The Desistance Series: Arienne’s Story

Holding space for a son’s identity exploration in an intensely affirmative California

Arienne had always been interested in youth subcultures. Years earlier, she had spent time in Spain observing the gothic scene and had come to see how teenagers form identities through music, fashion, and shared aesthetics. When her son began drifting into the anime-influenced youth culture that had become popular among American teenagers, she did not initially find it alarming.

She herself appreciated Japanese culture and had studied it, though she was not especially interested in anime. Still, she could recognise the appeal of the subculture that surrounded it. To her, it looked like another teenage scene.

What she did notice, however, was something she had not seen as strongly in other youth subcultures. Many of the young people involved seemed disconnected from their parents.

At first, the changes in her son felt almost playful. His presentation became more feminine. Arienne joked to him, “You’re like a gothic twink.” The parents assumed it was a phase of teenage experimentation.

Then their son told them he thought he might have gender dysphoria.

The word meant nothing to them at the time. When they asked him what he meant, he struggled to explain. He wondered whether he might actually be a girl, but he could not articulate why. The idea seemed vague even.

Arienne and her husband tried to keep conversations open and calm. They did not shut him down. But they noticed something unsettling. Their son had always been intensely interested in particular activities. When he became fascinated with something, he would throw himself into it completely. And when the phase ended, it ended abruptly.

This time, the pattern seemed to repeat.

The shift moved quickly. He went from describing himself as a feminine boy to calling himself a trans girl. His name changed. His pronouns changed. His private school accepted the new identity without hesitation.

At home, Arienne watched her tall teenage son trying to dress in ways he believed were feminine. The clothes were bizarre. She tried to steer him towards clothing that was appropriate for school. Arguments became more frequent and more intense.

One day, she saw him enter the women’s bathroom in a shopping mall. She felt uncomfortable but chose not to confront him in that moment. She did not want another fight.

Eventually, she began to understand what was happening online. Her son was spending long hours on Discord and Reddit, in communities filled with boys who were similarly confused about their identities. Some were gay, some were not, but many were receiving attention from older predatory males who told them how beautiful or sexy they were.

Her son graduated from high school in 2021 as a trans girl. His diploma listed both his old name and his new one.

Around that same time, Arienne began reading more widely. She came across accounts by Cori Cohn and Keira Bell in Britain. She discovered the podcast Gender: A Wider Lens. She read Alasdair Gunn’s reporting in Quillette about adolescent boys drawn into gender identity communities.

The more she read, the more troubled she became.

One day, she told her son directly that he would never truly become a girl. He stormed out.

He deteriorated in his senior year of high school. He struggled to get out of bed in the morning. His functioning collapsed. He began smoking marijuana heavily and stopped attending school regularly.

Through Kaiser (California’s largest private healthcare provider and non-profit health plan), he was referred to therapists who immediately affirmed his identity. Arienne eventually found a different therapist, an older clinician who approached things more cautiously. Later, her son began working with a gender critical therapist who turned things around and questioned the gender narrative more directly. Those conversations began to open things up, and this was how another piece of the story emerged.

When her son was in middle school, he had been sexually assaulted by a larger boy and targeted by bullies. At the time, he had not fully understood what had happened to him. The experience had never been processed. Later, online attention from older men reinforced the confusion.

For Arienne, the emotional toll was immense. She describes crying every single day. There were periods when she wanted to crawl into bed and disappear.

What made it harder was the social environment around them. Many of their liberal friends celebrated what they saw as their child’s transition. In progressive California, there was no freedom to say that their children were vulnerable and in distress, and little space for parents who believed something had gone wrong.

Both Arienne and her husband had come from the gay liberation movement. Her husband explained to her son that when he was eighteen, he had only had boyfriends and believed he was gay. Years later, he married a woman. Identity at that age, he reminded their son, is not always fixed.

During a family trip, they attended a wedding that was entirely trans-positive. Their son was annoyed that he had not packed the clothes he considered feminine and had a meltdown. In the middle of a heated argument, his father shouted that their son had not even had sex yet and could not possibly understand what any of this meant. This ended up being an important turning point in the story.

Later, they discovered that their son had abruptly stopped taking Lexapro that same weekend after months on the medication. The withdrawal likely contributed to the emotional explosion. Yet the confrontation forced everyone to speak more honestly about what was happening.

Shortly after turning eighteen, their son went to Kaiser, intending to begin estrogen. Blood tests were required before any prescription could be issued.

Arienne decided it was time to be direct. She told him plainly that she did not support medical transition. California might celebrate it, she said, but she would not. Teenagers make serious mistakes. She reminded him of people she knew whose lives had changed forever because of decisions made at that age – one had a child when he was still in school, another was paralysed from the waist down following a drink-driving incident.

“You choose,” she told him.

A few weeks later, he returned and said he was thinking of going back to they/them pronouns and perhaps his original name. His parents did not challenge it. They understood it as the famous quiet “walkback” that many young trans-identified people do.

A week later, he dropped the female identity entirely and returned to his male name and pronouns.

The change brought visible relief to her son. He told his parents he finally felt able to be himself again.

Several things shifted around the same time. After stopping Lexapro, he also stopped smoking marijuana. Arienne began sharing stories with him from detransitioners, particularly young women who described how difficult it was to be female. Her son had once believed that being male was uniquely difficult. Watching those accounts forced him to reconsider.

They struck a bargain. He would watch some of the material she suggested, and she would watch the material he wanted her to see. Later, he told her that hearing detransitioners speak was what helped him see the wider picture.

The crisis lasted roughly eighteen months.

Today her son is twenty-one. Life is not perfect. He is still finding his direction. But he has had real experiences in the world. He has worked, dated girls, and begun to build a life beyond the identity that once consumed him.

For Arienne, the experience left a permanent mark on their family. The identity that once seemed permanent turned out to be something far more ordinary – a phase of adolescence that eventually lost its hold.

Watch the full conversation with Arienne here: