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.
TL;DR/Summary: If you’ve ever been told that you can solve your kid’s gender issues by either immediately transitioning them, or by just taking away the internet, changing schools, finding the right therapist, sending them an article written by a detransitioner like me, or by trying to win an argument about gender identity ideology with your kid, this essay is for you.
Because you are getting bad advice.
I say this as a life coach who works with parents of gender-questioning youth, and as someone who spent 12 years navigating my own gender issues inside of a family dynamic. What parents need in order to help their usually autistic or adhd, gifted or twice-exceptional gender-questioning, dysphoric or transgender-identifying kids thrive, is not one quick fix, or two, or five. They need a much more comprehensive roadmap for what is actually happening with their child, in their family, and they need better context for the developmental moment they are all trying to survive. It is only in the ability to think complexly that parents or clinicians will be able to help gender dysphoric young people to truly thrive.
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There are no quick fixes to your kid’s gender issues.
My name is Maia Poet. I’m a few days shy of my 27th birthday, and I’m a Gen Z detransitioner. I spent 12 years of my life, from the ages 12-24, singularly fixated on pursuing the idea that turning myself into a man was my only path to happiness. I found myself in the Middle East, pretending to be a man, and then lived through some wars and terror attacks which made me rethink my priorities in life. This ultimately led me to quit my gender transition, otherwise known as a ‘detransition.’
You may know me from this blog or from any of the numerous podcasts I’ve told my story on, over the last two years and some change. Those of you who have followed me for a while know that over the course of my advocacy, I’ve received a predictable influx of hate mail and death threats.
But I’ve also received something much more interesting: a steady stream of questions from parents and clinicians who are trying to guide the next cohort of gender-dysphoric youth through their struggles.
With each subsequent interview I gave about my story, I began to grow increasingly bored with the sameness of the conversations, and so I tried to challenge myself by adding at least one new bit of my analysis or insight with each interview, just to spice things up. And for some reason, there were quite a few of you who listened and thought I had something valuable to say. That reaction surprised me more than getting the death threats!
A short time into my advocacy, parents began reaching out to me asking for my help in coaching them through parenting their kids through the turbulence of an adolescent gender identity crisis.
At first, I was hesitant to do so.
But when I had begun to unpack everything that had happened to me, and to reflect on it with slightly more distance and maturity, I began consulting with families.
When I began consulting with families one-on-one, I found their cases fascinating, and became immersed in this latest autistic fixation of mine: helping parents think through and problem-solve any number of really complex, heartbreaking, emotional, confusing, and even to embrace the joyful and deeply rewarding moments with their kids as the gender topic enters their family dynamics.
Pretty quickly in my work with families, I became aware that today’s parents are often stuck in a strange mirror image of the online world I inhabited as a gender-dysphoric 12-year-old adolescent in the 2011/2012 school year.
I was once online learning how to convince my parents to agree to let me transition.
Now parents are online trying to learn how to respond to kids like the one I once was, usually wanting advice about how to convince their kids out of it. As someone who went through really intense gender issues for 12 years after a lifetime of significant developmental issues, I re-immersed myself in the online worlds of parenting advice surrounding the topic of gender dysphoria.
I realized pretty quickly that there were two camps: one that tells parents to immediately transition their kids, no matter how young and no matter how psychologically or neurodevelopmentally complex, and the other, which tells parents that their kids have been swept up in a social contagion and have joined a cult.
One approach recommended essentially reversing the roles of the parents and the kids, by encouraging parents to pander to the inherent instability of their children’s and adolescent’s gender whims under threat of suicide. The other approach recommended doing everything in a parent’s power to shut whole thing down. Parents in both groups were seemingly quick to vilify those in the other. However, neither of these approaches actually treated the situation with the complexity it deserved. Seeing this, I became quickly disillusioned with the advice parents were giving each other.
It is almost as if, in their own ways, both the affirming and non-affirming parenting approaches had without realizing it, reduced their complex kids into merely walking, talking, transgender identities. This saddened me, and inspired me to write this blog.
In 2012, my parents had no resources available to them. My gender-questioning journey began a good few years before the rest of my generation’s autistic girls decided to do the same thing. But, rather than having no resources available to them, today’s parents of gender-questioning youth find themselves marinating in endless discourse about both gender-affirming and gender-non-affirming parenting strategies, trying to figure out which advice is loving, which advice is dangerous, which advice might get them somewhere, and which advice simply does not apply to their child.
Parents often find themselves trying to parent their kid through a gender identity struggle for far longer than they had initially expected. Even parents who affirm their kids’ trans identities usually greatly struggle with the consequences and complexities of this choice.
And then there are those parents who do not affirm their kid’s transgender identity. Some of these parents have made this choice from the outset, whereas others have landed on this decision as a result of first affirming the trans identity and then realizing that this decision had only made their kid’s struggles worse, and so had to walk it back. This essay will focus more on the parents who have made the choice to not affirm the trans identities of their kids, because I can speak to it from personal experience of being the kid in that dynamic and who now works with parents who have chosen to practice that approach.
Many parents come to believe that they are doing something wrong, when after an argument with their kid, they haven’t managed to change their gender-dysphoric or transgender-identifying adolescent’s mind about gender with relational brute force.
Some will try multiple quick-fix strategies and then resign themselves to the idea that their kid has been hopelessly swallowed up by a cult, which they are led to believe is why their kid becomes defensive around anyone who tries to poke holes in their trans identity claims.
Whenever I see this happening, I find it extremely depressing that parents are being encouraged to think in this way.
I do not believe that these young people are inherently unreachable from the moment they say they are trans, and their parents do not immediately affirm them. That unreachability usually comes as a direct result of other behavioral, (neuro)/developmental and family dynamic patterns which have been allowed to fester for an increasingly long time, because of how emotionally touchy this subject is. And I believe that this unreachability can be largely prevented or mitigated with a robust parenting and clinical strategy which thinks very differently about the experiences of gender distressed young people.
From my standpoint as someone who lived through the experience of growing up with intense gender issues for 12 years in addition to more longstanding neurodevelopmental ones, who now coaches parents of kids like the one I was, the one thing I can promise you, is that this will not be over tomorrow.
No matter what you say to your kid, no matter which article or study you may think to send them, no matter what: your kid’s gender issues will not be solved by some magic bullet. You and your child could be in this for a while.
I know no one wants to hear me say this, but in the spirit of accepting reality for what it is, please understand that how you parent your kid through this holistically matters way more than any proverbial dart you may want to throw at the board right now.
I understand why parents of gender distressed youth want quick fixes. Their fears for their kids are not irrational. The stakes of either facilitating a gender transition or trying to prevent it, are both high. Medical and mental health institutions are handling these cases extremely irresponsibly. But the fact that the institutional response is crazy does not mean that either parents or clinicians should think that responding from a place of panic is a sustainable successful strategy.
Sometimes responding from a place of panic looks like avoiding the gender topic altogether, affirming the trans identity immediately, or waging a war on the kid’s trans identity. All of these panic responses usually end up with trying at least one (if not more) of the commonly suggested quick-fix ‘desistance’ strategies parents find online. And usually, parents will spend years trying these quick fix strategies only to see their child’s mental health deteriorating.
