this? Well, first of all, I tell the parent that this is not the time for an argument. This is the time to listen and to be curious. So you are primarily listening to your kid, and you’re asking, you’re saying, wow, you know, I didn’t expect this. Could you tell me more? What does this mean to you? 

What do you mean that you, you feel that you’re a girl? Could you explain to me more about that? And where did you, where did you learn about this? And gee, I’ve, I’m not familiar with some of these ideas. I certainly am going to do a lot of research because I can see that it’s very important to you. So you’re not opposite the child. You are next to the child, and you’re saying to your, to your kid, you know, I love you. I wanna understand this. I see that it’s super important to you, and therefore it’s super important to me. And I’m gonna help you through this. I want you to know that I understand that you’re feeling this way. However, feelings do change, your sex cannot change. But I do endorse the fact that you’re, this is how you feel now. So it’s a kind of, it’s walking a tightrope, but there is a way to do it. 

And I am instructing parents on that conversation. Now, another type of conversation that I’m instructing parents on having is the conversation with either your pediatrician or your psychiatrist or your therapist, or for that matter. So you know, someone in the, at school, in the administration or what have you. And that’s the conversation in which a parent can come in. And you don’t have to have a PhD. You just need to, you know, have, have read up on certain things. I explain this in regular everyday language. In my book, I explain why social transitioning a child, in other words, using the new name and pronouns is a significant decision. It is not just a kindness or a sign of respect. It’s something that a lot of thought has to be put into, because we’re finding that sometimes what it does is it can lock in that that new identity. 

Most kids, the studies that we have on younger kids who identify as transgender, all the studies that we have on this condition, which once was so unusual, show that a majority of them, between 60 and over 90%, if they’re allowed to enter and go through puberty, do do reach, they grow out of it, let’s put it that way. They reach a sense of comfort with their bodies. They no longer want to be the opposite sex. Many of them are gay or lesbian. They are happy with their bodies. That’s the point. So when we do this socially transitioning and it’s done at school and at home, and you know, with neighbors and everyone is told to use the new name and pronouns, we have to look at that very carefully. This is something new. this is a new population that we’re looking at, the adolescent population. 

We may be looking at just a transitory identification, you know, that, I mean, I’m sure your audience has heard about all the detransition, maybe, I don’t know if you’ve had one on or not, but we have now many, many detransition, which are individuals now in their twenties, well, some of them are still in their teens but in their twenties, late twenties, that have been through the process of what’s called affirmation treatment. And they regret it. And some of them have unfortunately made decisions to permanently alter their bodies. some of them have had surgery, they’ve had bilateral mastectomies. I have patients who have had the genital surgery. They no longer have either male or female genitals. And this is a life shattering situation. 

So you mentioned institutions, you mentioned pediatricians, you mentioned counselors or therapists, you mentioned even school administrators. These institutions are supposed to be, I guess aside from schools based on science. How did they become so captured by this ideology when this ideology is in fact an ideology and not based on any scientific research? 

it’s really, you know, it’s a, it’s an astonishing thing that happened. And I do explain that in the book Lost in Trans Nation. And by the way, if I could just mention as an aside that Barnes and Nobles is censoring my book, don’t even try, don’t even walk into a Barnes and Noble. They are not carrying it. You can get it on Amazon. Make sure that you get the right book, because there’s also plenty of scams on Amazon, unfortunately. So in order to get to the right book, please go to my website, miriam grossman md.com or my Twitter, Miriam Grossman. how did it happen? 

We’ll post the link, we’ll post the links to the legitimate books just for everyone’s on all the different platforms. We’ll post it, so you can just go and click it as well, because I noticed that on Amazon too. There are some scams that are pretending to be a paperback version when I don’t believe there is a paperback version. It’s just this one, the hard copy. So we’ll make sure to provide those links as well. 

