Taking a Stand: A Mother’s Fight for Her Community
In her third article, a Virginia Parent attempts to spread the word
By Anonymous
My hands trembled as I typed the email to Patch journalist, Michael O’Connell. It was late March 2025, and I’d just read his article, glowing with praise for a new LGBTQ+ NoVA Prism Center in McLean, Virginia. To him, it was a routine article about a new community center. But to me, it wasn’t just a community center—it was a symbol of a movement I feared was pulling kids like my son into a world of lifelong, irreversible, and harmful choices. In fact, it’s a center where youth can access a closet full of breast binders in all sizes, 1,000+ LGBTQ+ publications, and guidance for connecting them with affirmation therapists like the one who told my son he could be a girl.
In my message to O’Connell, I poured out my heart, begging him to warn readers about the risks of transgender procedures, the hormones, the surgeries, the lifelong consequences. His auto-reply—“Thank you for your feedback”—felt like a wall between us, but I couldn’t stay silent. My son was lost to me, and I felt I had to try to protect other families in Fairfax County from the same pain.
Losing My Son
Five years ago, my son walked out the door of our family home. He was 25 years old, wearing a dress, and set on joining a transgender “community” in Washington, D.C. He was my brilliant boy—comical, intelligent, a creative wiz at anything he did—but he’d struggled with depression, anxiety, bullying, and maybe autism. An affirming therapist — not even a psychologist — told him he could become a girl, and LGBTQ+ activists’ online voices cheered him on. He changed his name, his birth certificate, and lives in a world I can’t reach. I live with the daily dread of what he’s facing—hormones that will harm his health, surgeries that might leave him in pain and permanently disfigured, in a life I can’t imagine.
When I read about the Prism Center, with its crafts, books, its promise of belonging, and its guidance on finding affirmative therapists, like the one who enabled my son, and other trans-affirming clinicians, I saw a place that could draw in other kids searching for identity. I saw a place only too happy to steer them into making lifelong, harmful choices when they, like my son, were too young to understand the higher stakes.
Sunshine, Rainbows, and Medicalization
The Prism Center’s location is clearly strategic. It is within walking distance from locations where McLean teens hang out: McDonald’s, Chesapeake Bagel, The Old Firehouse (a teen center), the community center, McLean High School, and community parks. Parents think of these as safe spaces. To them, the Prism Center seems innocent, not a place where simple identity exploration is apt to lead on to a conveyor belt of life-long hormonal therapy, surgeries, the rejection of their past, and alienation from family members and friends
I sent a second email to O’Connell, then a third, each one more desperate. I sent the same emails to our local supervisor James “Jimmy” Bierman. I shared stories of detransitioners who regretted their transitions, suffered from serious health complaints, chronic pain, or were left sterile. I told them about my son’s semen storage bill, a haunting reminder of choices he cannot reverse. I urged O’Connell and Bierman to listen to experts like psychiatrist, Dr. Miriam Grossman, endocrinologists, like Dr. William Malone, of the SEGM (Society for Evidence Based Medicine), plastic surgeons like Dr. Patrick Lappert, whistleblowers like Dr. Eithan Haim, and the growing chorus of concerns from psychologists and psychiatrists. Most of all, I urged them to listen to parents like me, to report the other side of the story. But the auto-replies kept coming, and I felt unheard.
Frustrated, I turned to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. I sent a message, through his website, pleading for him to see the Prism Center and Trans Visibility Day in Fairfax County schools as more than celebrations. To see them as invitations to vulnerable kids—artistic, awkward, maybe depressed like my son—to step onto a path of damaging lifelong consequences. I asked him to review the guidelines doctors follow to protect children, adolescents, and young adults from rushing into choices they can’t undo. I imagined speaking to him personally, sharing my family’s nightmare to save others in Virginia from the same fate. I received an auto-reply from his website, too.
I didn’t stop there. I reached out to some parents I know. I emailed neighbors and friends with kids in Fairfax County schools, opening up about my son for the first time. I told them about the Prism Center, about hormones that could cause sterility or liver tumors, or blood clots, and about surgeries that might leave kids in pain forever. I shared a Daily Signal article by Laura Hanford warning that schools were keeping secrets from parents about sex education. I volunteered to help connect parents with resources that helped me.
