Brandt Files #5: Mom and Dad Ace Obedience School

There are two types of parents: corroborators and treatment-delayers

This post is part of the Brandt Files, a series on the lawsuit in which “trans kids” and their doctors successfully challenged Arkansas’ ban on youth gender medicalization. Read the introduction to the series here. All the entries are linked on the author’s Substack page.

The trial documents cited in this piece are available on the ACLU’s website in several files. Witness testimony is in the “trial transcripts.” Volume 1 contains Karasic; Volume 2 contains Turban, Sabrina’s father, and Parker’s father; Volume 3 contains Hutchison, Brooke’s mother, and Dylan’s mother; Volume 5 contains Levine.

Photo by Ross Gilmore on Unsplash

I’m not a parent but a lot of my friends have young children. Three times I’ve had the same irksome experience: I tell a friend that I oppose medicalizing trans-identified kids. They ask questions. It’s a fine conversation, but I feel surprised by how little they know about the subject. These are liberal news junkies who’ve been wetting their pants over Ron DeSantis for years! Then something like this happens:

Friend: I haven’t noticed any signs in my daughter. Thank God. I mean, I would support her, obviously. That would be really hard. **Staring off earnestly into the distance.**

Me: But like I said, real gender dysphoria is extremely rare.

Friend: I haven’t noticed any signs. I don’t know what I would do. I mean, support her, obviously. **Still looking past me, jaw set.**

Me: Your kid’s not trans.

Friend: Him, I mean. I would support him.

My parent-friends have thought about trans kids, but in a totally different way than I have. To them, it’s not a debate or set of dueling studies. It’s more like a looming potential test of their worth as parents. They know the answer to the first question: support your kid by not challenging them.

The Brandt trial showcased parents of four “trans kids.” At least some of them, like my friends, didn’t seem to be fully educated (or indoctrinated) about trans issues before their kids “came out” to them. They knew right away that they wanted to “support” their kids, but that was about it. 

As far as we know, these parents were never coerced—they never had to worry, for example, that child welfare authorities would take their children away if they didn’t “affirm” (links to stories about parental coercion are at the bottom). Yet they swiftly marched from support to pronoun compliance to affirming counselors to doctors’ offices.

What happened? They encountered a healthcare system—in person and through articles and echoes on the internet—that only respected them as long as they supported medicalization, and scorned parents who questioned this treatment.

The “Big Parenting Moment”

Two of the four child-plaintiffs came down with gender dysphoria suddenly. To put it bluntly, they seemed to have Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), a clinical description (though not a formal diagnosis) that many in the pro-medicalization camp would prefer to sweep under the rug. When I realized that, I wondered why the ACLU had chosen these kids as public faces of the cause. Now I get it. It’s because their parents are ideal avatars of the trans movement, which is to say, they’re credulous and deferential when confronted with nonsensical ideas.

Parents of all four child plaintiffs testified at trial that they reacted calmly when their kids told them they were trans. It seemed that, just like my friends, they’d already imbibed cultural narratives about gender identity—on an empty stomach. 

Parker Sexton’s father and Brooke Dennis’s mother saw it coming; Parker had been dressing “masculine” and Brooke liked princesses. Sabrina Jennen’s father had expected his son to come out as gay because of a credit card charge for Pride merch. When his child came out as trans, he hid his surprise:

“I knew that was a big parenting moment. And I didn’t want to mess it up. And I just told her that I love you, I support you no matter what[.]”

Dylan Brandt’s mother had not previously considered that her daughter might be male and, poignantly: 

“I felt a little bad that he had been maybe struggling with this for a while and that I had missed it.”

The parents immediately complied with the kids’ demands that they use new names and pronouns for them.

Dylan’s mother:

“The first thing I did was respect those initial requests and I started working on changing the way I addressed him.”

Sabrina’s father:

“First thing we did was – she had told us when she came out to us, when she sad [sic], mom, dad, I’m trans and, by the way, I would like for you to call me Sabrina and use she/her pronouns. So first we adopted that in our household.”

Brooke’s mother:

“We said, okay, great. If that’s who you are and that’s what you would like to be called, we will use those pronouns for you. And, you know, we were happy that, you know, we were such loving parents to all of our children that she would feel comfortable expressing that to us.”

The parents then conducted research.

Sabrina’s father:

“And I think like most parents do these days, you Google it, right. So first thing I did was Google, you know, what do you do when your child comes out to you as trans.”

Dylan’s mother:

“I pretty much immediately started Googling to start to kind of – I was trying to wrap my brain around it and starting to kind of get some information. … So I spent probably an enormous amount of time Googling trans youth[.]”

As directed by the top search results, the parents presented their kids for counseling and followed whatever professional advice came next. Only one parent hesitated to medicalize, and not for long; the child, Sabrina, received estrogen only six months after coming out. “Like we did when she came out to us, something we Googled a lot and read a lot about.” Brooke was still too young for medicalization but his mother was so confident in that path that she, you know, sued the state.

These parents weren’t just mimicking internet models. Once they joined the suit, they became internet models. The ACLU created webpages for each of the families. The Googlers are now the Googled.

