(The “transgender agenda” strikes again … )

From a feature story (“To be a man”) in today’s Albany Times Union on 20-year old transman, Dan Foerste …

Mother’s view

Andrea McArthur, Foerste’s mother, sounds alternately baffled, hurt, worried and angry when talking about her daughter. She uses female pronouns and Foerste’s given first name, which Foerste requested not be printed in this story because it feels wrong to him and because now that he’s begun living as a man, it’s another label he’d like to shed.

“I never thought about the possibility of her being gay (as a child),” says McArthur. The more radical idea of transgenderism proved difficult to even try to wrap her mind around at first. As she did research, McArthur says, she came to believe that people who try to change their gender are deluded and harming themselves, enabled by a complicit community of therapists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists and surgeons, some of whom are transgendered themselves. (Her views are generally rejected by the mainstream medical and therapeutic communities.)

“It’s like a cult,” she says. Speaking of a transgendered therapist whom Foerste has visited, McArthur says. “He’s into lobbying for transgendered (rights). … He’s recruiting people.”

Informed by her Christian faith, she believed something similar when Foerste was in high school; gay and lesbian friends, McArthur says, exploited her daughter’s loneliness and made the lifestyle seem attractive: “She had a lot of those friends, (and) she transformed that way.”

Later in the conversation, McArthur rails against a “Godless society” in which sexual-education classes discuss homosexuality and transgenderism as valid alternative lifestyles. She wishes her daughter would had seen a heterosexual therapist with a doctorate, not a transsexual with a master’s. She suggests Foerste’s confusion originates in rejection by his biological father, who favored Foerste’s siblings. She speculates Foerste may have been sexually abused, which Foerste says never happened.

Disagreeing with her daughter’s decision to begin taking hormones and otherwise pursue the transition from female to male, McArthur cut off financial support. She says, “When my friends call me to tell me, ‘I think my daughter is drinking alcohol,’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘You think you got problems? My daughter wants a penis!’

McArthur softens later in the interview when she recalls a photo of Foerste as “a baby in a dress.” She says, “We love her and we miss her. We all have to make our mistakes. … We are here for her no matter what.”