Me too, I’ll contribute.
I can’t share the link here but I’ve been pm’ing it to people.
He has already received enough to pay his tuition for the rest of freshman year and is keeping the campaign open and adding the expense of hormone treatment, as his parents have also cut him off their health insurance. Or perhaps he will be able to pay for some of next year too, since he is looking into various scholarships.
He cannot believe the support he has gotten. Some of the most generous contributors were complete strangers. He was up all night texting with my daughter and was crying with surprise and joy.
Again, thank you to everyone who chose to offer helpful advice and links, who chose to contribute and share his page. The moral and emotional support is just as important as the financial support. Late last night he said that this has restored his faith in humanity. What an amazing boost after such a heart wrenching rejection from his family. 
@IBviolamom He had two whopping donations. Amazing.
Terrible unthinkable situation. Can’t imagine doing that to my own child. Has he signed up for medical insurance during the open enrollment. I think that is really critical. Everything else is secondary.
@IBviolamom please pm me the link too.
Wait, what? My son has string lights and throw pillows, is he not really trans? J/k 
@IBviolamom , as the father of a very loved trans son, I’ve read this thread and discovered that my face was wet. Please PM me a link to the go fund me page.
Hello everyone. I am the dad of the person referenced by the OP. Lots of speculation on here so let me a set a few things straight. Of course, I am sure I am setting myself up for vitriol from the “let people be anything they want to be crowd”. In any event, I thought explaining some facts may be helpful to some people on this board.
First off, her mother and I love her tremendously. Are we heartbroken that she has come out as transgender? Of course we are, as I am sure any parent would be.
Our daughter was a very happy girl for the first 16.5 years of her life. She dressed like a girl, played with girl toys, had a crush on One Direction - things all normal girls do. Absolutely no sign at all of being transgender and the OP can attest to that - she has known her for a long time.
About a year or so ago she cut her hair and starting dressing like a boy. She told us she was transgender. How did she come about that? I will tell you. She was having difficulty fitting in at school. She was depressed. She was looking for acceptance. She found a website that asked “are you depressed?” “Do you have trouble fitting in at school” “do you dislike wearing dresses?” You are probably transgender. From then on she was “transgender”.
Did we support her as transgender? No. It was/is fake to make up for something lacking in her life. It is part of a cult mentality. And we don’t accept it. If she had shown signs some time during her first 16.5 years of life maybe we would have. But this was a mechanism to deal with depression and not fitting in. A way to be “someone else”. Also she had a friend in high school who was transgender and very popular. Did that “influence” her to think she could also be popular if she was trans? I certainly think so.
Now let’s move to college. We did pay for her first semester. We did it with the understanding that she was to focus on adapting to college life, making new friends and getting good grades. We did not want her to focus on beginning hormone treatment and beginning a medical transition. We told her to put that off until she graduated and until her brain matured. The human brain matures around 25 years of age, not at 18. When she came home at Thanksgiving she told us she was beginning hormone treatment in December. We told her, as we originally had told her, that we will not support that. As recently as Monday of this week, we offered to pay for her entire college education if she held off on hormone treatment until she graduated. She said she was not going to do that. So we wished her luck paying for college.
We have spent countless months researching the trans issue obviously since it effects us so personally. So, we don’t need PFLAG stuff sent to us. We have researched more on this issue than I am sure almost anyone on this board has. Here is a stat for those who care. The suicide rate for those who medically transition is 41 percent. Yes 41 percent. So what we are trying to do is help our daughter wait until her brain is fully developed before making life and body altering decisions that will lead to her having a 41 percent chance of killing herself.
Many on here will I am sure think we are awful people. Well that’s not the case. We love our daughter. However, we are not going to support her beginning hormone treatment and a medical transition at the age of 18. This is especially true for a girl who, just 18 months ago, everyone on this board would have thought of as the girl next door. Unfortunately, transgender has become the cult of the 2000s. Those who do not believe that should do their own research.
Thank you.
@abcman123. Obviously I’m a total outsider to what’s going on in your family, but I urge you to go into family counseling with your child immmediately with a counselor both you parents and child can accept.
@gearmom I was going to post that even though people have been amazingly generous with this boy (I’m saying boy because that’s how he identifies right now), he needs to be extremely careful with how he spends this money. This may be all he will have to get him through the next 2.5 years, along with whatever he can make working. He should still continue with talking to financial aid about proving independence, still have the LGBTQ community involved in working with financial aid, he might consider taking out whatever government loan he is entitled to take out on his own in order to make his money stretch further, and take other steps to make his money last. Separate from his father’s post, I was going to say that he should hold off on the hormone therapy because he can spend the money on that when he has a job in 2.5 years. Right now he might need the money for food or shelter or tuition before all is said and done.
