Season 2 Episode 9

Emma: When I was 11 years old, my parents had already divorced and my mum was suffering quite severe mental health problems, so much so that she couldn’t look after me anymore and I was living with my grandparents. My mum’s a schizophrenic. And my father came to visit and he took me out for the day and he told me that he had a woman’s brain in a man’s body and that he was going to be transitioning into a woman. And that was obviously a big shock and it might’ve been the next day or a few days later, my grandfather wasn’t there but my grandmother was there, and my father dressed up as a woman and sort of came and sat with us and sort of introduced his new persona you know, which had a different name and you know, lots of make up and kind of big blouses to cover up the Adam’s apple and things like that and not long after that I actually went to live with my father, he wanted custody, and I lived with him throughout his transition until I was 18.

Stassja: Try if you can, to put yourself into this scenario. You’re 11 years old, sitting with your grandmother, seeing your father wearing make up and women’s clothing, for the first time ever. It’s weird, right? And yet as a society, we’re telling children who are going through this that it’s perfectly normal. Not just that it’s normal, but that it’s wonderful and something to be celebrated. If you’re 11 years old and feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing, you might start wondering if there’s something wrong with you. 

Children are often just an afterthought for men who pursue medical transition.

Emma: I think for a child of a transitioner, I think it’s really really difficult because your dad has fallen in love with himself and there isn’t space for you in that love affair. You know it’s like he’s gone off and he’s had an affair with someone else but that’s him. It took me a really long time to understand that that my feelings weren’t important, that I wasn’t important. You know and you’re a child and you think ‘you’re supposed to love me and look after me’ and he doesn’t want to do that, he doesn’t care.

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Stassja: Welcome back to Desexing Society. I’m your host Stassja Frei. Episode 9: Children of Transitioners

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Emma Thomas is now in her mid 50s. And it’s taken her a long time to come to terms with her childhood and the impact of her father’s transition. 

Emma: I really buried a lot of my feelings about what happened between 11 and 18 and it would’ve stayed buried and I wouldn’t have been talking to anybody about it really except to explain why I come across as traumatised sometimes, except that this transgender issue exploded and I became interested in it and I thought ‘can I contribute something to this discussion that uses my experience?’ So it’s been a bit difficult cos I’ve had to go back into what happened to me between 11 and 18 to talk about that and I think I have some insights to share. 

Stassja: In 2019 Emma started the website ChildrenOfTransitioners.org.

Emma: I started writing really as a kind of a misery memoir of how awful it was and how awful my dad was and how awful he was to my mother and how she had a schizophrenic breakdown as a result of his awful behaviour and all these things. In the course of writing about that, people have got in touch with me and I’ve started talking to people who’ve had similar experiences and what I thought was an individual experience with an individual who had very specific things like, there was alcoholism, there was narcissistic abuse, there was emotional blackmail, there was gaslighting, there was all that kind of thing, what started to shock me was all of these people coming to me with exactly the same story pretty much. You know, that their father’s behaviour was really similar. The behaviour towards their mothers, the behaviour towards them, there were lots and lots of things that were similar, you know emotional abuse, financial abuse, all of those things. So I thought ‘hang on a minute, there’s a pattern here’ and recognising the pattern is something that we do, trans widows do, but of course, I don’t think clinicians do. 

Stassja: We learned the meaning behind the term trans widows in the last episode. These are women whose male partners have transitioned, leaving them feeling as though the man they married has died. Children of transitioners have a similar experience of loss.

Emma: When you’re a child you love your dad. I loved my dad so much. You know, he was everything to me. He was funny, he was lovely and then at some point he said, ‘you know that bit where I was your dad? All of that time was fake. All of that time it wasn’t the real me and I was miserable.’ And when we talk about mourning, you know like grief, I feel like, like my dad died when I was about 11 but there was this other person around so I wasn’t able to recognise that as grief. But, you imagine sort of the psychological impact of your father saying, ‘all that time I was really miserable.’ 

Stassja: Long before her father’s announcement, Emma had sensed that something was off with her family.