The tension I want to explore here in the rest of this essay is: why parents reach for various quick fixes, why many of those impulses make perfect sense, and why still those strategies often fail to help young people when they are treated as the whole plan. I will start by illustrating how this dynamic plays out by reflecting on how it did in my own family.
I’ll use myself and my family as a case study to showcase why the quick fix strategies you are seeing online are probably not working for your autistic kid.
As a kid, my favorite hobby was research.
And as a kid who was born in the summer of 1999, for the first few years of my sentient life, my proclivity to latch onto highly age-atypical obsessions with rare medical conditions began after a more age-typical obsession surrounding the Guinness Book of World Records.
At first, I tried to memorize every record in the book.
Then I wanted to beat all of them.
Unfortunately for eight-and-a-half-year-old little me, I was remarkably uncoordinated. I had just a few years earlier learned to walk flat-footed after spending kindergarten in leg braces to correct toe-walking that had started in toddlerhood. So, after trying and failing to beat any of the records in the book, and now closer to nine than I was to eight, I stumbled across a page about the world’s tallest people.
Immediately, I became transfixed.
My mom had just told me that I was going through a growth spurt and had explained puberty to me. But I was still confused about the basic difference between fiction and reality, about the notion that puberty would turn me from a kid into an adult, about the idea that I was a girl in any permanent sense, and even about the fact that Shel Silverstein’s poem “Hungry Mungry,” in which a boy eats his way through the entire world and eventually himself, was a work of fiction.
So I thought, quite seriously, that perhaps I would grow abnormally tall and could try to beat the record for the world’s tallest person.
The year was 2008, and we had one home computer for the family to share.
I didn’t care about playing computer games like my brother did, though I did beg my dad for the latest version of Windows, which was on our school computers. I wanted the updated operating system because it had page breaks, and because I loved to write.
At that age, I had a basic understanding that I could use the internet to learn more about things I found fascinating. But I was still so slow with typing, and so unwilling to move myself away from the book I was reading all the way to the computer, and to redirect my attention toward a screen, that I had not really mastered those skills yet.
But I was so invested in beating this record, and so convinced that my early pubertal growth spurt might give me a “head start” in terms of growth and strength, that I needed to figure out how these people got so tall.
So I went online, having memorized the birth and death dates of America’s tallest man, Robert Pershing Wadlow, and China’s tallest woman, Yao Defen, and began to hunt and peck my way to glory.
There was only one documentary available on YouTube about the world’s tallest people, and so I watched it over and over and over again until I had committed all 45 minutes and 38 seconds to memory.
After watching it enough times, I got bored of it, but I couldn’t find any more videos.
I learned that they all suffered from something called “gigantism,” which was somehow related to this other thing called “acromegaly,” and down the rabbit hole I went.
Once I realized that being abnormally tall as a result of acromegaly, which is caused by a pituitary tumor, is really deadly and killed these people very young, I had many mixed feelings.
First, I felt guilty for even desiring such a thing.
Second, I was now paranoid that I too had a pituitary tumor because I was growing out of my clothes.
Thirdly, I had developed something of an emotional bond with China’s tallest woman at the time, Yao Defen, who had described living a life of physical pain, all sorts of medical issues, and social ostracism, only to have made it into her adulthood, becoming bedridden, and knowing exactly how she would die: because her heart was on track to outgrow her rib cage.
The more I watched and rewatched the documentary, the more compelled I became to figure out what could be done to help these people.
In my now nine-year-old mind, this meant that I needed to learn everything there was to know about this pituitary tumor and accomplish the feat of removing the so-called inoperable cases.
This fixation started out far more slowly than my future ones would, because so much of the research took place in medical journals that were not made for little kids and that I, with a then incomplete elementary school education, was incapable of parsing. I latched onto whichever words I could pronounce, and those became the subjects of other lines of inquiry I would fixate on until I could solve this problem.
I branched off into obsessing over the human genome because I learned that these things called genes could cause diseases. By the time I was ten years old and in fifth grade, my obsession with the world’s tallest people and the rare pituitary tumor that caused their condition had begun to rule my life.
At some point later, I fell out of love with that fixation because my inability to solve it was not something I was mature enough to cope with.
Then, around eleven years old, in sixth grade, I began to move away from acromegaly and more fully into topics such as Myers-Briggs personality tests, the nature/nurture debate, progeria, a condition of rapid aging, and then, as the academic demands of sixth grade reared their ugly head and I struggled to cut out the noise of my own thought experiments long enough to pay the slightest attention to what was going on around me, I became fully fixated on all things related to learning differences such as hyperlexia, various learning disabilities, and conditions like autism and ADHD.
Clearly, puberty itself was an incredibly confusing time for me, and I was trying to understand it through researching proxies of various growth and aging-related pathologies.
The bulk of my research before my 12th birthday was almost entirely analog. I used the internet mostly to look up more book titles about topics I was interested in, to read the occasional article, and to find relevant abstracts from medical journals which were pertinent to the medical condition I was fixated on that month.
But on my 12th birthday, in the summer of 2011, I got an iPad as a gift.
From what I recall, I didn’t have any yearning for an iPad. What I really wanted for my birthday that year was a really expensive college textbook about genetics instead. But when I got that iPad, my parents tried to relieve my disappointment by telling me that I could read hundreds of books on this new machine. And so, I quickly warmed up to it.
Both my parents and, seemingly, their whole generation were really naive about introducing little kids to free-range internet. Gen X thought that these mobile, internet-connected technologies were the way of the future and that their kids needed to learn to use them in order to be successful. They were not remotely aware that by giving their kids unrestricted internet access, they were in fact giving the whole world access to the impressionable minds of their children.
When I got that iPad, my tendency to research everything fascinating that entered my mind went into overdrive.
My lack of finger dexterity and motor skills no longer precluded me from rapidly getting my thoughts down in a way legible enough to reference later. Now I was free to explore whatever interested me.
Over the course of the next six months, my research into all sorts of new rare medical conditions got deeper. I was introduced, at a much more rapid rate, to the fact that there were an endless number of additional rare medical conditions I could research.
That said, the algorithms back in the 2010s were infantile compared to those that kids are using today.
But for those who have made it this far, you know now that during my seventh grade year, I stumbled across one rare medical condition that simply learning about altered the course of my life profoundly.
And that rare medical condition was called “transsexuality.”
Much like with my obsession with the rare pituitary tumor that causes gigantism and acromegaly, my obsession with transsexuality included learning about the theories about the biological underpinnings of the condition. My previous deep dives into the pituitary gland had taught me that one of its functions had to do with the secretion of growth and sex hormones. When I learned that transsexuals needed to be on cross-sex hormones for the rest of their lives, I wondered whether there would be a way to alter trans patients’ pituitary glands themselves, so they would not need to make regular trips to the pharmacy.
In addition to an obsession about the biology of transsexuality, I became fixated on the patients’ life stories. I found something highly relatable and resonant in the ways transsexuals described their lives. These adults who were in their 20s described having lifelong feelings of being very different from others of the same sex, being disconnected from their bodies, and not knowing why until they came across the possibility of a female-to-male “sex change.”
These young adult transsexuals described, in such detail, their fraught experiences with embodiment. I wondered if the condition these adults were describing was something I experienced too.
