Please help me understand this way of thinking in parents of trans kids

My guess, from personal experience, is that such parents developed and connected to their own imagined version of their child. So when said child challenges that perception, it seems like they are trying to be a different person.

I'm a cis mom to a trans son. I haven't had those feelings myself, but I think those feelings are because those people are afraid of losing what they thought they could mold their child to be. My own mom wasn't very nice and she would be upset if I did things like dying my hair or getting piercings (at a legal age to do that). She didn't want me to have purple hair because she imagined me as a blonde and she wanted me to stay blonde. Parents of trans folks saying they've lost their kid is a more extreme version of that. They are losing what they wanted you to be. I'm not a perfect parent and I don't want a cookie or a gold star for saying this, but I've never wanted anything for my kid except for him to be happy. I've never had any expectations for my kid.

I had to hammer home to my parents that it would only mean knowing the real me more and having me around more if they came around. And that if they didn’t, or if I didn’t come out, I would wind up dead or resenting them and distancing them for feeling like they were the reason I stayed in the closet. Like “me not coming out and transitioning means you WOULD lose your kid. me being the real me is the only option you have to keep me alive/around”

As a parent, I’m sad to say that some parents clearly feel ownership over their children. They do not understand that they need to put themselves in the back seat and appreciate they gift they have been given, to be a parent. This attitude sickens me in all respects, but especially when it leads to not accepting their child as a person with their own ideas, personality, sexuality and gender.

Those parents who ruin their lives by rejecting their kids are weak-minded fools. I’m sorry they aren’t living up to what their children deserve. ❤️

In the charitable takes it's about the grief-like emotions that arise when plans and expectations for a beloved child's life suddenly change. They say that such parents don't really feel like their child has actually died, but it's more that the happy future they were picturing and had invested years and years of effort into supporting, with all its cisgender (often heterosexual) assumptions, has suddenly been proved impossible. That future is what the parents are grieving. The more introspective and healthy parents will then follow that up with "Later, I realized that we were silly to have been so attached to that image of the future anyway. We were never guaranteed any particular future for our child; they're their own being with their own life and don't owe us anything. But it was still hard to have to give up that picture of the future we'd imagined."

I understand that. But I'm also kinda "ehhn" towards it.

Because if a parent talked about needing time to grieve the fact that their child became an artist and not a lawyer and talked about feeling like their beautiful lawyer child had died and been replaced with a stranger, I think most people at least in my country would react with "Uh, what? Get over yourself." If a child turned out to be a maths genius and became a professor and won a Nobel Prize, who's gonna be sympathetic to the crying parent saying "But I decided he would play football when he was 3 months old :(:(:( This stranger killed my baby." If a child's hair color turned brown from blond at puberty I think people would look askance at the parent mourning their child's blond future with their blond career and blond babies. If a parent talked about grieving their unborn future grandchildren because their kid decided instead to adopt some step-children...ok actually that's a bad example because a ton of parents really do feel entitled to grandchildren and it's not yet fully culturally acceptable to let adult children decide their own fertility. Sure, in any of these situations, a bit of wistfulness and mourning could make sense. But not that much.

Yes, I understand a parent mourning the image of their child in their gender assigned at birth. That's a sort of loss and the emotions are sort of like grief. It's a natural reaction and they can't help it. I've grieved impossible futures, too. But I think the fact that "death" language is used so much for trans kids in particular, and trans kids get told over and over to be patient with their parents' feelings of grief and to patiently comfort their parents through grieving FOR THEM, and we're asked not to take offense at the suggestion that we're dead zombies/ghosts now or that our emergence from the chrysalis -- something that is necessary for us to LIVE -- is in any way equivalent to death, and something to which tears and grief and sorrow is an appropriate response... Hot take but IMO that's transphobic, and linked to the idea that trans status is inherently bad.

Change is scary. Losing the familiar hurts. But change is inevitable. It makes some sense to be scared of losing the beloved child of today, because the child of tomorrow is unknown. But nobody can stop time. And all of us will change, whether we're cis or trans, and the people we loved yesterday are gone forever. Crying over those lost yesterdays is understandable, but it seems to me the wrong choice to waste time crying and crying over those lost loved ones of yesterdays, when the loved ones of today are right here to be loved right now, and so many loved ones of tomorrow are waiting for us to meet them.

That's my long stupid ramble just to say, I understand your mom's feelings, I understand yours better, I don't think you're wrong to be upset, and you're not dead. I hope that with time she'll get it.

I don’t know if my child will be trans or not, as she is still young, but being a parent there is an immense connection to raising a kid, and I think it’s more grieving that than anything. One thing I’ve been working through is grieving my own past self, as I have 34 years of being a “man”. And I’m sure my parents are still grieving the same thing as they raised me to be that “man” and now I’m not. It’s not that they don’t love me, and they are super supportive, but pouring that much time and energy into someone for them to be different than you expected is going to cause grief.

It’s not grief in the way “my kid died” it’s grief in “this isn’t what I expected” and that sends someone through all of the same stages.