Emma: And I was really aware that there was something wrong with my family but I didn’t know what, like, so, I think everybody knew that my dad was cross dressing cos I think sometimes he walked around our little village cross dressed and he went to the local pub in women’s clothes sometimes but of course I didn’t’ know. So I had this very weird experience where everyone is behaving really strangely and my mother was really odd because she was having a schizophrenic breakdown so everyone was behaving really oddly towards me and my family but I didn’t know why. Like, our next door neighbour was in the kitchen one day, she had an awful accident, she nearly cut off her finger, it was like a huge gash in her hand and she came out of her house and I remember afterwards seeing the trail of blood, she came out of her house and she walked all the way around our house even though we were in, to get help from another house, because she couldn’t, she didn’t want to come to us because we were so weird. And there was a little boy next door and we were like best friends, we used to play together all the time. And then one day his parents said ‘we’re moving.’ And later I discovered that they’d actually just moved to like a few roads away, to an identical house not very far away. So clearly, people were moving away to not be next to my family, so it was- so I think it adds to this very odd paranoia where you’re just convinced there’s something wrong with you, and there was, you know our family were really weird.

Stassja: There was also a strange rule imposed on Saturdays, that didn’t make much sense. Another clue that something odd was going on around her.

Emma: So when I was a kid, every Saturday morning, I wasn’t allowed to come out of my bedroom for a couple of hours. So I’d wake up, and I’d be quite excited because it was Saturday morning, it was no school, but for a couple of hours I was not allowed to come out of the room. And then I would come out of the room and there’d be lots of treats and we’d go to the shop and we’d watch Fantastic 4 and things like that, it was all great. But I don’t know, maybe until 9 or 10 o’clock I can’t remember exactly. But it turns out that was when he was cross dressing. 

Stassja: Her parents’ relationship was unstable and that led to Emma and her mother’s housing situation also being unstable.

Emma: I do remember him hitting her. I wasn’t supposed to see that. I was just kind of- I could hear shouting and I went to look and he wacked her across the face. So I don’t know. I think it might’ve just been it got too much so we went to live with her sister for a while. Her sister wasn’t really happy to have us. Mum got a job in a department store and she tried really hard but when you’re having a schizophrenic breakdown and you’re tyring to look after a child, it wasn’t working…Yeah I don’t know what started it but I think they were in crisis, and it couldn’t’ go on anymore. And we were homeless for a bit, you know like every time we had a row with her sister- you know my mum had a row with her sister, she’d get chucked out and we’d be like walking the streets trying to find somewhere to stay you know. She had so little money. I mean it was impossible really. So fortunately my father’s parents, my grandparents, stepped in and took me.

Stassja: She lived with her grandparents for about two years before her father’s big announcement. And then she went to live with him full time.

Emma: I literally just arrived and I just, I was in the kitchen, and something, I think the tap wasn’t working, something happened and I went ‘dad!’ and I called across…and he just came in and he was like, ‘what did you say?’ you know, like really angry. My dad didn’t hit me, you know there wasn’t anything like that, but there was like, he was absolutely mad and I think that was the- and I was, I was scared out of my wits, cos I’d literally never seen him that angry with me before. My dad had always been the calm, friendly, you know kind of thing. And that was the beginning really, I think, of just a very emotionally abusive experience. My teens were just full of a great deal of emotional abuse.

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Stassja: After a difficult childhood, Emma’s teenage years were just as challenging, if not more so. At the same time that she was going through puberty, her father’s body was also changing.

Emma: It was yeah, really strange – the hormones, you know- having, taking the hormones, his appearance changing and things like that. I think it’s very unusual to be living with your dad while that process happens.

Stassja: Because of the sexual nature of autogynephilia, growing up with her father meant that Emma was exposed to adult sexuality at a young age.

Emma: My dad went to gay pubs all the time – he was an alcoholic so he had to go to pubs – and so I spent a lot of time just sitting in gay pubs throughout my teens. You know it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but there’s a little bit of grooming because you’re, you know like, all the people in the gay pubs are like, ‘oh it’s so great that you get to be here and everyone’s so understanding’ and…I think I see some of that now where people are so like, oh all the kids are learning about being LGBT and how great that was and that kind of stuff and I’m like, there are things that I probably shouldn’t have seen, you know shouldn’t have experienced that young really…We watched films, all those kind of gender bending films there was a lot of that kind of like you know that ‘you’ve got to be more grown up, you’re growing up, you’re special, you can cope with these grown up films, you can cope with this grown up material’ that kind of thing. Which I think people who’ve suffered sexual abuse – which I didn’t – will be familiar with, that thing about, ‘look how mature you are for your years’ there was that because I was so understanding and I could cope with all this grown up material yeah we, you know, there was kind of sissy porn around. My dad was like ‘that’s not me, that’s just the newsletters I get’ but there was a lot of that sort of stuff around.

Stassja: It’s a well known tactic of paedophiles to first build trust and an emotional connection with a child. One way to do this is to praise the child by telling them they’re mature for their age. After building trust, the next step in the grooming process is testing boundaries. An example of this could be showing the child pornography to gauge their reaction and to normalise sexual acts. I find it quite disturbing that Emma sees parallels between what happened to her and what happens to victims of child sexual abuse. 

