He's Not an Ideology. He's My Son.
When a father speaks with this much love and clarity, we all need to listen.
I came across a piece this week that stopped me in my tracks1. It was written by Chris Benson, a father, an educator, and a man who knows what it means to love someone the world sometimes struggles to understand. His son is transgender and autistic, and Chris has written about him with a tenderness and an honesty that I think more people need to read.
I am sharing it here because this is exactly the kind of voice that gets drowned out in the noise of policy debates and political commentary. Families like Chris’s are living inside the consequences of decisions made by people who have often never spoken to them. His words deserve to reach further.
Chris’s son is also autistic, and if you want to understand the clinical and research picture behind that intersection, I have written about it this week in a companion piece here on Dr Webberley Responds.
His Son Is Not a Talking Point
One of the things that strikes me most about Chris’s writing is how gently but firmly he refuses to let his son be reduced to an abstraction. He describes his son as a thoughtful, perceptive young man who has spent years doing the hard work of understanding himself in a world that often misunderstands difference. That is a sentence worth sitting with for a moment.
Because that is precisely what trans young people are doing. They are doing the hard work. They are the ones navigating systems that were not designed with them in mind, sitting in waiting rooms, explaining themselves over and over again, and still finding the courage to live openly. And while they are doing all of that, other people are debating whether their existence is a trend.
Chris makes the point that when public figures describe identities like his son’s as contagions or diagnostic inflation, that language does not stay in newspapers or parliamentary transcripts. It shapes culture. It shapes whether young people feel safe existing openly. That is not rhetoric. That is what I have seen, over many years of clinical practice, played out in real lives.
Evidence Is Never Neutral
Chris works in education, and he writes thoughtfully about evidence, about reviews like the Cass Review, and about what it means when conclusions are presented as settled while the communities most affected feel unheard. He describes it, very precisely, as a failure of trust.
I have said similar things many times, though perhaps with more heat than he brings to it. He frames it with a quiet clarity that I find compelling. Evidence is gathered, yes, but it is also interpreted, communicated, and applied. Those processes are shaped by perspective and by power, and by whose voices are allowed into the room.
He also draws a parallel with the history of neurodivergence in public and clinical life. The pattern he describes will be familiar to many of us: first dismissal, then recognition, then a backlash framed as concern about over-identification. Each time, support is restricted in the name of caution. Each time, outcomes worsen. Not because individuals changed, but because systems withdrew understanding.
That is a pattern worth naming, because it is happening again.
A Son Who Chose Safety Over Proximity
There is a part of Chris’s piece that I keep coming back to. His son received multiple offers from leading UK universities. He chose not to accept them. Not because of ability, not because of ambition, but because he had watched how people like him were spoken about in public life in this country and did not want to live here. He chose a neighbouring country where he feels safer.
Chris writes that this decision was not political. It was protective. And he understood it, even as a father who would dearly have loved his son nearby.
That is what policy debates look like from the inside. That is the human cost of a climate in which a young person calculates that another country offers him a better chance of living safely and openly. We should be deeply troubled by that. Not defensive. Troubled.
What Chris Is Really Saying
At the heart of Chris’s piece is something very simple, and something that I think we can all learn from. He is not worried about his son. He is proud of him. He describes him as one of the kindest, most thoughtful, most compassionate human beings he has ever known, and he means it not as a defence but as a statement of fact.
What he worries about, he says, is the behaviour of those who choose to dehumanise. He ends with a thought that I think should land for all of us. When entire groups feel as though their existence is under review, what is really being tested is not them. It is us.
“My son is not someone I worry about. He is someone I am proud of.”
I could not put it better than that.
From a Doctor Who Has Sat Across From These Families
I have spent over a decade working with transgender young people and their families. I have sat across from parents who were frightened, or uncertain, or grieving the child they thought they knew, and I have watched them arrive at something very like what Chris describes here: a deep, clear pride in who their child is.
The families who get there do not get there because someone talked them into it. They get there because they listened to their child. Because they stayed curious rather than fearful. Because they found support from people who understood what their family was navigating rather than what they imagined it might be.
Chris’s son gave him the courage, he says, to publicly disclose his own ADHD while he was a serving headteacher. His son did not even know he had done that. He inspired his father simply by being himself.
That is what love looks like when it is working properly. And it is what I have seen, again and again, in the families who find their way through.
You Can Read Chris’s Full Piece Here
Chris Benson wrote his piece for LinkedIn, through his newsletter ADHD: Changing the Narrative. I would encourage you to read it in full and to share it. It is the kind of writing that reminds us why this conversation matters, and who it is actually about.
These are real people. Real families. Real lives. Not a debate.
If you have a story to share, or if you are a parent navigating something similar, you are welcome here. This space is for all of us.
Dr Helen Webberley
Gender Specialist and Medical Educator
www.helenwebberley.com
Thank you Dr. Webberley! I will definitely read this father's piece.