How to Parent a Gender Dysphoric Kid - Part One

This is the first segment of an essay in two parts.

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Tips on how to parent a gender dysphoric kid – using the idea of “gender dysphoria” loosely because I believe it to be way overused at this point, covering kids who may just not want to wear a dress/suit and rebel a bit against “gender norms” all the way up to kids who are experiencing true body dysmorphia and distress. The problem arises when adults take what may be transitory feelings to mean a kid is “trans”.

Quick background

My 11-year-old learned about “transgender ideology” on the internet via roleplay and art sites.  That began a four-year journey starting with her insistence that we use another name/pronoun for her. After some research and the discovery of ROGD, we forcefully responded no. This made her go “underground” and hide her trans-identification from us for three years, during which time she found herself a trans- identified licensed social worker through a school aligned program. This “therapist” coached our daughter on how to socially transition, which she did at high school her freshman year, all unbeknownst to us. This was facilitated by her freshman school counselor. When we found out by reading her school emails, it all came to a head and the “big announcement” at home.

Here is what we did over the course of the next 11 months and how she came to desist a few months before her 16^th birthday. She did not have any severe mental illness, but did have some history of separation anxiety, traumatic stress from the breakup of a friendship group in junior high and some social anxiety in her past.

BE CALM! First and foremost, our children (no matter their age) look to us for guidance. EVEN WHEN THEY MAKE A CRAZY OR INSANE ANNOUNCEMENT, how we react will set the tone.  When my 14-year-old daughter announced that she intended to save up money for “top surgery” and testosterone, I let her speak her peace because I could tell she was frantic in that moment. Helping her to feel comfortable enough to talk to us was most important. I KNOW wanting to scream and cry is your first instinct. You will have to suppress your emotions when your child is speaking insanely. You will not be able to reason with them when they are in this state of mind.

Educate yourself so that you feel comfortable talking about these issues with your child! I began devouring information which I was lucky to be able to do since I work from home. I listened to countless gender-related podcasts such as A Wider Lens, Transparency and Calmversations with Benjamin Boyce. I joined Sasha Ayad’s parent group. I even listened to Blair White, Buck Angel, Marcus Dib, etc. I found other parents who had gone through this, like January Littlejohn, Erin Friday and Erin Lee. I joined Genspect’s Discord server and reached out to my local ROGD parent group. This consumed me for about three months. I HAD to understand what was happening and feel confident I could understand anything that might be thrown at me. Ultimately you have to come to your own conclusion as to what is going on with your own kid. For me, I knew she was just uncomfortable being a girl due to stereotypes, that she was online way too much where this stuff was everywhere especially in the art world and that well-meaning but uninformed adults (including therapists, pediatricians, counselors, LCSWs, teachers, etc.) were perpetuating this idea that maybe she could really be a boy. I found it to be harmful BS. That helped me to remain stoic and calm and focused on the goal when needed and when being challenged by my daughter or other adults.  I KNEW MY DAUGHTER BEST EVEN WHEN IT DIDN’T FEEL LIKE I DID.

Get support for yourself. Through therapyfirst.org, I found a psychologist who had gone through this with her own daughter.  Then, I found a non-affirming outpatient program for my daughter via their website. They referred me to another non-affirming therapist for more long-term psychological help after the three-month program ended.  What was most helpful was the support for myself so that I could parent effectively and know that I was not alone in this insanity.

Take action. You’re going to have to take action as the parent and the adult. There is no way around this. There will be conflict. That is OK and, in most cases, is absolutely needed. Too many parents I see get caught up in walking on eggshells or wanting to avoid conflict. You cannot be this way! You have to prepare yourself to get beaten up and take it. At some point you have to take a leap of faith that the actions you’re taking are needed and necessary to help your kid through this. It doesn’t have to be perfect action.  But you HAVE TO ACT and not sit back and hope things work out. Do not put yourself in the position of regretting not having done more.  It is hard, but what I imagine is harder is watching your “adult” child harm their body. I didn’t want it to get to that point and so I knew I had to act now.