The transsexuals whose stories I watched on YouTube described really niche experiences that I had never heard anyone else mention before. For example, one described experiencing a disconnect with her body as she looked in the mirror. And I too shared the experience of looking into a mirror every day as I washed my hands, and being surprised that when I moved my arm, the reflection did too.
Puberty only made that pre-existing disconnect worse.
Looking back on it as an adult myself, this specific type of mind-body disconnect is not even remotely uncommon in autistic people. And neither are gender non-conforming behaviors. But the fact that so many of these trans people I was watching online, many of them in retrospect clearly autistic themselves, had labeled this disconnect as the evidence that separated trans men from tomboys and lesbians, I began to understand myself as someone who tragically was afflicted with having a male brain in a female body.
Everything that had once been deeply confusing to me about myself had finally made sense.
And there was a solution proposed.
That I could become a man, and finally become “normal” without needing to sacrifice my personality, interests, or quirks.
And to a 12-year-old like me, it seemed like a great idea.
I couldn’t wait to share this discovery with my parents.
However, when I confided these feelings in my parents, they panicked.
When I was 12, my parents took away my internet access because I had become so obsessed with all things trans that I had adopted it as a self-concept.
We got into a series of arguments about the trans topic, then about matters of personal style and appearance, and then we stopped talking about anything emotionally meaningful altogether.
Did that make my gender transition fixation go away?
No. Of course not.
And let me tell you why:
Pretty quickly into this whole thing, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to convince my parents into entertaining this latest twist and turn at the beginning of my adolescent identity developmental period. Even me thinking about it made them really upset, and the consequence of that was that I, being a very sensitive kid, became even more upset and that my life became measurably worse.
Instead, I chose to be pragmatic about it.
I used the internet at school to find trans-related anthologies from the 1990s and early 2000s in libraries and bookstores around the city. Because I have a nearly photographic memory, I could easily refer back to the previous information I had consumed about how to bind your breasts using normal household objects, and perfected that in secret. Now that the trans topic had become totally taboo, I became even more fixated on it. My parents thought that by avoiding the subject while making comments about my atypical appearance, time would solve this problem. In fact, time did not make me grow out of my trans identity. Time, in the absence of a clear parenting plan for how to help me, only caused me to grow further and deeper into my trans identity.
In retrospect, there is no way my parents could have predicted that their once happy and compliant child would become so sneaky and resourceful in pursuit of researching something. They also could not have expected that this would be so different from the usual teenage phases that come as quickly as they go. It was 2012, and this was unheard of. It is precisely for this reason that I am reflecting on it here.
The reason I became so fixated on transsexuality as a 12 year old is because I had an underlying emotional, intellectual and developmental need to understand myself and I had pre-existing vulnerabilities which made it impossible for me to do those things in a more typical and embodied way. Shutting down the trans topic because it was uncomfortable to think about or talk about, did not make any of those things disappear. What that strategy did do, was to make me feel that it was not safe for me to confide my feelings in my parents.
Kids and teens who do not feel they can confide in their parents about their emotional and life problems will go elsewhere to meet that deeply human need. They will confide in their friends, find new ways to go online, or find any adult who will listen. And that isn’t simply because the kid has been ‘groomed’ or ‘brainwashed.’ It is a sign that they have a need going unmet, and they are earnestly just trying to solve their own problems. Unfortunately, at those young ages, they cannot actually solve their own problems effectively. They will find a maladaptive coping strategy of any kind, and they will stick to it with ardent fervor, because they are distressed and immature.
The longer that goes on, the more entrenched, unmovable and intertwined this maladaptive coping strategy becomes with the adolescent’s self-concept. When parents do not have the many tools and comprehensive supports they need in order to meet their kids where they are at, with a (neuro)developmentally informed and emotionally attuned parenting approach, teenagers will try (and fail) to figure these things out on their own, with no guidance from the very adults who have their best interests in mind. And that is where I see the biggest danger.
It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this essay, why my journey of gender questioning took 12 years and the traumatic aftermath of two middle eastern wars for my trans identity (and my identity as an Israeli-Palestinian peace activist) to fracture so significantly that I deprioritized pretending to be a man. With every passing year of my development where the subject was totally ignored, my pre-existing vulnerabilities only compounded. At that point, transition became the only way I was able to learn much of what I needed to, in order to eventually become a somewhat more embodied, less confused and more well-rounded version of myself at nearly 27. But by the time I desisted and detransitioned around 24, I had already lost half of my years of really important development to pursuing an idea which ultimately damaged my body and honestly sort of traumatized me.
I have arrived at my opinions about the types of parenting and clinical supports that I believe gender dysphoric youth (particularly the neurodivergent ones) need, not as someone who is simply theorizing about gender-distressed youth from the outside. I hold the opinions I do because I was once that kid, that teenager and that young adult.
I was once that kid who became obsessed, then secretive, and then unreachable. I too, was once the 12 year old who interpreted my parents’ panic around my trans identity as proof that they could not understand me and did not want to try. My parents had only the best of intentions, and are highly capable people. But they had some considerable generational blindspots and no guidance available to them. Not only did I eventually embark upon the social transition process as soon as I turned 18, after spending much of my adolescence secretly binding my breasts, but because this had become such a power struggle in my family, our relationship was perhaps only salvageable due to the fact that I was living far away in a foreign country.
And it is for that reason that after I detransitioned, moved back to the States and began trying to mend my relationships with my own parents; when I began seeing some of the advice being given to parents of gender questioning kids like the one I had been, sometimes by other parents, I found myself pretty disheartened by the state of it.
And so I created this blog to reflect on it all.
The Common ‘Quick Fixes’ Parents of Trans-Identifying Youth Are Offered
When I talk about quick fixes, I do not mean that every one of the strategies I will cover in this essay which parents often try, is always wrong in every circumstance.
The snippets of generic parenting advice I’ve listed below range, in my opinion, from really bad ideas to ideas that may have some merit, but only when they are practiced responsibly and only when they are part of a much more targeted and individualized family-based work.
The five quick fixes I see parents being offered most often are: to control the flow of information, to try to win the argument, to outsource the problem, to shut it down or affirm it completely, and find the one real cause of why this is happening.
As someone who has worked with many families by now, the thing I can say with most certainty is that every single situation is highly variable, even though they all follow distinct patterns.
Quick Fix #1: Control the Flow of Information
The first quick fix I see parents trying is to control the information inputs that the kid is using to explore or obsess about all things ‘trans.’ I’ve seen parents being told to just: take away the internet, remove the kid from their school, cut off the teen’s trans friend group, block every trans-related piece of content, and assume that if the source of the bad idea disappears, the identity will eventually disappear too.
I understand why parents reach for this strategy. Internet communities, ideological teaching at schools and peer groups who collectively obsess over these ideas are all influences on impressionable and young people. And no parent should be expected to let their child marinate endlessly in online spaces that are actively teaching them to hate their body, distrust their parents, and interpret every developmental difficulty through the language of gender identity. I get it.
But I also see this cluster of strategies as being incredibly short-sided and unsustainable. Where this level of authoritarianism does yield positive results, it mostly does so by staving off immediate influence in very young kids: think pre-teens, who usually already have good family relationships and who are not autistic, particularly gifted or particularly obsessive. Very few gender distressed youth who come to their parents disclosing this, fall into that category. Using this approach with most of the types of kids who develop gender dysphoria, all of whom will eventually age out of the point where it is developmentally healthy for their parents to control everything about their lives, is by definition only a quick fix, at best. But if you see any of your kid in how I described myself as a kid, you should be very careful with this because unless you course-correct pretty intentionally, this will become the source of totally unnecessary power struggle.
