Parenting the gender-distressed child in 2024

Reflections about what is facing parents this coming year - all thoughtful comments and alternative points of view are, as always, very welcome.

For those of us who have lived in genderworld for some years, it feels like all the pieces are set up and ready for 2024 to be a pivotal year.  Although it is still indescribably difficult to be the parent of a gender-distressed child in a world where ideological health systems combined with a rampant and red-hot culture war frames loving and engaged parents as ‘transphobic’, yet the landscape has dramatically changed and these days there is – finally – some good news to contemplate.

To start with, there are now multiple sources of help and support available for parents who do not believe that a fast-track medicalised pathway will help their children. Looking back, it is clear that 2021 was the first game-changer. Prior to 2021, there was no such thing as Genspect, Sex Matters, the Countess, the Lesbian Project, Thoughtful Therapists, CAN-SG, and many other groups – too many to mention – that are now well-established.

Back in early 2021, Alasdair Gunn (aka Angus Fox) eloquently described how parents hid in bathrooms and used the sound of the Roomba to maintain Kremlinesque-level secret meetings among like-minded parents. At the time parents were silenced in a stranglehold. We have come very far from those dark days when parents found it almost impossible to access any sort of thoughtful approach to gender distress. Nowadays groups such as the Gender Dysphoria Support Network (GDSN), Bayswater Support Group, Our Duty and Parents of ROGD Kids and many more all offer a wide range of supports and have become a huge source of relief for many parents.

When Maya Forstater won her appeal in June 2021 the world turned on its axis as the right to hold gender critical beliefs came to be upheld in law. Books such as Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, Carole Hooven’s Testosterone and Helen Joyce’s Trans were all released in 2021. Pitt started releasing hundreds of parent stories and have since had their first book released. Subsequently the mainstream media finally started to take notice and public intellectuals such as Wesley Yang, Leor Sapir, and – more recently – Wilfred Reilly and Michael Shellenberger entered the debate. Hannah Barnes released her exposé on GIDS at the Tavistock early in 2023. Myself, Sasha Ayad and Lisa Marchiano also released our book When Kids Say They’re Trans this year – a book that simply would not have been possible prior to this change in the tide.

And so the pushback to the medicalised approach to gender identity distress is now in full swing. A measure of this pushback is that at Genspect we have finally surrendered to the fact that we can no longer keep up with the scores of thought-provoking articles and media clips that are released every single day across the world. This is a good position to be in and we are very thankful that it has arrived.

Along with these changes, the parents’ position has been legitimatised. No longer are they forced to nod along to every utterance of their child. They finally have choices, difficult though they may be. Of course, we still have a long, long way to go. Certain regions are much more caught up in gender ideology than others and so parents who wish to question gender-affirmative authoritarianism may need to relocate if they are to regain some authority within the household. This can bring about an unwanted and unhelpful massive upheaval to everyone else in the family and many parents remain forced into gender-affirmative compliance.

An unforeseen issue that has recently cropped up is that parents who have been so long silenced by a world that imposes the gender-affirmative narrative upon them, that they have trained themselves into reflexive silence. During what is often the most traumatic time of their lives, some parents have become paralysed and feel terrified in the face of any sort of truth-telling and so they say nothing and keep their heads down. Sadly, a conspiracy of silence seems to have developed among certain parents and this has led many conflict-avoidant parents to believe that dodging all the difficult conversations is essential. They know any questioning of the narrative will be fraught with conflict and so they quietly retreat.

But all mental health issues are extremely difficult to manage within the family and, in this context, if there is no conflict, then there is probably an unhealthy level of avoidance and enabling. Not only that, a certain type of conflict-avoidant ROGD parent is much more comfortable within the intellectual realm compared to confronting raw emotion. These parents tend to feel terrified when they are forced to tackle heightened emotion and they tend to avoid and rationalise instead. Yet the time-tested method to help someone who has mentally lost their way is not prolonged avoidance. Instead, it is authentic, compassionate, thought-provoking support that encourages individuals to contemplate – and speak about – all their options freely.

This certainly doesn’t mean that parents should suddenly don their Adult Human Female t-shirt and start loudly identifying as a TERF as the bells ring in the new year. It is often vitally important to choose the right moment carefully and to have the discipline to refrain from commenting at the wrong time. Nonetheless, gently questioning the narrative, or perhaps even a firm ‘coming-out’ from the parent to the child might be valuable. The parent might say something like, “When you first identified as trans I was aware that you knew a good deal more than me and so I let you take the lead. But this always niggled at me. As your parent, it is my job to give you guidance and to educate myself when I am under-informed. I have done my homework since then and now I really know my stuff. I’m afraid I have come to the conclusion that medical transition is not the best option for you. I know this is upsetting but I believe it’s more important for me to be honest with you, rather than pretending to agree with you.” Parents don’t need to stay and argue the point; they can simply make their point and leave the room, giving time for their child to digest it. Of course, each parent has their own style and it’s usually most important for parents to behave in the way that feels authentic to them.

Things are changing very fast and it’s hard for everyone to keep up: clinicians are reporting further complicated manifestations of gender distress, and corresponding complicated responses from parents.  Another unexpected issue to look out for in 2024 is the arrival of parent-affirmative professionals who tend to affirm everything the parents say. This can be just as destructive as the gender-affirmative professionals who tend to affirm everything the children say; neither approach is helpful.

The good news is that gender has finally gone fully mainstream and LGBTQ is not so edgy anymore. Just like the apocryphal shoeshine boy who gave Joseph Kennedy (father of JFK) tips on the stock market and thereby prompted Kennedy to exit the over-exposed market, the ubiquity of trans-identification among young people is leading many to move away from their fixation upon their gender identity towards more unique manifestations of identity.

Long before gender identity was a thing, Spinoza told us that to understand all is to forgive all. Hopefully in 2024 we will understand more, if not all, about gender identity concerns, and in its own complicated way, this should bring some consolation to parents who feel isolated, terrified, and profoundly misunderstood.