My Kid Came Out as Trans. Now What?

8 Tips from a Detransitioner Who Coaches Parents of Kids Like the One I Used to Be

Me, on my 14th birthday with my beloved poodle.

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For those who don’t know me:

Me a few days ago at the beach, a few hours before a gnarly sunburn.

Hi, my name is Maia and I’ve just turned 26. From the ages of 12-24, I was convinced I was born in the wrong body. I spent my entire adolescence planning my future upon the basis of achieving a gender transition, going as far as to bind my breasts so I could in adulthood qualify for a scar-free mastectomy option available to women with smaller breasts. Rather than preventing my breasts from growing, the decade of binding left me with irreversible damage to nerves, breast tissue and my rib cage, with pain I still face while taking deep breaths and lying on my side.

I began to transition socially as an 18 year old. At 20, I moved to the Middle East and lived as a man (undercover) where very few people in my life knew I was female.

Me, age 19 on the men’s side of the Western Wall after getting a bar mitzvah which I didn’t know happened until it was over. This picture showcases the moment I found out it had happened.

I didn’t question anything about devoting my life to gender transition until I had lived through my first war (or “military operation” as the locals call it) in Israel in May of 2021, and then in the wake of the atrocities of October 7, 2023, my transgender fantasy finally broke as I had to prioritize survival (in the form of running from rockets) over identity (in the form of binding my breasts in an attempt to pass as a man).

I began to identify as transgender at the age of 12 in 2012 after getting an iPad in the summer of 2011 for my 12th birthday and spending months wading in trans-related content before my parents had caught wind of any of it. My transgender identity was the source of so much tension in the family that I found refuge living in the instability of Middle Eastern chaos just to pursue a life which I thought was an expression of my “true authentic self”— only to realize that the war I’d waged against my own body (and against my parents in what became a power struggle of epic proportion) was all based upon lies which had totally derailed my development.

Now, I’m writing on this blog in an attempt to share my insights from my 12 years of transgender identification, which started several years before the massive wave of Gen Z teen girls coming out as trans in peer clusters, and which has ended a few years before my generation has disavowed the idea. In many ways, my story may be somewhat of a time capsule for parents, clinicians and educators who are confronted with these challenges within younger cohorts, so I try my best to illuminate how I experienced my own process of transgender identification over the course of those 12 years.

Now as someone who has detransitioned and has spent hundreds of hours over the last two years trying to make sense of what the hell happened to me, and writing about it— I also consult with parents of trans-identified kids like the one I used to be. Working with a multitude of families from a variety of different backgrounds and countries, who are all united in their wading through the challenging waters of an adolescent or young adult child’s transgender identity— has taught me so much.

Coaching parents has helped me to understand how the experiences of my own trans identity and its impact on my family, even at its most maladaptive and relationship-destroying points, was not an isolated experience. As the young adult kid who used to be in your kid’s shoes, I don’t think families have to settle for the fatalistic notion that a teen’s transgender identity will inevitably implode every family relationship. Will this be a difficult and trying time unlike anything your family has ever experienced before? Very possibly. But, if handled in an informed and compassionate way, this experience may also serve to bring your family closer in the end.

In my previous essay, titled “What I Wish My Parents Had Understood About My Trans Identity” I touched on some fundamental misconceptions my parents had when they were tasked back in 2012, to help me navigate a relatively unheard of phenomenon. In this essay, I will touch on themes from my own story and from the patterns I have observed amongst many of the families I have consulted with.

This essay won’t just discuss patterns I’ve observed occurring on repeat, it’ll also cover some of the lessons I have learned through trying to bridge the perspectives of parents with the perspectives of their children, who are often talking past each other without even realizing it.

Though these reflections are based on general themes and will not use specific stories from any family other than perhaps my own, you may see your family reflected in them nonetheless.

That is because though you may feel alone in this, I can promise you that you are, in fact, not alone.

Eight Guiding Principles: Here are a few things I’ve Learned from Parent Coaching Thus Far:

But first:

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Here are just a few of the things I’ve learned from parent coaching: about kids, about parents, about trans identification, and about how relationships fall apart and how they can get rebuilt.

1. Your kid is using a script. Don’t counter it with your own.

When kids and teens adopt trans identities, they often use a prefabricated framework to explain complex sentiments they can’t otherwise articulate. They use trans activist language as a script to express their distress or confusion. They often use phrases like "my egg cracked," "top surgery will save my life," “testosterone is poisoning me” (in the case of boys) or "if you don’t affirm me, I’ll kill myself" because they’ve absorbed those narratives online, at school, or in their environment. Those narratives seem true to the young person who says them, because they express a type of distress, discomfort and salvation which the young person has not found the language for elsewhere. The more they say these things, the more they believe them to be true.

