“Setting limits is a primary responsibility of parents. Teens are too young to be making major decisions on their own. It is age appropriate for teens to experiment and take risks. It is our job as parents to take measures where we can to ensure that these risks and experiments don’t carry long-term consequences.” – Lisa Marchiano
A lot of parents will relate to Marchiano’s words: it chimes with their sense of responsibility, their desire to be protective. In the context that she was talking about though, where a child has come out as transgender, this attitude is deeply misguided. Let me explain why.
When a child comes out to their parents, in most cases – and I use my words carefully, because no two cases are ever exactly alike – for the child, this moment will have been years in the making. They’ll have struggled for a long time with their sense of their own gender. They’ll have done some reading of their own, and then questioned themselves some more. They’ll have thought about consequences, and very likely will have had other conversations already. By coming out and asking for acceptance, they’re signalling that they’ve accepted their new identity and are ready to move on in their life.
For the parents on the other hand, this may be a moment when they’re suddenly, unexpectedly, thrust into a new reality, which society hasn’t dealt them the tools or the experience to know how to deal with. Coming to terms with this new reality will take time. Already, we can see a problem with setting over-zealous boundaries, because how can a parent without an understanding of why gender transition happens know what’s best for the child ?
There may be emotions of guilt or grief. Guilt, for not having seen or understood the trauma that the child was going through. Grief, for the “loss” of a son or daughter. One trans parent tweeted this – “The best piece of advice I got was from a father whose child had transitioned, who told me when my child first came out as trans, ‘All you can see now is what you are losing. In time you’ll see what you are gaining.’ Now I see how happy my child is. He was right.” The priority though has to be to support the child, who’s probably been going through their own emotional hell.
Some parents, aware of the importance of social networks, will have fears that their child is risking social isolation, loss of friends, barriers to future relationships, and so on. They would do well to keep these fears to themselves. Their child isn’t stumbling in the dark: they’ve made an active choice. Everything may not turn out as they hoped, but they deserve some space to make their own mistakes. The surest way to improve the quality of their outcomes is by affirming them in their choice, helping them to build up their self-confidence, and making sure that they know how to access the networks and resources that can open doors to a new social life.
The coming out moment is a wake-up call to the family. The cohesion of the family unit is about to be put to the test. Some parents, once they’ve got over the initial shock, become active allies, advocates for their child, supporting them every inch of the way. Some go down the Marchiano route, trying to take control and to put a protective ring around the child. Many others float somewhere between these two poles, maybe leaning more in one direction or the other. Experience has shown that it’s the parents who most actively affirm the child in their new gender identity who build the strongest emotional bonds and the closest knit families. This shouldn’t come as any great surprise: what the child needs above all else is to be listened to, believed, and accepted as who they are. If parents can do this, and beyond it show willingness to trust the child to make their own decisions, that can go such a long way in cementing the relationship.
No one’s claiming that social and medical transition is risk-free. The risks of transitioning must be balanced though against the risks of not transitioning, including the impact that this can have on a child’s wellbeing, inner confidence, and mental health.
Social transitioning frequently comes with powerful feelings of relief and joy, but it’s not a solution to every problem. Trans people who’ve been through this will experience, on average, higher levels of mental health problems than the general population, though this will still represent a real improvement on how they were before transitioning. What the studies don’t always tell us is how much of this is caused by real life problems interfering with transitioning goals: non-accepting families, poverty, homelessness, lack of access to certain forms of medical treatment, being misgendered, and general transphobia. Perhaps the best gauge of their happiness is the fact that, among those who’ve medically transitioned (for whom there is the most data), regret rates and detransitioning rates are extremely low.
Transitioning then isn’t a “risky experiment”. Decades of research and clinical experience have proven that in most cases, the greater risks lie in trying to stop a child from transitioning, and in not fully supporting a child through their transition.
Trans parents need more resources and better support. This is so vital: it can improve the lives of countless trans teenagers, and yes, trans adults as well. Unfortunately some of the sites and networks that currently exist give credence to false narratives which call into question everything that trans children say, and even in the very idea that children can be trans at all. Parents need to understand that denying their child’s gender identity and shutting their eyes to evidence of it isn’t a form of tough love, it’s a form of abuse.
Optimism of the Will 