Just because you may feel guilty that you got your 12 year old kid an iPad and unaware of the dangers, let them roam free on it; it does not mean that taking away your child’s ability to ever use internet is the most sound thing to do now. This is especially true if there are other siblings at home who are still being allowed to use the internet as much as they want. If there is already a rivalry between those siblings, or if they are close in age, the gender questioning kid will very immaturely, but understandably from their vantage point, believe any number of possible things, including:
1. That you are favoring their sibling. If that sibling happens to be of the opposite sex, this will probably only further be used as confirmation that your child’s life will be easier or better if they were the opposite sex. And this may become the subject of their rumination even in absence of further internet usage.
2. That you are punishing them for telling you how they feel. Parents often will take away their kids’ phones or computers as a consequence for bad behavior. If you have done that before, consider carefully whether you are contemplating this particular move because you have such strong negative feelings towards your child in the wake of their trans identity declaration and that you are trying to somehow punish them, or whether you are just engaging in some Gen X wishful thinking that taking away the internet will make the thoughts your child now has, to just go away on their own. In any case, it is important to be realistic about how this will land for your kid and to what extent the trade-off is worth it. If this move is framed as a punishment for the type of content they have been looking up, or interpreted as such, your kid will quickly learn that it is not in their best interests to tell you things anymore. The internet is meeting at least one need in your kid’s life right now. Removing it without anything to replace it is a recipe for disaster, both in the short-term and in the long term. Developing an adversarial dynamic with your emerging adolescent will make your family life measurably more difficult in just a few years. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t ever make this move, but if you do, I want you to be aware of the potential consequences.
I do think it is healthier to take your kid’s gender and life distress as a potential sign, however, that something needs to change. Maybe your whole family needs to rethink its over-reliance on internet usage, and to find other things to do in its place. Because truthfully, there is so much more useful stuff you could be doing to bond as a family.
Also, it’s important to consider the future. By the time your kid has hit their teen years, and in particular by the time they get to high school, it is both unhealthy for them and unhealthy for you to seclude your teenager from every aspect of the world you find objectionable. 13 year olds are different from 14 year olds who are different from 15 year olds and so on. All of those kids are very capable of finding this information on their own. And all of them already know that gender transition is a possibility and that someday they will turn 18 and be able to do it. Gender transition as an option is so culturally popular that it helps no one to pretend that it does not exist. Once the seed has been planted, it must actually be contended with.
Otherwise, you run the risk of your younger teenager becoming totally secretive about their lives. And that is precisely when as an older teenager, they will make their worst decisions.
It is important to contextualize the period in which most young people these days present with gender issues: in their pre-teen and teen years.
Traditionally, teens had freedom to rebel or push back against their parents in ways that their parents never found out about.
But today, kids of all ages are allowed far less real-life freedom than kids of prior generations, and are allowed nearly endless access to freedom in the disembodied Wild West of the internet.
They tend to have fewer life and social skills than kids of the same age did in generations past, precisely because their development has taken place in a disembodied way.
So often, when they get this healthy adolescent urge to push back against the authority of their parents, they do so while being stuck at home, unable to leave the house and retreat to a group of their peers, unable to rebel in a way their parents are unaware of.
I can see why taking an almost authoritarian level of control becomes so tempting.
Parents today are trying to control a developmental process that used to happen more often in bedrooms, friend groups, malls, parking lots, bad poetry, and awkward adolescent experiments, but is now happening inside an institutional and digital world that can escalate it into something medically and socially consequential.
So while the impulse to exert the utmost control makes sense under the circumstances, it is really important to slow down and think through this stuff. Age-appropriate boundaries and age-appropriate freedoms are important for your child’s development.
But locking your kid’s world down after they declare a trans identity to you, still does not help to resolve their underlying strife. That strategy in isolation is both unsustainable in the long-term and it still does not answer the more important questions which should ideally be answered before your kid turns 18:
Which developmental problem(s) is this identity currently solving for this child?
What is my kid using this to cope with?
How can we meet those needs in more adaptive ways?
Quick Fix #2: Win the Argument
The second quick fix parents often try, is that they attempt to win the argument: they will try to send the right article, to find the most compelling detransitioner testimony, to suggest the right book about cults or gender ideology, or sit the kid down and logically dismantle their entire belief system.
Again, I understand the impulse.
Parents often feel like if their smart child could just see the contradiction, the danger, the social contagion, the ideology, the medical risks, or the incoherence of the claims they are repeating, something would click.
As I see it, the truth of why your kid isn’t responding to their parents’ well-intentioned factual and logical eviscerations of gender ideological thinking is actually far less bleak than parents are being led to believe:
That you cannot reason someone out of that which they came to believe due to emotional yearning. You cannot meet an unmet developmental need or impulse through relational brute force. There is a reason that your kid specifically is exploring this subject, even though his or her entire class was exposed to the same idea and they gave it no mind. That is worth exploring.
And also, because frankly, parenting an adolescent is different from parenting a younger child.
Younger children can be Pavloved into obeying their parents because they are entirely dependent upon them for survival.
Adolescents are in a different stage of life, where not only does the strategy of just saying “no” often fail to get the behavior you want, but it is actually far more likely to encourage it.
Why?
Because adolescents, unlike small children, are beginning to form the basis of their mature identities as human beings who aren’t just the children of their parents.
In order to complete this process of identity formation, teenagers will usually separate themselves from their parents through boundary testing, risk taking, sneaking around, pushing their parents away emotionally, secluding themselves in their rooms, and by adopting new beliefs.
And usually these new beliefs are not compatible with their parents’ for this reason.
Those beliefs, be they about gender or about religion, politics, music, philosophy, or anything else, become the basis of that young person’s identity.
All of that can be really annoying or even heartbreaking to parents, but it is entirely normal.
The types of exploration which gender-questioning youth are engaging in are actually at their core a normal aspect of adolescent identity development.
What is not normal, however, is what the adults are doing in response.
If the trans identity serves the function of a solution to pubertal distress, social confusion, sensory issues, shame, loneliness, obsessive thinking, or the desperate need to make the self coherent, then treating it as an inalienable truth to be reified through the potentially lifelong medicalization of an immature person is patently irresponsible. However, in this circumstance, treating the youth’s new transgender self-concept as a bad argument to be defeated will, make the child defend it more intensely.
Many of the “winning an argument” strategies that parents suggest to each other online can advance a rupture in the parent-child relationship and cement a power struggle in which the kid becomes increasingly fixated on the notion that gender transition is their only path to peace and happiness in adulthood, and then increasingly determined to prove their parents wrong by sticking ardently to the conclusion they came to as an adolescent.
You do not want the situation in your family to get to this point.
When kids get to that stage in a power struggle with their parents over something as significant and consequential as the desire to alter their bodies and lives in line with a transgender identity, everything in that parent-child dynamic goes off the tracks.
If you are in such a situation, hope is not lost.