Assess and mitigate your environment. Try and ascertain where most of the influence is coming from. Once we realized what was happening with this LCSW referred by the school, we ended the sessions (where I live 12-year-old kids can get “therapy” without parental knowledge for up to six free sessions). We did this indirectly as I will describe below. We determined that, while the school was affirming (via her freshman counselor and this affiliate counselor), it was mostly coming from my daughter. Before the beginning of her sophomore year, we did speak to the school counselor and tried to let her know that our daughter had been using this persona at school as a way to deal with post-traumatic stress and separation anxiety (which was true) but in the end most everyone just continued using whatever name/pronouns my daughter led with. Since this all came out the end of the freshman year, we decided to let our daughter finish the school year and then ended up telling her during the summer that if she wanted to go back to this high school, she would have to sign a contract with us to use her birth name on all documents including band programs, yearbooks, official documents, etc. Otherwise, we would have to look into another school. She hated it and screamed and cried but signed the contract (we just calmly repeated this was what was going to have to happen because it was our choice as her parents and did not react to her outburst). We showed up on back-to-school night to prove that we meant what we said and that we were not afraid to be seen with her. We bit our tongue when we saw teachers with pride and trans flags and lanyards. We did not try to fight her on using another name on assignments or with her friends or teachers. We could not win that fight and so did not ask for that.  We checked out her school activities and saw that GSA club met every two weeks on Wednesdays. I told her I wanted to start taking her out to lunch on random school days but didn’t tell her why. I picked her up those days for lunch so she could not attend the club meetings since they held them during lunch and bought her favorite lunches and enjoyed some time with her.

We removed her iPhone and got her a bark phone. That is a phone with all parental controls built in so they cannot be disabled. I controlled every aspect of her phone use through the bark app, including contacts. I got Microsoft family safety on the laptop and also controlled devices through our router. She hated the bark phone at first and even refused to use it. I just kept it for her and eventually she started using it. When she complained I just ignored it. Now, she even paid for a new one (since she had smashed the original one in a moment of anger) and has a cute cover on it. We worked directly with school district IT to recommend websites to block on her school computer. They would not do it directly on her computer, but through the district as a whole, so I sent them emails with suggestions as to which sites to block. None were related to LGBTQ per say, but were websites like AI character websites, artfight, deviant art, webtoons, amino, warriorcats, anything where she could role play as we feel fantasy and role play was a big part of this for her and that we saw she had been visiting on school time. We could not block youtube as the school uses that platform.

We signed her up for horse riding lessons. We started taking her to a local Japanese club as she wanted to learn the language and had always wanted to visit Japan. We signed her up for drum lessons. We tried to take daily walks as a family. We started asking her to help out with chores, such as dishes, trash and cat boxes more frequently. We wanted her to be doing something physical and feel like she was contributing to the family. We went ahead with driving lessons and helping her to get her permit. I filled out all of the information so there was no inaccurate information on her permit application. She needed to start feeling like she was capable of getting to adulthood. We did lower the limit on her debit card to $20 a day, as she had suggested she might get a burner phone. We told her that it was to help her learn how to manage her money and avoided the true reason why we set the limit. We had her start babysitting the neighbor kids who had known her forever. To find new ways to bond as a family we started booking in-state Airbnb mini vacations to explore new places together during the weekends, once every few months. We busted out the card and board games to play as a family. We watched videos on travel destinations and new hobbies on youtube together.

SET BOUNDARIES. We stopped the LCSW sessions by telling her we wanted her to see someone in person (she had been zooming at school on her school laptop). We did this while we were driving to get a smoothie. Dad handled the conversation smoothly without me there since she was still raging at me. We told her we would be limiting the internet until such a time as we felt better about it as a family and we weren’t sure when that time would be. When she would storm around the house and act out, we stayed calm and said things along the line of “when you behave this way, it doesn’t incentivize us to let you have the responsibility of things like the internet”. Her anger subsided after a few months when she saw her acting out wouldn’t get the intended results of us caving in.

Eventually we bargained with her to try and start introducing more concepts, such as critical thinking.  She wanted to participate in “artfight” contest online. I told her she would have to watch three videos with us.  She agreed.  Over the next three weeks we watched a transparency podcast with Lisa Selin Davis. We watched Laura Funk God on how personality can be confused with gender. Finally, we watched “No Way Back, the Reality of Gender Affirming Care” together. During the part where they talk about the harms of medicalizing, we paused the video and spoke about them at length to make sure she understood them, one by one. After the movie was over, dad and I spoke briefly to her about the fact that ONLY the most dysphoric people should EVER even consider medicalizing and that I sure hope she wouldn’t end up as one of those people. We kept up our end of the bargain and let her participate on artfight downstairs on the laptop at the kitchen table.

Realize that your kids are going to say things sometimes just to see how you react to them. If you make a big deal about them, chances are, they will react in turn. Model the behavior you would like to see out of your kid. You can ALWAYS choose how you react. This is HARD and exhausting. I get it.

(Continued… next week with part two)