Affirmation Is Not A Tactic

Selling comfort to estranged parents at their children's expense

There’s a piece circulating at the moment, written by a counsellor writing for Genspect, about parents who are estranged from their adult trans children. The argument is that parents are so frightened of losing their children that they affirm everything, and that affirmation turns out not to protect them because some of the most affirming parents end up estranged anyway. So parents should just say the things they’ve been holding back, while they still have the chance. Those things being their transphobic fears and judgements.

I am not minimising the grief and concern that parents can feel when they are confronted with changes they may not have expected, but to centre the parents means you are de-centering the child.

Underneath exploring whether affirmation works or not is the idea that using your child’s chosen name and pronouns is something you do because you’re expecting something back for it.

When your kid tells you their name/pronouns and you use it, you’re just calling them the right thing, it doesn’t stop being the right thing to do if the relationship falls apart five years later.

The second you're weighing up whether affirmation works or not, your kid's reality has conditions attached to it, and you're the one setting them.

This Isn’t Failed Affirmation

The article focuses on one family in particular, describing that their adult child came out and they affirmed them. They used their name and pronouns from day one, they backed both social and medical transition, supported them with the extended family, and eventually they packed up and moved cities so they could stay close. Then eventually the calls stopped getting answered and they worked out they’d been blocked.

The article misses that the parents were sitting on things that they kept quiet, held bits of themselves back, and told themselves there’d be a better moment later to raise what they were carrying and they did that for years.

This was not affirmation, it was just compliance with a quiet and private concern they chose to keep hidden. They performed acceptance because they were scared of the alternative, and adult children pick up on that. If you’ve ever been the person someone was tiptoeing around, you’ll know the feeling that there is something in the room that isn’t being said and you know that you are the reason.

The article isn’t evidence that affirmation failed, it’s evidence that hidden non-affirmation failed. That’s a very different claim.

Internalised Transphobia

If you’re using your child’s chosen pronouns while privately you are unconvinced that they are who they say they are, and you’re doing it because you’re scared of losing them rather than because you believe them, then what you’re carrying is transphobia.

It’s a quiet kind of transphobia that lives between what you’re doing and what you think, and it’s extremely common, because most of us were raised in a culture that taught us that it was the standard.

This isn’t about shaming anyone because honestly, the parents who notice it in themselves are usually the ones doing the most serious work. Naming it for what it is matters because you can’t process something you refuse to name, and “concerns” is not its name, transphobia is.

The Genspect article says that the conflict inside the parents is the child’s problem to solve, but it is never the childs job to sit through the parents process, answer for it, or reassure them out of it.

The article’s advice is to take what is unresolved in you and voice it at your child before you run out of time, which makes your child the site where you work through your own discomfort about their existence. That’s just outsourcing your own transphobia onto the person with the least power in the room and the one with the most to lose.

The work is the parents, to do with a therapist who isn’t going to validate the discomfort as insight or evidence that your child is doing something wrong.

• Connect with other parents who are further down the road than you, which is exactly what the peer support organisations at the end of this article exist for.

• Listen to other trans people when they write about their own lives rather than reading organisations that write about trans people.

• Reflect in your journal at two in the morning.

• Process this anywhere except across the kitchen table from your child.

Unprocessed transphobia is going to leak out and harm your child. That’s the actual lesson buried in the case study; the parents who thought they were affirming while holding something back, were actually harming their child who could feel the unspoken judgement.

The choice was never between speaking and staying silent, it was between doing the work and making your child live alongside the work you didn’t do.

Silencing Trans People

Every fact in that article comes from a parent with no indication that the adult child was ever interviewed, and no acknowledgement that their version of the story might differ.

In a 2015 study, researchers asked 898 people, estranged parents and estranged adult children to explain in their own words why the relationship had ended.

If you ask a parent, you tend to hear about the child and who they’ve fallen in with or how entitled they’ve become. Ask the adult child and you hear about the parent, or about a long stretch of not feeling supported or accepted by them. Parents were significantly more likely than their children to admit that they didn’t know what went wrong.

