How to ensure your children will hate and abandon you.
As a preface, I absolutely agree that the parents here are very likely to be wrong in that it seems like they were ideologically opposed to their son’s identity.
HOWEVER. I find it difficult to trust the validity and/or truth in the details given about this particular story as the article and title are both blatantly biased. On top of that, the claims made about the intentions and motivations of others are aggressively ignorant and just insanely unhelpful. You want people to double down on transphobia? Tell them they’re a terrible person and they’re only transphobic because _____. I get it, conservatives, Christians, etc should respect Trans people and their autonomy, but it’s better for literally everyone to find the best way to reach these people in a way they’d actually be receptive to, rather than trashing and dehumanizing them as monsters. If they’re conservatives, it shouldn’t be surprising when they act like it. We should also recognize that they’re people who are capable of learning to be better.
I used to be homophobic. I was a fairly conservative Christian back in the day and the justification came via biblical principles. I didn’t learn to be better by being characterized as “he only hates gay people because he’s secretly gay himself” or “he just wants to control what other people do in the bedroom”, but rather by actually engaging my own rationalizations. I would have rejected the premise that I hated anyone who was homosexual, so any rhetoric that mirrors the dishonesty of this article would have been a non-starter. In fact, it would have seemed to me that there were no legitimate arguments to be made against my position, so I would have felt more justified with the given approach above. Being in a few opposing positions on the topic, I never believed that my concurrent position was morally wrong, even though I would strongly submit today that my position before as a conservative Christian absolutely was immoral and extremely uninformed. The takeaway I’m trying to emphasize is that going on the offensive for any such position is not only ridiculous, but very counterproductive.
While I understand the frustration with what this article appears to portray, the added dishonesty is harmful in that we’re dehumanizing two parents who probably legitimately believe what they are doing is justified and moral. Attacking them would make them double down on their beliefs and who would directly suffer for it? Their son. So where I always found the blatant bias of articles or the always ridiculous non-argument “you just believe _____ because _____” inherently dishonest and icky, I think we should definitely take better stock of how we approach these topics for more than just the intellectual honesty, but also to recognize the second, third, and even fourth order effects our method of approach manifests. Outrage, especially about something moral, feels good, but what good is it when directed the way it is in this article? I could accuse them of being blind and only utilizing outrage as a clickbait tactic, and I have a chance of being correct, but I’m not arrogant enough to assert that I know for a fact what they believe and intend and post that on the internet.