For as long as both parties are alive, relationships can be repaired if thoughtful effort is put into mending them. This is one of the things I spend most of my time helping parents with. It is entirely doable. It just takes creativity, patience, time and open-mindedness.
Quick Fix #3: Outsource the Problem
The third quick fix I see suggested often, is to outsource the problem: usually by finding a therapist who won’t affirm the trans identity and let that person handle it so you don’t have to.
I want to be clear about something: putting your kid in therapy for their gender issues is a hugely mixed bag.
Just because social and medical transition come with their own dangers, it does not mean that a psychotherapeutic intervention is some kind of inherently safer or more neutral alternative. Just because a therapist understands the basic fact that sex cannot be changed, it does not mean that therapist will be a good fit for your kid. The only cases in which therapy is helpful are when the kid wants to be there, and where the therapist can succeed in building rapport with your kid while actually being skilled at their craft. From personal experience, there are exceedingly few good therapists who are skilled at working with exceedingly high IQ teenagers who lack social skills and have gender issues. Finding them is like finding a needle in a haystack. And bad therapists, or therapists who are bad for this population, are a dime a dozen. If sending your kid off to a therapist is the only strategy you are using, you are running the risk of wasting valuable time putting all the eggs into this one basket when the therapist may either be incompetent, not a good fit for your kid, or as was my case, I simply refused to cooperate with them because there was not enough family trust for me to presume that my confidentiality would be respected by a therapist picked and paid for by my parents.
But even a good therapist who works with gender distressed youth cannot substitute for parents understanding their own child, their own family dynamic, and the developmental problem in front of them.
In addition, many of the young people I met over the course of my time in trans communities, needed a lot more help than a weekly session with a therapist.
If therapy is involved in your overall parenting strategy, do not assume that sending off the ‘problem’ child to a gender shrink will magically solve the problem. The families I have worked with who see the best outcomes are those who diversify their strategy by seeking the guidance of a number of people, including: family therapists, adolescent psychologists, psycho-educational evaluators, speech and occupational therapists, and various life coaches, including myself. If you are unsatisfied with the advice you are getting, you are well within your rights to check-in with yourself and your partner, and to seek as many second and third opinions as possible. Everyone has their own differences in approach, because therapy and coaching are crafts more than they are sciences. Every human being has their blindspots, and so the most comprehensive approaches tend to unearth the most pressing ones quickly enough to be useful.
Taking a comprehensive approach, rather than a quick fix approach to your kid’s gender issues can involve sending your kid to a therapist, but it should not be limited to that. Your kid may need more comprehensive developmental support that you may not have considered until this gender stuff entered the picture. That is a common revelation which many of the parents I’ve worked with have come to. In addition, you will need support too. That could be a life coach like me, a therapist you trust, a pastor, or a group of friends.
Quick Fix #4: Shut It Down or Affirm It Completely
There are two broad relational approaches that most parents are aware of, which they use to respond to their child’s gender distress: either to try to shut it down or avoid it (non-affirming) or to facilitate it through social and/or medical transition means (affirming).
These mistakes are mirror images of themselves.
One side treats the child’s words as meaningless because they are immature, borrowed from online spaces, highly ideological, or factually wrong.
The other side treats the child’s words as unquestionably true because they are emotionally intense.
I am not interested in either approach because I think they are both incredibly unhelpful.
A child can be wrong about the conclusion that he or she has come to, while still be communicating something meaningful. That’s why I am far more fond of a truly exploratory approach.
For better or for worse, when your kid is in their teens and early twenties, these are the frustrating developmental waters you are all swimming in.
So, when parents approach the emotional disclosures their gender-questioning kids make with a degree of genuine curiosity and desire to understand what their kids are saying, rather than based on the assumption that their kid is a hopelessly brainwashed cult lemming, I can guarantee that the quality of your interactions will with your kids will improve.
Because I was once the kid in one of these dynamics, I can often act as a translator between your perspective and that of your child. If your child has an atypical, autistic or adhd neurodevelopmental trajectory similar to the one I have described extensively on this blog, I can help you navigate the additional landmines this predisposes your family dynamic to. But in all honesty, every situation benefits from more genuine curiosity than it ever will from another trans debate around the dining room table.
Quick Fix #5: Endlessly Search for the One Cause
The fifth quick fix I am describing is more disjointed than the others, and it usually looks like trying to find the one cause as to why all this all happened: it is the internet, it is the school, it is my kid’s other 12 year old friend, it is the bad therapist, it is the other kid’s parent, it is the “cult”. And then, to chase it to the exclusion of examining other unhelpful patterns in the situation.
There is never just one reason why a young person develops gender dysphoria or a desire to change their outward appearance to more closely resemble that of the opposite sex.
Usually, there is a perfect storm of factors.
Attributing your kid’s trans identity to “we’ve failed as parents,” or to “it’s the internet’s fault,” or to “it’s the fault of this other 12-year-old kid who has clearly influenced my daughter who otherwise wouldn’t have fallen into this,” will never give you the full scope of information you will actually need to help guide your kid through this time in their life.
Secondly, the kids who are attracted to trans identities are very psychologically, neurodevelopmentally and sometimes even medically complex.
Some of them simply identify as transgender or nonbinary and have no dysphoric or distressing feelings about their sex or associated expectations, while some of them are highly distressed and desire a social and medical transition as soon as they find out such things exist. Some of them stay fixed in one trans identity whereas others move around between various flavors of non-binary, and sometimes into a more binary cross-sex identity.
Some of these kids have complex mental health needs, family upheaval, or early-life trauma, whereas others have neurodevelopmental conditions like autism and ADHD. And some have all of the above.
In any given case, in addition to the inherent turbulence of adolescence which acts as its own major predisposing factor, there could be any number of these other factors in any given case.
Thirdly, parents seeing their kid’s birth sex identity rejection tend to blame themselves for their kids having come to the conclusion that they are not, in fact, the boy or girl their parents brought into the world and raised from birth, or that their parents chose to bring into their family through adoption.
Either way, there is a tendency of parents whose kids reveal a transgender identity to believe that their child’s violation of their expectations is somehow their fault.
I do not believe that living in either self-blame or in a state of blaming everyone else, in response to a teen’s trans identity, is in any way helpful. Blaming yourself, the internet, the school, or the “trans cult” does not give parents enough of a map for how to actually help their kids.
The truth of the matter is that:
There is no quick fix or shortcut through adolescent immaturity.
There is no quick fix or shortcut through complex mental health needs.
There is no quick fix or shortcut through complex family dynamics.
There is no quick fix or shortcut through neurodivergence-related needs.
And there is certainly no quick fix or shortcut through the task of helping a struggling adolescent become more mature, more embodied, more socially grounded, and more capable of living in reality.
The more intelligent and developmentally uneven the kid, the more difficult the task of parenting them through the turbulence of adolescence becomes.
Why Autistic Identity Development Makes Your Work as a Parent or Clinician More Complicated
Exploring the parenting angle has been an especially natural place for my mind to go because I have had an almost 20-year-long obsession with parenting discourse.
It started when I was around eight years old, when I discovered that reading my parents’ stash of parenting books could get me out of reading inane fictional books with social-emotional plots I neither comprehended nor enjoyed.
