Affirming Trans Identities Does Not (Necessarily) Prevent Estrangement

Why the “gender leap of faith” is no guarantee of connection

Jean-Marie Gitard

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“We affirmed our kid’s trans identity because we thought it was just a phase.”

“We went along with the names and pronouns because we wanted our child to feel supported.”

“We agreed to the social transition because we were scared that she’d harm herself or shut us out.”

These are just some of the reasons parents have shared with me for going along with their child’s trans identity. Even when parents want to hold the line at medical interventions, they often believe that affirming social changes is largely inconsequential. In fact, many organizations, therapists, and institutions encourage parental affirmation as the only choice to preserve the well-being of the child.

Leading LGBT nonprofits, like The Trevor Project, unequivocally recommend affirmation. On their website, they describe the results of a poll administered to adults:

“Most adults would be willing to take all actions tested to support their child if they came out as transgender or nonbinary, including: encouraging other family members or friends to respect their gender identity (71%); use their chosen name and pronouns correctly (69%); and not vote for political candidates that support anti-transgender policies (65%)”

The Trevor Project implies that “support” for your gender-questioning child means taking the lead in advocating (maybe even more enthusiastically than your child is) for the use of new pronouns, policing your family’s language, and even crossing off your favorite political candidates if they have the wrong views on legal and policy issues.

With messaging like this, it’s no surprise that today’s conventional wisdom on gender identity and family relationships reads something like:

If your kid comes out as trans and you don’t affirm their gender identity, you’re at risk of becoming estranged.

In fact, preventing permanent damage to the relationship is one of the most common reasons given by parents who started out by affirming.

Many families, in moments of desperation or vulnerability, follow this script to a T. But if perfect affirmation supposedly creates a perfect shield against mental health deterioration or relationship tensions, what happens when parents take that gender leap of faith and everything falls apart anyway?

Under the logic of this dogmatic approach, it simply means the parents must have failed to affirm sufficiently, emphatically, or completely. The implication is that they just didn’t believe hard enough in their child’s gender identity, so the erosion of the bond was inevitable.

But is it true that affirming gender necessarily keeps relationships intact?

Many people believe so, but I don’t. And I want to tell you a story to illustrate why.

In May, I co-facilitated a retreat over Mother’s Day weekend for mothers and grandmothers (and their partners) who are estranged from their adult children.

Before the event, I had looked through the registration list of attendees, seeing if any familiar names popped up. I only spotted a few mothers and fathers whom I had met through my consulting work, parent membership group, or retreats. I foolishly assumed these would be the only “gender parents” there—or at least, the only gender parents who sought providers that go beyond the superficial affirmation script.

Since I expected that most attendees had no idea who I was or what I was doing there as a facilitator, I introduced myself and my gender work in my first talk. Ahead of the event, the organizer had also generously purchased a copy of my book for each attendee. Honestly, I felt some guilt about this; that she’d spent so much money and more than 100 people would get a book for which they had no need and that they would find irrelevant.

So what I encountered over the next few days truly surprised me.

Almost immediately, a steady trickle of people kept coming up to me in the hallways, saying how glad they were that I was there and thanking me for my work around gender. One of the volunteers privately shared with me that she herself has a trans-identified kid, and she knew of many other estranged parents in the room who also have trans sons and daughters.

The manner in which these parents talked about their children was a little different from the families who contact me independently. In deep earnestness, they used their child’s preferred pronouns flawlessly. They proudly told me they were 100% supportive of their trans child. They had completely adhered to the affirmation playbook.

And yet, here they were: estranged! According to gender affirmation dogmatists, this should be an absolute anomaly, but lo and behold: the affirming parents also got cut off by their kids!

Why?

To understand what may be happening here, we have to get away from a flat unidimensional perspective. Because, it really depends how you look at it. Like in this classic illusion, the image stays exactly the same, but the picture looks very different when you recognize the secondary interpretation.

Duck-Rabbit Illusion

In all family dynamics with adolescents and young adults, there are two layers of activity happening simultaneously:

• The Content Layer: This is the level of details and the presenting story. It’s the obvious, surface-level situation: My child identifies as trans, and I either do or don’t affirm them. My child is using new pronouns, and I either do or don’t use them.

• The Relational Layer: This is the deeper dimension, in which adolescents are working through a psychological process, some of which is about the attachment to their parents. Here they are navigating developmental tasks: individuation, differentiation, seeking autonomy. They are attempting to balance closeness with branching out.

To properly appreciate and work at this deeper layer, specific content about gender matters far less than what is actually taking place in the relationship between parent and child.

When parents (or clinicians) get trapped entirely on the content layer, they miss opportunities to strengthen the relationship with the trans-identified child and to promote the young person’s growth. This blind spot manifests through two different mechanisms that both fixate heavily on the surface content. On one side, when parents emphatically affirm the identity, they will often bend over backward to accommodate every social transition demand. They operate under the illusion that checking the Trevor Project’s boxes will protect the relationship and connection. Conversely, some parents are solely focused on encouraging desistance. These parents are so consumed by reducing their child’s gender ideation or halting a social transition that they resort to rigid, oppositional means—arguing the science, contesting the logic, and micromanaging clothing or haircuts.