Initially, to parents this plethora of fancy sounding jargon can sound like the teen has really done their research and has a deep understanding of the topic—but what they’ve really done is memorize a script for confusing feelings and distress they cannot otherwise explain, in a way that helps them initially feel less overwhelmed. And this script offers them an ‘out’ of their distress.

What I see again and again in coaching sessions is a war of scripts. Kids come in with trans activist language they’ve learned from the internet. Parents come in armed with counter-narratives; biological reality, desistance statistics, stories of regret. Each side is repeating lines that feel true to them, but no one is actually being heard. The child sees the parent as denying their reality. The parent sees the child as spouting nonsense, and denying biological reality. Everyone talks past each other. It’s not a real conversation, but an elaborate performance of desperation which quickly escalates the power struggle.

But here’s the thing: your child is using a script because they don’t yet have the internal tools to identify and describe what they’re going through. They’re overwhelmed, confused, and trying to make sense of themselves using someone else’s words. When you meet that with your own borrowed script, you reinforce the idea that this is a battle to be won. That’s how kids get entrenched. That’s how you as the parent, lose influence.

There is no arguing or debating your kid out of an identity crisis. This will only further entrench them in it, and the transgender identity will become the thing your adolescent will feel the existential need to protect at all costs.

2. Trans identification is not some mystery or an expression of an ineffable inner truth– it is a coping mechanism.

Though it may seem this way to you, your child’s trans identification hasn’t come out of nowhere. These kids are confused and in distress, sometimes struggling for years in ways their parents may have noticed but don’t connect to the trans identity, and often in ways their parents don’t notice at all. These young people are desperately trying to solve a problem they don’t yet understand for what it is. For neurodivergent kids especially, their bodies and emotions can be chaotic, intense and confusing. They often struggle to know when they’re tired or hungry– let alone confused, sad or humiliated. They might not know how to make friends or express emotion. They’re growing up online, often in isolation, with highly dysregulated nervous systems.

Adolescence is a time of identity crisis. That’s normal.

What’s not normal is that there are adults and entire institutions telling teenagers to resolve that crisis by rejecting their body, dissociating from their sex, and demanding breast binders, genital tucking devices and a variety of other irreversible medical interventions underpinned by no solid evidence attesting to their efficacy. The transgender pathway is peddled as a search for “gender euphoria”— though in reality, it is a deeply flawed attempt to treat a young person’s experiences of disembodiment, distress and confusion with the false promise that bodily dismemberment and a life lived in opposition to one’s biological reality is a sure-fire path to salvation.

It is best to assume that your adolescent or young adult child, though they may seem at times to be immature and irrational, are actually making decisions with a calculus underpinned by its own rationale. Though the rationale proposed by gender identity ideology has been shown by systematic reviews of evidence to be flawed at its most fundamental logical premises, your child did not adopt any of these flawed logics because they were enticed by the arguments provided by gender ideology. They were enticed by the promise of happiness and resolution to their developmental distress, and the logics of gender ideology have most likely been adopted post hoc so this young person can explain to themselves and to others, why they must be supported in embarking upon this specific pathway.

Which is why:

3. Teenagers in distress don’t need to be debated. They need to be seen.

Kids don't just adopt trans identities for “fun.” They do it because it explains their pain. Parents often react by correcting them, trying to argue them out of it, citing studies or showing them photos from childhood where a kid behaved in a gender conforming way and were smiling. These strategies almost always backfire. What the kid actually needs is to feel understood in their distress. To feel like their parent is capable of seeing their real pain, beneath the label. These kids are often such literal and rigid thinkers that it seems to their parents that the kid will settle for nothing less than total gender affirmation– but that does not mean that either gender affirmation or rejection are the best paths forward. What these kids need is understanding and an environment conducive to exploration.

When you argue with the coping mechanism your trans-identified kid has accepted as a literal truth, you teach them that their pain is invalid. When you listen, you teach them that their pain can be expressed in other ways. You can listen without affirming when you place reasonable boundaries for engagement and state them honestly and lovingly. Asking the right questions in the right way is paramount– and the questions you ask depend on your kid’s age, duration of identity questioning and transition, and their level of introspection and emotional awareness. Listening actively to understand, rather than to debate, is even more important.

