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On January 23, the filmmaker Taylor Reece received an email from Vimeo, the video platform that had been hosting her documentary, Dead Name, since its online debut in December. “We have successfully unpublished your film,” it said. Apparently, the film, which profiles the lives of three parents whose children suddenly began to identify as transgender, had violated Vimeo’s Terms of Service, which prohibit “discriminatory or hateful content.”

Reece was disappointed, but unsurprised. “I am not the first to have a message out there that is unwanted by a certain faction of activists who’ve become very expert at being able to silence filmmakers or comedians or journalists,” she told me.

Vimeo claimed the film was a form of “hate speech,” but Reece insists it’s the opposite. “This is love speech,” she said. “This is an intimate portrait of three parents who are, in great and painstaking detail, sharing the anguish of their specific journeys.”

Within four hours of Vimeo scrubbing the film from its website—along with all of the analytics, which told Reece the film had already been viewed in sixteen countries, from Canada to Kuwait to New Guinea—the film was relocated to a private server at deadnamedocumentary.com.

“Nothing says a spike in attention like being canceled,” said Reece. “The film had more sales in the in the last three days than we did in the previous 34.” Maybe one day, proponents of cancel culture will realize that their tactics inevitably backfire. And that the only solution to whatever they erroneously deem “hate speech” is—and always has been—more speech.

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The film’s title refers to the birth name of a transgender person. For many trans individuals, dead names represent the identities that, for one reason or another, they want to disappear into a memory hole.

For Amy, whose 15-year-old daughter came out as trans after she broke up with her boyfriend and began hanging out with an influential trans-identified teen, the erasure of the past is one of the more difficult aspects of this situation for her to reconcile.

In the film, Amy, sits outside on a sunny day. She has the familiar look of a mother emotionally wrecked by this uniquely twenty-first century phenomenon: tired eyes, a permanent crease in her brow, streaks of silver in her brown hair. She describes a recent afternoon, when she cried while watching an old video of her daughter’s singing recital. (Her daughter’s voice has been irreversibly deepened by testosterone.) That night, she told her daughter that she had rewatched the video. Amy says her daughter replied angrily, “Don’t remind me, I want to forget about that stuff.”

“You can’t erase yourself,” Amy says in the film, near tears. “You can’t get away from yourself no matter what you do.”

When we learn the backstory of Bill’s son, Sean, it’s easy to imagine why he would want to escape his past. When he was two years old, he developed a rare form of cancer, which led to the amputation of one of his legs. Three years later, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Then his mother died. And finally, not long after he began college at Rochester Institute of Technology, he was diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer.

At RIT, Sean planned to live with three girls, all of whom were “involved in the trans thing,” his father says in the film. Bill believes they must’ve told him how pretty he would look as a girl. After a lifetime of medical treatments that had compromised his physical self-image, Bill understands how his son could fall prey to that.

Sean told his father he was transgender and preferred to be called “Eliza”. He then set up an appointment with an RIT endocrinologist to get hormones. But the endocrinologist, after reviewing Sean’s medical history, cancelled the appointment before it even happened. He explained that if Sean took hormones, he would likely die.

Of the three children spoken about in the film, Helen’s is the youngest. Jonas was still in preschool when Helen got a phone call from her son’s daycare director, who said that Jonas now identifies as a girl. Helen was confused. “Maybe tomorrow he’ll say he’s a fish,” she remembers thinking at the time.

From the film, we learn that Helen’s ex-wife, Jonas’s other mother, appears to be leading the charge on Jonas’s transition.

Not long after that initial phone call, Helen received a letter, addressed to every parent of Jonas’s classmates, from the preschool, announcing that Jonas was now “Rosa”. It instructed the parents to come “celebrate” Jonas’s (or Rosa’s) new identity and to support “her”. A week later, Helen went to drop Jonas off at school. “Rosa” was on the entrance sheet, on her son’s cubby, everywhere. It was like, says Helen, “I’m invisible. Like I have no control. This is my child, but [I’m] completely helpless.”

“There are common threads that run through all of [these parents’ stories],” Reece told me. “And that is a combination of one, being very blindsided, feeling alienated, feeling ostracized, feeling helpless, feeling frightened.”

And then, of course, there’s the concern about the possible lifelong medicalization of their children. “That's not the kind of decision I think that any former generation of parents has ever had to face,” Reece said. “And that's what makes this different.”

Helen describes near the beginning of the film what happened after she took her son to a therapist, who, she hoped, would agree when she said Jonas didn’t appear to have typical gender dysphoria, and that perhaps his cross-sex identification was a reaction to his mothers’ divorce. Instead, the therapist told Helen that she needed to learn to accept Jonas—or “Rosa”—and celebrate her new identity.

