Sometimes It’s The Children Who Leave, Not The Parents Who Kick Them Out
This article was first published in Psychology Today – but quickly taken down – so it must be good!
WRITTEN BY Tina Traster
Tina Traster is a journalist, an author, and a documentary maker
More than a third of New York City’s young people in foster care identify as LGBTQ+. A recent report published by the Administration for Children’s Services, the city’s welfare agency, reveals this cohort is more likely to experience homelessness than their counterparts.
The New York Times writes “While some children are placed into foster care because of abuse, neglect or poverty, many LGBTQ teens enter the system after families reject them.” The language points to a causal relationship between homelessness and a parent’s reaction to a child’s choices.
But the A=B in this formula may be disingenuous to some parents struggling to parent LGBTQ+ kids. Teenagers may not become homeless because parents have rejected them—some may decide to leave their homes because they have rejected their parents.
The generally accepted narrative among activists, the therapeutic community, and the media is that many trans kids are living with parents who reject them based on morality or intolerance. However, there may be some parents who themselves are being rejected because they have not quickly or strongly supported their tween or teen through appearance and name changes, hormone-treatment, and, in some cases, life-altering surgeries.
Parents who detected signs of gender dysphoria in their very young or prepubescent children might feel more comfortable in accepting that their child really has been disordered for a long time. But a different cohort—those grappling with a sudden “coming out” as trans at 13, 14, or even through their 20s—may be skeptical. That skepticism guided a study done by researcher Dr. Lisa Littman, who surveyed the parents of a group of teenage girls who had recently come out as trans. Littman’s ground-breaking but controversial research focused on feedback from parents who largely believed that their daughter’s decision to become “trans” came out of nowhere or appeared to be related to social contagion within a friend group. Littman coined the term “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” to describe this phenomenon. Her findings may be threatening to those who believe any person who declares themselves as trans should be affirmed as such and should have access to any medical care to achieve transition.
This may often be the critical junction where tension escalates between “trans” children and parents. While some skeptical parents can support, or at least participate in pronoun changes, short haircuts, new manners of dress, and name changing, medical intervention can raise the bar for some. Many trans tweens and teens—who are not old enough to vote, drink legally, or marry—are, with the help of the therapeutic and medical community, starting on hormone treatment or considering double mastectomies, which parents may find difficult to accept.
In today’s culture, some children may spend more time with TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram than they do with their parents. They were raised in a world in which every question can be answered on Google. If they’re looking for role models, social media influencers are there to cheerfully guide any journey. This may be particularly true for children who believe that they may be trans. It’s a strong suction, the internet, one that parents may struggle to compete with. Amid this pull, parents may be experiencing something like parenting dysphoria, as they fight to preserve their relationships with children who may hear from other sources that their parents are the toxic ones. Parents who tell their trans declared children that they are worried about them, that they don’t think they should make life-altering decisions, that they’re young and they should explore slowly may experience pushback or rejection from their child in return.
Parents may also find that some therapists are not on their side. There is much testimony among parents of trans kids who have been told by therapists that lack of support for these children is the same as harming them. Ultimately, particularly as children enter their mid teens, they may become more emboldened to leave behind families and disconnect from parents—parents who, in some cases, have wanted nothing more than to make their children happy and whole. There are many exceptions to this, of course; some trans children have suffered abuses at the hands of their families. But some trans children may co-opt the language of abuse to describe a home life where their gender choice was not embraced, either in part or at all. Equipped with more information about transitioning online, some teens may feel more empowered than ever to strike out on their own, perhaps maintaining the belief their parents don’t love them. In many, many cases, they are very wrong.
