LIVID

Lured Into Victimized Identity Delusion

She’d never felt quite right about the term ROGD. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. For Mrs. Miller’s daughter, there was no official coming out. There was no declaration, no boilerplate letter she’d cribbed from the internet that said, Mom, you don’t have a daughter. You have a son. Instead, with no fanfare, there was a new name in the high school playbill, and they/them pronouns in the bio.

When her mother asked about it, “What’s with this name?” her daughter replied—mumbled really, “Well, I’d like it to be consistent.” Meaning she wanted her mother to use the new name at home. And she did. Until she didn’t.

Then there was the PowerPoint presentation, and the complaint about her breasts. Her daughter said, “Mom, you don’t understand. Sometimes I hate my boobs. I wish I could just unscrew them.” And her mother looked at her, astonished. “That doesn’t mean you’re trans, honey. That means you’re a normal teenaged girl.” She went on to wax nostalgic about her own adolescent body hatred. Part of being a Western woman. Ugh, hips.

But now it meant… trans?

So there was no gender dysphoria. No GD.

As for Rapid Onset, well, it wasn’t that either. As a little girl she was frilly, dancey, make-a-messy, and played with dolls. Preadolescence much the same. Then The Friend. That goddamned friend, the one who with Mrs. Miller’s daughter Googled “penis” and “sex” on the laptop when they were nine years old. The one who told her own mother she felt like a boy. That friend is now—remember Craterface from Grease? With the gravelly hormone-soaked voice. Never any dysphoria with that one either. Same dresses, same dolls. Same typical girly-girlness, but with a heaping helping of family dysfunction, alcoholism, autism, Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, and a smattering of schizophrenia on the father’s side.

So Mrs. Miller’s daughter, she went to her first GSA meeting. Sixth grade. Came home delirious, pumped full of love bombs. That was a declaration. Fell on the floor proclaiming, “I’ve found my people!” And soon after, announced happily, “I’m pansexual!” Adorable.

In eighth grade at the mall with her mother, at Hot Topic, where fashion goes to die, they browsed the two-fer T-shirt wall. One boasted the pithy quote, “Let’s get one thing straight—I’m not.” Mrs. Miller’s daughter said, “Oh yeah Mom, I’m a lesbian.” And Mrs. Miller said, “Oh? When did you realize this?” And her daughter replied, “After seeing Super Girl.” By the time they reached Auntie Anne’s Pretzels Mrs. Miller said, “Well, I’m fine with this. But if you’d told me you were trans, that would be much harder. I like the idea of gaining a daughter, but not of losing one.” And to herself she remarked, This is all so weird. It’s like she’s desperate to be part of the cool kids scene, but the “scene” is LGBT.

Sophomore year the daughter said to her mother, “That thing you said two years ago was really unsupportive.” That was when she declared—to her peers anyway—that she was now trans masculine—a gay man.

And it was also when Mrs. Miller became an ROGD mom. But more specifically she became the mother of a confused, well-meaning social justice warrior who’d been love-bombed and indoctrinated by her friends, her school and the internet to believe it was evil about to be straight, white and middle class in America.

What would Mrs. Miller coin if she could? What letters would signify the phenomenon that she’d witnessed?

Trans Social Contagion? TSC?

Closeted Straight Kid? CSK?

Rainbow Flag Disorder? RFD?

Any one of these acronyms described more fully and more specifically what Mrs. Miller saw not only in her daughter and that goddamned friend, but in all her daughter’s friends—the non-binaries, the lesbians, the bisexuals, the girls who claimed they were boys, and the two or so boys who claimed to be nonbinary. Dozens upon dozens, all at the same suburban school. All caught up in the same trans craze. And fretting alone, imagining the worst, Mrs. Miller felt like the only mother in the entire school who knew something was just not right. It infuriated her. She was alone. And she was livid.

💔