“Celebrate what?” Helen says in the film. “That my child’s going to be put on hormones and his penis will never grow and he’ll never have a normal sex life and he’ll be on drugs for the rest of his life?”

Helen describes the night she was giving Jonas a bath, when he started to freak out about the prospect of sex-reassignment surgery. “When am I having the surgery, am I having it now?” he asked her in a panic.

The next morning, it was the same thing. Says Helen, “He was terrified of his private parts being wacked off.”

The film cuts to a home video, recorded by Helen, of Jonas playing on his bike. He wears a pink top that says “twirl, sing, dance.” It is illustrated with a kitten wearing a tutu, princess tiaras, butterflies, and stars. He says in his six-year-old boy voice, “If you want girl parts and you don’t have them, you can do special surgery where they turn your penis inside-out and there’s a bagina inside.”

Helen asks Jonas who told him about all of this. He says a name, which is bleeped out by the filmmaker (it is likely Helen’s ex-wife). She asks him why. He says, “I don’t know.” Then Helen asks him to tell her about the hormones. Jonas says, “You can also change your parts with hormones. Like, if you hormone yourself, you have to be, like, older to do things like those. But hormones, um, you just like, take hormones and do some other special [inaudible].” Helen asks him who told him about the hormones. “I saw it on a video,” he says.

“There’s too much that we don’t know,” Reece told me. “We haven’t looked at this carefully through the lens of the medical implications, but also through the implications of where, how, and when does the parent have the right to remain the decision maker.”

Reece is not entirely correct. If the figurative “we” she is referring to includes other western nations like Sweden and Finland, we have looked at the medical implications. Gender clinicians in these countries have rolled back gender-affirmative care for trans-identified youth in the wake of systematic evidence reviews that found studies purporting its efficacy as consistently “very low” in quality.

In Dead Name, Amy says she could’ve perhaps gotten on board with her daughter’s new identification if it had caused her daughter to come out of her shell, but it was the opposite. She turned into “a shadow of her former self,” says Amy. She became mean. And she threatened suicide constantly.

“I didn’t know it was so scripted,” says Amy. “I learned so much later on.”

One of the things parents like Amy learn is the way suicide statistics are exploited by trans activists to fear-monger parents into affirming their children’s transgender identities. “Forty-one percent of trans kids will commit suicide if they’re not affirmed in their gender,” activists will say.

That is a devastating number.

It is also false.

The statistic comes from a 2014 survey of a non-representative sample of adults who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming. In this context, “non-representative” means that the survey relied on convenience sampling, therefore, as the study itself states, “it is unclear how representative the respondents are of the overall U.S. transgender/gender non-conforming adult population.” Further, the study clarifies, the survey suffers from possible sample bias as well as inadequate wording (for example, many respondents may have conflated self-harm behavior with an actual suicide attempt), and also fails to explore comorbid mental health issues and adverse life events.

Perhaps most importantly, according to existing data, suicidality actually increases after medical transition.

The Movement Advancement Project (MAP), a nonprofit think tank, hosts on its website a series of educational material, including a pamphlet titled, “Talking About Suicide and LGBT Populations.” It states that media coverage of LGBT youth suicide “has oversimplified or sensationalized a number of the underlying issues, and in some cases may have created the potential for suicide contagion risk.” It urges readers to avoid normalizing suicide by “presenting it as the logical consequence” of the hardships LGBT people face; to avoid talking about suicide “epidemics,” which “can encourage at-risk individuals to see themselves as part of a larger story and may elevate suicide risk”; and to avoid saying “that a specific policy (or its absence) will in and of itself ‘prevent suicide.’”

It’s hard to believe that the publication’s co-authors include GLAAD and the Trevor Project, two organizations which perpetuate narratives that violate these very guidelines. Dr. Erica Anderson, a transgender psychologist and the former president of the United States affiliate of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH), stated in December, “To have [suicide] be used as a lever to force someone to concede to treatment that may or may not be appropriate—I think is unwise and, and borders on malfeasance.”

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In the film, Amy explains how she found out her daughter had started taking testosterone: she intercepted a text from their local pharmacy. The prescription, Amy says, was approved by a telehealth doctor via Planned Parenthood after only one phone call, with no psychiatric evaluation.

After another blow-up, Amy’s daughter moved out. Amy and her husband began to diverge on the issue; he had become terrified that their daughter would kill herself, which affected his judgment. He found a PFLAG meeting, led by a trans individual, for Amy and him to attend. Everyone at the meeting “drank the Kool-Aid,” Amy says, an offhand reference to the cult leader Jim Jones, who in 1978 convinced over 900 of his followers to ingest cyanide-spiked punch. “I felt alone. Everyone I spoke to tried to get me to accept this. My in-laws wanted me to accept this to have peace in the family. People that don’t have transgender youth or have no idea how this affects someone wanted me to accept this.”