Another troubling similarity is the condition of secrecy. Paedophile groomers will tell the child that the abuse is their little secret. But this can also take the form of a threat for example, ‘if you tell anyone you’ll get in trouble.’ Sadly, young Emma was also threatened into staying silent about risky things that were happening in her home.

Emma: He moved this kind of transvestite prostitute into our house, and we lived in this tiny little flat, and he moved him in for like several months and then he said ‘if you ever say anything I will stop loving you. I won’t love you anymore.’ So there was lots of that where it was the emotional blackmail of, ‘I will withdraw speaking to you, I will withdraw everything, if you don’t completely cooperate all the time.’ So I was in absolute misery…I was just so traumatised.

Stassja: In response to the emotional abuse, Emma comforted herself with food.

Emma: So I had a really, such an extreme eating disorder I was much bigger than I am now. I was very very big. I was just the classic ‘fat is a feminist issue’ thing about ‘this is my armour, I am protecting myself, you know, this is what I’m doing’, and he sat me down and he said, you know, ‘no man will ever want to fuck you.’ You know that was his big parental advice: ‘you are so fat, no man will ever want to have sex with you Emma.’ And that was, you know like because your purpose, to my father, the purpose of a woman is to be fucked. That my only value was in a sexual context. 

Stassja: This very male idea of what a woman is, once again betrays the fact that trans women are men. For young Emma, this wasn’t the only sexist, misogynistic messaging that she received whilst living with her father. Before the internet, one of the ways that transvestites and transsexuals connected with each other was through newsletters. Emma’s father subscribed to such newsletters and was happy to accommodate his friends when they visited England.

Emma: Cos my dad had lots of transsexuals visiting or transsexuals would come from the States and they’d come and visit and stay and when I look back now with adult eyes, what I really see as interesting is they all had awful attitudes towards their exes, they had no empathy with women at all, they didn’t particularly like women. Now you talk to an average guy, you know I go out and I’ve got lovely neighbours and friends and things like that and you talk to an average guy, he’s got quite a lot of understanding about what it’s like to be a woman in terms of, you know, they’re married, know their wives have had children, there’s a kind of normal you know understanding, but the transsexuals didn’t have that. They just didn’t understand. So in this kind of desire to appropriate you know, walk within the skin of, in a sense women had to be othered. You know it was kind of actual women had to be kind of go in the corner over there so that they can wear the clothes and do the whole thing.

Stassja: Years later, in the course of writing her blog, Emma reached out to her father’s second wife who recounted yet another example of this lack of empathy for women.

Emma: My dad had two exes cos he married again after my mother and it was awful, he took all her money and she had an awful experience. And so one thing that happened was that she became pregnant and she miscarried twins and she nearly died in the process because she bled so much. I mean it was- you couldn’t just imagine. So she’s lying in the hospital bed and she’s just lost these babies and nearly lost her life. My father comes in, and it’s the only time he visits her in hospital, he’s not there at all, and he comes in and he says, ‘you have fulfilled your role as a woman and now I will fulfill mine’ and he walks out. And so years later, I have this conversation with her, we get in touch, I’m like, you know I’m writing this blog, I’m interested in what’s happened to you, and she tells me this story and I’m just like- as a woman, and I’ve not had children, I hear that story and I have a visceral reaction to it, I feel like I’m her, you can feel it can’t you, somehow in your whole body how awful that experience must’ve been. But my father wouldn’t even visit her. I don’t know a man who wouldn’t have been there holding her hand, apart from my dad who thinks he’s a woman.

Stassja: After his second marriage failed, he took custody of Emma and committed full time to his medical transition.

Emma: But we lived in a very small flat you know and yeah, it was invasive I suppose, it was very uncomfortable because my father was developing breasts and you know then he had his operation and that was quite distressing. A couple of things went wrong, his urethra healed up a few times so he had to go into hospital and it looked possible that it would keep healing over in which case he would’ve been quite disabled but they seemed to have been able to open it up surgically. I remember once there were two district nurses who came in just to check to see that his operation had gone ok and one of them came out and she stood in the living room and she looked at me and she said ‘it’s too weird, I can’t go in.’ I mean it’d just been too strange you know this kind of faux vagina. I did see it. He kept on kind of sitting with his legs open and at one point I said, ‘could you wear some pants please’ and he did he put on some knickers but that was a bit- what was that about? Why did I have to see it? I don’t know.