It was terrifying to be so vulnerable, but I couldn’t let another parent go through what I had: the shock of my son’s crossdressing, the bill from the semen storage facility, and finally hearing the front door slam shut as he left without saying goodbye, never intending to return.
I dream of a day when someone—maybe a senator, maybe a journalist— will ask the very hard questions that will bring an end to this living nightmare. Their voices could make all the difference in uncovering the truth. Why isn’t anyone listening to more detransitioners, or parents like me, or psychologists and psychiatrists who could help kids heal and learn to love themselves without harming their bodies? Could it be that they are only hearing one side of the story?
What We Should Be Saying
I understand the well-meaning support for the Prism Center and Trans Visibility Day in Fairfax schools, but I wonder how many parents would be okay with channeling vulnerable kids engaged in the normal identity exploration of the teen years down a one-way road towards medical transition? Experimentation is good. It’s okay to do body piercings, get tattoos, and dye hair in crazy colors. But it is not okay to encourage a young person to harm their mind and body based on the fantasy that they can change their sex. It is not ok to lure anyone into a make-believe world where they live a lie that cannot be sustained. It is not ok to pull youth away from their families. It is not ok to change birth certificates to say you are someone you are not. Instead, we should focus on creating healthy human beings who learn to love and accept themselves.
Kids need time to grow and learn who they truly are. We all have periods in life when we do not like ourselves or our bodies. Young people need healthy support as they go through the often difficult and confusing challenges and transitions that extend from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood. They should not be lured into a world that promises rainbows and candy but will likely also deliver very deep lifelong regret.
Clarity from Somone Who’s Been There
I recently read the article, ‘From Self-Hate to Self-Love,’ by Jonathan Blackwell, someone who detransitioned after living as a trans woman for 23 years. His book, From Transgender Pain To Inner Peace, describes his transition in a raw and heart-wrenching way that should make anyone think twice about going down the same path. He is a thoughtful commentator with a profound understanding of the insidious narrative being pushed upon our youth and the destructive movement behind it.
I asked him what he thought about Trans Visibility Day in the public schools and the Prism Center in McLean. In his opinion, these initiatives “shove” trans ideology down your throat.” “It’s like the claim that drag queen story hour is “family and kid friendly.” It’s porn meant to lure and indoctrinate vulnerable children and adolescents into the world of “queer kinship.” “They push gender ideology in bright colored books and parade people happily like it’s eating candy. Everyone, have a lollipop. You’ll only be reproductively infertile for the rest of your life, but no big deal.”
When I asked him about Virginia, he told me the chilling truth: “It is literally criminal what is going on in your state.” Jonathan believes the brutal truth is “that those promoting the gender narrative in our schools do not want educated, adjusted, balanced, and functioning children. They want TRANS children.” Activists want so badly for kids to be trans that they are promoting the most ruinous thing our children could ever do with their lives — as if it were candy — and then giving it the hard sell with an irresistible dose of peer pressure.
He also believes that the school systems have indoctrinated our children into the “victim mindset,” which creates fertile mental soil where the idea of being transgender can easily grow. Once children believe they are powerless against things that happen beyond their control, the idea that an accident placed them in the wrong body becomes so palatable that it goes down like a spoonful of honey, with no resistance or objection whatsoever.
Before anyone knows it (especially not the parents who have been left in the dark on purpose), children and adolescents have been hijacked into believing the unthinkable about themselves. And all around them are rainbow flag-waving peers celebrating their “bravery” for declaring their new identity, when in reality, their lives are being stolen from them right under their feet.
Johnathan writes:
In my own life, being transgender was a very real experience. I discovered years after my transition that it had a real and identifiable cause, and it had a real and definitive solution. I didn’t discover the solution until I had long gone down the path and created unfathomable destruction in my life. The solution wasn’t the one the world wanted me to believe, and it isn’t the solution that the world wants to sell to your child. It is the solution that preserves their own sovereignty over their life, that preserves their empowerment, and that preserves the sacredness of the body they were born with. Most importantly, it is the solution that preserves their future.
I am with Jonathan. We must protect these dear and precious children who are so under attack in today’s upside-down world. As we do, they will be able to rise above a failed society that didn’t serve them and become the architects and creators of a better world that will rise and take its place.
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