4. This trans identity is in the realm of normal teenage stuff. But, with very high stakes.

This doesn’t mean you should wait idly by and hope that your kid’s gender issues will “sort themselves out on their own.” That is a pipe dream.

The “wait and see” (and avoid) approach to a teen’s trans identity is a detrimental one, for reasons I outline in my essay titled “When Your Kid Comes Out as Trans, Doing Nothing Isn’t an Option.”

The way parents react when confronted with the transgender identification, particularly of a young adolescent child, is undoubtedly trajectory-defining.

What I mean when I say that this trans identity is in the realm of normal teenage stuff, but with very high stakes– I’m referring to something different.

I often hear from parents: "My kid was so sweet, so compliant. Then they became trans and everything changed." Parents can be quick to attribute the bad behaviors of previously compliant kids, to their newly declared trans identification. As someone who was recently one of these teenagers, it is my opinion that there’s a far more ordinary explanation for adolescent onset ornery behavior: your kid is becoming a teenager.

We should be very careful with which obnoxious and troublesome developmental attributes we attribute to the trans identity. Believe it or not, your teen’s transgender identity isn’t actually just about gender. It is for many teenagers, their valiant, developmentally normal attempt to become their own person, but it takes place as a result of confusion and/or distress that cannot be simply attributed to this thing we call “gender.”

In many of the families I coach, their kids don't begin the process of splitting off from their parents and moving into their own friend groups starting at 11 or 12, like their peers do. Their parents are happy to have a middle and high schooler who wants to hang out with them all the time, rather than seeing this as evidence that their kid may not have the social, emotional or developmental skills to achieve that type of normal independence. Many of these kids, myself included, hit that milestone later—at 14, 15, 16, even 18. The parents of these kids are often used to having a kid who has been their best friend for a decade and a half, and they struggle to adapt to their changing role as the parent of a teenager when their kid finally does try to assert more independence. Then, the dynamic becomes explosive.

The coddling I am describing isn’t necessarily the “fault” of the parents I work with. It is more often the result of our societal coddling of kids and our collective reluctance to allow them to experience emotional pain and failure in their younger years as a misguided way to protect their self-esteem.

Nonetheless, if the parent doesn’t allow (and encourage) age-appropriate autonomy, reinforced with reasonable boundaries explained properly, which center around prioritizing bodily integrity while allowing for benign identity exploration and unconventional teenage self-expression, the child may adopt the most extreme identity possible just to force separation from their parents. Your child is not supposed to be your best friend. That’s not their role. If you’ve fused your identities too tightly, they may be trying to do everything in their power to rupture your relationship just to breathe.

Dealing with teenagers, particularly stubborn ones, requires parents to understand the importance of picking their battles. I know this must be far easier said than done.

There is an important balance to strike between safety and autonomy.

Your teen needs enough breathing room to make bad choices and to learn from them, without having those mistaken adolescent foibles define the rest of their lives. Preventing a teen from making a choice you don’t like regarding unconventional hair and clothing styles which you may see as being aligned with the transgender identity, will probably make them crave transition-related body alterations even more. At least, it did for me.

In my opinion, it is most helpful when parents can enforce clear boundaries around protecting their kids from harmful psychosocial interventions, like those associated with adopting a new identity through a social transition, and boundaries around protecting them from harmful body modifications, including breast binders and hormonal or surgical interventions.

When those necessary boundaries are explained compassionately, though they may upset your adolescent, this actually gives your family a lot of breathing room to connect over topics other than gender and to allow your teenager the chance to begin meeting their developmental needs in healthier ways.

5. Therapists can’t replace you. And many aren’t even that helpful to begin with.

What I as a trans-identified 12 year old needed wasn’t a therapist to replace my parents. What I needed was for my parents to understand that my confusion was a signal that something in our dynamic needed to change. I needed them to see that I was crying out for help. I wonder every day what might have happened if, at twelve, they had the tools I now teach to parents of kids like the one I was, to help them understand their kids in the ways I wished my parents could have understood the nature of what I was going through.

A lot of Gen X parents of Gen Z kids will try to outsource their child’s problems to a therapist. While therapy is necessary in some cases where there are pervasive mental health issues which require targeted treatment, our culture seems to think that therapy is the best (or only) treatment for any given issue.