Stassja: I also wonder what this was about. Did he think this was something that female family members normally do around each other? Or was it perhaps his way of proving to his daughter that he was just like her now? Whatever the reason, it was clearly inappropriate and just another example of how transwomen are not really women.

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Emma: I went on twitter in 2017 and at some point I saw this thing about autogynephilia and I started to look more, I looked into what Blanchard had written and Michael Bailey. That was quite interesting. I read Galileo’s Middle Finger and things like that and that was yeah, an absolute revelation.

Stassja: You might remember those names from season 1 of Desexing Society. If not, here’s a quick recap. Dr Ray Blanchard is the psychologist and researcher who coined the term autogynephilia in the 1980s. Dr Michael Bailey, also a psychologist, picked up where Blanchard left off and continued the research into autogynephilia. In 2003 he published his book The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gener-Bending and Transsexualism. Following the book launch, Bailey was ruthlessly harassed, both personally and professionally, by transsexuals who wanted him destroyed for having written about autogynephilia. Dr Alice Dreger, an advocate for people who have intersex conditions, wrote about Bailey’s ordeal in her book Galileo’s Middle Finger.

It’s not surprising that Emma describes learning about autogynephilia as a revelation. After all, for 35 years, the truth of her father’s condition had been hidden from her. 

Emma: My father had implied that there was something wrong with the way that he was born, yeah he said that he had a female brain in a male body. And I had been a child when he told me that and I just accepted that, right? And so you know, you have the narrative and you go through your whole life and you think ‘well that’s my dad who has the female brain in the male body’ and then of course you start listening to feminists in 2017 and they go ‘what does that mean!?’ Cos I hadn’t asked that question: What does that mean? And I thought, ‘hang on a minute, because I have a female brain in a female body and I don’t want to wear make up. I don’t care about those things. I don’t care at all’ you know, in fact I mean I’m just hopeless at- I think I’m pathologically bad at dressing as a woman. Just bad at doing any of those things. I’ve never been able to work make up out – all of that kind of stuff. So I was kind of like, ‘what does that mean?’ Right? And then I thought hang on a minute, and this was honestly a feminist awakening in me where I was kind of like, ‘that’s rubbish! That’s so stupid!’ And so I realised – I found out about this condition I thought, ‘my god! This is not just my dad but these are all my dad’s friends. These are all these transsexuals who turned up and they were all like this. And it explains how obsessed they were with how they looked, how they talked about women, how they would- and honestly, the clothes! They’re all obsessed with the clothes! You know like the shopping for clothes and wearing the clothes and all the underwear, all of that sort of stuff. When I read about autogynephilia I got it, because I’ve seen my father kind of, blowing kisses to himself in the mirror, putting on make up and lipstick and I get that actually he’s fallen in love with the person in the mirror and there’s no room for anyone else in that love affair you know and it’s very and- this narcissism, it is just all about him. 

Stassja: There seems to be significant overlap between autogynephilia and narcissistic personality disorder. Certainly, if you listen to trans widows and children of transitioners, they’ll confirm this. 

Unfortunately there’s been very little research into the overlap between the two conditions. I found a 2014 journal paper from Iran titled The frequency of personality disorders in patients with gender identity disorder. Of the 73 participants in the study, an alarming 81.4% had a personality disorder. And the most common type was narcissistic personality disorder, which affected 57.1% of the patients. This is far higher than the general population where only 6.2% have the disorder.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell us much about narcissism and autogynephilia because the sample was a mix of both males and females pursuing sex reassignment surgery. The researchers also didn’t differentiate between the two types found in men – homosexual transsexualism and autogynephilic transsexualism.

As valuable as Blanchard and Bailey’s work was for Emma’s understanding of autogynephilia, she’s convinced that they never saw the full picture.

Emma: So if you look at say Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard and things like that, they really like these guys. These guys turn up to their clinics and they’re charming and I tell you what, this is narcissistic personality disorder, people. They’re really charming. My dad was really charming – could always kind of win people over. So you imagine those people, they go to these clinics and they turn on the charm and they’re really amazing and Michael Bailey loves them and Blanchard’s like, ‘I really like these people’ but they don’t know what’s going on at home. They don’t see anything about what gets turned on to people who don’t cooperate. The anger that gets turned towards women and children if they fail to cooperate is really quite something to behold, 

Stassja: The anger Emma is describing is known as narcissistic rage. And it can be terrifying.

A prime example of this, is trans identified male, Tiffany Moore, also known as GameStop Ma’am. In early 2019, a video of him verbally abusing a cashier at a video game store went viral on social media.

