This essay is accompanied by a video of me reading the essay. The essay video are not perfectly 1:1; the essay is slightly more succinct. The video is slightly more in depth. Both are available in full to paid subscribers.
I’m a detransitioner, and the most common question I hear from parents who come across my work is some version of this:
“I have a kid who is just like you. What can I tell her so that she will stop this trans stuff?”
These parents are often hoping that, because I eventually changed my mind, I might know the article, argument, study, or personal testimony that will cause their child to change theirs.
I am probably the wrong person to ask about quick fixes.
In my opinion, there are no quick fixes to this gender stuff. There is no single article, argument, study about the potential harms to health, account of transition regret, or detransitioner testimony that will suddenly change your kid’s mind.
There Are No Quick Fixes For Your Kid's Gender Issues
This written essay will also be accompanied by an audio recording of me reading it. Those listening should still scroll through to see the relevant images and links.
Perhaps that is my own bias. I identified as transgender in various capacities for 12 of my first 24 years. My mind eventually changed, but not because someone finally presented me with the correct argument. It changed gradually, in response to my broader development, increasing maturity, and some genuinely insane experiences I lived through while pretending to be a man in the Middle East.
My beliefs did not remain static throughout those 12 years. I experienced multiple shifts in my thinking about gender-related things within each year of my life from 12 to 24, and those shifts coincided with my broader development.
Those who know me well are aware that I do not believe my gender issues came out of nowhere. But I also do not see them as having been an innate fixture of either my cognition or my identity. Identity is not a permanent fixture for children or adolescents because it is actively being developed.
To be more specific, I think of my gender distress and confusion as yet another part of my long pre-existing history of developmental delays and precocities. I believe that history could accurately be described as an archetypal autistic developmental trajectory, even though, to this point, I have not been formally diagnosed with autism.
The confusion I had about sex and gender as a 12-year-old kid who became interested in the trans topic in 2011 and 2012, long before it became my generation’s zeitgeist, was far deeper than even my highly competent parents realized.
Because they did not understand how deep my confusion was, they unintentionally miscalculated which steps they needed to take early on. This contributed to the trans framework remaining the only salient way for me to explain my developmental differences and lifelong mind-body disconnect.
The older I became, the more entrenched and secretive I became about these thoughts and feelings.
My underlying issues were not addressed or properly diagnosed, even during evaluations that showed an extremely clear developmental pattern that clinicians, for some reason, were not picking up on. Some key needs of mine were therefore not met early in this process.
As a result, I became increasingly entrenched in the trans explanation and willing to make enormous sacrifices to pursue it. I had no alternative way to understand myself or what it would take for someone atypical like me to live a good life among other people in a society comprised of strange, unwritten rules, many of them sex-specific, that I was terrible at deducing and decoding.
In short: I believed I would fail at ‘being a girl’ forever.
By now, I have also worked with many different parents of gender-questioning kids in a consulting capacity.
We engage in a kind of collaborative strategizing in which we think through a myriad of complex contributing factors, evaluate each situation individually, and develop a plan for navigating the most immediate areas of concern or distress while also looking toward the future.
Every family I have worked with is at a different stage of this process. Every child has a different combination of temperamental features, sometimes developmental delays, sometimes developmental precocities, any number of varied autistic or ADHD traits, sensory preferences, emotional difficulties, strengths, weaknesses, fixations, social experiences, and family dynamics.
My lived experience and my work with families have convinced me that gender issues in preteens and teenagers can arise for many different reasons that neither side of the trans culture war explains particularly well.
These complex developmental and mental health issues require far more than a quick fix to mitigate. They will not be resolved overnight, nor will they necessarily be resolved through one hour of therapy every week, even with the best therapist.
Most of the necessary work will happen within the context of the parent-child relationship because that is where so much of a child’s development occurs, alongside their interactions with peers, clinicians, teachers, and the broader world.