In retrospect, it should have surprised no one that as I read parenting books centered around parenting adolescents, as a pre-teen myself, I took the bullet point of “identity formation” as a literal mandate and became obsessed with topics such as autism, ADHD, various learning disabilities, the gay rights movement, and quickly thereafter, all things “trans.”
In my consulting work with parents, I have seen firsthand that there is a massive gap in the resources available to parents who understand the importance of not brushing this gender stuff under the rug and who are trying to create a genuinely exploratory environment at home with their kids who are specifically twice-exceptional: who are both unusually gifted, and who have learning disabilities, physical disabilities or developmental delays in addition. Everyone seems to have forgotten those kids. They are usually failed by both special education and in gifted education programs because of how complex their needs are. And parenting this type of kid in a way that meets all of their needs is exceedingly challenging as a baseline, whether they get into the gender stuff or not. I know this because I was that kid. Many of your kids share that pattern, so I will speak to it briefly.
A brief note on the previously-compliant kids whose parents didn’t have any issues with them until gender entered the picture around adolescence:
Many of the families I have consulted with one-on-one describe having kids who were largely compliant before gender entered the picture, but are now behaving in ways which aggravate their parents.
There is a tendency of some parents to attribute this behavior change to the trans identity.
I disagree with this framing.
It is not a secret that adolescents are often a pain in the backsides of their parents.
The fact that a previously compliant kid is trying to assert him or herself for the first time through the trans identity seems more likely to be a developmental response of adolescence, rather than as I’ve seen argued in many parenting groups, evidence of some kind of cult brainwashing.
Whether your 14-year-old says “mom, you’re such a transphobic bigot” or “dad, I hate you” in response to being told ‘no’ to doing something they really want, you must understand that though your gender-questioning kid is using different words, they are in fact saying the same thing that teenagers have said for years to their parents when they don’t get what they want.
That doesn’t make it okay, but it is normal and annoying teenage behavior.
Something else I’ve noticed is that many of the gender-questioning kids whose parents I’ve spoken with will fully meet this angsty teenage developmental milestone far later than their other siblings have.
Then, when gender enters the picture, the kid also starts becoming secretive and wanting to hang out with their friends more than with their parents.
And for some of these kids, this happens closer to 15 or to 16 than to 11 or 12.
It becomes natural for parents to attribute this to gender cult brainwashing, when it is far more likely that your kid’s gender experimentation and their annoying behaviors are all a result of the same underlying mechanism: adolescence.
It’s just that it seems particularly out of character for some of these teenagers to behave in this way because they have hit certain psychosocial milestones later or in a more atypical way.
Most kids realize that they have knowledge that their parents do not at a much younger age, when they have the sense to sneak a cookie when their parents aren’t looking, and what gives them away are the crumbs on their face.
Usually, when confronted about it, the kid will lie, saying that they did not take the cookie without the permission of their parents.
The kid telling that lie is good evidence that they have reached a really important cognitive milestone in that they understand that they have access to information which others, in this case parents who were looking the other way, do not have.
A kindergarten-aged kid who sneaks sweets without their parents knowing will occasionally be confronted by their parents, who can use that as a learning opportunity to have any number of other conversations about health, telling the truth, moderation, and why it is they have instituted the rules they have.
However, a kid who does not engage in age-appropriate non-compliance and boundary testing in regards to something like stealing sweets without permission will probably get the urge to do that later.
And when they do, not only may it be their parents’ first time dealing with their child’s boundary testing, but because the kid is older, the stakes are much higher.
Between the ages of 10 and 12, I had just begun to realize for the first time in my life that if there was something I really wanted to learn more about, or to do, and my desires were at odds with those of my parents, I could find covert ways to do what I wanted to do in secret from them.
It started when I began attending public school in fifth grade and ordering hot lunch, which came with two options of milk: regular and chocolate.
One day, excitedly, I told this to my parents.
They responded by telling me that I was not allowed to choose the chocolate milk because it was unhealthy.
Looking back on old pictures, I was in a growth spurt and beginning to put on more weight, which certainly concerned my parents.
Then, they told me that if I did choose the chocolate milk, they would know, and would begin sending me to school with whichever soggy sandwiches I was getting before.
Naturally, that was an outcome I wanted to avoid.
But also, I had tasted the chocolate milk.
I had become accustomed to drinking it every day at lunch.
It gave me so much joy.
I tried my hardest to obey my parents’ decree and returned to drinking the regular milk.
But eventually, one day, I snapped. I decided to run back into the lunch line and swap the regular milk for the chocolate milk.
I was so gripped by the paranoia that my parents would have somehow found out that I picked the chocolate milk that I could not focus on anything else that day.
When I came home from school, and no one had confronted me about the chocolate milk, I decided to try it the next day.
And then the next.
When I realized that my parents could not in fact know whether I selected a regular or chocolate milk with my lunch, I felt I had unlocked a whole new world of potential.
I began to hone my craft of secrecy from then onwards, whenever a desire of mine conflicted with that of my parents.
That story is funny because the stakes were low.
A child learning that her parents do not know everything is a normal part of growing up. A child learning that she can conceal a desire, test a rule, break a rule, and survive the experience is also a normal part of growing up.
The trouble is that when this same developmental process begins happening in or slightly before adolescence, perhaps due to a developmental delay, the stakes are no longer about chocolate milk.
They are about sexuality, embodiment, peer belonging, internet communities, politics, religion, risk-taking, and identity.
And when the content is gender, many adults lose the ability to recognize that some part of what is happening is developmentally normal, even when the specific form it takes is frightening, consequential, or unhealthy.
And because that type of boundary-testing happens so late into development, parents have not had to set reasonable standards of discipline for that child, nor have they had the experience of putting down a boundary and sticking to it.
This complicates the dynamics a lot. But this is a special needs parenting issue, and not a gender issue.
So, at the age of 12, when my parents had taken away my internet because I was researching something that gave me the first sense of clarity and hope I had yet discovered to explain the objective oddities of my own development, I became newly invested in finding more covert ways of researching my latest autistic special interest surrounding all things “trans.”
Now that the trans topic had become totally taboo, I became even more fixated on it.
Unlike most of my previous fixations surrounding other rare medical conditions, namely brain tumors and neurological conditions, where my parents encouraged my curiosity and intense research desires, despite the fact that it was an odd thing for an eight-year-old to become fixated on, I was now prevented from doing the same type of incredibly intense research into this new trans topic of my interest on the grounds of it being something that I was supposedly too young to learn about.
My fixation on learning everything there was to know about transsexuality as a middle schooler was both intellectual in nature, similar in kind to my other medical obsessions, but it was also different in that there was a more complex emotional component to it which coincided with the natural developmental driver to figure out who I was and where I fit in, in the world.
I discuss that far more in depth in my essay titled “Is my autistic kid really transmasc, or just masking her autism?” for those who are interested.
Because you are all mature adults, I’ll level with you:
Clearly, the affirmation-only practices that comprise today’s gold standard of gender medicine have thoroughly forgotten that adolescence is a time of rapid and turbulent physical, sexual, and psychosocial development, and that it is irresponsible to unquestioningly funnel such complex young people down a highly consequential, life-defining trajectory as this.
That schools are socially transitioning kids, whether with or without the consent of their parents, is also remarkable, considering that social transition is a consequential intervention which school staff are now doing outside of a clinical setting.
