What I Wish My Parents Had Understood About My Trans Identity

The way parents react makes all the difference.

Me at 14, two years in to my trans identification.

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This essay is shorter than my others, and that’s for three main reasons. Firstly, I decided your eyes probably need a break this week. Secondly, I will be presenting at a conference abroad next week and I really need to prepare for it. Thirdly, I spent yesterday celebrating my 26th birthday and contemplating my own mortality… as one does around my age.

Anyways…

The point of this two part essay is to reflect on the ways trans identities can cause rifts in families in ways that even the most well-educated and well-intentioned parents cannot predict.

This essay focuses on my own relationship with my parents throughout the twelve years I spent identifying as trans, and on why the erosion of that critical relationship has deeply compelled me to write on Substack and to offer one-on-one coaching sessions to assist parents with insights I wish mine had.

The second essay will expand on the themes in this essay, by examining the patterns I lived through not only in my own life, but patterns that I see repeating themselves within almost all of the families I’ve worked with. That essay won’t just discuss patterns— it’ll discuss 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 in these essays are based on general themes and will not use specific stories 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.

But first:

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Part One:

Navigating my trans identity with my family is the reason why I as a detransitioner, now work with parents of trans-identifying youth.

From the ages of twelve to twenty-four, I was convinced I was supposed to have been born a boy. I “came out” as transgender in 2012, before the modern wave of today’s trans social contagion exploded. Back then, this wasn’t trendy. My parents didn’t have anyone to talk to.

There wasn’t yet a full cohort of kids my age coming out around puberty. When I told my parents I ‘knew’ I had been born in the wrong body, they were understandably terrified. I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling outside of the transgender framework that promised to solve all my problems. I was overwhelmed by sensations and emotions I didn’t have language for.

I needed help exploring my distress, but no therapist would take me on. My parents, afraid of what this might mean for my future, shut down.

There wasn’t a single exploratory psychotherapist who would take my case. And there wasn’t yet an industry of “gender-affirming” therapists rushing confused and distressed teens down the path of medicalization.

They did what they thought was right in a moment of panic: they argued with me about my identity claims, took away my internet and discouraged my developmentally-appropriate self-expression, fearing it would entrench the trans identity. Their negative emotional reaction to my disclosure and to anything or anyone they saw as being somehow associated with it, taught me one thing: sharing my inner life with them was dangerous.

Instead of asking genuine questions aimed at understanding me, which showed compassion for my struggles, or anything that helped either themselves or me to understand what was going on underneath, I got what felt like a never-ending series of punishments. The transgender identity I declared at 12, as a result of years of unresolved confusion and distress was seen as a rebellion, as something I did to make my parents’ lives more challenging, rather than as my only form of communication to the people I loved and trusted the most, that I was in pain and that I needed their help.

I felt totally alone in my own family and there was not one person on Earth I could talk to about any of it.

So, my identity exploration went underground. My parents had no idea of the messages I was receiving because they thought the internet was the problem, and that taking away the internet was the solution, to an idea which had already been planted in my mind.

I then read trans-related books secretly at school and in local bookstores. Even in 2012 it was relatively easy for me to get my ‘fix’ of trans content. I consumed the same themes in printed formats that I had previously been exploring online.

I spent the following years of middle and high school binding my breasts in secret, convinced I could stop their growth and qualify for a less invasive “top surgery.” With each passing day, I incurred damage to my breasts and rib cage which I was far too young to comprehend the impacts of, and assumed that my new physical pain would all be worth it when I became an adult and could get my breasts removed. Along with the new physical distress of breast binding, my psychological distress remained unaddressed and only got worse with age.

I began socially transitioning the moment I entered college, without telling my parents. When I was 19, and my parents found out I had begun my social transition,  they incredulously asked why I had been lying to them (by omission). The reason I didn’t let them in on my life wasn’t because I didn’t want to, but rather because nothing about their handling of my distress as a 12 year old actually incentivized me to be honest with them when I was a legal adult who could make her own permanent medical decisions.

My parents had only the best of intentions, but their panic clouded their judgement. They said things they didn’t mean, like we all do, when we panic. They became certain that doubling down on ineffective parenting strategies that only caused our relationship to further erode at my most vulnerable stage of life– adolescence— was the only way they could “save” me. “Saving” me from the irreversible consequences of gender transition was a far greater priority to my family than having any semblance of a positive relationship. It was precisely because of how much they loved me, that they were willing to sacrifice our relationship to keep me out of the gender clinic. Their belief that they had a choice between a good relationship with their trans-identified child and their child’s health, was a false dichotomy.