It is therefore critical for parents and the clinicians who care for these young people to develop a far more complex and robust understanding of the intricacies of each case.
Parents need to know that they have more options than blindly affirming every conclusion their child reaches, avoiding the subject entirely out of fear of making things worse, or waging war on their child’s new belief system.
There is a far better middle ground.
So I cannot give you the sentence that will make your child stop identifying as transgender.
What I can give you is something more realistic and, I believe, more useful: a framework for remaining in relationship with your child, having conversations that do not become fruitless screaming matches, understanding what problems gender may be helping them explain or temporarily solve, and building the social, emotional, relational, and self-accommodation skills they will need in adulthood.
For many kids, scaffolding their development in these ways may help them find less invasive ways to meet their needs, so that the desire to transition lessens or disappears entirely. For those who still transition, their lives will be even more difficult if they lack these skills.
Either way, these are skills your child needs.
Your child does not need one perfect conversation, one magical intervention, or more time without the adults in the situation having a clear plan for how to help them.
Before I get into one part of that plan, I have one request. If you believe more parents need to hear that there are alternatives to both unquestioning affirmation and family warfare, please subscribe to this publication, share this essay with someone who may need it, and leave a comment. Commenting does not require you to disclose your family’s entire story. You can simply tell me which part of this video essay, resonated, where your family is in this process, or what question(s) you would like me to address next.
If you want access to the complete practical framework and future entries in this series, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribing, sharing, and commenting all help me continue this work and get it in front of parents who currently feel as though they have nowhere useful to turn.
How Families Get Trapped in Unhelpful, Relationship-Damaging Cycles
By the time gender enters the picture, it can be incredibly emotionally difficult for parents, and emotionally (and sometimes sensorily) difficult for their usually intelligent and rigid adolescent kids, to have the conversations both parties wish they could have.
When the subject is raised, it tends to become explosive.
Because it becomes mutually explosive, and because no alternative is presented, families often fall into one of two patterns. Though, some families will oscillate between them both.
Some parents stop trying to broach the subject at all. They avoid the elephant in the room because they believe ignoring it is preferable to saying or doing something that will make the situation worse.
Other parents respond to their understandable panic at their child’s trans identity disclosure by waging war on their child’s new belief system. Gender becomes the subject of every interaction, and every conversation becomes an attempt to defeat the identity or prevent the feared outcome.
Both reactions are understandable. But, neither is sustainable.
In the absence of good, enlightening conversations between parents and their kids about uncomfortable but developmentally important topics, gender included, the child’s thoughts remain a mystery. The child is then tasked with dealing with complex distress entirely on their own, or at least feeling as though they are totally alone. Their distress will probably only escalate.
They may go online and find same-aged peers and a combination of well-meaning and totally unsavory adults who promise to help them achieve the only solution they currently understand as the thing that will make them feel better.
Over time, and in the absence of a change in the family dynamic, these kids can become increasingly certain that they simply need to kill time until they turn 18 and can make their own medical decisions.
Then the risk is that they fall into a system that does not assess the full causes of their distress, measure whether the individual understands the consequences of a transitioned life path, or examine their motivations for wanting to change sex.
This is the most common outcome I have seen, and lived myself, of using no intervention out of fear of making things worse and hoping that the kid simply grows out of this phase or distress on their own. And this outcome is so common, mostly because no alternative intervention has been proposed.
That approach of waiting and seeing how gender feelings naturally progress, may result in eventual distress resolution as a fluke for some of today’s teenaged kids, or for the non-affirmed early in life onset gender dysphoric kid (which is only a fraction of pediatric transition-desiring cases today). Maybe. But, I would not count on it working for your kid. Why?
If you have found my blog, it is probably because the way I describe myself as a kid reminds you of your own child. If this is so, I am guessing that your child may be particularly unusual in some aspect of their development. That might be diagnosable as giftedness, autism, ADHD, OCD, or various learning, speech, or motor difficulties.