Sorry it was @IBviolamom
@IBViolamom,
Please send me the link as well.
@abcman123, I second the suggestion to enter family counseling. Family relationships are very precious and worth every effort to preserve.
Another table pounding vote for family counseling.
ABC- I am 100% confident that you are a loving and supportive parent who would do ANYTHING to help your child fulfill his/her potential and lead a happy and useful and meaningful adult life.
I don’t know as much about transitioning/gender as you do, but I know a reasonable amount about suicide. It is very tempting as a parent to look at a set of statistics which say “Kids who do XYZ kill themselves at a rate of A% so if I don’t allow A to happen I am helping to keep my child from suicide”. Tempting, but wrong. Suicidal ideation is a very complicated and nuanced beast. Some people who have suicidal thoughts are successful at killing themselves (often after many attempts) and some people with suicidal thoughts do not attempt to kill themselves. Merely positing that the gender issues, hormone treatment or the lack thereof, is a way to encourage/prevent suicide is misguided.
The happiest and most well adjusted kid I know killed himself last year. He had a very brief bout of moderate depression from which he seemed to recover and bounce back. Looked like a simple case of a well adjusted kid who had a stressful senior year (but who among our kids doesn’t?)
Why did he kill himself? He had access to a gun. It’s a pretty efficient way to kill yourself, requires zero planning, and for someone with some impulse control issues (perhaps related to his depression, perhaps not) it’s a tempting fix.
So please continue on the incredible path you are on, supporting this child that you love and cherish, and get yourselves into therapy or counseling. Do not look back as my friends do and wonder what you missed, what could have been different, what loving message you were sending to your kid which got misconstrued somehow. Do not look back in ten years if you are all hopelessly estranged from this adult child of yours and wonder how you could have managed things differently, or look on with longing in 20 years at grandchildren you have never met who are being raised across the country and have been told that you are dead or just “checked out” of the parents life.
One never knows if someone we love who is in a “rough patch” is going to end up in a room, alone, with a loaded gun in a bedside drawer. (why people keep unsecured weapons in their homes is a tragic mystery to me). It can happen on a Sunday night after a fun and lighthearted family weekend; it can happen on a Tuesday at noon when your kid sees that the test which was supposed to be an easy A is a B-, it can happen on a Friday at 8 am for no reason at all.
Big hug to you.
@abcman: I know you love your child, and you want them to go back to whom you got to know. I get that you feel angry and betrayed. All this time your child wasn’t who you wanted them to be (which is the most common situation - parents hold this image of their child and the child has their own path which veers from that which the parent had planned) but also who you thought you knew. But as your child dressed as a girl, you may have seen it as your child being a girl, when your child thought of it as “being paraded around as a costumed monkey”. Have you discussed your child’s feelings about these moments? It’s possible s/he got influenced but it’s equally possible s/he wasn’t able to tell you - look at what happened once you realized it was real: you rejected him… so, at age 13, or 14, they wouldn’t have been able to tell you and face this rejection. I can’t imagine anyone going through something like hormone therapy on a whim.
Transgender kids don’t die from hormone therapy, they die from self harming due to being rejected by those they love.
Being trans isn’t a fad, like hulahoops or pokemon go. Trans people have always existed. They left their family and reinvented themselves as who they felt they were. Sure, others might have thought they had sharp features or thin shoulder or whatever, but they existed to the otuside as who they were inside. Or, they hid. They just couldn’t speak of their “other” existence, which is why you hear things like “first out trans woman”, not “first trans woman”. Others just didn’t know. The difference is that nowadays people feel it’s okay to say it out aloud to others, not that trans people were newly “invented”.
Do you really, honestly believe your child is better off homeless and at the mercy of strangers, than trans?
Somehow I don’t think so.
What I read is that you’re afraid for your child and want to protect her from herself,but can’t wrap your head around your idea your little girl could have felt like a little boy inside all along. But I’m not reading that you want your child homeless in the winter.
I do think family counseling could help you all talk about this on neutral grounds.
@abcman123 I believe you and I get it. I am sorry you are going through this with your daughter. I have a child with mental health issues and I have had to make radical decisions at times about it as well. Honestly if she will go this far to ‘fit in’ that is a big issue and perhaps college isn’t the right place right now.
