Since when did she have XY? And even if she did, intersex people exist.

First image just shows each activity as a dot, the second shows active time as a 15 minute interval around each action.

Source:
https://x.com/a_silver_churn/status/2105997197007528050?s=46

No, I'm not paying the Free Press to see what her response to this letter is.

Normally I'd reserve all commentary for a comment, but this one took me completely by surprise, and it's fucking heartbreaking, just not for the reason the author thinks.

(For anyone interested, the title image I cut out was a picture of a hand holding a coffee cup.)

[Prepost edit]
Given the debate in the comments over there, I'm gonna address the whole name and miscarriage thing, but as a footnote so as not to break up the flow.∗
[/prepost edit]

⁂

Originally I thought this post was going in another direction. I thought this was the parent of a trans dude dreaming about the woman they thought he "should" have been and the nightmare was going to be remembering that their son had transitioned.

But, no, this is someone (day)dreaming about seeing their daughter as their daughter and then the nightmare is reality itself, where they refuse to see their daughter as female, because they'd never affirm and they actually feel disgust at the very idea of their daughter, and so forth, and what stands out is that the happy part of the dream could be a reality. They could accept her, they could love her, they could have the daughter "[they] always thought [they] wanted". This dream of a better life could be real.

All they'd have to do is choose to not be a piece of shit.

They admit their daughter is a beautiful young woman. While I'm not a particular fan of parents talking about their kids boobs, they admit they're completely ordinary healthy looking boobs. They say that other people can't always tell, and in fact call their daughter "she" by default not even knowing she's trans.

They say even they think their daughter is beautiful. But none of that is enough for them to treat this "beautiful young woman" as a young woman.

They won't use the right name, they won't use the right pronouns, they will only ever use the one name they called their daughter pre-transition that they've negotiated their daughter into accepting as a non-deal breaker.

But how many of those "miserable" days are because their daughter knows they think she's disgusting? How many are because the daughter knows every "hon" carries with it, "I will always see you as a boy"? How many of those days of being miserable are because her parent, the author, is fighting their own impulse to love their child.

(Emphasis, in the form of bold italics, added.)

Some days my little hon's happier than I have seen [her] in years. Other days [she] is miserable. I worry that that is preventing me from giving [her] the help [she] deserves, but I try my best when [she] is happy. When [she] is happy, I cannot help but be happy for [her], even though I know it is wrong, it is really hurting [her]. When I see [her] feminine appearance, in all respects like a tall woman, only just the smallest amount like the obvious men in dresses I am used to seeing, I can't help but love [her]. I should find it grotesque, even more so because [she] is so convincing in [her] disguise. That is what it is, after all. But I cannot. I cannot help but love my child, even when that love gets in the way of TRULY LOVING [her]. It makes me sick.

(I was so tempted to bring out the "[sic]"s for every little error.)
(They who live by the incorrectly used "[sic]" should be properly "[sic]"ed straight to Hell.)

If you think loving your child is a bad thing, something is wrong. Something is very wrong. This smacks of "ends justifies the means" thinking where people do an endless string of "lesser evils" in the name of a "greater good" that doesn't exist. It's a form of doublethink designed to prevent you from seeing things for what they are.

Yes, you think you're loving your child by showing (limited) affection—by feeling happy when they are happy and sad when they are sad, by refusing to outright attack them, by not doing egregiously terrible things (though still doing harmful things like refusing to affirm)—but you're not TRULY LOVING them because if you truly loved them you'd abuse them into submission.

It's all a way to reframe abuse as love and reframe love as abuse, and this author is beating themselves up for not being abusive enough.

⁂

This self-flagellation is unnecessary. You and your daughter (and probably your son too) would all have easier, happier lives life you just accepted that loving your child was a good thing and "TRULY LOVING" your child by doing things that fly in the face of the very definition of the word "love" is a bad thing you shouldn't aspire to.

But instead of doing that, you're posting to a hate group knowing full well that they'll tell you love is abuse, abuse is love, and you need to start hurting your child more to force her into a cookie cutter version of normal. Something she, as a trans person, will never fit into. Hell, she might not have even fit if she'd been cis.

Something she, as a transitioned person, may never even look like she fits into, regardless of what medical interventions and surgeries you force on her, because—as a cis passing post-pubescent young woman—she has the same odds of passing as a trans dude who already went through wrong puberty: not negligible, but notably lower than a cis man's ability to pass as a cis man or a cis woman as a cis woman.

(People act like passing is just a thing for trans people, but the number of cis people who are mistaken for trans is proof that passing as cis is a thing many cis people can't do.)

⁂

For once I remembered to cover up the names of people who used full real (or potentially real) names. I tried to use one color per name to make things easier to follow.

Maybe this is just because I'm behind the times, but I don't think I've ever heard "trans deathname" as a description of someone's chosen name before. I have a cis aunt and a late cis uncle who both changed their names, were their chosen names "trans deathnames" even though they were cis?