An Australian researcher, Kylie Agllias, has spent years on this and she’s talked to both sides. When she sat down with estranged parents, a lot of them explained it the same way, that my kid just can’t handle anyone thinking differently to them.

Then she talked to the adult children and almost none of them had walked away lightly, explaining that cutting contact came last, after a long time thinking about it and after they had tried nearly everything else first.

Lucy Blake went through the whole field of research a few years later and found the same split running through all of it.

Parents saying their child cut off contact “seemingly out of nowhere” isn’t a neutral description of events. It’s the most characteristic thing estranged parents say, and the research consistently finds their children describing years of accumulation behind the same rupture.

When a parent says there was no warning and the adult child says there were years of warnings, the question is what made those warning signals are to see, not what else the parent could have said on the way out.

An article about why estrangement happens that contains no data from the people who initiated it isn’t a clinical observation, it’s a one-sided bias conclusion to support their own transphobia.

The Research Says Something Different

The author only works with estranged parents, so parents who affirmed their children and stayed close never walk into that office, because they have no reason to.

So “some of the most affirmative parents still end up estranged” is true and yet tells you nothing. It’s the same as noticing that some people who wear seatbelts still die in car accidents, and then writing a column advising people to reconsider seatbelts.

The biggest study we’ve had here is Trans Pathways, out of Perth in 2017. They surveyed 859 trans young people and 194 parents, and the numbers are hard to look at. Three in four had dealt with anxiety or depression, close to 80 per cent had self-harmed and just under half had attempted suicide.

Nobody treats those numbers as something inherent to being trans, they’re what happens to kids who aren’t safe.

The Canadian work by Travers and colleagues found that trans young people with strong parental support did dramatically better across the board, and that’s now settled enough that Australian researchers like Helen Morgan and her team don’t set out to prove it anymore. They start from it, and ask the more useful question of what actually helps a parent get there.

Then there’s Writing Themselves In 4, La Trobe’s survey of 6,418 young people aged 14 to 21. Among the trans and gender diverse participants, over 90 per cent were in high or very high psychological distress.

When researchers went back into that data to look at affirmation specifically, the young people who’d been able to affirm their gender legally and medically reported less anxiety and less distress, and legal affirmation was linked to lower suicidal ideation. In most of this country, a young person can’t legally affirm their gender without their parents, which means it’s partly measuring whether the family came along also.

Internationally the picture is the same.

• Caitlin Ryan’s Family Acceptance Project established the link between family rejection and suicide attempts.

• Stephen Russell’s team found that using a persons chosen name across more contexts predicted lower depressive symptoms and reduced suicidal ideation.

• Kristina Olson’s work found that socially supported trans children showed depression rates in line with their peers.

None of this proves that affirming your child guarantees that you keep them, because nothing guarantees that you keep an adult child, which is a hard fact about parenting adults generally.

What it does establish is that acceptance and true affirmation is one of the most consistently replicated protective factors, and that a counsellor writing to an audience of frightened parents has an ethical obligation to say so.

Genspect

“Say the things you may one day regret leaving unsaid” is unarguable as a general principle. She's right that silence costs you something, and she's right that a managed relationship isn't a close one, but look at where the article was published and what the unsaid things are understood to be.

In Genspect’s context, the things you’re being encouraged to voice are doubts about your child’s identity and their healthcare. It takes a political instruction and labels it therapeutic truth. Nobody can object to honesty in families but the objection is to what’s being smuggled in under it.

There’s also the question of regret - “What if I had only said” tells you that someone is in pain and searching for something they might have controlled. Treating that as a transferable lesson for other parents converts a normal part of grief into advice, and it just so happens to be advice that serves the publication’s anti-trans position.

An adult trans person choosing to end contact with their family is not what coercion looks like. Coercive control has recognisable elements like an identifiable authority, restriction of information and movement, isolation engineered by someone else, escalating costs for leaving.

What this article describes is an adult making a decision about their own life after a long period of not being heard, which is the opposite of having your agency removed.