It felt to me that my parents were committed to imploding any chance at a close bond with me to prove a point, whenever they sent me detransitioner horror stories and regret statistics instead of having a single honest conversation with me. Instead of attempting to repair our parent-relationship, or even to acknowledge that I was in distress, my parents sent me many of the exact same articles you have contemplated sending to your kid— or perhaps ones you have already sent them. This behavior showed me that winning an argument was more important to them than it was for them to listen to me.

This was precisely what made me so desperate to medicalize that I was willing to live through the chaos of war in the Middle East— so that I too could prove a point to them. It is genuinely a miracle that I fared as well as I did.

As a young adult, I was expected to change the life path I had meticulously planned for since the age of 12, because of the distress it would cause my family for me to attempt to resolve my distress in the only way I knew how to. If your kid is a young adult and thinks that their happiness must come at the expense of yours— be it through explicit guilt tripping or just through “vibes”— it will be nearly impossible for either of you to have a productive conversation and get to the root of anything. Kids and young people who feel misunderstood by their parents will seek understanding from anywhere else they can find it. You don’t have to affirm a false identity claim in order to show your kid that you are committed to understanding them deeply, even though the situation is stressful for you.

My parents expected me to quit a gender transition, a coping mechanism, I had already started based on distress and confusion which had incubated for as long as I could remember. Neither them nor anyone else could offer me a practical alternative.

All I wanted was for the most important people in my life to just try to understand me as deeply as I needed to be understood. I could not accept the status quo of misery, of feeling like a failed, odd freak of a girl, when such a tantalizing option existed, which promised to resolve such far-reaching problems that I had experienced, even prior to puberty.

Our parent-child relationship had ruptured to such an extent when I was twelve, that I was incapable of taking anything they said seriously for the next twelve years. I was required to see a therapist of my parents’ choosing in college. I did not take our sessions seriously and chose to disclose nothing to her, because I did not trust her to remain confidential.

My parents also sent me to study abroad in the Middle East, hoping I would “snap out of it.” Instead, I lived “stealth” as a man in Orthodox Jewish, Palestinian, and secular sectors of Israeli society. I began the process of becoming an Israeli citizen, so I could medically transition far from my non-affirming parents.

Being a young woman living as a man in the Middle East was an exciting, novel adventure—but it was also dangerous in ways I was too naive, even as a young adult, to grasp. I lived a double life, full of secrecy, paranoia, and the impossibility of sharing any part of myself with the very people I most needed guidance from. The consequences of the truth being “found out” would have been catastrophic, especially considering all the time I spent in the West Bank in Palestinian Muslim communities.

It took two wars for me to start unraveling the lie. The first, in 2021, sent me down a path of questioning leftist ideology, especially around Israel-Palestine. The second came via algorithms that introduced me to anti-woke content, and eventually, critiques of gender ideology. I became increasingly disillusioned with the trans movement—but by then, I was trapped. Detransitioning in the Middle East was no small thing. I was stuck in a lifestyle that demanded secrecy, required me to continue lying, and forced me to harm my body and derail my psychosocial development just to survive. I had already woven myself into a complex web I saw no way of being able to get out of. So I continued living as a man even when I realized the increasingly significant sacrifices this path would require.

On October 7, 2023, I woke up to a siren and didn’t have time to put on my binder before running to the bomb shelter. Something shifted. I realized I no longer had the energy to keep fighting biology. I saw that the path I had built my life around since I was twelve had been based on a lie. Not because I was bad. Not because my parents were bad. But because no one—no one—knew how to sit with my distress and help me make sense of it.

Trans activists have said on numerous occasions that my parents' biggest mistake was that they didn’t affirm me in my transgender identity. I disagree. Yes, affirmation would have made me feel better temporarily, but this temporary happiness would have come at the cost of even more harm in the long term. It would have treated my maladaptive coping mechanism as literal truth. It would have added increasingly pervasive medical trauma to emotional confusion, without resolving the distress that started it all.

My parents were right to not affirm my transgender identity. They took drastic measures, and made immense sacrifices, including sending me to a war zone, in their desperate attempt to protect me from something I had no way of understanding the ramifications of. But, if my parents had the tools to handle the situation differently, in a way that met my needs early on, I doubt they would have needed to take increasingly drastic, relationship-destroying measures to protect me later on. 

Two things can be true at once: my parents were right to not affirm my transgender identity, and the tactics they used were ineffective and caused such harm to our relationship that their opinions no longer had any influence in my life. They had only the best of intentions, but because they misunderstood the reasons I had adopted this identity as a kid, they handled the situation in ways which only made me more vulnerable to the messaging of trans activists. The worst part was, they didn’t even realize that they had other options beyond gender affirmation and automatic rejection– not because they were bad people but because they had no one outside of the immediate family dynamic who knew enough to be a sounding board for the plane they were attempting to fly as they built it.