What Happens to Parents Who Cooperate

A parent’s role isn’t simply to comply with pronoun demands, per the affirmation model. They may also participate in the medicalization process. While gender identity is whatever a child says it is, so parents can’t provide input there, they can attest to their kid’s distress about their gender identity. In this way parents “provide collateral information to make the diagnosis” of gender dysphoria, according to the plaintiffs’ expert witness, Dan Karasic, emeritus psychiatry professor at University of California San Francisco.

When evaluating whether a child’s gender identity is “persistent and consistent,” “parents are a valuable resource because, of course, they are living with that child and can corroborate a lot of that,” according to the plaintiffs’ witness Michele Hutchison, a gender clinic director. In other words, parents matter if they verify their kid’s story. (One thing to note: the greatest criticism of ROGD is that it was based on parental reports—despite that being a common and valid data collection method—and not the kids’ own word. So parental accounts matter only if they’re saying what affirming clinicians want them to.)

Parents also play an important role in signing consent forms. The “parents are part of that [medicalization] treatment team,” according to Hutchison, “so parental consent is required. So if the parents were not ready to move forward, that would delay treatment as well.”

Some parents might resent being viewed as mere form-signers or treatment-delayers. But wait, there’s more. Consider the parent who doesn’t challenge or contradict his kid, doesn’t click the Atlantic article about ROGD and detransitioners that Google might show him in the first 10 results. Instead, he signs forms promptly and sues the state of Arkansas at the behest of New York lawyers. This father may win confusing praise from a federal judge:

“If someone were to stereotype the most unlikely parent of a transgender child,” wrote the judge in his Findings of Fact, “it would be Donnie Ray Sexton. Donnie is a good and loving father.” The judge was referring to Parker Saxton’s father (and misspelling his last name).

Read literally, it sounds like the judge was saying most parents of trans kids are hateful and bad. But I don’t think that’s what he meant. After all, he made a finding (adopted from the plaintiffs’ Proposed Findings of Fact) that “There is no evidence that gender incongruence is the result of a dysfunctional family life, and many transgender people come from healthy, supportive families.”

I think the judge singled out Saxton for praise—and viewed him as un-stereotypical—because Saxton is a plumber. In the cultural imagination, working class men are the demographic most hostile to “LGBTQ rights.” You want to reward them when they do the right thing.

What Happens to Parents Who Resist

If a parent doesn’t corroborate their child’s story of persistent trans identity and instead tells their clinician that the gender angst came on suddenly, the clinician may see that as a sign that their child is afraid of them. As the plaintiffs’ expert Jack Turban, a psychiatrist, explained:

“In clinical practice, we generally see that from parents’ perspectives a young person’s trans identity is a surprise and that announcement comes all the sudden or rapidly, but when you talk to the young people, they usually say that they have been thinking about this often for years and they’re really afraid of their parents’ reactions[.]”

Hutchison confirmed that in her clinic at Arkansas Children’s Hospital:

“[T]he average length of time between when one of our patients first identified as transgender and when they told a parent was six and a half years.” 

This might be the most precise, mathematical data point that the plaintiffs presented in the entire trial. And it might be derived from false scripts that kids learned to recite from social media. After all, if parents are learning what to say to their kids from the internet, why shouldn’t those kids learn what to say to their doctors from the internet?

Not only will skeptical parents be viewed as creeps or morons, but if they don’t sign the consent forms, their kids might die (supposedly). Any parent who googles “my child is trans” will learn from results on page 1 that their kids are at high risk of suicide, which can be headed off by “supportive” parents; professionals recommend a “gender-affirming approach” to stem the risk of suicide. Parker’s father testified that after Arkansas banned youth medicalization, he “started sleeping on the couch, you know, as close to [Parker] as I could” because he was “very fearful” that Parker would hurt herself.

“Not all adolescents with gender dysphoria will live to age 18 if they are unable to get gender-affirming medical treatment,” the judge stated in his Findings of Fact. He cited four of plaintiffs’ doctor-witnesses, all of whom had been speaking anecdotally or speculatively. For example, Hutchison testified that she was “worried that we’re going to lose some kids” if the medicalization ban went into effect. (This paragraph, including citations, was lifted almost verbatim from the plaintiffs’ Proposed Findings of Fact.) None of the cited testimony referred to objective data.

Why? Because the data showing that medicalization reduces the risk of suicide for adolescents “doesn’t exist,” according to Stephen Levine, a psychiatrist testifying for Arkansas. He pointed out that “the suicide rate of people who have completed all the transgender treatments that medicine has to offer is higher than the general population by a very large factor.” You can find that information by googling, but you have to enter a cynical prompt in the search bar.

Parenting in the Shadow of Trans

When my friends say they haven’t seen any signs of trans identity in their child, what do they mean? I guess they mean their kids are gender-typical. They seem to feel relieved by this. I wonder if their daughters pick up on their relief when they spurn a toy truck; I wonder if their sons perceive a trace of parental anxiety when they play with a doll.

This is the fifth entry in The Brandt Files. Find past entries on the author’s profile page.

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Information and Resources for Parents

Lisa has reported on the dire legal consequences that parents face for “delaying treatment.”

Eliza Mondegreen documented the surreal experience of parenting a trans-identified child.

Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) is a platform for and by parents of trans-identified youth.

Genspect is an international organization that advocates for a non-medical approach to gender diversity. It hosts stories from parents concerned about their trans-identified children’s healthcare.

Leor Sapir refuted the trans-kid suicide myth.