The Federalist’s Conversion Therapy for Beginners Course

An anonymous essay suggests cutting adolescents off from peers, online and off, is a proportionate response to seeing a few rainbows on their phone case.

by Evan Urquhart

On the federalist today I found a piece of conversion therapy propaganda aimed at conservative parents of trans, gender nonconforming, or questioning kids. The anonymous essayist mixes reasonable suggestions in with drastic measures aimed at isolating children from peers and pre-meditatively gaslighting them. It’s bad! But let’s start at the beginning. How did this parent come to recognize that there was a problem with their kid?

Spoiler for the rest of this article: The kid never actually does more to come out as trans than this. The kid’s transgression was to put some rainbow stickers on a phone, dress in a slighly gender-nonconforming way, and have gender nonconforming peers. Based on this level of mild experimentation and questioning, the conservative parent is convinced the kiddo is on a one-way trip to trans town, surgery and hormones will definitly result, and decides that drastic measures must be employed. This is, of course, the impact of the anti-trans moral panic: The son of a conservative cannot wear a pastel shirt without mom and/or dad completely losing their shit (the pastel shirt is mentioned later, as a demonstration of the parent’s great permissiveness and patience in allowing such garments to be worn without a fight).

Now, considering that nothing has actually happened and there’s no reason to think the child is even trans, what course of action does this anonymous essayist recommend? Why, removing the child from school and cutting them off from all their friends, of course!

That’s right, when a kid puts a couple rainbow stickers on a phone, the Federalist says you need to make the kid change schools. (Don’t tell the child why though, goodness no! Pretend it’s about academics, not your panic over the possibility that the kiddo might explore their gender if you don’t.)

The author also mentions cutting children off from technology as a sort of conversion-therapy best practice, although the discussion of limiting technology in this case runs aground on the fact that the family already had very strict rules around this. There’s some clear flailing here: The author thinks parents should drastically limit time online, but this particular kid seems to have barely been online at all, so there’s really not much more that can be done.

To be clear: It’s fine for parents to impose boundaries around internet use for their children and teens. Ideally, there will be a gradual loosening of these restrictions as the child grows, alongside the loosening of rules such as strict bedtimes or needing to be supervised by an adult at all times. This gradual loosening is what prepares adolescents for the responsibilities of navigating an adult world without parental rules. However, since the internet doesn’t actually turn children trans, it’s hard for me to get too worked up over this. There’s a lot more that goes in to decisions about screen time than just preventing a kid from finding out trans people exist. Families that take wildly different approaches are all perfectly capable of still raising healthy, well-adjusted kids.

In addition to overt measures to control the child’s peer group both online and off, the anonymous parent goes on to describe a program of conscious manipulation and gaslighting.

Gaslighting is a term that has been used a lot lately, and is as a result often misunderstood. I mean something quite specific here: A gaslighter conceals the motives for their behavior for a purpose. The purpose is that the person being gaslit will believe their gaslighter is behaving normally, but that they, themselves, are going crazy. For example, this is gaslighting:

This parent is constantly reminding their gender nonconforming child of the sex differences between males and females, but without ever saying they suspected their child might be trans or how they felt about the possibility of having a trans kid. The goal is to put the idea “you can never change your gender” in the child’s head, but without admitting the parent believes that or is even thinking about it at all. The child is intended to arrive at a place of transphobia and (if they are trans) internalized self-doubt and self-hatred, while never being able to directly confront or argue with the parent about any of this. This is a very clear and unambiguous use of gaslighting as a psychological manipulation technique.

This behavior is cruel. It’s particularly cruel if the child really is trans (it reads like a recipe for making gender dysphoria worse), but it’s also cruel to every trans person this kid might encounter if they grow up to be a cisgender adult. A child successfully indoctrinated with anti-trans bias this way will grow to fear, hate, and discriminate against trans people all their life. In a climate where violence is growing ever more common on the right, there’s even a chance the child will grow up to participate in acts of violent terror themselves. But throughout that radicalization process this young person won’t even know it wasn’t their own idea. They’re being gaslit by a master manipulator parent, one who refuses to own their beliefs and present them clearly, because they’re too insecure to risk giving the kid an opportunity to object or resist.

All this is very disturbing, but another unsettling thing about this essay is that there’s some excellent parenting advice mixed in. In addition to the harsh conversion practices abive, the author advises cultivating a relationship apart from gender identity, focusing on the child as a whole person, and finding jokes and areas to relate that aren’t emotionally fraught. This is actually INCREDIBLY GOOD ADVICE for parents of teens. Teens crave adult attention and approval. Looking past teen prickliness to find shared interests and praising prosocial behavior, both of which the essay advices parents to do, is a great strategy! It’s honestly not a bad starting place for many parents who feel uncomfortable or skeptical with questions of gender identity, as long as they don’t combine it with removing a child from school over a couple rainbow stickers.

Adolescences is the time when humans explore who we are and how we relate to a complex social world. Trying on different ways of being in the world is what’s normal and healthy in that stage of life, and doing some exploration around gender at a time where questions of gender are so present is a normal, healthy response. Every child who wears pastels, uses rainbow stickers, has gender nonconforming friends, or even tries a new pronoun or a nickname on for size will not go on to medically transition, not because they’ve narrowly escaped a trans cult which is trying to make them trans, but because trying things out is how adolescents figure out what’s right for them.

According to the anonymous Federalist author, their child has gone in a more gender conforming direction after the period of exploration which prompted the piece. This might be because this is a trans child who is closeting themselves after having been isolated from their friends and gaslit by a terrible parent, but they also might have just been a normal cis kid who briefly explored something in a completely healthy way. For my part, I hope the kid is cis, because at least that way the isolation and gaslighting is less likely to have done them any lasting, lifelong harm.