The 5 ROGD Parent Reaction Archetypes

The Avoider, The Pacifier, The Staller, The SWAT Team, and The Loving Authority

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When a child suddenly announces they’re trans, parents are often stunned. And how they react in the short- and long-term will play a role in shaping outcomes for the family. Since 2016, I’ve worked with over 900 ROGD families—and I’ve noticed that parents fall into a few distinct reaction styles. Today I’ll share those with you and explain which parenting style is correlated with greater stability in relationships, improved critical thinking, and in some cases may even lead to desistance or detransition.

The following archetypes apply most closely in situations where the teen still lives at home when parents learn of their identity-questioning. Additionally, these archetypes are not meant to disparage parents or to minimize the role of other factors in the child’s life - neurodivergence, unhelpful influences, the spouse or ex’s influence, past traumas, the child’s personality, or other vulnerabilities outside of one parent’s control. These archetypes are meant to help parents recognize these reasonable and natural responses in themselves and to understand how family dynamics may interact with a teen’s identity struggle.

What is ROGD?

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is the social and cultural phenomenon of adolescents with no history of gender-identity confusion in childhood announcing or adopting a transgender identity. While this is not a formal diagnosis, this descriptive term has been corroborated by observations from thousands of parents, teachers and schools, therapists, and physicians throughout the world, especially in the West.

Because this identity declaration often takes parents by complete surprise, they usually feel stunned and unsure how to respond. “Being transgender” doesn’t reflect what parents know about their child and parents also worry that precipitating events like a friend “coming out”, a period of depression and isolation, other mental health conditions, or a traumatic event may be contributing to their child’s distress. However, even in the context of a loving, warm family, the parents’ concerns are often dismissed and belittled by other adults and authorities in the child’s life. Young people are encouraged to change their name, change their identity, change their pronouns, and even seek medical interventions against parental wishes. Sometimes secrets are kept from parents and mothers and fathers are explicitly challenged, criticized, or undermined by professionals in front of their teen.

Due to the sheer absurdity and complexity of the situation, as well as some pre-existing relationship dynamics, parents can become unmoored and lost.

Here are the ROGD parenting styles that emerge.

The Avoider

Maybe this will simply go away if you don’t talk about it! As an Avoider, you feel completely out of your depth, so you avoid the topic of gender altogether. Perhaps you also played it cool at the beginning, thinking this was just another one of your kids’ obsessions that would pass on it’s own. Maybe looking into all of this - the push to affirm from gender clinics, the lack of evidence, and the detransition stories made you feel completely overwhelmed and scared. So you stopped reading and decided to focus your efforts on other things. Your plan was to wait it out.

You’ve only had a few tense discussions with your child early on, and truly dread the next one. You set a firm boundary when your kid asked for hormones, and she seems to have accepted that you won’t support medicalization, but you’re at an impasse. You really have no idea what your child thinks or feels and it’s too scary to ask. But now you’re many months (or years) into this, and distraction and avoidance hasn’t really worked. While you haven’t been in a high state of conflict all this time, your child also hasn’t gotten much happier and your relationship feels somewhat strained and incomplete.

Your son likely feels invisible, dismissed or like his difficulties are a burden - he can see how uncomfortable all of this makes you. Whether he realizes it or not, your child could desperately use your love and guidance with his identity distress. But instead, he’ll have to rely on trans-identified friends or the internet to help him sort this out, because clearly Dad and Mom don’t want to deal with it. Maybe he’ll just keep quiet about all of this until he goes off to college.

The Pacifier

You’re terrified that your child and your relationship are too fragile to withstand conflict. Perhaps your teen has recently had a legitimate mental health crisis, is perceived as medically fragile due to other chronic health conditions, or maybe you’re just a seasoned conflict-avoider. Either way, a dynamic has been created in which your child has a great deal of power to control your parenting decisions because you are afraid of her big emotions. You were likely pressured into affirming your child’s new identity (against your own instincts) by providers or authority figures entrusted with her care. But each time you met your child’s demands for the new name, pronouns or social transition, the needle just moved further towards medicalization. Despite your best efforts to go with the affirmation program (while feeling fake on the inside), you just can’t satisfy your child’s escalating gender identity needs. You began looking at other perspectives, the lack of quality data, and you found detransition stories. As a Pacifier, you may have a “PhD in gender,” but still feel you’re at a dead end with nowhere to go because you don’t know how to address this directly with your kid.

Your child, despite projecting a stubborn confidence, is actually in free-fall. Regardless of what they claim they want, teens don’t do well when they’re completely in charge, especially not during a mental health or identity crisis. In fact, she might even flip-flop at times, but you’ve just tried to reassure her and give her even more choice and control. Letting her lead the way has confused everyone in this process. So to help your child feel safe, protected and secure, you can no longer parent from a place of terror, fear and capitulation.

