10 Things that Parents with Trans Youth Experience

How understand relationship process can make us better allies.

This weekend, thousands of trans and gender diverse (TGD), and allied folks are meeting in downtown Boston for the 2024 First Event. Workshops include:

• Partner Workshop for Cis/Trans Couples

• Writing Messy Queer Characters

• Being Bi-Gender, (Non-Binary), and Exploring Gender Duality

• Creating Platforms that Support the TGD Community

And that’s just part of today’s schedule.

Image by Boston Spirit

My business, South Shore Family Health Collaborative, and the non-profit that I founded, the New England Association for Family and Systemic Therapy, are co-hosting a conference on June 7 called Combating Anti-Trans Systems, where we’ll talk about individual, relational, and family therapy for TGD communities. Some of my colleagues will be promoting that conference at First Event.

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One of the things that Julia and I are studying is the tension between identity formation (for the sake of today’s conversation, straight, queer, trans, etc.) and relationship development.

In what circumstances do we invest in the celebration and protection of the individual, or the “I”, and when do we invest in the celebration and protection of aspects of community, the “we”?

Americans have tended to value the individual at the expense of the community. In our own profession, psychology, we see this through the rise of psychopharmaceutical drugs and the privileging of individual therapy by insurance companies. The bulk of the burgeoning wellness industry that is attempting to compete with psychotherapy provides services for the individual, and often ignores the larger community.

Our own research interest—folks who are deconstructing from conservative religion, and many times, leaving it—is rooted at the center of this tension. Deconstruction is an act of individuation, or thinking for oneself independent of the larger communal or cultural narratives around you. And individuation almost always results in loss of relationship, which in some cases can be healthy, such as problematic religious leaders. Often times, the relationships threatened by individuation are the most important ones—namely, spouses and partners. Our work is helping folks discover ways to practice individuation from a relational perspective, something that we refer to as differentiation.

Differentiation reminds us that individuation requires dialogue and non-coercive negotiation, and the emotional regulation skills to manage that. We perceive that relationship therapy is (with the exception of physical abuse) the most effective strategy to practice the differentiation skills, so that all family members can be involved (or, at minimum, be aware) of how the shifts that one person makes impact the entire system.

In our current context, social media has transformed the process of identity formation into an act of personal selling, where pictures, videos, and memes often communicate participation in a particular, larger, nebulous community, such as “Republicans” or “Christian” or “LGBTQ". Content seeks to tighten the bonds between like-minded people (or similarly-portrayed avatars), which is great for early stages of relationships, but doesn’t set groups up for what inevitably happens in later stages of relationships:

The processing of differences.

It turns out, virtual platforms are terrible spaces to negotiate differences. In virtual platforms, there are no relational consequences for bad behavior, such as criticism and blame. In virtual platforms, if someone says something I don’t agree with, I can criticize them for their stupidity, call them racist or homophobic, even though I don’t know the person, all the while not taking accountability for the ways that I participate in those systems, and move on with my day because I don’t see their responses.

In virtual spaces, I don’t have to engage with the emotional tension that comes with initiating conflict.

Real life doesn’t work that way.

Real life involves navigating the art of communication, finding and using my voice, and emotional regulation—dealing with the consequences of using my voice or someone else using their voice, especially when navigating differences.

Which brings us to First Event and how we support TGD people, specifically TGD youth and their families.