Adjusting to sudden changes can be hard, but calling your own child "degenerate" and threatening to disown them is not an acceptable reaction. The fastest path to peace may not be fighting them over it, but they ARE hurting their child, and they ARE putting them in danger. Many, many parents of trans kids handle this much more sensitively and responsibly, we don't need to make excuses in this case.

In what way is discovering you have a daughter a loss? That framing isn't the only one you could use to describe the situation. I agree strongly with @BenMillwood

Yes, she was expecting blowback. I do give her a lot of credit for her strength and courage, and her overall maturity and levelheadedness, sorry if I didn't make that clear. I think she is a great kid tbh

@Racheet It's not as much that she gained a daughter, but that she lost her son as someone who can continue the masculine family line of her late husband. Generally speaking, many societies today provide larger benefits to the father, both economical and social, like using the father's last name instead of the mother. also, transgender people cannot reproduce due to the lack of working equipment, so she effectively lost her chance at grandchildren.

@Nzall but the fact is that this is not about her, but about her daughter and her mental (and physical) health.

@Darkhogg Many people disguise their own problems as being caused by other people, even if the actual problem is with themselves. Gender issues are a classic case of "I don't like it, so they're to blame, they should just conform to what I think is normal".

My GF may come around eventually, I share that hope. So far she has rejected reading materials as "biased" and she won't even consider going to therapy. But Emily's safety is what I'm most concerned with atm. And I'm sorry, but someone who makes threats toward her own child does not need my support just as much as the child herself. Also, I mentioned legal guardianship and not legal custody because without legal guardianship I cannot take her to the oft-recommended therapy, especially sincr she has seemed depressed to me for quite a while...

@Racheet even if the mother was otherwise healthy and were completely accepting of transgenders in general (doesn't sound like this is the case here), receiving this news is/can still be a loss in the sense that her internal world view is broken. The mental model she held of her child does not match up with reality and on at least one level the daughter is not the person they thought they were, or were expecting them to become. It takes time to come to grips with the change. Phasing it differently doesn't change that. (not approving in any way of the abuse.)

@Nzall Not all transpeople undergo bottom surgery immediately (or even ever). Even those who undergo surgery are strongly encouraged by their doctors in the (very long) period leading up to it to freeze gametes for future reproductive use. It's very incorrect to say that the entire category of transpeople "lack working equipment" or cannot reproduce.

@Septagon I assume that taking hormones and hormone blockers would affect your reproductive capabilities.

@Nzall Not usually, no. It's not helpful to speak from assumption. Considering that transpeople already suffer from many actions and laws motivated by inaccurate assumptions and other misinformation that gets spread, it can actually cause unintentional harm.

This discussion is a bit strange and irrelevant, strange because it's readily available information that trans people can have biological children even post-transition (for instance, the famous pregnant man Thomas Beatie) and it's also irrelevant because a 14 year old is unlikely to be able to freeze sperm anyway. That's more relevant to trans adults who transition later in life.

@Nzall - I know transpeople with biological children. You can freeze gametes/delay full medical transitioning (at 14 years of age full transitioning isn't even an option for several more years even with aggressively seeking it). It's also a valid question if the stepdaughter even actually wants children (not everyone wants to reproduce).

"Conversion therapy" is NEVER an acceptable response to anything.

Not directly related to this answer, but one game developer who went through the transition had some (imho valuable) opinions in retrospect on the surgery.

My most favorite part: "Be the calm in the storm."