The Staller

You just need more time. You want to slow your child down, but you find yourself in an escalating cycle: there are moments of relative stability, punctuated by your child’s distress or anger, and re-emergence of gender demands. Your child complains that you’re not doing the pronouns right. You didn’t let them take puberty blockers. You won’t give them the hormones they “need.” So you ask your child for even more time. This is a never-ending negotiation, and it’s exhausting.

In the past, you might have tried to use the pronouns, always receiving the death-stare whenever you “messed up” and you’ve since migrated to the pronoun ninja stage — no pronouns, no problem…for now. When pressed by your child you might have said, “I’m not there yet, this is hard for me.” The Staller often struggles with managing his or her own emotions, becoming extremely tearful or angry. Conversations about gender always lead to hurt feelings, on all sides.

Your child has learned this is a game of stamina. Maybe my parents will believe I’m really trans if I can prove it to them by hanging in for the long-run. After all, my parents said they aren’t ready to get on board… yet.

The SWAT Team

You are a natural problem-solver who orients towards solutions. You want to nip this in the bud ASAP, so you’re working through a checklist of strategies you learned from detox manuals and ROGD parent groups: get rid of the phones, no YouTube, web filters for all-things-trans, forbid the LGBTQ club during lunch at school, have a meeting with the principle, fire the affirming therapist, get a new pediatrician. You’re also filling your child’s schedule with other engaging activities and keeping her busy. Out of sight, out of mind right?

When you’ve talked to your child you were crystal clear “You’re a girl. This gender thing is not happening. End of story.” Maybe there was a bit more engagement. You showed her a detransition documentary and made her read articles about medical risks. You might have gotten into debates, trying to appeal to her rational side. “Look at these pictures of your 5th birthday, you loved wearing dresses!” “How could you know what it feels like to be a boy? You’re NOT a boy!”

The SWAT team parent is a highly competent and resourceful individual who knows how to make things happen at work and in life. These same behaviors should work here too, right? You tried to get control of the situation, but now your child’s identity exploration has become the forbidden fruit. You found a trans flag tucked into her sock drawer, you discovered she’s confessed her identity to a sympathetic school counselor, and this trans thing has gone underground. The trust has been shattered and your child is now angry, isolated, and gender is her rebellion.

The Loving Authority

You have all the same emotions as the other parents here: the fear, the anger, the anxiety, the heartbreak, the confusion, the desire to take control. But you’ve also figured out a few important things:

1. Nobody is coming to save you (or your child).

2. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

So, once you got your bearings, you started gathering information, learning about gender identity distress and the scandalous aspects of “gender affirming care". This research helped you get crystal clear on what you actually believe about gender, trans identity, and transition. However, sometimes what you learned was deeply troubling and overwhelming. When you noticed that your ROGD research began interfering with your ability to engage your child effectively, you shifted your focus away from ROGD parent groups, political issues, and detransition horror stories.

Managing your own emotions has been a deeply valuable exercise. Maybe with the help of a parent coach or trusted therapist, you’ve learned how to process your own experience so you can show up as a calm, warm, and assertive parent. Rather than being reactive (only responding to your child’s demands or gender complaints), you started being proactive by initiating discussions, listening respectfully to your child’s experiences, and sharing some of your own beliefs and concerns. You speak from the heart and offer your observations about underlying emotional needs or problems your kid may be trying to solve through their identity. You value these conversations and know you shouldn’t outsource these rich discussions to the therapist.

You’ve made some careful and deliberate decisions about schools, providers, and internet access. You explained to your teen what your expectations are and “the why” behind them. And you weathered the storm if your rules upset her. You have practiced speaking authentically, in your own voice, and this has broken the tension from your previous attempts to debate or rationalize your child out of her feelings. When you see your teen behaving in self-destructive ways, you address it directly with warmth and structure. And on the other hand, you pick your battles and remain flexible about things like self-expression, clothing, and hairstyles. You’re learning to do a skillful dance between guiding your teen and letting him develop independence.

Your child might have reacted very strongly when you first began to set boundaries. But over time, as you’ve remained consistent and warm, you’ve seen him soften and return to moments of “being himself.” You’ve invested a great deal of energy into improving your relationship, and it’s paying off. Your child may or may not be “out of the woods,” but by using principles in your parenting, you’ve gotten much closer, his mental health has improved, and you can talk about difficult topics in a more productive way. This whole experience, although certainly traumatic for you, has also made you a stronger version of yourself and a more attuned parent.

The Takeaway

You may see a bit of yourself in all of these styles. Remember that relationships are a two way street, with your child’s behavior bringing out different aspects of you, and vice versa. In different contexts, you also may lean more towards one style or another. Most parents would benefit from adopting The Loving Authority’s stance.

If you see yourself in one of these styles and want to become more of a Loving Authority, I can help. Schedule a 1:1 consultation, join parent membership group, or attend our in-person parent retreat in Texas in November.

Tell me in the comments…

What type of ROGD parent are you?

What would you need in order to show up as a Loving Authority for your child? What gets in your way?

When do you feel most calm and confident, as a parent?

If you have an older child who is making decisions you don’t agree with, how can you take on the role of a Loving Consultancy at this stage?