A little more than a week ago, I excoriated actress Camryn Manheim, who gave a speech at a Human Rights Campaign event lamenting the fact her son — despite her best efforts — was heterosexual. Manheim was mad that his being straight deprived her of the ability to brag about her gay son to her friends and virtue signal to the rest of the world that she is a Very Tolerant Mother™.
It's abhorrent to me, as a parent, to want my child to face any difficulties in life, and being gay — while far more tolerated today than in the past — does present certain challenges. That's especially true in a world where the Left is also increasingly aligning itself with Islam, which has a penchant for hurling gays off of rooftops and hanging them from highway overpasses. To turn a trans community question back at Manheim: would you rather have a straight son or an alive one?
My job as a parent is to give my child a better life than the one I had. That's not to say mine was bad; just that there were opportunities I didn't have that I want my sons to experience, like going to Italy on a senior class trip. Part of that better life is to protect my child from harm, including the permanent harm of so-called "gender-affirming care."
The Trump administration rebranded those barbaric procedures "gender mutilation" and "gender denying care," and both are far more accurate. Hormone treatments and puberty blockers render children sterile; for boys, it prohibits normal growth so they end up with micropenises. Genital surgeries often render victims without sexual sensation or the ability to orgasm. For girls, testosterone deepens their voices, causes hair loss, and robs them of their feminine appearance. A neo-vagina needs constant dilation, often smells like feces because it's constructed from a piece of colon, and the procedures often cause bladder and bowel incontinence.
So when I see stuff like this, I bristle.
I don’t care where you started out on the political spectrum.
— Catherynne M. Valente (@catvalente) October 5, 2026
If your kid comes out as trans & you don’t become a rainbow-clad, parade-cheering ally & rock-solid supportive girl/boy/enby dad/mom?
You were never a parent at all.
You were a doll collector furious they didn’t…
The entire post reads:
If your kid comes out as trans & you don’t become a rainbow-clad, parade-cheering ally & rock-solid supportive girl/boy/enby dad/mom?
You were never a parent at all.
You were a doll collector furious they didn’t stay in their packaging.
If you can go every level of ham to support their travel hockey league, whether you like hockey or not, you can do it to support their deepest hearts & souls.
This isn't a hockey game. This isn't a tennis tournament. This isn't some cheerleading competition.
This is your child's bodily integrity — up to and including his sexual function and fertility. Up until last year, my eldest couldn't even get a tattoo under state law. But I'm supposed to not only stand by but actively cheer when he tells me he's got a mental illness that makes him believe he was actually born a girl?
There were times when he was younger where he'd say "I wish I was a girl." I would look him in the eye and tell him, "You are my son, you are a boy, and I love you just as you are." I shudder to think what would have happened had someone like Catherynne heard him instead. And I weep for the children of women like Catherynne, who will be brutalized and mutilated for a political ideology that will eventually wash its hands of the victims it's created.
Catherynne doesn't care, however. She wants to be able to post a picture of herself waving a pride flag on Facebook because she gets a little rush of endorphins when her friends like the post. Her child's well-being — like that of Camryn Manheim's son — is secondary to her own ego-driven need to virtue signal.
The Left lives in an inversion of reality. Up is down, black is white, and applauding your child's self-harm is now being a "good parent" while protecting your child's bodily integrity and mental health is condemned as selfish.
In the sane world, where I live, the good parents are the ones who make sure their children are comfortable with the bodies they were born into, even when those bodies undergo the rough changes of puberty. If and when questions of gender dysphoria rear their ugly heads, the good parents seek appropriate treatment for a mental illness instead of the nearest butcher who will remove sexual organs and pump your child full of hormones and puberty blockers.
One day, history will look back on women like Catherynne with the same disdain we have for slave holders and guys like Josef Mengele. And while they spend the rest of time being portrayed as the monsters they are, parents like me will be content knowing we were on the right side of history.
