On Transgender Identity and Family Estrangement w/ an ROGD mom.

In this almost four hour paid subscriber live Q&A, I sit down with JaneSmith9941 , a mom of a trans-identified and transitioning young adult son with whom she currently has no contact. For obvious reasons, she wishes to remain anonymous.

In this essay and in the LIVE video, we have a raw and honest discussion about how disagreements about a child’s gender identity, or any number of other significant life choices a kid can make, which deviate from their parents’ expectations or desires for their child, can become flashpoints for various flavors of relationship strain and estrangement. I also discuss what it took for me and my parents to come back together after periods of extreme strain on our relationship both related to and unrelated to my transition.

Jane and I sat down and talked honestly about our lives, about the role gender questioning played in our respective family dynamics, about what it is like to grow up developing an identity in disembodied circumstances that do not make that easy, and about what it actually takes to come back from rupture. I spoke from the perspective of the kid in the dynamic, someone who navigated gender questioning within my own family for twelve years, who went through both transition and detransition, and who had to do a significant amount of work alongside my parents to get our relationship to where it is now. Jane spoke with a level of self-awareness and insight that I found genuinely refreshing; the kind that does not come from reading the ‘right’ forums online, but from actually sitting with hard questions long enough to understand them.

We covered a lot of ground. Both of us got personal in ways that I think will land for parents who are in the middle of this, including those who are in periods of low to no contact and are not sure what to do with that. We arrived at conclusions that I think are actually applicable to the situation of parenting a kid through various stages of gender questioning, transition, and detransition.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I found it one of the more honest exchanges I have had on this subject, and I hope it gives you something real to work with.

This video will be available for paid subscribers, and this short essay will be available for everyone.

When gender identity questioning enters a family dynamic, whether in middle school, high school, or young adulthood, it has a way of becoming a fault line. What started as a tearful conversation in which I as a 12 year old in 2012 disclosed to my parents that I was struggling with questions around my gender, became an increasingly contentious power struggle that agitated my family for the next 12 years. The subject became so painful for everyone, that it was something we rarely talked about. And when we did, it became a source of explosive arguments which did not serve any of us. The longer this strain continued without an attempt to repair the relationship, the easier it was for all of us to just stay silent and to stop talking to one another… about much of anything.

Sometimes this takes the form of low or no contact, which can happen in any direction. Sometimes the young person pulls away. Sometimes the parent does. Sometimes it is simply too painful for both parties to be in the same room, and the distance between them becomes a kind of default that neither party officially chose. Whatever form it takes, it tends to feel permanent for those on the inside even when it is not.

I am speaking from personal experience when I say this: estrangement is not the inevitable outcome of disagreements between parents and their adult kids about gender identity or gender transition. It also does not need to be permanent.

Speaking as someone who was the kid in this dynamic, I do not think the people on either side of these family-child ruptures are villains.

Parents who panic and say the wrong thing, are not monsters. They are people who love their kids and are watching something unfold that terrifies them, without a roadmap for how to respond and usually, without anyone in their lives who truly understands what they are dealing with. And of course, the prospect of the type of change their trans-identifying kids want to undergo, shatters something at the core of their evolutionary programming which can make it hard for them to engage with their kids, because they may not recognize them anymore.

The parents in these situations are often not adequately supported in navigating their own emotional turmoil during these times, and instead experience a lot of pressure from others in their lives to disregard their own experiences and concerns. This is particularly true for parents raising their kids in progressive environments. Sometimes both parents are not on the same page about how to handle the situation. When these things happen, their kids tend to find themselves on the receiving end of all it, even when this is not developmentally appropriate for them to contend with these matters, and so they cannot cope with the pressure of it.