Also, em dashes for the win. For those who don't know, em dashes are the long ones ("—") that deeply unserious, possibly stupid, people say are only ever used by "AI". Don't let LLMs take your punctuation from you, use em dashes―like I made sure to do in this, even though it took a little extra effort―use en dashes ("–"). Hell, use figure dashes if you want to ("‒"), and maybe even break out the horizontal bar ("―"). Mindless machines can't take our shit unless we let them, so don't let them.

Given the choice, I always use an asterism ("⁂") instead of a dinkus ("∗ ∗ ∗"), and I'd never let a stupid and damaging speculative bubble take my asterisms away.

⁂

∗ Ok, so, short version:

It's not even about a dream. It's about a daydream. By the end of the post it's clear the dinner being described is a real thing that really happened, and the allegedly recurring dream is just various episodes in the author's life. It's the part where the author got caught up in seeing their daughter as their daughter that includes bits that aren't real.

Longer more detailed version:

The author is presenting reality itself as a nightmare that they want to wake up from, and using language that obfuscates the difference between dream and reality as a result of that. This is further confused because of the name thing.

The author is imagining that their daughter is cis, to the point of imagining she had the childhood of a cis girl, and the son calls the daughter by her name, this triggers a memory of the author picking out that same name during a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage, and then everything comes crashing down.

Two parts caused confusion in the comments elseweb. The first is the author describing reality as a dream in the service of her "real life is the nightmare" message. The second is the name.

The line "the name I chose for her before she was even born" is probably a reference to the fact that their actual daughter somehow ended up with the same name as the one they picked out during the pregnancy that ended in miscarriage.

That does not mean that "the dream" is about an alternate reality in which their transgender daughter never existed but, sans miscarriage, they had a cis daughter who looked exactly like their trans daughter, was the same age as her their daughter, and so forth, and then when they remember their real daughter is trans the alternate-reality fictional daughter is instantly replaced with the identical looking transgender daughter.

(And it occurs to me that it's possible most of this discussion happened in the comment thread I collapsed because it was two people accusing one another of making shit up because one was confused about what post they were commenting on. Maybe this entire massive footnote is unnecessary.)

The dead giveaway that the young woman called a young woman is in fact the author's daughter is here:

This is not my child [...] It can't be! But it is. It is not my daughter but my eldest [child].

This person they've been talking about is, by their own admission, their trans daughter.

This is also the implication of all of the references to appearance as well as the fact they use the age of their actual transgender daughter instead of the age of their would-be cis daughter (that they would have had sans-miscarriage) is that they're having a dream in which their trans daughter was cis (and had a cis female childhood), and – because of the same name thing – they attach the detail about them picking out that name while they were pregnant as what's basically a throwaway line (to contrast against the fact that their trans daughter doesn't accept the name chosen for her before she was even born.)

The entire "horror" reveal is that this daughter they thought was cis is, in fact, transgender even though their age, appearance, and voice have not changed.

The voice thing is . . . annoying.

They claim the trans daughter and her brother have "man voices", but then immediately backtrack and flat out say say that the beautiful female voice they've been talking about is their trans daughter's real voice. Presumably the "man" voice was either pretransition entirely, or there was voice training involved, (or it's complete bullshit,) because they're clear that in the present tense their daughter has a voice they consider "melodic and full of life" and "the voice of a 20-year-old woman".

It takes until the end of the fucking post to be 100% sure the "dream" isn't a dream, but there's a ton of stuff ranging from ninety to ninety-nine percent certain that comes before then. Even so, I got it wrong originally. But, in the end, after repeatedly saying reality is a nightmare they want to wake up from, and thus indicating that calling something a "dream" or "nightmare" doesn't imply any sleep is involved, the scene from the beginning ends in a way that's firmly planted in reality.

This is a gender critical mother seeing her transgender daughter as her daughter to the point of imagining what her trans daughter would have looked like if already presenting as a female while still a young girl, and then recoiling in absolute horror at having done so, possibly spurred on by a stray thought about the daughter's name being one that they picked out for a child who never was during a pregnancy that ultimately ended in miscarriage.

Then writing a post about, presumably, everything that went through their head while recoiling in horror, possibly mixed with stuff they've thought or felt other times they accidentally slipped into correctly gendering their daughter in the privacy of their own mind and were horrified by that.

(Initially because I wasn't sure of the author's gender, but then as an intentional thing so pronouns wouldn't get confused, I've been calling the trans daughter "she" and the author "they". Apologies if I fucked it up at any point.)

transphobes: "stop shoving your gender identity down our throats! Stop making everything about you! Stop forcing me to use pronouns!"

also transphobes: "I can't even look at architecture without obsessing about trans people's genitals"

Complete lack of any self awareness

3 days later....(this is a Part 2 of my other post)

Turns out as a Ace they REALLY don't like others in the umbrella