What I’d Actually Tell A Frightened Parent

Honest disclosure is telling your child that you’re frightened, that you’re grieving a version of the future you’d imagined, and that you don’t understand something that you want to. That’s you speaking about your own experience, while not judging your child’s identity. Then do your own work to process your fears and internalised transphobia without putting the responsibility to educated you on your child.

If you’re an Australian parent reading this while frightened, please know there are people who will sit with you in that fear without asking you to trade your child for it.

• Transcend Australia has been doing parent-led peer support since 2012 and works nationally.

• Parents of Gender Diverse Children runs support across the states.

• Transforming Families brings research and community work together specifically for parents.

• TransHub, run by ACON, is a great resource for trans people and the people who love them.

• QLife is on 1800 184 527 if you need to talk today.

• Equality Australia and Minus18 are worth knowing about too.

Your child isn’t broken and needing you to fix them, they’re a person who told you something true about themselves and is waiting to see what you do with it.

References

Agllias, K. (2015). Difference, choice, and punishment: Parental beliefs and understandings about adult child estrangement. Australian Social Work, 68(1), 115–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/0312407X.2014.927897

Agllias, K. (2016). Disconnection and decision-making: Adult children explain their reasons for estranging from parents. Australian Social Work, 69(1), 92–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/0312407X.2015.1004355

Agllias, K. (2016). Family estrangement: A matter of perspective. Routledge.

Blake, L. (2017). Parents and children who are estranged in adulthood: A review and discussion of the literature. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12216

Carr, K., Holman, A., Abetz, J., Koenig Kellas, J., & Vagnoni, E. (2015). Giving voice to the silence of family estrangement: Comparing reasons of estranged parents and adult children in a nonmatched sample. Journal of Family Communication, 15(2), 130–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/15267431.2015.1013106

Grant, R., Amos, N., Lin, A., Cook, T., Hill, A. O., Pang, K., Skinner, R. S., Carman, M., & Bourne, A. (2024). Mental health and wellbeing outcomes associated with social, medical, and legal gender affirmation among trans young people in Australia. International Journal of Transgender Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2024.2366881

Hill, A. O., Lyons, A., Jones, J., McGowan, I., Carman, M., Parsons, M., Power, J., & Bourne, A. (2021). Writing Themselves In 4: The health and wellbeing of LGBTQA+ young people in Australia. National report (Monograph series no. 124). Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University. https://doi.org/10.26181/6010fad9b244b

Morgan, H., Heritage, B., Lin, A., Perry, Y., Cook, A., Winter, S., Watson, V., Wright Toussaint, D., O’Donovan, A., Almeida, R., & Strauss, P. (2022). Factors influencing parental acceptance of trans children and young people: Findings from Trans Pathways. LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18(5), 475–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/27703371.2022.2125470

Olson, K. R., Durwood, L., DeMeules, M., & McLaughlin, K. A. (2016). Mental health of transgender children who are supported in their identities. Pediatrics, 137(3), e20153223. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2015-3223

Russell, S. T., Pollitt, A. M., Li, G., & Grossman, A. H. (2018). Chosen name use is linked to reduced depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and suicidal behavior among transgender youth. Journal of Adolescent Health, 63(4), 503–505. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.02.003

Ryan, C., Huebner, D., Diaz, R. M., & Sanchez, J. (2009). Family rejection as a predictor of negative health outcomes in white and Latino lesbian, gay, and bisexual young adults. Pediatrics, 123(1), 346–352. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2007-3524

Strauss, P., Cook, A., Winter, S., Watson, V., Wright Toussaint, D., & Lin, A. (2017). Trans Pathways: The mental health experiences and care pathways of trans young people. Summary of results. Telethon Kids Institute.

Travers, R., Bauer, G., Pyne, J., Bradley, K., Gale, L., & Papadimitriou, M. (2012). Impacts of strong parental support for trans youth: A report prepared for Children’s Aid Society of Toronto and Delisle Youth Services. Trans PULSE.