Thank you. Thank you so much. yeah, unfortunately, a lot of people bought that paperback version, and they’re telling me that when they open it up, it has the same, almost the same cover. They open it up and it says, like, how to organize your office, or something like that. So it’s really, it’s really a scam. It’s just awful. So, you know, it’s quite a story of how all these entrusted once trusted institutions and medical associations were, were hijacked over the years and were, I would say taken over, at least in part on this issue by small groups of very vocal and aggressive activists who had a certain agenda in mind. So for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics, forget it, totally captured, totally just regurgitates this ideology about, you know, everything from A to Z no basis 

In. So what’s the purpose of that? If I may interject here, this is the part that always is a little mind boggling to me for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Is it because there are people that make the decisions at the American Academy of Pediatrics who are like Marxists, who want to destroy reality with, with this queer theory nonsense? Is it because they have ties to the pharmaceutical industry and they’re profiting off of it? Like, I guess I’m, I’m stuck on the how and the why some of these professional organizations bought into it. 

So what my research indicated is that, is that anyone who dissents is bullied into silence. and I have interviews with pediatricians who have tried endocrinologists, who have tried to voice their dissent. They’ve tried to have panel discussions at the annual meetings. They’ve tried to write articles, letters to the editor. They are simply silenced. And it’s a really awful situation when a few you know, a few ideologues who believe in this. And I believe that, you know, some of them simply are just, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid, and they’re too lazy to do their own research. They’re only going with the, with the program, with the narrative. And they are convinced that this is helping children. This does not represent the entire membership of the American Academy of Pediatrics. They present it as if it, there is a consensus, but there is no consensus. 

There has been no referendum of all the pediatricians at the, at the Academy of American Academy of Pediatrics. There has been no referendum of my organization. I say my, because I’m a child psychiatrist. I, I’m not a member of the American Academy of Child Medicine psychiatry. And that’s one of the reasons. But I can tell you that there has been no referendum. So the rank and file pediatricians, child psychiatrists you know, and other doctors, endocrinologists, they haven’t had their say. They are not given the microphone. And then policy statements are put out to the public. And the public is led to believe, like Dr. Admiral Rachel Levine constantly saying, there’s a medical consensus. There is no medical consensus. It’s a scam. It really is a scandal. It’s 

So awful. It’s so harmful too. it’s worse than a scam because it’s so harmful. So this idea of, well, it’s not just gender identity, but the idea of gender itself. I really enjoyed reading the parts that you wrote about when the word gender even came into our language, because this hasn’t been something that’s been around for that long. it kind of validated the feelings that I’ve had, that we shouldn’t be using the word gender at all, that even though we use it as an equivalent to sex, that we should discard gender entirely and just say sex. But talk to me about that, where that came from, and who basically invented this ideology. 

Yeah. So at the basis for all this is the idea that there’s not only a physical sex, but there’s sort of a psychological sex in your mind, which is completely separate from your body. And this idea was the brainchild of John Money, and he came up with it. in around 1957. He was a a psychologist, a PhD psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. Not a good guy, a pedophile. he promoted incest. He thought that it would be beneficial for kids to be exposed to graphic sexual images, also known as pornography. Not a good guy, a very troubled human being. And he came up with this idea that, like I said, there’s a, there’s the sex of the body, and then there’s the sex of the brain. And he wanted, you know, it was his life goal to prove this theory and to prove that the psychological sex that we have takes precedence over our physical sex. 

He believed that we are all born gender neutral. So he gave this name to, to the psychological sex, he called gender or gender identity. And he proposed that everyone is born like a blank slate. Our gender identity was neutral. And depending on the messages that we got from our parents and our siblings, and, you know, the blue blanket or the pink blanket, or the dolls, or the trucks, those sorts of stereotypical messages that depending on those, the child then internalizes those messages and feels like they are either a boy or a girl. He said it was completely unrelated to be to our physical biology and only things like menstruation and lactation and gestation you know, were, were linked to biology. Everything else he said is a social construct. It is imposed on the child by society. Now, he wanted more than anything to prove this. 