PM me if you like - mine was not saying anything like transgenderism, but she was saying if a, b, c didn’t happen she was going to kill herself and that is when I decided it was time to come home from college as she wasn’t in the right mind to be successful there.
I hate to say it, because I don’t have the stats, but I wonder what percentage of kids who wanted to transition. but were blocked from it, commit suicide?
It is difficult being a parent of a non-typical trans kid. My son, aside from being athletic (if that’s a male trait), didn’t have any of the usual stereotypical identifiers of gender dysphoria. He was a very pretty, long-haired, girl. We also thought that it might not truly be gender issues, but came to the view that our relationship couldn’t be one of us expressing our doubts when it so obviously was hurting him. It would have been so much easier if he had “been masculine” from an early age, but that wasn’t the trajectory for him.
We provided the best medical care that we could find, and came to the conclusion that we needed to be supportive more than we needed to be “right in doubting him.” One of my great fears, going in, was that one day he would turn to us and ask us “how could you let me do this?” As time has gone on, I no longer worry about it; it was the right decision for him, and it was the right thing for us to be supportive.
At the end of high school, one of my son’s friends said something to his parents, who then relayed it to me. I’ve changed the names to protect my son’s privacy, but the “female-ness” and “male-ness” of the names match my daughter’s birth name and my son’s legally changed name: “John is much nicer than Mary ever was.”
Trust me on this: if you are supportive, the day will come when you are proud of how courageous your son was in coming to his decision. I know you’re bewildered and doubt what I’m saying, but please find a quiet moment and see if you can imagine the joy of a much happier child.
Counseling. Absolutely. I could very easily as a parent support not letting a kid on my insurance pump their body full of chemicals. I tend to agree with the parent on this one. There are decades upon decades for this young woman to be a young (and then presumably old) man on hormones and chemicals. If the kid is heck bent on the path despite the parents request to postpone chemical intervention for a couple years, that’s on the kid and there is no need to heap stuff on the parents. Plus if, and I say if, this is really a mental health issue arising from depression stemming from something other than gender identity issues or whatever all the more reason not to start pumping chemicals into the body.
I think your facts are incorrect. I googled “transgender suicide 41”
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf
“The prevalence of suicide attempts among respondents
to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey
(NTDS), conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality,
is 41 percent, which vastly exceeds the 4.6 percent of
the overall U.S. population who report a lifetime suicide
attempt, and is also higher than the 10-20 percent
of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults who report ever
attempting suicide.”
Your child is already in the high risk class for suicide ATTEMPTS.
Further down
“Respondents who experienced rejection by family and
friends, discrimination, victimization, or violence had
elevated prevalence of suicide attempts, such as those
who experienced the following:
—
Family chose not to speak/spend time with them: 57”
Your actions potentially ELEVATE your child’s suicide attempt probability.
Therapy is essential for you to come to grips with this.
@abcman123 Thank you for sharing. I don’t think that asking to wait until after college is completely unreasonable for such a life changing decision. Would you support the transition after college? My concern working through some medical issues myself and having female relatives and friends also who have had medical procedures is how the change in hormone levels will affect your child during college. If a woman changes her hormone levels it can sometimes be debilitating and a difficult thing to handle especially during an intense period of life like college. As a parent, I’d be fine with accepting the child as my son but would really prefer any medical transition be done during a not stressful time when kiddo can live at home. Family counseling but also medical counseling to fully understand the best way to approach.
Just trying to keep up with the latest developments. So the title of this thread is erroneous? The parents have declined to pay for hormone therapy at this time, but have not rendered the student homeless or without funds. It would seem a good compromise might be for the student to come home, enter into family counseling to determine the nature of the underlying issues here and any complications thereto, and reassess the situation in 6 months. That might go a long way to preserving the relationship and would not cause irreparable harm. A good counselor could really help in creating family harmony here.
@abcman123 I have no experience with transgender, with the exception of a couple of casual acquaintances, but I have experienced suicide among close friends and family members. It will rock your world for a lifetime. Whether this is “a fad,” “a cult,” a depression situation, or a well thought-out decision, be there and support your child. Make sure s/he knows that your love is unwavering. Whatever the reasons, you still want your child in your life. This is not the time for tough love.
@roycroftmom – when the son would not accept the parents’ terms (no hormone treatment), they “wished him luck paying for college.” They absolutely withdrew funds because they can’t accept their son as he is.