For these children, more time alone to sit with their own unbridled thoughts can actually risk making them more entrenched and more certain that what they need is to intervene invasively in their bodies and lives. Especially if they have been presented with no other way to explain or address their distress.
Doing nothing in response to a kid’s gender distress is not a neutral response.
Complex developmental distress, confusion, and questioning are too multifaceted to reliably resolve through time alone, especially when gender transition is being presented as the only salient solution to it, everywhere in our culture.
But realizing that something must be done is only the first step in determining which actions would actually be useful at this current moment.
Parents who are parenting a gender-distressed child are in fact parenting their entire child. They are not merely trying to nurture or trying to defeat a walking, talking gender identity (depending on which approach they take). Thoughtful action means supporting the child’s social communication, sensory processing, emotional regulation, academics, relationships, age-appropriate independence, and other relevant life endeavors.
It also means looking at the entire family system and asking ourselves what skills the parents may need to learn alongside an adolescent whose developmental atypicalities may only now be contributing to a significantly more stressful family life.
There is a far better middle ground between avoiding gender because it feels too loaded or scary to touch and making it the subject of every parent-child interaction. Both panicked responses have far more potential to become relationship-damaging than the disagreement over gender itself.
Even if your family is already stuck in a cycle of avoidance, fruitless arguments, secrecy, or despair- that cycle can and should be interrupted.
And the most important skill is first and foremost, to learn how to have better conversations about hard things that stoke conflict.
What This Conversational Framework Is Designed to Accomplish
The goal of parenting any child through adolescence, whether autistic, gifted, gender-questioning, ADHD, or not, is ultimately to prepare them for their future endeavors, understanding the reality of who that kid is and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Where neurodevelopmental divergence exists, it is the job of the adults in the situation, namely: parents, clinicians, and educators to become more complex in their understandings of what all is going on. Your kid may be an exceptional genius in some areas and struggle in other realms of life in equally exceptional ways. It can be very difficult for some parents to accept the extent to which their potentially genius child’s weaknesses may constitute functional impairments in other areas.
The common refrain we hear a lot in this space sounds something like “my kid is so smart, how could she believe in something as absurd as the idea that she is really a boy?” In my opinion, that question is worth answering in earnest rather than treating it as a rhetorical question.
As I see it, it is precisely that combination of high intelligence and immaturity with developmental or emotional difficulties both endemic to and amplified by adolescence, which draws so many developmentally atypical kids into treating identity development as an intellectual rather than an embodied and intuitive task.
High intelligence alone can put kids and teens at odds with their peers. Then, if there’s a co-occurring mental health issue, a difficulty with social intuition (which usually looks like not picking up on social cues), the child’s robust logical faculties (which are also under construction at this stage) will try to substitute to bridge this gap. In today’s climate, the logical loop-de-loops of gender identity theory can be an enticing thought experiment to a kid who both likes to think and who finds themselves totally lost in a changing social landscape of middle or high school because they cannot keep up with the developmental trajectory of their same-aged and same-sex peers. Around adolescence, kids have the drive to explore various pursuits which will eventually become consolidated into their mature adult identities. In most cases, this occurs in the context of teenagers spending less time with their parents and branching off into peer groups.
However, for a teenager who finds other teenagers confusing or uninteresting because of an IQ difference which confers many downstream differences, and/or because they lack the social intuition and processing speed needed to parse the complex social and relational maneuvers which their peers are beginning to engage in, that drive cannot in most school environments, be actualized upon in an embodied way. In fact, such a kid is more likely to spend his or her day oscillating between a state of intellectual under-stimulation and sensory over-stimulation in school, which could contribute to living in a state of disassociation just to survive the day. At some point, a smart kid will become aware that this way of functioning is not normal.