That so many medical institutions have adopted the most irresponsible and careless, one-size-fits-all approach to gender dysphoria, while pretending that the evidence base underpinning these interventions is settled science when it is in reality of extremely low quality, and that they can in many places coerce parents both emotionally and legally into allowing their minor children to be experimented upon, is really not normal.
But I do think it is possible for a parent to correctly identify that the institutional response to adolescent gender distress is crazy, while also responding to their own child in a way that makes the situation worse.
The distinction I want parents to understand is this: the fact that the affirmation-only model has lost its mind does not mean that you will also make your wisest choices amidst this panic.
The fact that schools and clinicians are acting irresponsibly does not mean that every act of parental control or authoritarianism, or going the other route and avoiding the subject altogether will be sustainable as your kid gets older.
It means that you will need to be very strategic about how your family handles these potential landmines.
The fact that the stakes are high does not mean that the child’s developmental reality disappears.
My trans identity and the steps I took to embody it were by far the most life-defining and health-destroying pursuits I could have possibly dreamt up from among the series of my many middle school thought experiments.
For some of us, identity development can become unusually literal, unusually cognitive, unusually obsessive, unusually rule-bound, and unusually disconnected from the ordinary embodied and social processes through which adolescents usually go through to figure out who they are.
Many adolescents try on identities.
But autistic adolescents may not “try on” an identity in the same flexible, socially intuitive, developmentally temporary way.
A concept that might remain fluid or experimental for another teenager can become a theory of the self.
And once it becomes a theory of the self, it can become something the child feels compelled to defend, systematize, embody, and prove.
I suspect that for this reason, autistic teenagers are more likely to fixate on their gender issues than other gender dysphoric teenagers do.
For this reason, they need way more guidance from their parents and from specialists who can help them patch up any developmental delays to their best ability.
This is especially true when the young person is bright but developmentally uneven; verbally sophisticated but socially immature; intellectually intense but emotionally delayed; deeply uncomfortable in their body but lacking the language to describe sensory, social, sexual, or developmental distress in any other way.
When I look back at my own life, I can see how easy it was for me to mistake a compelling explanatory framework for self-knowledge.
I was not merely “exploring.” I was building a theory of myself. And then I was trying to live inside it.
That is why I am so skeptical of quick-fix advice that treats the gender identity as either a simple delusion to be argued away or a sacred truth to be affirmed without question.
Both approaches miss the developmental function the identity may be serving for a particular child.
To mitigate that, I’ve begun crafting a series of neurodivergence-specific parenting strategies to help parents begin to think about how their autistic and ADHD kids may be experiencing embodiment around adolescence, and to explore the many ways in which specific autistic and ADHD traits act as their own predisposing factors.
Because that is the biggest missing piece I keep seeing.
Everyone now seems to know how autistic this cohort of young people is, but very little of the advice parents receive is actually informed by that fact.
And when parents of autistic, ADHD, or gifted kids take advice that may work well enough for non-autistic adolescents or for more typically developing ones, it can sometimes fail them badly. So, if you’re parenting a kid in this category, do watch my series and comment your questions or thoughts on this post.
There is a better way forward than cycling through quick fix strategies and being disappointed when they don’t work
So no, I do not believe there is a magic sentence.
I do not believe there is one article, one detransitioner testimony, one book, one therapist, one change of school, taking away the internet for one child, one argument, or one perfectly calibrated parental response that will “snap” a child out of this gender stuff in an instant.
To recap: some of these quick fixes I have mentioned should just be avoided, but any number of these things can be intentionally integrated into a broader parenting and clinical response. It really just depends on the individual factors of the situation.
If there were a quick fix that could resolve your kid’s complex developmental distress, none of us would find ourselves here now.
I hope this actually gives you some solace, in knowing that there is not one thing you say that will make or break your child’s entire future in this regard. That said, you could be in this with your kids for a very long time, and how you show up for them in these moments will define so much of your relationship going forward.
Because ultimately, your child does need guidance as they go through confusing and difficult life circumstances. What you have control over as the parent is whether you’ve done your part to increase the likelihood that as your adolescent gets older, they will still come to you with their life problems and to seek your guidance, rather than trying to seek guidance from within online communities of strangers who do not have their best interests in mind.
In all cases, the real work you will be doing with your child throughout this journey is much slower, more developmentally informed, more relational, and more specific to the child in front of you.
No parenting advice column will actually be able to help you get that level of depth.
Two things can be true at the same time:
Your kid’s gender questioning process could be a phase, or a response to a developmental struggle, or an attempt to cope with complex life distress, while also being unlikely to just go away on its own if nothing in the family system, developmental landscape, educational context, mental health or developmental support, or parent-child dynamic changes to meet your complex child’s special needs.
That is why it is so important to come up with a plan for how your family will handle this situation, ideally in the early stages.
Getting the necessary supports in place as early as you are getting an inkling that your developmentally atypical child is struggling to meet any number of milestones is your best chance at guiding them through life before they, being teenagers, shut you out and start seeking advice entirely from their peers.
But coming up with a plan later is objectively better than never coming up with one at all.
Many parents come to me after months or years of feeling frightened, frozen, confused, or reactive.
Some have delayed creating a plan because everything feels too chaotic and scary. Others did not realize how deeply connected their kid’s gender questioning process was to his or her objectively atypical development. They thought their kid’s high intelligence would eventually kick in and the problem would solve itself.
And when time elapses, and the autistic or gifted kid only grows further and deeper into the trans identity which they have nurtured as an elaborate escape fantasy, it is not uncommon for parents to panic, which in turn causes their sensitive kids to panic, and then everyone becomes miserable and hopeless. This type of crisis situation is usually totally avoidable, in my opinion.
Once I sit down with parents and help them to slow things down and to map the moving parts clearly, creating a plan is exactly what helps them stop parenting from panic.
The families who come to me are not reckless, indifferent, or checked out.
Quite the opposite.
They are thoughtful parents who have already spent months, and sometimes years, trying to understand what is happening with their child. They have read all the books. They have joined all the parent groups. They have listened to all the gender podcasts. They have talked to therapists, schools, friends, spouses, and sometimes even lawyers. And still, they feel like the advice they are getting does not quite fit the child in front of them. Or in some cases they are beginning to realize that their immersion in endless gender-related content has become a barrier between them and their child, and they would like my take on a healthier way to move forward.
Some parents come to me because their child’s gender issues seem to have appeared “out of nowhere.”
Their daughter was anxious, intense, socially awkward, rigid, academically gifted, sensory-sensitive, or had social-emotional communication delays for years, but none of that was understood as part of a coherent developmental picture with predictable areas of developmental struggles by the teachers or clinicians who overlooked autism spectrum disorders or ADHD as potential explanations. Then gender entered the story, and suddenly every prior difficulty was retroactively assimilated around this new identity, which then creates fertile ground for more developmental difficulties.
Others come to me because their child was largely compliant until adolescence.
These are the kids who did not have the ordinary childhood phase of sneaking cookies, lying badly, breaking small rules, testing boundaries, and learning that their parents did not know everything. Then, around 13, 14, 15, or 16, the child suddenly becomes secretive, argumentative, dismissive, ideologically rigid, and more interested in friends or the internet than in family life.
Because this shift happens at the same time as gender, parents understandably attribute the whole behavioral change to the new gender identity. But often, what I am seeing is a late and atypical version of adolescent development.
