Mick Hartley

Dead Name is an American indie documentary released at the end of last year giving a platform to parents who've seen their children sucked into the trans vortex and are anxious to speak out. It was – no surprise – soon removed from video platform Vimeo, who claimed that it violated their policy prohibiting “discriminatory or hateful conduct”:

The documentary “Dead Name” tells the stories of three parents—identified only by first names—living in what the filmmaker described as “The Twilight Zone,” as they struggle to protect their children from life-altering gender “treatments.”

“The film is subtly explosive but I can tell you unequivocally there is no hate speech, there is nothing hateful,” filmmaker Taylor Reece told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “All these people talk about is how much they want to protect their children.”

Reece suggested that transgender activists targeted Vimeo in a pressure campaign, urging the company to remove the video. She said the video had been up for about 34 days before the company removed it.

Jo Bartosch:

Those profiled in Dead Name are not campaigners. They are relatable people struggling to make sense of a nonsensical ideology. In Reece’s words, ‘they’re simply parents who’ve dared to raise questions, who have struggled with being marginalised and being silenced’.

The first to speak is Amy, a mother whose teen daughter began identifying as a boy at 15, following a break-up with her boyfriend. She went from being a youngster interested in performing arts to becoming introverted, increasingly distressed and ‘cloistering herself in her room’. What Amy describes of her child’s behaviour sounds like normal adolescent angst. Yet, after a single remote consultation with a clinic, she was prescribed testosterone. This mother will never again hear her daughter’s voice as it was before it was altered by hormones. She has not seen her daughter for years.

Then Helen tells her story. Helen is a lesbian whose ex-wife decided to socially transition their child, Jonas, when he was just four years old. The first Helen knew of this was when a letter from Jonas’ preschool informed her that ‘one of our students is now trans, and we would love for you all to celebrate and support her’. Jonas’ name was changed to Rosa on the register. Helen had to fight a legal battle for two years to prevent her son from being socially and medically transitioned, eventually winning custody. Initially, she struggled to find an attorney who would even take on the case.

Last is Bill. Bill’s son, Sean, began to identify as trans shortly after he enrolled at college. Just months later, he was dead. As a child, Sean suffered the loss of his mother from illness and his brother from a heroin overdose. He was diagnosed with cancer both as a toddler and then as an older teenager. Bill believes that Sean had been buying hormones online and that these interacted with his cancer medication, hastening his death. His request for a proper autopsy was refused.

This story is particularly haunting because of the chances that were missed to set Sean on a different path. Bill took Sean to a psychiatrist in the year before his death. Bill trusted that a medical professional would help Sean understand that his mental distress was caused by his childhood bereavement and his illness, not his gender identity. Instead, Bill was told that his son was ‘definitely trans’ – and that, for questioning this, he was an ‘unsupportive, abusive father’. But as Bill reflects with poignant directness, he ‘was just trying to keep him alive’….

This quiet, intimate film reveals the inhumanity of transgender activism – how zealots who believe themselves unquestionably in the right can be both blinkered and cruel. Dead Name also reveals the extent to which US institutions have been captured by trans ideology. And it shows the terrible effects this has had on families.

This has unmistakable echoes of the testimonies you'd get from parents whose children were sucked into the false memory hysteria back in the Eighties and Nineties, where kids suffering from low self-esteem and depression were persuaded by irresponsible therapists that they'd been sexually abused by parents and carers, using highly dubious hypnotherapy techniques. It quickly evolved into accusations of satanic rituals and the rest. Lives were ruined: families were ruined. Making Monsters: False Memory, Satanic Cult Abuse, and Sexual Hysteria was one of the best explorations of the whole wretched business, with Mark Pendergrast's Victims of Memory another eloquent analysis.

Except this current gender craze seems worse. It's certainly captured more institutions and made more headway in supposedly liberal and progressive circles. And, however bad the false memory panic may have been, at least the damage was psychological. Now they mess up your body too.