The adolescent or young adult kids who pull away from their parents in the wake of these increasingly fractious disagreements over a myriad of life choices, including the decision to transition, are not evil either. They are usually quite vulnerable young people who have reached out to their parents in earnest, with something that felt enormous to them and the panic-driven reactions of their parents get interpreted by the kid as a response that confirmed their worst fear; that their parents are rejecting or abandoning them. This too is destabilizing for the kid, especially if the kid, like me, was about 12 years old at the start of this. To such a kid, it feels as if the people who were supposed to be their safe harbor are not safe anymore, or that they are unable to provide the emotional stability needed to assure their kid that everything will be okay and that they are not in trouble for sharing their feelings with their parents, even if the parents do not agree with the conclusion their middle schooler has come to. In the case of the older adolescent or young adult kid, this can take on a different flavor; which is that, they may see their parents as rejecting the emerging adult version of who they are becoming as they are asserting their right to make their own choices. What complicates this, is that today’s adolescents have way less independence to experiment with stupid but relatively inconsequential endeavors away from the watchful eyes or the cell phone tracking of their parents. And in addition, young adult kids are also in many ways, still very much dependent on their parents, due to broader cost of living challenges. So there are lots of things to navigate at these junctures.

Two things can be true simultaneously; both parties are usually doing the best they can with what they have, and that when frightened people interact with other frightened people whom they love very much, it is not difficult to meaningfully damage those relationships by saying and doing regrettable, emotionally-charged things. Where there is a combination of robust developmentally-appropriate boundaries (and associated freedoms), a baseline level of stability, mutual respect and emotional resilience in a family, these exchanges do not tend to tank the entire relationship. Where those things do not exist, they must be actively developed so that the family relationship does not erode over a series of political or ideological disagreements and over what is at its core, angsty adolescent behavior.

What I have also come to understand, from my own experience and from working with ROGD families, and from navigating these issues within my own family dynamic, is that gender identity questioning rarely ruptures a relationship entirely on its own. It does however, tend to turn up the heat on everything that was already simmering. The communication patterns that were already strained become increasingly impossible to navigate, using the same, rusty tools. The unspoken expectations that were already there become explosive flashpoints. The emotional needs that were already going unmet become further exacerbated. Gender is often the most obvious presenting issue, but it is almost never the whole story. Understanding that is actually useful, because it means there is a lot more to work with than most people realize.

It also means that estrangement, where it does occur, does not have to be permanent. A strained relationship is not the same as a severed one. Spirited disagreements about gender do not automatically mean no future relationship. Even extended periods of low or no contact do not have to be the end of the story. If you find yourself in online spaces or in real life communities which convince you that this is the case, those communities are not going to help you repair your relationship with your child.

The parent-child relationship is one of the most primal bonds there is, and in my experience, most kids, whatever they are doing on the surface, are not actually trying to lose their parents forever. They are trying to survive a crisis that feels otherwise unsurvivable, and they are often just trying to assert the independence they are developmentally wired to crave and that our culture has basically denied them the chance to experience in less invasive ways.

And most parents, whatever it looks like from the outside, are not trying to drive their kids away. They are trying to protect them in the only way they currently know how, and against the backdrop of a distressed kid and a sea of largely incompetent clinicians who are allergic to the idea of differential diagnosis and will mindlessly set their kid down a consequential path with many irreversible consequences that the kid, depending on their age and stage of development, is incapable of properly assessing for themselves.

What the situation actually requires is a strategic, compassionate, and practical approach. Not endless arguing. Not pretending the subject does not exist and hoping it resolves itself, all the while becoming more anxious when it does not. Not being paralyzed by fear of saying the wrong thing and therefore saying nothing at all. Not outsourcing the relationship to a detransitioner’s essay or video testimony sent via a text message. Those approaches do not work, and most parents who have been in this long enough already know that.

What actually works here takes effort, grounding, and a willingness to develop an individualized strategy which will involve playing a longer game than most people feel capable of playing when they are in the acute phase of this. It also takes being honest about your own role in the dynamic, both for better and for worse, which is genuinely hard to do when you feel like the wronged party. But it is the work that needs to be done. There is not really a version of this process that goes well without it.

That is what this conversation is really about.

And if you are a parent of a gender questioning young person who wants to think through your specific situation with me, including the family dynamics, the practical next steps, and how to navigate whichever stage of this you are currently in, I offer one on one parent coaching sessions. The goal is always to find approaches that are practical, creative, and compassionate, and that are built around your actual kid and your actual family, and which accounts for special needs associated with conditions like autism and adhd, rather than simply a generic framework.

Send me a DM on Substack to book a session.

I will be doing more live conversations with paid subscribers about topics that are too personal for a public post, in addition to working through specific questions you send me. Always feel free to send them.

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