Onscreen, Amy becomes visibly angry. Or maybe she’s just incredulous.

“I felt powerless,” she says.

Amy had to endure the nightmare for close to a year before she found a parent support group that shared her concerns. The film cuts to footage of protesting parents who chant, “Hey Big Pharma, we’re sounding the alarm-a!” They hold signs that say, “No child is born in the wrong body,” “Gender clinics are sterilizing our youth,” and “Stop tranzing gay kids.”

Amy says, “I realized that I can be a voice. That I can be there for other parents that are going through this. And that’s important to me.”

Like Helen, Bill thought that if he took his child to a mental health specialist, the specialist would take into account all of the traumatic events in Sean’s life, and agree with Bill that perhaps Sean had sought some sort of escape in trans identification. Instead, the specialist told Bill that Sean is “definitely transgender, and you are an unsupportive, abusive father to not identify that.”

Bill says he believes mental health professionals’ hands are tied by the
affirmative-care model, which advocates for no-questions-asked acceptance of a child’s trans identification and against exploratory therapy. “Obviously people are approving stuff they don’t understand,” Bill says. “Because if they understood it, I can’t imagine anybody saying that this is OK. I felt like I’m on an island.

Bill eventually asked his congressperson for help. But she, too, had already drunk the Kool-Aid. She told Bill he “had to let kids be kids” and compared Sean’s trans identification with her own kid getting a tattoo. “That’s when I realized, this is a huge problem,” Bill says. “Politicians don’t care. Our local state representatives didn’t care.”

Then one day the police showed up at Bill’s house. The officer told Bill, “We got a call from Monroe County that your daughter passed away.” At first, Bill thought they had gone to the wrong house, since he didn’t have a daughter. And then he realized they were talking about Sean. Besides grief-stricken, Bill was confused: none of Sean’s most recent lab work had indicated that Sean’s cancer had suddenly turned fatal. At the funeral home, he viewed Sean’s body, which was unrecognizable. His face had feminized, and in the course of two weeks, he had gained nearly ten pounds. Bill believes Sean had been taking hormones.

The film cuts to a gravesite on a rainy day. Bill stands over his son’s burial place. He describes how he had livestreamed the funeral on Facebook so Sean’s college friends could view it. All of the comments on the video were antagonistic; they ridiculed Bill for “dead-naming” Sean. Bill had to learn what that even meant. Bill’s siblings, Sean’s aunt and uncle, came to the funeral, but skipped the reception; they disapproved of Bill’s failure to unquestioningly affirm his son’s trans identification. Neither of them has contacted Bill since the funeral. “It’s like an additional death,” Bill says.

Reece understands that there will be a temptation for viewers to see these parents’ experiences as anomalies. Since production of the film began, she has interviewed at least one hundred parents of trans-identifying children. But she wanted to focus on these three, because they “were willing to pull down the mask to show what it looks like.”

It “wouldn’t be responsible,” she said, “to use them to emblematically talk about an issue if I didn’t think that there were thousands of parents out there in this situation.” Like drunk driving, the opioid crisis, and gun control before it, she said, “parents have been forced to talk about this issue because we reached a critical mass.”

I asked Reece about the revenue from Vimeo’s sales before they took the film down. As far as she knows, some people who bought the film have been issued a refund, and some have not. But she has yet to receive any money from the video platform. “That will be another issue for another day,” she said.

She continued, “It really speaks to what is the power of this digital company. [Vimeo] put out this disingenuous statement about their trust and safety department vetting the film. But the truth is they had the film up for 34 days. Where was the trust and safety department [during that time]? Waiting for the trans activists to start their usual tactics? If this was a sensitive subject and anybody could see that from simply watching the trailer… it's like, you either vet it or you don't.”

Reece grew uncomfortable when I asked about her personal politics. She’s aware how that can be exploited by whichever extremist side chooses to use it for their benefit. If it’s radical trans activists, it’s: See, she’s just a bigoted right-winger. If it’s conservatives, it’s: If she feels this way then she must agree with us about topics like abortion. And on and on.

“Like many people, I'm watching the radicalization on both ends, and just wondering what that is doing to our country,” she said.  “If we have to duke it out, that's fine, but let's duke it out in the sunlight. Let's duke it out where every voice gets to the table, and what parents are going through is understood on both sides. And then at least we've leveled the playing field. That's why I made the film.”

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