It's a Terrifying Time to Have a Gender-Questioning Kid

Democrats and Republicans are both scary

Caitlin Ryan began her pioneering work on families with LGBT children twenty years ago. It was her research that found what’s oft-repeated in the left and mainstream media today: Familial support is integral to the mental health of such children. Other work confirms this hypothesis. One study noted that while social transition for trans-identified kids made little difference, social support had tremendous impact. “[C]laims that gender affirmation through transitioning socially is beneficial for children with GD could not be supported from the present results,” the study reads. “Instead, the study highlights the importance of individual social support provided by peers and family.” When I interviewed Ryan for a different piece, she told me that she almost always tries to keep families intact, to maintain connection even when parents aren’t accepting. However your kid identifies, whatever they’re going through, they need you. And you need them.

Which is why the increasingly punitive legislative measures from both the right and left, to wrest decision-making from parents and put it in the hands of the State, are so terrifying.

Take what’s happening in Alabama. After a partial injunction on the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, the State requested the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturn it based on the Supreme Court’s nixing of Roe v. Wade. “[N]o one—adult or child—has a right to transitioning treatments that is deeply rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition,” per a brief filed in court. “The state can thus regulate or prohibit those interventions for children, even if an adult wants the drugs for his child.”

The state can regulate the treatments your child receives, regardless of what you, your child, or you child’s medical and mental health providers think best. There is no respect for parental rights—so much for Florida’s Parental Rights bill!—and no respect for the general welfare of the family.

But don’t start ranting about Republicans yet, because California has a scarier bill. SB107 makes California a “sanctuary state” for kids who identify as transgender and want medical treatments, but who live in states (like Alabama) where it’s banned. It indemnifies California practitioners who provide such care to out-of-state kids. It also would “prohibit the enforcement of an order based on another state's law authorizing a child to be removed from their parent or guardian based on that parent or guardian allowing their child to receive gender-affirming health care.” That is, if there’s a custody dispute, this law indemnifies parents who take a child, against the other parent’s wishes, to California for care. [I’ll be doing a more in-depth post on this law on Year Zero soon.]

The state of California would intervene in private family decisions the same way Alabama would. I understand that we don’t have a constitutional right to privacy, but I do believe it is a human right. And we do have a constitutional “fundamental right of parents to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children.”

Both sides are ignoring these rights in ways that are terrible for the many thousands of families of children with gender dysphoria, many of whom are going through hard times. If they feel their child is of the rapid-onset variety—kids who have complex mental health issues and no history of childhood-onset gender dysphoria—or if their kid has a more classical presentation of GD and they understand that traditionally such an affliction resolves by the end of puberty and can in some cases be an indication of homosexuality, not necessarily future transsexuality, they must be terrified. With Biden’s executive order banning “conversion” therapy, they may fear seeking exploratory therapy for their suffering children, and if they don’t want to medicate, their children can flee to California and go forth without them. If they feel their child is a good candidate for cross-sex hormones and genital or bodily surgeries, and they live in a place where it’s not offered, they, too, live in fear—fear that they don’t have the power to make the best decision for their kids because the State insists on doing so.

Such parents, though, might feel a tidbit of solace if they looked more carefully at the actual research of gender-affirming care, and in particular at the research around suicide. The truth is, these treatments cannot accurately be described as life-saving, and the first nonpartisan evidence review in this country—which garnered almost no media attention—found that: “Studies presenting the benefits to mental health, including those claiming that the services prevent suicide, are either low or very low quality and rely on unreliable methods such as surveys and retrospective analyses, both of which are cross-sectional and highly biased. Rather, the available evidence demonstrates that these treatments cause irreversible physical changes and side effects that can affect long-term health.” That’s not politics talking; that’s science.

But many parents and children believe that they are life-saving, and have experienced them as such. I know transsexual adults (as they refer to themselves) who do believe that transition saved their lives—though are glad they went through endogenous puberty and were old enough to understand what they were consenting too. I also know transsexual adults who believe that transition nearly ruined their lives. We need more and better research. We need to depoliticize the issue. We need to understand that teenagers are having unprecedented mental health crises during the period when their job is to explore identity and separate emotionally from their parents. To have the State intervene during this era is, pardon my language, really fucking terrifying.

I realize that the medical associations that have blindly adopted gender-affirming care without considering why so many other countries are scrutinizing or abandoning it aren’t doing their duty. I realize we have no regulating body to be the grown up, to demand that we remove these issues from the hands of extremists and make policy from the center. I realize that it’s not just polarization but the radical wings of both parties vying for power over this issue that has paralyzed us. But children—some of them troubled, some of them simply gender nonconforming in a world that doesn’t understand or make room for them—are the ones feeling the fallout.