GameStop Ma’am: You’re going to give me my fucking money back

Shopper: Excuse me sir there’s a young man in here, you need to watch your mouth

GameStop Ma’am: Excuse me it’s ma’am! It is ma’am!

Shopper: I can call the police if you’d like me to. You need to settle down.

GameStop Ma’am: You need to settle down and mind your business ok? Ma’am. Once again, ma’am.

Cashier: I said both of you.

GameStop Ma’am: No you said sir! Once again it’s ma’am.

Cashier: I actually said both of you guys. 

GameStop Ma’am: Right beforehand you fucken said sir!

Cashier: Sir…

GameStop Ma’am: Motherfucker! Take it outside. If you wanna call me sir again I will show you a fucking sir. 

Cashier: I apologise. 

GameStop Ma’am: Motherfucker!

Cashier: I apologise ma’am [bang]

Stassja: The bang you heard at the end there is GameStop Ma’am kicking over a product display as he heads for the door. 

He looks and sounds just like a violent angry man. And the thing that’s triggered this violent outburst is the cashier referring to him as Sir. You might think that being called sir is a common experience for a man who thinks he’s a woman. After all, we humans can determine a person’s sex within milliseconds of looking at them. So calling an obviously male person ‘ma’am’ means we have to override what we’re actually thinking. And that takes conscious effort. As we just heard, even when facing an irate, abusive customer on the verge of violence, the truth still slips out.

GameStop Ma’am: Right beforehand you fucken said sir!

Cashier: Sir…

GameStop Ma’am: Motherfucker! Take it outside. If you wanna call me sir again I will show you a fucking sir!

Stassja: So why can’t GameStop Ma’am put himself in the shoes of the cashier? Why can’t he understand that other people see him as a man and that means even if they don’t mean to, sometimes they’re going to call him sir?

This brings us back to the question: what is the relationship between autogynephilia and narcissistic personality disorder? People with narcissism come across as self obsessed, full of themselves and lacking in empathy for other people. But behind this outwardly self centred persona hides a fragile and wounded self that has been crippled by a deep sense of shame. 

Psychologists believe that narcissism develops in early childhood. Through traumatic events or through unstable relationships with the mother and/or father, the child comes to believe that there’s something inherently wrong with them at their core. They’re damaged and unlovable. So the child creates a false idealised self in order to avoid this unbearable sense of shame. Of course, this process is unconscious, so the narcissistic individual believes the idealised self is their true self.

Psychotherapist Dr Joseph Burgo believes that for many autogynephilic men, a similar process is at play. In his article, Are Trans Rights Activists Victims — Or Bullies? Burgo writes the following. Quote: “For the troubled young men in my psychotherapy practice who have de-transitioned…their female identity represented such an idealized false self. By imagining themselves to be female, my clients had taken flight from a shame-ridden self which was felt to be defective, damaged, and beyond repair. When this defensive new identity finally broke down, they found themselves engulfed in pain, confusion and shame, and as a result sought professional help.” End quote.

When GameStop Ma’am was called Sir, it brought him back to the painful reality that he’s not the false self that he’s pretending to be. He’s not a woman and other people don’t see him as a woman. The delusion was interrupted and the offending cashier had to be destroyed.

Now, imagine being an 11 year old child, like Emma once was, on the receiving end of such overwhelming rage.

Emma: I know that lots of people have narcissistic parents and have that experience, you know it’s just here, there’s further gaslighting because your dad is then saying things like ‘I am now authentic. I’m now authentically me.’ The authentic him doesn’t love you and that’s really difficult…It’s a difficult experience and it’s very traumatic and I don’t know, I don’t know how you can go through that and not have some damage.

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Emma: I wrote a piece called Not Shutting Up and what I did was, I just went, and it was like 10 minutes googling, it was really not a lot of time, and I found a whole pile of trans sex offenders and I looked at the news reports and they all had children. Karen White has two kids. 

Stassja: We covered the infamous case of Karen White back in episode 5, Prisons. White was a serial sex offender with multiple prior convictions. The UK Prisons Service placed him in a women’s prison because he said he was a woman. For three months he terrorised the female inmates and sexually assaulted at least two of them.

Until Emma pointed it out, it honestly never occurred to me that he might have children.

Emma: You know there’s a whole pile of them and they all have kids, all of these sex offenders. Because they’re all late stage transitioners, aren’t they, they’ve all come out as autogynephiles and then they’re finding child sex images on their computers or they’ve assaulted somebody, all of those kind of things. I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that there is this link between autogynephilia and se- it’s a paraphilia so it clusters with other paraphilias. They’re more likely to do and say sexual things because of this condition. 