Some parents are being given two completely opposite pieces of advice by different people and institutions.
The school may be socially transitioning the child. The therapist may be telling the parents that affirmation is the only safe and loving response, or the therapist may give the impression that they practice an exploratory approach while actually just secretly affirming the trans identity while doing no meaningful exploration. And then, they may also be in online parent groups which are telling them to remove the internet, pull the child from school, and treat the whole thing as cult brainwashing.
Meanwhile, the parents are trying to figure out what is actually true about their own child, without either surrendering their authority to institutions or turning their home into a battlefield.
Some come because their child is autistic, ADHD, gifted, or developmentally uneven, and the standard advice they have gotten does not help them.
These are the kids who tend to sound far more mature than they are, which makes it very easy for adults to either overestimate their capacity for insight, or to underestimate the extent of their suffering.
Some parents who come to me are not sure whether they have been too permissive, too strict, too passive, too reactive, too trusting of professionals, or too afraid of being blamed.
They do not need someone to tell them that everything is fine. They also do not need someone to tell them that their child is hopelessly lost. Neither of those things are usually true. They need help slowing down, mapping the moving parts, and figuring out which problems are gender problems, which are autism or ADHD problems, which are family-dynamic problems, which are school problems, and which are ordinary adolescent-development problems being discussed in the language of gender.
Some families have already tried one or more quick fixes, and yet their child did not become less distressed.
The strife of their family’s situation did not resolve, because the child’s alternate gender identity was not simply a bad idea sitting on top of an otherwise functional set of life circumstances. It was often serving some function inside that child’s valiant attempt to cope in the only way they know how.
And some families I work with are not in immediate crisis, but they know they need a better plan.
They may have managed to avoid the worst forms of escalation, but they still need help thinking through how to reduce the centrality of gender, how to support independence without capitulation, how to talk to schools and therapists, how to set boundaries without turning every boundary into a war, and how to help their child mature into someone more embodied, more socially grounded, and more capable of not just living, but thriving, in reality.
What most of these families have in common is that they are trying to parent a complicated child through a complicated developmental period, while receiving advice that is either too ideological, too generic, too panicked, or too disconnected from the actual child in front of them.
And delaying some kind of family-based intervention risks the situation descending into chaos as the distressed kid becomes even more distressed and the conflict tears the family apart.
If a neurodevelopmentally or developmentally informed approach is not taken, the child’s underlying needs may continue not being met.
A kid whose gender issues have been lurking in the background for months or years without the subject being meaningfully explored, is way more likely to turn 18 and immediately begin making rash and highly consequential life and medical decisions with little to no insight into their motivations and little to no communication with their parents, simply because their distress has been allowed to incubate, because they feel alone, because they have been ensnared in an unhelpful power struggle, and because they are unable to envision other options because nothing else has been modeled. That is what happened to me. That is the outcome I hope to help you all avoid with your kids.
It is really important not to lose sight of the fact that you are not parenting a walking, talking gender identity.
You are guiding a whole child through different stages of life. The more complex your kid is, the harder your job is. Parenting your kid through their gender crisis is effectively just parenting your 21st century kid through adolescence and neurodivergence. Each of those things are difficult on their own, let alone in combination. Getting yourselves a whole village of people who will be on your’s and your child’s side will be critical to helping you retain your sanity through this process.
If my approach and the level of analytical depth I provide on my Substack resonates with you, I think my approach to parent coaching could be useful to you.
I bring together a combination of logic, personal experience, the research I have done into all things related to gender and neurodivergence, and the patterns I have seen across many families and across the many young people I met over the course of my time being trans, to help parents understand what may be happening underneath the layers of confusing language, and how they might respond more effectively and in a structured way.
Much of the advice I give families individually is based on the specifics of what they tell me about their child, down to the level of their child’s special interests, because I believe that entering the world of your autistic child’s special interests is probably the only real way to truly connect with them, or to facilitate necessary development where it is not happening on its own.
I like to collaborate with the families I work with, because I realize that once we strip the panic away, you guys actually do know a lot more about how to help your kids than most of you give yourselves credit for.
Many parents leave our conversations feeling calmer and more confident, because things that were once confusing finally make a lot more sense, and because we create an individualized plan for how to move forward.
Sometimes parents will say something like, “We’ve been in this for five years, and no one has ever explained why our autistic daughter does these things in a way that actually fits everything we know to be true about her.”
That is the work I care most about; not giving parents a magic sentence, and certainly not pretending there is a one-size-fits-all answer.
But helping them understand their child and their family clearly enough that they can parent from a place of steadiness, joy, confidence, and love, rather than fear, appeasement, or panic.
Parent coaching helps us look at where you are on the map and decide where to go next.
Regardless of where you are in this with your teenager or young adult kid, I have probably navigated that given juncture in my own life, considering that my trans identity spanned 12 years of my life.
If you are interested in doing parent coaching with me, you can set up a session with me by sending me a message on substack or by emailing me at officialpeacepoet@gmail.com
Final Notes:
As always, thank you for reading my essays and engaging with my work.
And especially, thank you to those who chose to support my work with paid subscriptions.
You all help me make it possible to spend an extremely long time autistically fixating on ways to help you to help your kids.
Please do comment whatever comes to mind as you are reading my work, or restack any of your favorite quotes from my essay with your own thoughts.
Your thoughts and questions are a huge dopamine boost after spending 30+ hours writing and editing each essay. And some of you guys ask such awesome questions that I will answer them in a Q&A.
“Pretty quickly into this whole thing, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to convince my parents into entertaining this latest twist and turn at the beginning of my adolescent identity developmental period. Even me thinking about it made them really upset, and the consequence of that was that I, being a very sensitive kid, became even more upset and that my life became measurably worse.
Instead, I chose to be pragmatic about it.”
This text breaks my heart because it shows so perfectly the pain on both sides of our story.
On one hand, there’s our pain as parents. A real suffering that just overwhelmed us, born out of fear, of not knowing what to do, or wanting to protect you from a path we knew would be hard. Our sadness was never meant to hurt you; it was just a reflection of how vulnerable we felt and how much we struggled to process that twist in your identity.
But what hurts me the most is seeing your side of it. You were just a girl dealing with your own search in an already incredibly complicated stage of life, and you ended up carrying the weight of our sadness. Because you were so sensitive, seeing us suffer just dragged you down even more, making your own life worse.
What completely breaks me is the end: your decision to be "pragmatic." That took a massive sacrifice on your part. To give us peace and protect yourself, you chose to keep your truth to yourself, put who you were on hold, and walk that path alone with a maturity you shouldn't have needed at that age.
It’s a picture of how, sometimes, out of pure love, we end up trapped in a labyrinth of silence just to avoid hurting each other. 💔
Thank you Maia for such a thorough, insightful essay. There is so much sense and wisdom here. And also, kind of a "permission" to focus on all the joys and challenges of parenting my amazing child without having to (actually needing not to!) keep the gender issue in a disproportionately show-stealing anxious spotlight that eclipses all the other important aspects of ND adolescence.
Reading this I kind of sighed with relief at the reminder that there is a much more natural, bigger picture, and that gender issues need to be addressed sensitively and proportionately as part of the lovely (though challenging) job of parenting this child.