Parenting within the minefield of sex and gender

This piece explores the highly contentious issues that impact parents of gender-distressed children

Parents of gender-distressed children should probably wear chainmail and a hard hat when they go on social media these days. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t, parents often feel caught right in the middle of the fallout between gender-critical voices and trans rights activists. It’s no wonder that some parents end up almost like a mirror image of their child, distrustful of the world around them and almost paranoid about any offers of help.

On one side, trans rights activists attempt to stifle all forms of debate, truly convinced that #NoDebate is the only way to handle people who they believe are fascists and bigots. In this context, parents are bullied mercilessly for asking reasonable and important questions about the long-term health prognosis of medical transition. On the other side, gender-critical voices desperately try to make their points within a cultural context that implies any questioning of the narrative is a nefarious bid from far-right Christian zealots to bring in a fascist regime. The fact that the vast majority of gender-critical people appear to be across the political spectrum and a good deal of them are atheists is blankly rejected and ignored by activists.

Yet both sides almost unite in their dismissive disregard for the plight of the parents. Trans rights activists piously instruct parents to ‘love their children’. By that, they mean that parents should allow their children to lead the way, no matter how young or vulnerable they are. Gender-critical armchair generals take a different position and like to command parents to ‘turn the computer off’ and ‘just say no’ as if such basic measures have not been tried and tested, many times over. 

The viewpoint within families tends to divide into two camps: the affirming and the questioning.  Sometimes the siblings are the affirming and the parents are questioning, other times it’s the opposite way around. When it is the parents who end up divided, it can sound like a death knell on even the most loving of marriages. The fragile young person at the centre typically ends up in a good deal more distress, unsure about who or what to trust. Sadly these kids have also been puffed up by a sense of righteousness, having been told by their online counterparts that they are victims who are being oppressed by the cis-normies all around them. As these are typically very naïve, immature and vulnerable young people, they tend to fully fall for this narrative and believe it is their duty to educate their family about their purported wrong-think. A lot of gender-distressed young people today are neuro-diverse and they aren’t able to manage disagreement very well. They typically feel overwhelmingly frustrated and melt down if their enthusiastic programme to better educate the gender hesitant doesn’t work. Meanwhile, the parents feel terrified as the very professionals, teachers, clinicians and other healthcare workers that they turned to in the hour of their greatest need succeed in creating a chasm of distrust between themselves and their troubled child.

Added to all this, certain tropes are creating further distress as they simplify this complex condition and thereby limit people’s understanding of what’s going on. One unhelpful narrative is the commonality of the parents’ concerns. The motivation to transition can be rooted in wildly different reasons. Not only that but the fears and concerns of the parents of girls can be very different to those of the parents of boys. Ironically enough, there seems to be a typical male manifestation of gender dysphoria and a typical female manifestation.

In the GDSN we first noticed this back in 2020, and we responded by holding different meetings for the parents of boys and the parents of girls. These meetings took on a very different flavour. The parents of girls focused on the complicated relationship entanglements, the heightened arguments, the paralysing atmosphere that demanded parents to walk on eggshells, and the unspeakable fear of testosterone and mastectomies. Meanwhile, the parents of boys focused on the heavy silence, the lack of connection, the closed bedroom door, the guarded nature of their hitherto sweet-natured boy, the fear of sexual deviancy and the devastating consequences of genital surgery.

As the years have gone by, it seems to be accepted that the parents of boys seem to have more difficulty being understood by the wider world than the parents of girls. Essentially, the gender-critical community tends to unhelpfully position the trans-identified girls as victims and the boys as perpetrators. This cruelty upon cruelty has led to a terrible sense of shame among parents of boys who sometimes feel compelled to declare that all their boys are ROGD and none of them have any AGP tendencies whatsoever. Gender-critical voices can stifle the issue by insisting that autogynephiles leap forth only when they are middle-aged, without showing any tendencies before this, and fully obsessed from that point on. Many parents of boys are dismissed as protectors of abusers if they admit any signs of sexual impropriety. To further complicate matters, some parents of boys who are motivated by an erotic impulse to transition join forces with parents of ROGD boys. This is challenging for everyone involved as the parents assume they are all following the same thread to better understand their child, when, in reality, they should be pursuing different threads.

Thankfully recent research on the matter offers some sunlight on this contentious issue. We can be informed by Lisa Littman’s 2021 study that suggests that boys are three times more likely than girls to have an erotic impulse propelling their urge to transition. While this is informative, it must also be noted that the female sex drive is very different to the male sex drive and an erotic impulse within the female is not always very clear-cut. The male sex impulse is typically target-driven. The female sex impulse is a much more full-body experience, and so they could be just as determined to transition but the underlying erotic impulse is perhaps not obvious.

