Avatars of Dem Alienation: Liberal Parents Wary About Their Kids’ Trans Identities
Avatars of Dem Alienation: Liberal Parents Wary About Their Kids’ Trans Identities
Almost all the distressed parents who tell me they think their kids’ trans identities are not authentic are liberals who find themselves drifting away from the Democratic party.
Even the liberal parents of children who identify as transgender often harbor profound reservations about the Democratic party’s positions on trans kids and medicalized gender transitions.
In fact, many of these parents have become especially alienated from left-wing politics—not in spite of, but because of their all-too personal stake in an issue that Donald Trump leveraged as his successful closing attack-ad message against Kamala Harris.
These concerned moms and dads are avatars of a phenomenon in which the far-left, by staking positions that are far at odds with public opinion and science alike, have only managed to cultivate a critical mass of disaffected former liberals. We’re talking about longtime Democrats who have found themselves at odds with their own communities and political identities and who, in some cases, have in turn been welcomed into the Republican fold.
A year ago, I risked my reporting career, not to mention my personal connections as a gay man to the LGBTQ community at large, by beginning to cover pediatric gender medicine. From the start, I insisted on writing about this issue from a from a circumspect position—free from the ideological bents, whether from the left or the right, that sadly dominate the wildly politicized discourse about gender dysphoric kids.
I insisted on covering this issue as I would any other—as a science reporter, not an activist or mouthpiece for LGBTQ advocacy groups such as GLAAD or the Human Rights Campaign.
Becoming a public figure positioned within the eye of this sociopolitical storm has meant I’ve sustained my fair share of abuse and vitriol from people on the left who see me as a traitor to my own kind.
But I’ve also heard from a steady stream of parents whose adolescent children identify as transgender. They write me privately to thank me for my coverage of this issue. And they come to me to seek solace. Spilling out their hearts, they express gnawing anxieties over their children’s future.
For the most part, these are not bigots. They are moms and dads who love their children. They typically support trans and gay rights in general. But they think their own kids are poised to make egregiously life-altering—and even life-ruining—mistakes.
They believe that their kids aren’t really trans.
Invariably, these parents tell me that upon hitting adolescence, their child, quite out of the blue, began identifying as transgender and asserting that they suffered from gender dysphoria. This shift, which some researchers have controversially dubbed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” occurred without their children ever previously having betrayed much in the way of gender nonconformity or discomfort about their natal sex.
The parents typically say that they believe their children have adopted this mindset due to outside influences. The trans identity, the parents say, is a maladaptive coping mechanism as their children struggle to deal with myriad other psychiatric problems, trauma, autism, or the after-effects of the Covid lockdowns.
Invariably, these parents are eager to prove their liberal bona fides to me.
And invariably, these parents say that as lifelong Democrats, they are now grappling with destabilizing cognitive dissonance. After all, the party’s positions on pediatric gender medicine effectively forbid parents from harboring or expressing any misgivings about medicalized gender transitions for minors.
Ideological purity tests have left these parents out in the cold.
They fear that speaking their mind would alienate them from their children and their communities alike. They know perfectly well that the prevailing dogma on the left is that good liberals “support trans kids.” And so, by dint of their political affiliation, they are required to subscribe to the assertion—a claim that is unsupported by science—that prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria is “life saving.”
And so these parents are left in a disaffected political limbo.
Their heartbreaking stories of familial strife and turmoil remain untold by the liberal press, which instead focuses on the heartstring-tugging tales of families who flee red states to seek life-saving health care for trans kids in bluer waters. This woeful lack of representation in the media of a substantial swath of the contemporary human experience only compounds the stigma and supposed shame over these parents’ misgivings over their children’s gender identities.
Some parents, however, are remarkably unafraid of alienating their Democratic neighbors.
Among the most extreme examples is Erin Friday. A California lawyer, mom and lifelong Democrat, she reacted to her daughter coming out as trans by cutting the child off from all outside influences. In time, her daughter desisted back to identifying as a girl.
“No phone no internet. New school forced break up of friends,” Ms. Friday told me this week of her method. “It’s how every parent I know gets their kid out.”
(Plenty of skeptics, when hearing stories like this, insist that these are trans children who simply went back into the closet. This is home-spun conversion therapy, they say.)
Ms. Friday has since become an activist campaigning against progressive policies regarding transgender-identified children. She remains a registered Democrat. But for the first time in her life, she has begun voting Republican. She said she will keep doing so “until the Democrats stop transitioning children and placing gender identity above biological reality.”
The staffers of organizations that dominate the discussion about trans rights from the left, including GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and the ACLU, seem unaware that their positions do not cultivate support for their cause in particular and the Democratic party in general.
Quite the opposite.
After all, it was the ACLU that provided the survey to Kamala Harris in 2019 in which she said she supported taxpayer coverage of gender-transition treatment and surgeries for detainees, including those in ICE detention—a move that came back to haunt her 2024 campaign and may have helped sink it.
The fact is that most Americans support trans civil rights in general, but are deeply uncomfortable with the ethics of providing gender-transition drugs to kids in particular. These are life-altering drugs that put them at risk of infertility and lifelong sexual dysfunction and that, many concerned citizens and scientists alike believe, young people may later regret taking.
Most Americans don’t believe it’s fair for biological males, even if they’re on estrogen, to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. They believe that rigid trans-inclusive sports policies strike a devastating blow to hard-fought second-wave feminist gains, most notably Title IX’s guarantee of equal opportunities for girls and women in athletics.
As pundits sift through the data to explain how a convicted felon managed to return to his seat as the most powerful person in the world, it’s impossible to miss the role—surprising to many—that pediatric gender medicine likely played in Trump’s second win.
One exit poll found that trans-related cultural issues were third, behind the economy and inflation, on the minds of voters who went for Trump. Another poll found that a majority of Americans, and 80 percent of Trump voters, believe that the trans-rights movement has “gone too far.” And the Times reported that the Trump team’s testing of the closing-message ad—tag line: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”—showed it was the most effective.
Just as Republicans had soul searching to do following Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, now Democrats are faced with the same gloomy challenge. They might look to the parents of trans-identified children for answers as to how they have managed to alienate many of their own core constituents.
I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation. Follow me on Twitter: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net
Thank you for this piece!
Not only does MSM not cover our stories, the affirming parents are a noisy bunch. They are invested.
There are many excellent interviews with Helen Joyce on parents of trans-identified youth.
Just wanted to recognize your bravery wading into this in a responsible way as it is such a shitstorm. I originally found you on Twitter several years ago during Covid and your perspective was always sober and evidence-based. Basic good science journalism! I have been so dismayed with the total journalistic, epistemic and scientific breakdown around this topic. I know you must have sacrificed a lot to do what you do.