The other holiday for people with identities

So, both my children are alienated from me.

The one some of you already know about: she identifies as trans, I oppose all the baggage that comes along with a trans identity, she doesn’t like me calling it a cult, and so she’s decided to have nothing to do with me. Or I guess that’s her reasoning, since she won’t really talk with me about it. Supposedly I can change the situation by going into therapy. All that means, if I’m right about her motivations*, is she thinks I’m crazy for knowing what a woman is and for being able to recognize the signs of a cult, plus most therapists are captured by this ridiculous movement in the first place and would be absolutely no help to me. So we’re basically waiting her out to see if she comes to her senses.

The other offspring’s situation is not so simple. I went through a nasty divorce and was betrayed by my mother-in-law, who then did her best to muck things up between me and my son in the years afterward, because apparently helping someone with material considerations entitles you to emotionally abuse them too? I keep running into people who think like that, and I’d love to yeet them all into the sun. Anyway, my son and I sort of reconciled slightly after he reached adulthood, but then he withdrew again. I’m not sure what is going on there, and am afraid to find out, especially after what’s gone on with his kid sister. So that situation’s at an impasse too.

The salient point where my son’s concerned is that on top of all her other offenses, my mother-in-law insisted she had to adopt him in order to properly care for him even though I had gotten a power of attorney drawn up in the presence of legal counsel to ensure precisely that, and that if I didn’t sign the surrender she would force the issue in court. It wasn’t about caring for him, it was about making sure I couldn’t get him back, even though I initiated his going to live with her because I wanted to see him properly cared for while I navigated my sudden poverty. Sounds like the sort of thing an unfit mother would do.

Pardon me. My eyeballs just rolled across the room.

[fumbles across room]

[pops eyeballs back into head]

…Ugh. Carpet fuzz.

Anyway. The adoption happened in late 2000. I spent most of the next decade reeling from it, and this is only surprising to people who don’t really know what adoption is or what it’s like to be the relinquishing mother. And it was worse for me because I’d had time to live with my son, to get to know him, to see him as a full person. When you’ve just given birth, your baby is still just mostly an idea. It’s still horrific trauma to lose that baby, but it’s a trauma for different reasons and it hits differently.

So I’m limping along, trying to navigate this new and awful thing in my life and in my psyche, and — as you do — talking about it on the internet a lot. You might be surprised, if you are under a certain age or have less than a certain amount of experience with this, to hear that there were places we could talk about things on the internet before social media. Either we could go to gathering places and chat with one another, or we could build our own soapboxes and sort of talk to ourselves publicly. Mostly, I did the latter after finding out that people who were supposed to be my “friends” didn’t give two shits. Okay, FINE. I’LL TALK TO MYSELF. LALALALALA.

One of the interesting things about standing on a self-built soapbox talking to yourself on the internet before maybe 2010 is that Google was still worth a tin shit in a goldmine, and people could find you just based on googling whatever you happened to be talking about. Those were glorious days. You could consult the true “wisdom of the crowds” and sometimes solve medical mysteries, find good support groups, or whatever the case. I once found out, for instance, what was going on with my daughter’s feet thanks to a random internet commenter. (Pronation, not “flexible flat feet” as her podiatrist originally thought. The things you learn.) And in the case of the situation with my son, I was found by a mothers’ rights activist who had also lost her son to adoption, and my whole world expanded.

I won’t get into the details because this essay is too long already. Suffice it to say I had known someone who lost her newborn to adoption, I’d read other mothers’ accounts of losing children to adoption, and I had lost my own son to adoption and yet I still didn’t understand what the hell was going on until I met politically-active relinquished mothers who could help me make sense of it all. People who do not like to be politically aware tend to refer to this process as “radicalization.” If they meant “getting to the root of the problem,” which is the original definition of that term, they’d be right but of course, that’s not what they mean. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t been going around blowing up adoption agencies or threatening the lives of adopters. Anyone who thinks I’ve been turned into a monster by finally understanding the meaning of what goes on in adoption hasn’t been paying attention. Also, they’re showing what they really thought of me all these years and confirmed why I was right to tell them all to fuck off. Thanks for the validation, assholes.

Does this sound familiar to you gencrits out there? It should.

Basically, to make a very long story short: I came to realize that in adoption — especially, but not limited to, newborn adoption — you have adults who want to identify as a biological state they are not in, so they go through this whole campaign to first discredit the biological state and then to claim they have it because that’s how they identify and they said so. Oh, and now the government issues identification documents proving their identified state.

It’s the same fucking thing as transgenderism, except instead of identifying as a sex you don’t have, you’re identifying as a mother or a father to a child who never came from your gametes. And to do this you have to violate a child’s right to their own identity and also their right to know what people they come from. You have to wangle the government into upholding your right to commit fraud. You have to convince the media to treat your little fraud campaign as if it is right and natural and progressive. You have to get schools to educate kids that this is all normal.

Oh, and if all of that doesn’t work, rope in the LGB community ‘cause we all know Those People can’t have kids without adoption anyway. It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!

You even have known psychopaths who helped found the movement, only in this case it’s Georgia Tann, not John Money.

AND you’ve got all of society writing off women who call attention to the drawbacks of this movement as being subhuman, less than moral, bigoted, or what-have-you. After all, if we were good women, we’d be “selfless” and care more about the feelings of an infertile** couple than about our own rights and those of our children.

HOLY SHIT.

It took years for me to get here to my current place of understanding, and first I had to take a detour from adoptee/parental rights activism into anti-gender activism, which then gave me more language to understand just what the fuck’s going on here, and now I find myself sort of holding both in my mind because they’re so closely related to one another.

As a postscript: Interestingly, the adoptee/mother’s-rights community started falling away from me after I started speaking out about gender idiocy. Including a lesbian woman who turns out to be the granddaughter of Winston Churchill, but her mother gave her up for adoption and so she’s completely severed from that family. None of those people speak to me now. Because it’s not okay to identify as the mother of a baby you bought, but it’s perfectly okay to identify as a woman and then wank in a women’s restroom.

Happy fucking Mother’s Day.

—-

*I devoutly hope the trans situation is why she’s telling me “go into therapy” because if this is about my anger at her father, I’m not the one who needs real therapy to fix that situation. He has handled “us” — me and him — as if he is a bloody lunatic since day one. But I feel there isn’t anything left there to navigate and there never really was. So if she’s waiting for me to “fix” my aversion to being treated like a dysfunctional side-piece bangmaid who won’t meekly obey, she’ll be waiting until the solar system is yeeted into the sun, and none of us will be around to see that anyhow. I hope it’s the trans thing. A lot of young people outgrow that, and in far, far less time.

**In a very interesting conversation that occurred within three days of the above photo being five months after the above photo was taken (pardon me; I was mushing two separate visits together in my middle-aged brain), my ex-mother-in-law confessed to me that she and her second husband struggled for years to have a child between them, including birthing stillborn quadruplets. So this wasn’t just about whether I was a fit mother. I’d love to believe that if I’d known her true motivation I’d have told her to fuck off, but at the time I gave her my son I was still drinking the kool-aid. Equally interesting, she claims to be a Christian, but I suppose she thinks the failure of the Tenth Commandment to mention other people’s children constituted a loophole. Anything that lets her sleep well at night, I suppose.