In most of the families I’ve worked with, there’s a nefarious therapist with a savior complex sabotaging the child’s relationship with their parents, doing more harm to the kid than had they just been left alone to deal with their confusion (like I was for the first seven years). Of course, neither of these outcomes are ideal and I believe that wherever possible, parents can (and should) equip themselves with the expertise to guide their own children.

But, if therapy is involved in the picture, it is the duty of the parents to thoroughly vet their child’s therapist, even if the therapist seems to agree with your general opinion about the best course of action. Just because a therapist has the “right” opinion, it does not mean they will succeed at connecting with your child enough to allow him or her to truly explore his or her feelings, nor should the therapist’s role be seen as a replacement of yours.

I’m speaking from personal experience when I say that there are a lot of bad therapists offering bad therapy which will only make your kid feel worse at the end of the session— so it is in your best interest to be exceedingly selective with the mental health professionals you allow into your child’s life.

I am lucky to have found a gem of a therapist after an entire lifetime of ‘bad fits’ and my only good experiences in therapy occurred when I realized I had problems which I needed someone’s support in addressing— and only after I had made the decision to detransition.

Here’s the thing: therapy isn’t a substitute for your child’s relationship with you. I didn’t trust any therapist my parents sent me to—because I didn’t trust them. If your child doesn’t feel safe or understood by you, they’re unlikely to open up to anyone else either. If they’re too emotionally immature to be self-reflective, or to understand that they may need a specific type of help, you will be wasting your money and your child’s time on therapy. If your kid is opposed to therapy, there is no control tactic which will force them to actually benefit from the process. If therapy is a part of the picture, it will almost certainly help you more than it will your child— which is really worth considering if you are struggling to maintain your sanity in such trying times.

Even an exceptional therapist can’t undo what a child interprets as betrayal or extreme pressure from home. And most therapists, frankly, don’t have a deep understanding of what’s happening here to reach your child. The best thing you can do is to learn as many tools yourself, to (re)build trust with your kid so that you can give them the tools to express themselves beyond the transgender script.

6. Social contagion matters. But it’s not the whole story.

Yes, there’s a huge social contagion element to trans identification, and there always has been. And yes— this current trans craze is highly culturally mediated. But most kids have absorbed gender ideology at school or online, and the majority of them will never identify as trans. Instead of treating this as a brainwashing issue, with ample family debates on trans issues that are bound to turn into nuclear warfare, a far better use of your time and relationship capital would be spent on understanding how your kid got here.

The question of interest shouldn’t be what would have happened if your child weren’t exposed to gender ideology, but rather, why your child, unlike many other kids who’ve been exposed to the same content, latched onto a trans identity as a self-concept rather than as an abstract idea applied only to other people.

Many parents agonize over the following questions: what made my child vulnerable to the trans explanation? What made it resonate for my specific kid? What are they using it to cope with? What utility does it serve?

Parents will often latch onto a favorite theory: autism, ADHD, internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia, social contagion, brainwashing, trauma, porn exposure. While some of these factors are way more relevant than others to any given child, adopting a script to counter your child’s script will not get you far.

For example: If your kid says “I’m trans” and you say “no, you’re just autistic” this will not help your parent-child relationship and it will not help your child reconcile with his or her body. Only with an understanding of how your child’s neurodivergence impacts their experience of embodiment and of social situations do you have a chance of navigating this process with your child in a way that gives them more skills than they entered with.

If you as the parent use these new labels you’ve found within gender critical internet spaces, as a way to categorize your child inside of a new framework— you’ve missed the point of the label. You can’t cure a kid’s coping mechanism with a single diagnosis and business as usual. No label has any power against this trans identity unless it is 1) accurate and 2) useful in informing your understanding of your child— and by proxy, your parenting strategy.

No matter how painful or uncomfortable it is, you have to get curious about the needs your teenager has as an individual who has their own experiences, rather than as an extension of yourself— or as an extension of any other sense-making framework which could be feasibly applied to them.

Your kid might actually indeed be autistic and though autism may indeed be the largest contributing factors to their gender distress, but your kid is also an individual person trying to cope in the only way they know how. It is critically important to not lose sight of that.

7. One good conversation won’t fix all your problems. But it can start something.

Parents sometimes tell me, "I tried what you said and it didn’t work. My kid didn’t desist after our conversation."

When I try to figure out what didn’t work about the conversation, the parent will describe what I see as an extremely successful first time conversation with their kid.

