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Your parents sound like me, though I don’t home school. If it’s not too personal, what did your journey look like? If you became trans after hearing about it on the internet, would an introduction to the phenomenon in some other way have been less appealing to you? What was your pre-existing mental state like? Does being trans make you happy?
My model for how this works for most people is they are depressed for some reason that can’t be pinned down. Despite mental health messaging, it’s still low status to be mentally ill. At some point they go down an internet rabbit hole on trans and realize it’s a way of transmogrifying their mental problems into something sympathetic and avante grade.
I pretty much learned everything I could about it as quickly as I could; I doubt there was any kind of manipulation of the order of evidence being presented by parents that would have affected my ultimate conclusion. I spent about as much time as I did on math homework in the basement on my PC reading PubMed and Sci-Hub and forum articles from all sides of the political divide, on that specific topic.
However, to this day it's a small negative facet of interaction with my mother is that she occasionally makes some rueful comment about how I've “bought into this delusion”, since I have explicitly never made any kind of politically disputable claims that I “am I woman” or anything like that.
If you try to take the approach using political rhetoric like “trans people can't accept reality” — remember, one of the aspects of being on the spectrum is taking things literally, and there is an implicit “every/∀” on unqualified general statements in English — or selective facts like “the [genital] surgeries have a high regret rate” (which is relatively undisputed, but for that very reason most trans people don't get those kinds of operations), you may end up briefly getting the kid on board as an ideologue, but when he eventually finds out that you essentially “lied” to get him on board with your particular perspective, you risk ending up strictly worse off from a relationship perspective than had you not broached the topic at all, and having had no impact on his actual outcome.
That may be true. It may even be common. But — if you grant that there are any legitimate cases of gender dysphoria — depression is a symptom of it, so “Joe has depression” does not on its own preclude “Joe has gender dysphoria”.
I live across the country from my family; I see them on Christmas and whenever one of them has occasion to fly out to my city for a business trip. In summer of 2023, when I went back on HRT after an (in retrospect) very ill-advised 18-month experiment in desistance, my father, who would generally invite me out for lunch whenever he was in town, did so again and was astonished at how much I seemed to be “thriving” compared to the last several times he'd seem me; he even took a picture to send back to the family to capture what he saw as he was so struck by it. He was not informed of my having gone back on HRT, and would have disapproved had he known. I have many, many similar anecdotes of people who happened to be against Transgenderism noticing and commenting on marked improvement in my well-being as broadly construed as could be seen from the outside when I first went on HRT seriously around age 17.
Setting aside any bad vibes you're catching from his queer behavior and presentation per se, has your nephew improved academically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, or socially since getting on HRT?
As a quick tangent: if you're not a single parent, have you and your spouse talked about your approach to Shiri's Scissor childcare topics like antidepressants? Being on the same page, or at least knowing what page you each are on, before a storm hits will make things much easier.
For example, if one of you thinks that “trying whatever the doc recommends for a few months” is a great first-resort for a kid who's been acting funny, while the other views any psychotropic prescriptions as the absolute last resort only after ruling out any reasonable possibility of lifestyle changes fixing it, finding that disagreement out only when it's time to choose is going to make things much, much harder and more stressful than they need to be.
(And of course, an alleged GD case would be just one somewhat central instance of the general case of “things like antidepressants”.)
Circling back around: does your son have a large fraction of queer people, same-sex-attracted people, or “allies” in his sphere of influence, which I assume is mostly his cohort at school plus the school staff? Is there any “clout” to be got?
You mentioned your nephew was 22yo; is he in college, or a NEET, or somehow in a workforce that's got him to to this, or do you think it's only to look cool for the apocryphal “strangers on the internet”?
Has anyone put the bug in your ear of the concept of
autogynephiliayet? That seems to be a larger and more insidious “threat” thansocial contagion, at least for males.Gender and the Brain with an AGP Neuroscientist - Benjamin Boyce on YouTube
It may be worth noting: something that has exploded in either popularity or awareness over the past few years is arguably the opposite of that — not people chasing any kind of attention, but just staying in the closet and not drawing attention to themselves while quietly medically transitioning:
That word was not even a blip on Google Trends all the way up thru December 2019, yet I saw that very word in use in forum and imageboard culture around 2010, as I guess some kind of sleeper strategy.
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
https://voetica.com/poem/3341
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