Parents and caregivers of gender diverse youth talk about their challenges
A brand new article is UP in online preview in the Journal of Family Issues!
Katz-Wise, S. L., Galman, S. C., Friedman, L. E., & Kidd, K. M. (2021). Parent/caregiver narratives of challenges in raising transgender and/or nonbinary youth. Journal of Family Issues. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X21104448
You can find it here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0192513X211044484
It is often difficult–even taboo– for parents and caregivers to talk about the challenges of caring for a gender diverse child. Families need a space to talk about those feelings without guilt or shame, and our understanding of difficulty is an essential part of finding new and better ways to support gender diverse children and their families.
A brief excerpt (page 3):
“The length of time needed to be fully supportive and affirming of TNB
youth may be related to the parents/caregivers’ own experiences with discrimination.
Some researchers have described an experience of “secondary
stigma” among parents of TNB youth, particularly among mothers who feel
blame for their child’s gender identity (Johnson & Benson, 2014). Parents/
caregivers of TNB youth may also experience minority stress as proxies for
their children by encountering stresses in alignment with those experienced by
many TNB individuals (Hidalgo & Chen, 2019). This stress can take many
forms including discrimination from peers and society, rejection by family and
friends, and feeling hypervigilance is necessary to shield one’s child.
More recent work has emphasized that all family members are impacted by a
TNB youth’s gender transition (Katz-Wise, Budge, Fugate, et al., 2017) and this
experience is not a uniform progression fromone stage to the next, but highly varied
between and within families. A number of studies have found parents/caregivers
often disagree about how to best care for their TNB youth (Bhattacharya, Budge,
Pantalone,&Katz-Wise, 2020; Pullen Sansfaçon, Robichaud,&Dumais-Michaud,
2015), which can become a barrier to supporting and affirming the TNB youth’s
gender identity. In a qualitative study of mothers of TNB youth, conflict between
parents often led to heated custody battles in family court (Kuvalanka, Bellis,
Goldberg, et al., 2019). Mothers in that study sensed courtrooms were biased
against them for being supportive and felt pressured to be less supportive in order to
maintain custody (Kuvalanka et al., 2019).
Families also face discrimination in community and school settings, as well
as with extended family and medical providers (Birnkrant & Przeworski, 2017;
Kuvalanka et al., 2014; Pullen Sansfaçon et al., 2015; Riggs & Bartholomaeus,
2018). This “secondary stress” and hypervigilance can translate to higher rates
of anxiety for parents/caregivers, which has been associated with mental health
concerns for their children (Kuvalanka,Weiner,Munroe, et al., 2017). There is a
paucity of literature on the experiences of parents/caregivers of TNB youth.
Given the well-documented association between parent/caregiver support and
reduction of mental health disparities in TNB youth, further research is necessary
to inform how to best support this population. The aim of this study was
to explore attitudes and challenges faced by parents/caregivers of TNB youth.”
