News (USA)

Trans man speaks out against famous anti-trans mother

Trans man speaks out against famous anti-trans mother
Photo: YouTube screenshot

Anti-trans activist Tania Joy Gibson, a former Miss Illinois and a regular on General Mike Flynn’s conspiracy theory-fueled Great ReAwakening Tour, routinely invokes her trans son’s journey to self-realization, in hateful terms.

“Not over my dead body are you my son,” Gibson testified to cheers before an evangelical gathering in California recently.

“God made two genders: male and female. That is it!” the one-time beauty queen railed at a Great ReAwakening event in Pennsylvania last fall.

Gender-affirming care is the work of the devil and a scheme of mass sterilization, she claimed.

“Where is that going to leave our nation or our world in 20 years?” Gibson demanded. “Who’s gonna have children?! It’s horrifying, and we must stop it!”

Global elites and “demonic” forces are trying to steal the “seed” of humanity.

Supportive parents of trans kids should be executed for “treason,” according to one of her podcast guests.

She and her son, Renton Sinclair — whom she always misgenders — are the victims of a woke cult of “gender ideology,” Gibson claimed to the congregants at Flynn’s conspiracy carnival, also home to Eric Trump and his wife Lara. They cheered.

And Sinclair had finally heard enough.

After seeing his mom use him to promote a self-serving agenda aimed at erasing trans people from public life — and raising her own public profile — the trans son his mother so loathed decided it was time to speak out and tell his side of their story.

“Hey, maybe this is weird, but this is my mom,” Sinclair wrote in a Twitter DM after the Huffington Post posted a clip of Gibson inveighing against trans people.

“I’m trans,” Sinclair shared.

Now Sinclair has shared how his mother spent his childhood trying to smother his gender identity, resulting in a suicide attempt, drug addiction, family estrangement, and an itinerant life in “punk houses” around Chicago at just 12 years old.  

After an overdose attempt that went unnoticed by his parents, Sinclair found refuge in affirming communities online but was discovered when his mom broke into his phone and computer and came across an alternate identity named “Axel.”

“They freaked the fuck out,” Sinclair said, and placed him in a psychiatric facility, where he was subjected to conversion therapy and the ministrations of evangelical pastors praying over him and speaking in tongues.

“I don’t think the goal was necessarily to make people straight or whatever as much as it was just to, like, repress you to the point where you either just die or you just stop arguing with it,” Sinclair recalled.

He just stopped arguing, Sinclair said, and succumbed to a years-long state of repression.

It wasn’t until he was 19, when the pandemic hit, that isolation finally brought Sinclair face-to-face with his true identity. Soon enough, he started hormone replacement therapy.

“I woke up, I sat up and — I’m trying to even put into words — it was just waking up and not being in pain,” Sinclair remembers. “I woke up, and my head was quiet. And I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m calm, and I slept a full night.’ It was just a thing where I woke up, and I wasn’t panicking.”

Seeing his mother on stage denouncing his choices, and now speaking out about her, was another step in reconciling his true nature, Sinclair said. “Just being in a position now where I’m like, OK, I can actually f**king stand up for myself, and I don’t just have to sit and just take this bulls**t forever, and I can actually like have a say in it, that is cool,” he said.

And he has a message for anyone despairing of their family’s reaction to coming out.

“If there’s adults in your life or if there’s people in your life or friends or whoever the f**k that you love, that you’re worried about losing over this, and if you’re like… ‘if I come out this person might abandon me,’ that’s their decision that they’re making,” Sinclair says. “That is 100% not on you. It doesn’t mean you’re f**king bad. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean there’s something broken with you. That is someone else being f**ked up.”

Don't forget to share:

Support vital LGBTQ+ journalism

Reader contributions help keep LGBTQ Nation free, so that queer people get the news they need, with stories that mainstream media often leaves out. Can you contribute today?

Cancel anytime · Proudly LGBTQ+ owned and operated

Sopranos star Michael Imperioli bans “homophobes and bigots” from watching his work

Previous article

Houston sues Texas for law that could ban cities from passing LGBTQ+ rights ordinances

Next article