Centering Parental “Anguish” Harms Trans Kids

Christian media is encouraging parents to make their children’s trans identity about themselves at a time when their kids most need parental support.

by Evan Urquhart

A Christian media outlet is promoting a documentary about three parents who have chosen not to support their transgender children, by a reporter who appears in and contributed to th video himself. The focus of the article, and presumably one theme of the documentary itself, is the “anguish” parents feel when their child comes out as trans.

While the article refers to “families” throughout, there’s no indication that the film involved family members other than the three non-supportive parents.

These sorts of profiles are actively harmful to trans youth and their families. While some parents certainly struggle more than others to understand and become supportive of their kids, and such parents deserve the support they need to better help their children thrive, problematizing trans youth and making raising a trans kid seem like an insurmountable obstacle to being a good parent really harms the chances of parents for whom the love they feel for their children makes the difficulties less overwhelming than all that. Parenting is hard! Every parent will encounte difficulties they never expected, and most will have to endure personality clashes with their children that are painful and hard to accept.

Families that struggle to know what the right approach is to raising a trans child deserve our sympathy and support, especially in a media environment that has made medical interventions with robust evidence and mainstream medical organizations’ full support sound untested and potentially harmful. Such parents deserve patient answers to their questions and a recognition that children are dependent on their parents, which mean that working with imperfect parents helps children more than anything else we can do.

However, feeding in to parents paranoia and desire to center their own feelings at the expense of supporting their kids is the absolute wrong approach, and it leads to the exact sort of parental estrangement that Christian media portrays as an inevitable result of “gender ideology.” Religious writers portray themselves as pro-family, but in their messages to parents of LGBTQ+ kids they’re pushing a rigidity that is what breaks up families, harming everyone involved. While those on the inside of this rigid mindset may see no other choice, reasonable people understand that being willing to stay involved and supportive of a child, even when they make choices you’re uncomfortable with, is at the very heart of good parenting. Kids and families aren’t served when parents fail to hear that message from the rigid right.