My parents’ biggest mistake in dealing with my transgender identity– is that they made parenting decisions based on panic. They removed my coping mechanisms without offering any new ones. They focused on the label—trans—rather than asking themselves what I was using this label to run away from. They didn’t help me explore my feelings because they didn’t have the stomach for it. Because it was too painful for them. They took actions which effectively punished me for expressing my feelings to them, using the same type of punishment they used for violations of other rules: taking the internet away and then, silence. But I was a teenager. I needed someone to show me that they could hold my pain and show me how to work through it. The trans community becomes very powerful when this type of family relationship erosion happens.

No one ever showed me how to feel okay in my body in a way that worked on the relevant mechanisms of my distress, (which I now recognize were largely sensory and interoceptive in nature) because their assumptions about the situation I was dealing with, were fundamentally incorrect. So I latched onto the one coping mechanism that promised relief: the trans identity.

Because of how my trans identification was handled, instead of spending my adolescence and young adulthood becoming independent from my parents or learning how to understand and express my emotions in my own words– I spent that time shoving my emotions deep, down inside and damaging my body in an attempt to prove to my parents that they were wrong. And simultaneously, I hoped that persisting in my trans identity so long could convince them that they were wrong to doubt me.

I could not walk away without saving face.

Now, it’s been about two years since I quit my gender transition. I’ve disembarked from my futile attempt to dismember my female body in response to distress I have associated with it, largely because real life and war made me realize that there are bigger problems than having a healthy female body. I’ve realized there are more worthwhile pursuits than trying to convince my parents that the conclusion I came to about myself as a 12 year old is one they need to believe is true about me today. That’s because for all of its flaws, my parents’ plan did get me as close to the age of 25 as they could, with only the permanent damage of breast binding to remind me of this horrific period of my life. The trade of mastectomy scars for war-related PTSD is certainly a victory in the eyes of many. Frankly, I’m just glad it’s all over. Even the abuse I receive from trans activists pales in comparison to the insane set of experiences I’ve lived so far.

The aftermath of this gender journey I’ve been on is quite depressing at times, but since I’m good at ignoring my emotions, I choose to think of it as a profound one.

I’m now writing about my life on Substack. I discuss my personal experience— the twelve years of being trans-identified, which I spent inside the culture of transgender communities online and in real life in two countries— from my unique vantage point.

I’ve walked the path your kids are on. I’ve lived the fantasy and I’ve survived the fallout. I know what the world looks like from inside a teen's or young adult’s trans identity.

I understand now why parents have extreme concerns about affirming their kids’ trans identities. I share their concerns wholeheartedly. I also understand how even the parents with the best of intentions can, in the midst of their own distress and complex family dynamics, fail to intuit what would serve their child best. And I know what it takes to start picking apart a complex family dynamic, to find the distress and unmet needs underneath. I have many ideas about what it takes, then, for parents to meet those needs of their children in ways which aid in the positive development of their children, rather than relying on strategies which only cause these kids to become more entrenched in their maladaptive coping mechanisms.

Why? Because I’ve gone through this intense journey with myself and with my parents. Now our relationship has recovered in ways I never would have expected it to. That took a lot of effort on their part and on my part, because relationships are a two way street. I’m now old enough to realize that my parents’ intentions were right, but that their execution of their good intentions was at times, catastrophically relationship damaging in a way that was totally unnecessary. In retrospect, I realize that their unfavorable parenting strategies were purely a result of their human-ness, and because humans make irrational decisions when they panic.

My parents so badly wanted to save me from the consequences of an identity that entails a lifelong medical burden, and in that pursuit, they took actions which actually decreased my likelihood of desistance. Their fundamental misconceptions about what I was going through, turned my adolescent identity confusion into a power struggle that left all of my underlying distress in tact, and escalated into an oblivion that only literal war in the Middle East could interrupt. And not even one war was enough. I needed two of them. That’s how stubborn I was.

If this is how living in your house feels, you must know that it does not have to be that way.

That’s why now, I now consult with parents of trans-identifying youth. I use my unique vantage point from my lived experience, a basic understanding of adolescent development, an intimate understanding of neurodivergence, and an analytical ability to spot patterns within family dynamics— to craft an individualized plan with parents to help them to re-connect with their kids.

If you are at any point in your kid’s “gender journey” and you would like my perspective as the kid who lived what your kid is going through now and would like a tailored plan suited to your individual kid and family dynamic, please feel free to send me a DM to book a parent coaching session.

Also, If you’re a parent who has benefitted from my essays and/or coaching sessions, feel free to leave your experiences in the comments. If you’re someone who is interested in this topic, also please leave your comments below. I always enjoy hearing from you.

Your comments give me life— even the angry and unhinged ones.

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