And as it appears today, many of those kids will try to resolve that tension by searching for an answer which will help them solve their problems. That answer, for an increasing number of them, comes in the form of a culturally salient transgender identity. Unlike in the 2011-2012 school year when I as a 12 year old had to search for about two years before I stumbled on the concept of a female to male sex change, kids today are being handed it on TV, in all sorts of internet spaces, in school and in the broader culture. Most kids who hear about the concept of gender transition are unlikely to be seduced by it, because their developmental needs are already being met by their environment, and so their quest for identity development can quite easily occur within the more normative social landscape of a peer group who is similarly matched in terms of their development.
Rather than intelligence being seen as a protective factor against the development of gender dysphoria or a transgender identity, perhaps we should see it as one of the biggest predisposing factors. That is one of my theories about what could be going on with some of these kids.
One of the biggest uphill battles for parents of kids who are extremely gifted or precocious in some raw intelligence-related areas while being significantly delayed in others, namely social or sensory processing, is helping that child develop into a more well-rounded person.
Learning to have good conversations is part of that development. This applies not only to gender but to any important life topic involving disagreement, discomfort, or the need to discuss something unrelated to the one or two subjects on which your kid may be fixated.
The objectives of these conversations are therefore developmental and, frankly, more realistic than expecting one perfect argument to change your child’s identity.
You are trying to:
Keep the channel of communication between you and your child open.
Help your child build tolerance for emotionally difficult conversations.
Help both of you express disagreement without treating the relationship itself as being in danger.
Gather better information about what your child is actually experiencing.
Help your child develop emotional regulation, sensory regulation, perspective-taking, body awareness, and a basic understanding of how their brain processes information.
Maintain reasonable boundaries without teaching your child that becoming more secretive is the only way to become independent.
Expand your child’s world so that gender is not carrying the entire burden of identity, belonging, emotional regulation, and future meaning.
These are skills your parent-child dynamic will need regardless of whether your child continues identifying as transgender, is currently transitioning, desists, detransitions, or makes some other trajectory-defining decision as an adult.
What Successful Conversations Actually Look Like
Success does not necessarily mean your child agrees with you.
Early success looks like:
Your child stayed in the room for ten minutes of a difficult conversation.
Your child became angry about something you said but told you why.
Your child returned to the table after taking a break to regulate their emotions.
Your child corrected a perceived misunderstanding without insulting you.
You maintained a boundary without screaming.
Your child disclosed something valuable that they knew you did not want to hear.
You learned that a supposedly gender-related behavior may also have a sensory component.
You had one enjoyable conversation in which gender never came up.
Your adolescent initiated a conversation about something difficult, and you stayed calm.
Your kid started coming to you with their problems because you became a better source of emotional attunement and information than the chatbots they may currently be soliciting advice from online.
For clinicians, it is important not to become the only person with whom the young person can communicate. Part of the clinical task should be helping the family develop structures that allow the child and parents to speak directly with one another.
Clinicians can help families identify:
Which subjects or relational patterns trigger immediate defensiveness.
Which sensory conditions make good communication harder for both the parents and the child.
Whether the young person communicates better while moving or using their hands.
Whether the parent is asking genuine questions or delivering disguised arguments that their kid can probably see through.
Whether a boundary is producing age-appropriate safety or simply encouraging better secrecy.
Whether the teen’s world is expanding as they get older or becoming increasingly fixated around gender.
Whether the family is equipped to address issues related to their child’s development outside of gender.
It is exceedingly easy for gender to hijack a family, especially one comprised of intelligent people with a research mentality who use information to process complex emotions and broader existential themes. This can happen within both the child and the parents. It is important to take note of this if you see this becoming an ever-present theme in your family life.
The framework that follows is intended to help families reset those patterns. Although these strategies explicitly take neurodivergence into account, they are not exclusive to autistic or ADHD presentations of adolescent gender distress.
I will use examples from families I’ve made various of these suggestions to as we have worked together, with identifying information removed, and reflections from my own life to explain the principles I think are most important. I will also give you the beginnings of a plan for beginning to use them right away.
The rest of this essay is available in full to paid subscribers.