Stassja: This brings us to a difficult question. But it has to be asked. Should autogynephiles be given custody of children?

Emma: Personally no and I’d really like to see social workers at least overseeing that…In my case, my mother couldn’t look after me and you see other ones where they’ve got custody, there’s some problem, the woman’s sick, and things like that. So they’ve got custody but every time I look at that it’s dodgy as hell. And I don’t know what goes on for those kids but if you look at for example the, ‘it’s Ma’am’ guy, you remember that guy? 

Stassja: Emma is referring to GameStop Ma’am.

GameStop Ma’am: Excuse me it’s ma’am! It is ma’am!

Emma: Right? He’s got a son and there are pictures of him with his child, he’s naked, the child’s semi naked there, the child’s wearing a dog collar at one point and you just sort of think, ok, who’s overseeing that? Could there be somebody kind of coming in and saying, how safe is that child? 

Stassja: I have to correct Emma here. Although she’s not too far off the mark. The pictures she’s remembering were featured in a video by YouTuber and transsexual, Blaire White. The young boy is shirtless and lying in between his father’s naked thighs. But GameStop Ma’am isn’t entirely naked. We can see that he’s wearing pink underwear. In another of his social media photos, he and his male partner are both wearing fetish dog collars in front of his son.

Emma: I’m talking about the fact that there is a very sexual nature to what these men are doing and that’s a sexual nature that’s escalating and I don’t know how someone like that can be looking after a child and that’s healthy. It wasn’t for me although I wasn’t sexually abused but nevertheless, I am very aware of sexual abuse that happens in these scenarios. I’m aware of children who are exposed to much more sexual content and sexual danger…this isn’t healthy.

Stassja: As we learnt in episode 5, more than half of the trans identified males in UK prisons have been convicted of sexual crimes. Autogynephilia is a red flag. 

Unfortunately, the transgender industry has been very successful in normalising autogynephilia. Police, schools, social services, courts – all these sectors that are supposed to recognise when a child is in danger have been groomed to believe that trans women are women. And of course, if they’re really women then they’re not considered a safeguarding risk.

Emma: These guys are being seen as, they’re brave and they’re doing a very stunning and amazing thing and that the role of wives and children is to be supportive. You are just there to be supportive of them and my big concerns are how would you report abuse? If you were ‘It’s Ma’am’s’ child or some other child, how do you report what’s going on at home? Who do you talk to? So you go into school, right, and I know this because I know of children who’ve had this experience, where you go into school and you try and talk to somebody and that somebody has gone through all the training and they’re going to be saying, ‘you can’t refer to your father as your father, you can’t talk about your dad, you can’t use those pronouns, you can’t be saying that,’ that you’re a problem from the minute you start speaking. The minute you start saying there is a problem, they’re not geared up for there to be a problem…and they’re not going to want to hear it. What happens, you go to the police, what happens when you go to the police? You go in there, they have autogynephile officers, they’ve had all the training, they don’t want to hear that there’s a problem.

Stassja: Emma’s comments prompted me to look at what’s happening with the police in my home state of Victoria. I quickly found their publicly available LGBTIQ+ Inclusion Action Plan for 2023–2024. Skimming through the 24 page document, I discovered that Victoria Police have been members of ACON’s Pride in Diversity since 2015. That’s 10 years of ideological grooming of police officers. In 2021 they achieved a silver ranking in ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index. In 2020, more than 400 Victoria Police employees underwent LGBTIQ+ awareness sessions, presumably delivered by ACON. We don’t know exactly what kind of training was in those sessions. Were police instructed that misgendering was a form of violence? Were they taught that unsupportive wives and children are simply transphobic? What we do know, is that no police officer would have heard the term ‘trans widow’ or ‘autogynephilia’ in any of those training sessions.

So then, what would Victoria Police do if they were called out to the following scenario?

Emma: This happened to someone who has been in touch with us whose daughter, well, there’s a group of girls, they’re getting changed for a dance competition, dance recital and the father, who has just recently transitioned, still looks incredibly male, walks in, and there are all these 12 year old girls and they’re like ‘argh, get out, get out’ and he’s like, ‘I’ve got the right to be here’ and he’s just standing there watching these girls and eventually they’re like, ‘well it’s not going to happen. The tournament isn’t going to happen, like we’re not going to compete, we’re not going to do anything because you’re here’ and eventually he gets persuaded to leave. But that sort of- what’s going on? What’s going on with that man? That suddenly he thinks he’s allowed to go in with all those girls?