Both approaches treat an important developmental crossroads as simply a matter of aesthetics, labels, and outward appearances. By investing all their energy into the exterior presentation of the child and her social context, both approaches incorrectly work from the outside in. Hoping that managing the exterior will somehow change the interior, parents fixated on either “affirming” or “non-affirming” dynamics miss the plot. When both dutifully affirming parents and skeptical resistant parents end up getting cut off, it becomes clear that the gender material itself is a smokescreen. The real transformation is found by working within the relational layer instead. We’ll address how to do this shortly, but first let’s explore why so many parents get trapped, spinning their wheels in the content layer.

It can be hard to remain in the relational layer when the content layer of gender is so jarring, prominent, and at times, even absurd.

Material claims that one is “trapped in the wrong body” or confident assertions that feelings of discomfort or alienation are sure-fire proof of being a different gender- these statements are hard to swallow. The child’s “coming out” declaration feels like a rigid, black-and-white litmus test about factual reality: Do you believe my gender identity is real, or don't you?

A mother who reads my Substack recently captured this perfectly in a comment:

“What do the ultimate demands upon the parent mean? Are they supposed to order or erase the parent, by requiring an unreasonable fidelity to the new identity? Are they a challenge? Is it forcing an impossibility? Either you make yourself insubstantial and lacking integrity by taking on any identity ordered to you, or you prove your lack of fidelity to your child by refusing? Are we supposed to fail?”

This framing is deeply understandable on the content layer. It is a true double-bind: if you refuse to validate the new gender identity, you “fail” your child’s loyalty test. But if you comply entirely, you make yourself “insubstantial,” erasing your own reality and integrity just to keep the peace.

But it’s easy to forget the actual goal of development at the young adult stage. Moving from adolescence into young adulthood does not require a young person to feel constantly secure in a parent’s perfect acceptance, validation, and agreement with every new self-exploration. In fact, true maturation requires the exact opposite. Growth happens when a young person learns to recognize that their parents may not always approve of each whim, interest, or pursuit—and learns to tolerate that existential tension.

Beneath the surface demands of the gender litmus test, the young adult is putting forward an intense crisis of self-definition. Because if a young person is making life-altering choices either to blindly please their parents or to rebel directly against them, they have not sufficiently individuated. They are still entirely controlled by the parent’s reaction.

The mother’s true job is not to pass an ideological litmus test or provide an echo chamber of total agreement. The parent’s job is to hold unwavering love for her young adult child while speaking honestly, and remaining grounded in her own reality. The mother has the capacity to hold the line and say, “I love you, but this is a step I do not think is good for you.”

Some parents may choose to make compromises, creatively negotiating various aspects of their child’s requests. However, making thoughtful, deliberate and conscious choices about how and where to make concessions is quite different from capitulating because one fears their child’s reaction. It’s only when the parent can remain a distinct individual that the child might begin to authentically weigh their own choices, decisions, and their consequences.

On the relational layer, parents must engage in a delicate and subtle dance. But instead, many skeptical parents are engaged in a tug of war. Parents pull forcefully on one side of the rope: they emphasize worry, caution, logic, and health risks. Here, they inadvertently force their child to pull in the exact opposite direction: they adamantly strive to the next transition step, acting reckless and defensive. When parents hold only skepticism and doubt, the child matches them with certainty and confidence. Sometimes young people even plow forward with transition, refusing to consider the downsides, simply to prove their parents wrong.

This is why pushing parents towards political activism or dogmatic worldviews (on either side) can often be counterproductive and damaging to the attachment-individuation process taking place in the family. Stepping out of the ideological or political frameworks allows parents to stop fighting the content war. When you refuse to become overly rigid, it helps you create more room for your adult child to experience their own internal ambivalence. If you aren’t showing up as purely a wall of opposition, your adolescent may not have to spend all their energy pushing against you. This softer dynamic may help them grapple with the weight of their own choices.

Our culture—especially in the digital age—is obsessed with tidy formulas and blanket recommendations. But in my clinical experience, real families actually tell a different story: across the country, there are gender-skeptical parents who maintain exceptionally devoted and strong relationships with their adult children. And there are entirely affirming parents who have been left to grieve the absence of their estranged trans child.

The point here is that there are no formulas. If we stay hyper-focused on the content layer, we will completely miss the dynamic relationship story unfolding at the deeper level.

Moving through strategic checklists cannot grant a parent immunity from the difficult and painful aspects of their adolescent’s individuation. As a parent, you won’t be able to control the situation by either capitulating to fear or micro-managing your child’s exterior presentation. Instead, you have to love your child while remaining connected to your understanding of reality. This gentle dynamic can be difficult to learn, but you don’t have to figure it out alone:

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