And the way that he, the way that he, that he, well, he never really proved it, but he used, he exploited a family in a very tragic situation as pawns in his research. There was a family that came from Winnipeg, Canada young blue collar family. They gave birth to twin boys. the, the boys were fine, but when they went for a circumcision, the first one was, was, was irreparably damaged. The equipment that was being used by mistake burnt off his penis. And so the parents were left with this little boy with no penis. They heard about John Money, who by the way, was a very impressive you know, his whole demeanor was that of the professor, the the expert, the intelligent researcher the Johns Hopkins expert. 

And so that made a huge impression on the parents of this little boy. this is the story, of course, of the Reamer twins. some of the people in your audience may have heard of this very, very important that they learn more about this terrible experiment that was done on those kids. what happened is that the parents sought out his expertise. They felt that he was like a God. That’s how they looked up to him. John Money said to them, just take this little boy and raise him as a girl. we’ll, give him some surgery. You’ll change, you’ll change his name. You’ll put him in a pink dress, and you will treat him forever as a girl, and you will never ever tell him that he was born a boy. So they went home and they did that, and they started raising this little boy as a girl. 

Now John Money reported that this little, that this child did very, very well as a girl, and that she was adjusting and happy and had plenty of friends and did well in school. He did acknowledge that she had some tomboy-ish traits. But aside from that, he declared the experiment a success. He started writing about it. He wrote chapters in books. he spoke about it publicly, both to professional groups and to and to the public. And he was just catapulted into a position of fame because of this experiment with the twins. I mean, if you can imagine, you know, this was a time when there was a great debate going on in society of what has the great influence, nurture, or nature? Is it our environment that causes us to be how we are, or is our genetics? Now, of course, now we know that it’s a combination, but back then, John Money’s research was saying that it’s all nurture. 

It’s all the way we raise our kids that’s going to determine how they are as adults. So this was absolutely, he got, you know, he got 25 years of continuous funding, and he was a superstar, a total super superstar. Now, getting back to the family, what really happened was that this little boy girl was absolutely miserable. Never, never accepted you know, f the, the feminine interests and clothing and toys that were being foisted on her, by her parents, and by everybody else. She was extremely masculine, and she preferred playing with her brother’s toys and trucks and climbing trees, and was even more, more of a boy than her own brother was. so, oh, I should also mention that one of the reasons that this was a perfect experiment for Dr. Money is that these boys were identical, excuse me, they were identical twins. 

So they had the same genetics and they were then going to be raised in the same household, same parents. So it really was a perfect setup for John Money. so as the years went on, this little boy was more and more miserable, and every year they would go back and see Dr. Money in Baltimore. And Dr. Money was actually abusing these poor children, sexually abusing these children when they came for their visits. it’s just, it’s just a complete nightmare. But a a point came when the boys refused to go back to see Dr. Money when Brendas she was called, was so miserable that she was suicidal. She had been put on estrogen, she was growing breasts. She was entering puberty and realizing that she was attracted to girls, she was suicidal. And her psychiatrist at the time, much to her credit, told the parents, you must tell your son that he’s your son, not your daughter. 

And when they did that Brenda, who, who then became David, David then described years later that that moment when he was told he was always a boy was such a massive relief to him because he never ever felt internally like a girl. And he felt like he was going crazy. Now, he immediately returned to living as a boy. He stopped the estrogen. He had surgery to you know, to, to take away the breast tissue that he had grown because of the estrogen. he had surgery on his genitals to construct a, a neo phallus, and he ended up actually marrying a woman with children and adopting those children. Now, unfortunately, the story does not end well. 

I talked with Dr. Miriam Grossman even longer than we had time to show you today. So the rest of my interview with Dr. Grossman will be on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify on Sunday, July 30th. Head over search for the Liz Wheeler Show on Apple Podcast. Click subscribe, get ready for It was a phenomenal conversation. We couldn’t stop talking. We ran over our time. So we have some extra bonus content for you. More of our conversation on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just search the Liz Wheeler Show, and you will find it.