Stassja: This example really disturbs me. It demonstrates just how far an autogynephile can drift from consensus reality. It’s not normal behaviour. In any other context aside from trans, it would be considered predatory behaviour. But would the police view it that way? And can you imagine being that man’s daughter? You would feel completely grossed out and humiliated in front of your dance friends.

But the trans industry simply can’t acknowledge that children might have negative feelings around their parent’s transition. Instead, children are encouraged to become cheerleaders for their “queer” fathers.

Emma: Cos there’s a book that this group COLAGE have written called My Trans Parent. There’s a little industry there with some books. There’s some books for children which is about how you can be the right kind of child of a trans parent. And it was, it was like now you can go to pride. That’s the thing – you’re now part of a queer family so you’re part of the queer community and this is what you’re part of. And I was just, I’m horrified by it, I really am. The behaviours are all about negating yourself. And I think particularly for girls: be submissive, don’t speak out, be supportive. And if you’d been there and met me at 15 I would’ve been fiercely in my father’s corner you know because that’s what you do when you’re a girl you protect all these people and there’s that sort of martyrdom that you kind of adopt and that’s the worst thing that girls can do and it’s the worst thing that we can say to girls, is be submissive and just submerge yourself for these other people.

Stassja: It must be so confusing for children. On the one hand, they’re feeling embarrassed or uncomfortable because of their father’s strange behaviour. But on the other hand, the whole of society is telling them they should be happy and celebrating.

In her blog post titled The Autogynephile in the Room, Emma wrote the following. Quote: “When your father wants to go to a bra fitting or make up session with you, or wants to know all about your period, that’s autogynephilia too. If your father is doing this he is involving you in his erotic world.” End quote. This is the terrible truth for daughters of autogynephiles. And we’re doing those girls no favours by ignoring the sexual nature of their father’s transition.

For sons of autogyenphiles, the problems are different, but not insignificant.

Emma: I mean I talk about it from a female perspective. I am trying to get men to write for my site as well because there’s some really sad stories out there about boys who are like, ‘you’re supposed to show me how to be a man, you’re supposed to be there for my key moments’ and they’re talking to someone who’s trying to run away from all of that.

Stassja: Even for adult children of transitioners, the experience is still hard to process.

Emma: What’s been interesting to me as well is I’ve had some, you know, contact from people who didn’t have that when they were children but you know the adults in their 20s or 30s or 40s even and their fathers say ‘I’m transitioning’ and it’s still really difficult. 

Stassja: An example here is Caitlyn, formerly Bruce Jenner. On The Alec Baldwin Show, his step daughter Kim Kardashian described the disturbing moment she discovered Bruce cross dressing.

Kim Kardashian: I found out when I was maybe 25. I’d walked in on Caitlyn, my mom was out of town and I walked in on Caitlyn all dressed up. It was Bruce, but dressed up as a woman in the garage at my mom’s house. And I ran in, packed a bag so fast, shaking, and ran out and called Kourtney and said ‘I have to come spend the weekend with you.’ And I was hysterically crying, and she just was like, ‘What is it? Did you catch Bruce cheating?’ And I was like, ‘I wish. I don’t know what I just saw.’

Stassja: Clearly, Kim was deeply affected by what she’d witnessed. It was so upsetting that she was crying and shaking. Her body had gone into fight or flight mode.

Nonetheless, 10 years after that incident, having kept his secret all that time, Kim would become one of Bruce’s biggest cheerleaders. Within just weeks of him announcing that he was transitioning, she went on the Today show to sing his praises.

Kim Kardashian: Bruce is the most honest, just, he has the biggest heart and I’m really happy for him that he is living his life the way he wants to live it and that he has found inner peace and just pure happiness. That’s what life is about.

Stassja: I think Kim Kardashian is a prime example of how children – or step children – learn very quickly to suppress their discomfort and play a supporting role in their father’s paraphilia. I do wonder though, with increasing awareness of autogynephilia, are the Kardashians now also aware of the condition?

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When Emma turned 18, she moved out of her father’s flat and went to university. After that, he completely lost interest in her. Eventually she came to recognise that he has narcissistic personality disorder. She learnt a strategy known as ‘grey rocking’ to deal with him. The idea is to not react when provoked and to not engage with any of the mind games. In short, you’re deliberately being as boring as a grey rock so that the narcissist becomes disinterested in trying to manipulate you.

Emma: I just grey rock my dad. We do share texts now and again where my dad sort of says, how awful his mother was and boasts about how many holidays he goes on and how many coffee machines he owns and he never once asks me how I am. Never once. Despite the fact he knows that I went through stage three cancer, he never once asks me anything about it or how I am. 

