A new HBO Max documentary, titled Transhood, is pushing the claim that parents must unconditionally accept their children’s claims to be members of the opposite sex.
Director Sharon Liese told Time magazine: “People ask me, how do kids know when they are four years old? I quickly realized that is not the question. The question is, how do you not believe them?”
The soft-focus documentary, shot in Kansas City, Missouri, and follows four children over the course of five years, doesn’t mention much science. The film follows the four subjects who are ages 15 (Leena), 13 (Jay), 7 (Avery), and 4 (Phoenix) when we first meet them in the documentary. 4-year-old Phoenix buffs the transition encouraged by his parents and we later learn that he accepts his male sex.
As noted in this Indie Wire review:
The youngest subject in the film, Phoenix, is just four years old when filming began. While their parents are supportive at first, once Phoenix de-transitions and begins identifying as a boy, their mother does a complete 180, calling transgender identity “a mental disorder.”
Phoenix at 4 is seen identifying as a “girl-boy.” He later identifies as a girl and by age 7 is seen identifying as male.
Watch below:
The documentary also sidelines the parents who resist the transgender demands and instead help their children accept their unavoidable biology. These parents battle the quiet seduction of their children by transgender activists on Instagram, HBO, and other social media channels, and they get little recognition from commercial culture. For example, Psychology Today quickly removed a November 20 article which described how children reject their parents in favor of pro-transgender voices:
Amid this pull, parents may be experiencing something like parenting dysphoria, as they fight to preserve their relationships with children who may hear from other sources that their parents are the toxic ones. Parents who tell their trans declared children that they are worried about them, that they don’t think they should make life-altering decisions, that they’re young and they should explore slowly may experience pushback or rejection from their child in return.
Parents may also find that some therapists are not on their side. There is much testimony among parents of trans kids who have been told by therapists that lack of support for these children is the same as harming them.
Ultimately, particularly as children enter their mid teens, they may become more emboldened to leave behind families and disconnect from parents—parents who, in some cases, have wanted nothing more than to make their children happy and whole. There are many exceptions to this, of course; some trans children have suffered abuses at the hands of their families. But some trans children may co-opt the language of abuse to describe a home life where their gender choice was not embraced, either in part or at all. Equipped with more information about transitioning online, some teens may feel more empowered than ever to strike out on their own, perhaps maintaining the belief their parents don’t love them. In many, many cases, they are very wrong.
The Transhood trailer glosses over the tension in the four families caused by the transgender claims. Phoenix’s parent divorce, partly over their disagreedment with their child’s claims, while other parents get praise for their advocacy.
The film also ignores the growing evidence that more kids who would grow up to be gay or lesbian are being seduced into the de-sexed, unhealthy, sad, infertile, and unattractive role of “transgender men” and “transgender women.” Most children, if not scored by their parents to pro-transgender medical providers, grow to accept their bodies. In 2018, Dr. Susan Bradley, a child psychiatrist who founded the Toronto Gender Identity Clinic, told National Review:
We know from multiple studies that around 80 percent of gender dysphoric children will desist from their cross-sex identification in childhood to identify with their natal sex. Most of these will grow up to be gay or lesbian; a substantial minority have also been diagnosed with autism.
The trailer ignores the many young men and women who quit the transgender lifestyle.
“We are manufacturing transgender kids,” said Walt Heyer, founder of Sex Change Regret. “We are manufacturing their depression, their anxiety, and it has turned into a huge industry that people are profiting from after kids’ lives are completely torn apart,” he told a Washington meeting in 2019.
The trailer also ignores the revolutionary ideological demands behind the transgender movement — and its impact on the legal rights, institutions, and civic support for all women and girls.
A lopsided majority of voters oppose transgender medical treatment of children.
But Transhood producer, Liese, told Time: “Let the [children] lead … you can never go wrong by affirming your child.”