The conversations parents see as being unsuccessful because their kids didn’t immediately desist afterward, are the types of conversations my parents and I never managed to have. I help parents to have the conversations I wished I’d had with my own, which I believe could have helped me to begin the process of reconciling with my sex sooner. In lieu of those conversations, it took 12 years and the trauma of two wars to come to the conclusion that transition wasn’t my only path to happiness.

If you want to be successful, you cannot let panic and overwhelm cloud your judgement or cause you to mistake huge successes as failures because you didn’t immediately achieve an outcome which is unreasonable to expect from someone of your child’s developmental level.

If you want to maintain your sanity through this process, you need realistic expectations and the ability to exercise distress tolerance. No single conversation will change your child’s mind. This journey you’re on with your kid is a long game. You will be in this for a while, which is why you need to develop tools to handle your specific child’s situation at the beginning, and use them as needed.

If your kid comes away from a conversation feeling like you heard them, stayed calm, and didn’t try to argue them out of existence, that’s a win. That builds the trust you need to have deeper conversations later. That opens the door.

Don’t measure success by whether they abandon their trans identity overnight. That will not happen. Measure success by whether your child starts letting you back in.

8. You still matter. More than you know.

I know it can feel like your trans-identified child is lost to you. But from where I stand, as someone who was that kid, and who now helps other families achieve meaningful progress with their kids, I need you to know: your kid still needs you. Even if they’re pushing you away. Especially then. Your kid who is now an adolescent or young adult needs you in a different capacity now, than they did as a young child— and this is critical for families to understand.

From where I stand, as a formerly trans-identifying young person: if your kid is still trying to force you to affirm them in their new gender identity, that’s one sign that they deeply care about what you think.

The bond between parents and kids is not broken easily. Estrangement and alienation are not inevitable outcomes of trans identification and non-affirmation. They are the result of years of relationship tension, unmet needs and low tolerance for emotional distress on the part of one or both parties. In order for a relationship as primal as the parent-child bond to be irreparably destroyed, even in the wake of a catalyst as big as this, it must be consistently eroded over a long time. There are better ways to navigate stressful conversations so that your relationship with your child can become closer.

If you stay grounded, if you stay connected, if you stop panicking and start listening—you will become someone they can trust again. You will become someone whose perspective matters.

And from there, the real healing can begin. Not through panic. Not through ideology. But through relationship. Through presence. Through the type of love that sees your kid past the script.

This journey will be at times quite painful, confusing and difficult. But it isn’t hopeless. Take a deep breath. Let’s start there.

Next Steps: Parent Coaching with Maia Poet

I am not a therapist and I do not offer therapy. What I do offer is parent coaching. In my coaching sessions, I partner with parents to tailor a variety of communication tools and strategies to the temperament, age and developmental stage of their kid— often factoring in knowledge from my own divergent neurodevelopmental trajectory where relevant, to highlight areas where parents and kids may be talking past each other without even realizing it. I base my individualized plans for families largely on my understanding of how my own trans identity developed alongside me over the course of twelve years– and with a personal understanding of the kinds of social, emotional and cognitive skills a kid really needs to emerge from this period of gender questioning and reconcile with themselves.

My role in the coaching dynamic is one of a liaison. I try to bridge the perspectives of parents with the possible perspectives of their children for the purpose of helping families to come up with a plan. I am neither a talk therapist, nor a psychiatrist and will always advise that pervasive mental health issues are not within my purview and should be treated seriously by trained professionals.

If you're struggling to connect with a child who seems unreachable…

If your once warm relationship now feels like a battlefield of identity politics, hurt, and silence…

If you're stuck in a war of scripts, unsure how to respond without making things worse…

If you’re afraid that anything you say will drive your child further away…

If you’re wondering what happened to the kid you used to know (and whether it’s still possible to reach them)…

I can help.

As someone who lived this from the inside, and now supports families through these exact dynamics, I offer parent coaching rooted in lived experience, developmental insight, and real compassion. I help you puzzle through what your child’s identity is doing for them emotionally, and how to gently open space for new ways of relating. I help you listen in ways that lower defenses, rebuild trust, and create room for connection, even when you disagree.

There are things that even the most educated and attuned parent will not see in a situation that an informed outsider can. My role is to be that informed outsider: someone who knows what it’s like to be the kid, who understands (from many conversations with my own parents) what it’s like to be the parent, and who can hold the complexity with clarity.

This could very well be the hardest journey you will ever walk with your child, but it is not hopeless. Let’s work together.

DM me here to book a session:

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