personandidentity.com
2026-01-24
handsome son with a smile that would light up a room. The picture was taken 5 years ago. Staring at me on the screen was a dark and handsome tall boy with a dazzling smile. He is standing at the beach in his swim trunks, wearing a blue rash guard and holding a boogie board. I remembered that moment and that vacation, the last one we took as a family. He had just come out of the water and he smiled as I snapped that picture.
It stabbed me like a knife in the heart knowing that he looks nothing like that picture now. Three years ago, my son stumbled into Internet groups that told him that the reason why he didn't fit in socially, was not due to his Autism, but because he was really a woman, not a man. My son now thinks that he's a woman and is taking hormones to try to achieve an impossible dream, that he can be a woman, fed by his own delusion and a world that tells him daily that he can.
I took a snapshot of the Facebook memory, with my phone's camera, and added it to the ever-growing collection of my son's pictures from those memories, that I'm keeping in the camera roll. I will never forget the dark-haired boy with the magnetic smile.