Another layer of complexity is the 23% of respondents in Littman’s study who believed that “homophobia or difficulty accepting themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual” was a reason for transition and subsequent detransition. This aligns with my clinical work in this area as many young people appear to be suppressing their sexual impulses with a superimposed gender identity, and so their motivation to transition is rooted in a suppression rather than an expression of their sexual drive.

Nonetheless, if we are to properly understand the complexities of gender dysphoria, we need to confront the fact that, according to Littman’s 2021 study of 100 detransitioners, 38.7% of boys and 13% of females report an erotic impulse to transition. The ominous and controversial spectre of autogynephilia (AGP) and autoandrophilia is raised within these figures but, despite the censorship, the only way through is civilised discussion. It is notable that the motivations of the different groups who are trying to suppress all discussion about the erotic impulse to medically transition are starkly different. Nonetheless, the level of suppression about these conditions is phenomenal and many groups are prepared to bully and lie about anyone in order to silence the people who choose to speak out about these issues. Consequently, in some ways, the quality of reliable information appears to be growing worse rather than getting better.

Probably the most virulent of these groups are the trans rights activists who are sharply motivated to disentangle any sexual impulse from gender identity. Autogynephile transwomen are also often over-invested in suppressing any knowledge about autogynephilia as it pretty much ruins their illusion. However many women’s groups and gender-critical voices appear to be equally compelled to silence any discussion about autogynephilia or autoandrophilia as they believe that discussion will inevitably lead to normalisation of sexual deviancy. Parents also seek to suppress discussion about sexual links to gender distress, perhaps because they feel frightened and disturbed by any signs of sexually inappropriate behaviour coming from their children. Some parents respond by insisting that all trans-identified young people are ROGD and dismiss the research that suggests that, statistically speaking, at least some of them are bound to have an erotic component driving their sense of gender identity. Clinicians working in the field tend to agree that sex can play a part, that porn can be deeply destructive, and that exact links are difficult to establish within the chicken-and-egg conundrum of the sexual development of the human. In my view, ROGD remains the most common issue for parents to tackle and we need a lot more discussion to figure out the links with sex.

Some boys appear to present as both ROGD and AGP. Others report acquiring maladaptive coping behaviour after a difficult break-up and they fall into imitating the look of their ex-girlfriend. Others appear to turn towards medical transition as they are disgusted by sex and horrified by their sex drive. Some feel alienated from their sex when they realise they are cast in the role of the male oppressor by society and they respond by seeking to escape. These boys can be very sweet-natured and are averse to what they see as the aggression involved in a sexual encounter. Another issue, as Blanchard and Bailey pointed out (on the brilliant 4thWaveNow website) is that autogynephilic cross-sex identity disorder also presents as ‘rapid onset’:

From a parent’s perspective, autogynephilic gender dysphoria (which occurs only in natal males) often seems to come out of the blue. This is likely to be true whether the onset is during adolescence or adulthood. A teenage boy may suddenly announce that he is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body, or that he is transgender, or that he wants gender transition.

Clinical work suggests that some trans-identified males are a combination of ROGD and AGP, some are only AGP, and some are only ROGD. Nonetheless, the vast majority of their parents are devastated and in need of support.

There is also the misjudged tendency for people to presume that AGP males don’t regret their transition and so they should medicalise. This is questionable on many levels; the ‘lost to follow-up’ rates are so high in these studies, as are the high levels of post-transition suicide (e.g. the Dhejne et al. study that shows over 19% rate of suicide among people who have medically transitioned compared to the general population), that no serious person can offer statistics as some sort of proof that medical transition is a panacea. Added to that, the difficulties family, friends and society can have about a person ‘lying with their body’, pointed out recently by the comedian Dave Chappelle, lifts the point that there are many other considerations that need to be evaluated if we are to fully assess the merits of medical transition.

It’s easy to forget that in between all the political arguments and the point-scoring, devastated parents and distressed children are desperately trying to keep their heads above water. Both gender-distressed girls and boys may treat their loved ones extremely badly and this is difficult to handle as these kids are often extremely vulnerable too. One thing is sure, as awareness continues to expand, it is imperative to allow people to continuously question and explore the many related issues. Suppression of debate doesn’t help the afflicted, it just allows everyone else to avoid the difficult issues.

Photo by Gwengoat on iStockPhoto.