Dangerous Love: On Anti-Trans Parents

Far more dangerous and destructive than detransition activists are anti-trans activist parents whose refusal to accept their children is correlated with the worst outcomes imaginable.

by Evan Urquhart

It’s always been important to me to try to reach out to the parents of trans youth, as someone who is trans myself, and as someone who has served as a foster parent to gender nonconforming, and transgender youth in the foster system. My belief is that almost all children are better of in their own families, and that’s true even when those families struggle to affirm or understand them. Most parents want to do what’s right. For cisgender parents whose media diets have been influenced by anti-trans propaganda, what they believe is right may be misguided, but it also may have been arrived at honestly, while making every attempt to grapple with the evidence.

That’s why it’s so hard for me to talk about one particularly dangerous segment of anti-trans activists, one example of whom guest-starred in a New York Post article by Kirsten Fleming yesterday.

The Post article is a tough read, and our screenshots won’t show the worst of it. It consistently misgenders a young transgender girl, as well as sharing a pre-transition picture and deadnaming Elon Musk’s trans daughter, Vivian.

Throughout the Post’s piece, a version of events told by this rabidly anti-trans mother (referred to pseudonymously as Josie), is given without any hint that there might be another, perhaps truer version of the story if the daughter was consulted. Still, there are some hints that the girl would tell a drastically different story.

It is extremely rare for an 18-year-old to completely cut off their parents. Even for trans youth with non-affirming parents, the difficulties and dangers of living alone at such an early age, especially as a trans young woman without support, is daunting. Trans youth are more likely than other youth to be homeless, and more likely to rely on sex work for survival. Although suicide is often mentioned in this context, far more young trans people experience poverty, unemployment, sexual assault, and violence due to familial rejection than ever die of suicide.

Most young trans people do the best they can with the parents the universe has given them. But this particular young trans woman’s parent is an extreme anti-trans activist, a fact the article shares proudly.

The article doesn’t clearly state that “Josie” began her activism even before her daughter left home and ceased all contact, but it seems likely that living with a parent whose views were so extreme contributed. These sorts of anti-trans parent groups are notorious in the trans community for hosting open conversations about abusive practices such as cutting off all contact with peers, removing children from home, forcibly cutting their hair, etc, to prevent their children from transitioning. It has been suggested that the “detransitioned” children these groups then surface may well be the result of these abusive practices.

Most parents do their best, and most children are better off with parents who do, even when those parents aren’t always perfect. But some parents are so obsessed with their own image, and the image they’ve created in their mind of who they think their child ought to be, that they knowingly or unknowingly perpetrate great harm, destroy their own families, and increase the risk of negative life outcomes for their adult children precipitously.