Stassja: Knowing what she knows now, what advice would Emma give to other kids going through what she went through?

Emma: Find out how to deal with a narcissist. Go online, Tik Tok’s got loads of videos, YouTube’s got lots of videos, and there are lots of things you can say and do that just take some of that aggression off you. And also, talk about it. If your dad is doing something that makes you uncomfortable, that is, you think is abusive, or you’re any way uncomfortable with what’s going on, find an adult, talk to that adult, because I was bullied into silence, I really was and made to feel like I was my dad’s champion and I couldn’t possibly say anything and one of the things that was happening was, it wasn’t just if I complained about my dad, all transsexuals would suffer. Right? That I was betraying all of these poor people if I complained about my father. That I was responsible not just for my father’s emotions but also all of these transsexuals. Which I really took on board. I thought ‘oh my god, I can’t say anything. It’s just my dad who’s an alcoholic, emotionally abusive, horrible person. All of these poor transsexuals are lovely.’ And obviously not, and you’re not responsible for them, so speak. I know obviously it’s difficult because schools are captured and the police are captured and things like that, but can you find an adult that you can talk to? And if so, then talk to them and just tell them what’s going on.

Stassja: After starting her blog, other children of transitioners have reached out to Emma. She’s acted as counsellor as they share their stories with her and she’s opened her blog up for others to write about their experiences. It’s also led to her speaking at the House of Lords.

Emma: I went to the House of Lords and I spoke about my experience alongside a trans widow and people were really sympathetic and I thought, my god, we’re such a niche group of people, we’re so small, we’re never going to be a political force. You know, we’re never going to unite and it’s never going to work. We’re just a bunch of traumatised people. But there are people out there who are listening to us and want to do something to help us and I thought that was just amazing.

Stassja: There’s one thing that I find puzzling about Emma’s story. Her father could’ve easily left her with his parents, freeing him up to do whatever he wanted. But instead, he wanted custody of Emma. The question is, why? If he was a narcissist, surely it wasn’t out of concern for Emma’s welfare. So what was it about?

Emma: Imagine you’re walking down the street and there are lots of people walking past you, you’re not looking at those people, you’re kind of clocking them, you’re looking for a threat but if they just look like regular people, you’re not going to spend a lot of time looking at them…Now here was this person who’s walking around with a child, with a young woman, you’re not really going to look at them that hard. You’re going to assume that they’re a woman. So I notice a lot of trans identified men talk about, ‘oh I pass and nobody says anything’. If you’re sitting next to them in a restaurant and you’ve got a bit more time, then you’ll clock the Adam’s apple, the big hands, no hips, all that kind of thing, you’ll clock it. But a lot of the time, you’re not looking that hard, so if they sort of resemble women, you’re going to let that go and I was definitely very useful as a kind of a beard really, you know, you don’t really look at a woman who’s with a child. 

Stassja: In follow up questions I sent to Emma, she wrote the following in reply. Quote: “I think it’s difficult when normal people look at autogynephiles to comprehend that it is not so much about being something – people have to see you being something. Even alone with a mirror, in their head there are two people there: a gorgeous woman and a man looking upon her with desire.” End quote.

For her father, having custody of Emma was about being seen. She was there to witness and validate his woman identity. She was proof to others that his transition was successful because here he was lovingly caring for his daughter who loved him in return. And importantly, he could play the role of mother which was more validation of his woman identity. In short, just like the make up and the dresses are a prop to achieve the autogynephilic fantasy, Emma too was, sadly, a prop.

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Coming up in the next episode of Desexing Society, we’ll investigate the extraordinary influence the trans lobby has in local government

Dean Hurlston: They’ve had a main seat at the table on many of these issues and through things like the Rainbow Accreditation and Rainbow Votes program, what they have really successfully done is infiltrated every council’s thinking and influenced council officers.

Stassja: We’ll examine how councils are putting women’s safety at risk

Rebecca: Every single time I entered the women’s change room, he was in there, fully clothed in like a long skirt and a jacket…He’d be standing near the wall drying his already dry hair, watching the women and little girls all around him getting changed.

Stassja: And we’ll explore why councils keep inviting drag queens to read books to small children

Moira Deeming: Drag Queen Story Time, some of the stories that I’ve seen would really confuse children about the reality of their bodies and about sex

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Stassja: Thanks for listening to Desexing Society. Written and produced by me, Stassja Frei. Thank you to my script editor, Ms Edie Wyatt, my sound technician Matthew Friend, and to Emma Thomas for appearing in this episode. For more information, or to donate towards this project – which I paid for myself – please visit desexingsociety.com