I think also, especially with the world’s political climate as it is, there is a lot of fear of what is going to happen now.

TLDR; I think it all comes down to grieving expectations rather than the child itself.

I'm with you. I don't get it at all. Gender is just one aspect of who I am as a person, and it's the only thing that's changing—if other stuff changes, it's just because I'm happier now. Always so weird and upsetting to me when people act like their kid is dying and being replaced or some such nonsense.

I think the narrative about folks grieving us is too tolerated.

I remember going to a trans support group in college in the early 2000s and seeing women like me with parents who weren’t accepting, were still grieving, and needed time. Most of the parents never made any progress and these relationships just fell apart over months or years. The counselor who was leading the group said something like if your parents have known for a long time, and don’t accept you because they’re still grieving, they’re going to end up having to grieve your suicide or lost relationship.

Almost no one is going to immediately understand and accept. But hiding under the notion of grief, failing to grow in the situation or heaven forbid finding a way to be supportive, is language that relies on the validity of needing to process big changes to hide their intransigence; a lot of people using this language will never be accepting.

This obviously isn’t everyone discussing the notion of grief. But it’s plenty common, and it hasn’t changed in the over 20 years I’ve been hearing people say it. I don’t think a single one of us in the group had a parent present at college graduation.

I will never understand this either. Parents “lose” their kids every time kids grow to the next stage of development. Like — that’s why I don’t have babies or toddlers anymore, or small kids. I have full grown humans. I might feel nostalgic at times — they were really adorable amazing little humans— but that doesn’t mean that they DIED.  If your mom is truly mourning at that level, she needs to get to a p-flag meeting or find a therapist she can pour her heart out to. It’s not okay to burden you with it. 

I’m general it’s not your job to make your parents happy. Your job is to take steps towards becoming a healthy, productive part of society. 

I can't say it any better than this article already does: https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/letting-them-let-go

Your parents might also benefit from this one: https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/oh-st-my-child-just-told-me-theyre

There's actually a ton of incredibly helpful stuff on that substack that could well help you, too. I'd suggest spending a while browsing through it.

Expectations are nothing but premeditated resentment. These are parents who are having their reality redefined in a way they have never had to reckon with before.

It's very hard for them, and unfortunately the kids deal with the fallout more often than not. Grieving a living person that you have regular contact with is absolutely uncalled for.

I think it's manipulative and cruel, and I really don't have any patience for it. I was told that by my mom a while after I came out. I let her know exactly how insulting it was, and that if she doesn't smarten up, she will get to actually mourn our relationship, because it won't exist anymore. It worked, and she's been good since, minus a hiccup or two.

Every parent will end up with a child who ends up differently than how they expected in some way. It's childish as shit to throw a tantrum over.

It's really heartbreaking to learn that your parents never knew you, the individual, and only cared about the idea of you. Parents who feel like they're losing their child when they transition never really loved their kids in the first place. They loved the idea of their child. But when reality diverges too far from that idea, they reveal that they loved the idea of you a lot more than the real thing. Parents who love their kids would celebrate with them when they work toward happiness, not grieve the loss of the depressed child.

It doesn't make sense to me, either. I didn't really see anything changing aside from name and pronouns. It's the same person.

I'm a parent of a trans kid but also trans myself though I transitioned about 4 to 5 years after my youngest. I don't understand it either my youngest is still the same person he just presents a bit different to how he was before when we had input in his presentation. I'm sorry you're having to live through it.

As a parent myself, I think there’s a lot of conflicting emotions.

I could imagine that especially until recently most people’s expectations when raising a child of gender X is that they will imagine a future for gender X based on their own and cultural expectations of what a “successful life” will be. Maybe this is changing now to parents who seriously consider their children might grow up to be lgbtq and that IS a successful life as we do see more acceptance and success stories now than before.

The grief might be multifaceted, the name change, parents spend a lot of time and associate that name to someone they’ve literally carrier from infancy. There might be grief if the personality they seemed to have raised was really a mask and the new identity is really different or changed.

I could imagine there being guilt as a parent, did we do everything right along the way?

I think it comes down to the nature of the way parent see their child, whether they value the child as an individual, as a person, someone distinct with their own character, life, hopes, dreams, and aspiration or if the parent sees the child mostly only as an extension of themselves as a vicarious means of achieving the parents hopes and dreams.

From my own experience with family that had to "grieve" when I came out: they had an image in their head of who we were/will be.

I guess when I turned out to be a bigger nerd than expected, it was fine because it was a slow progression, over decades, so their expectations adjusted as we went. When I came out, though, it was a quick 90° turn. They were holding a version of adult [deadname] in their head, right up until I said "I go by [name] now." Then [deadname] didn't change a little, she vanished.

I feel the same as you, that mental version was never real, who we are now is who we've always been. But part of coming to terms with being trans is coming to terms with a different future than we expected. They havnt had a chance to come to terms, so I think it's just a knee jerk reaction to a "loss" of their idea of who we were going to be.

I think parents often have a fairytale idea of what they want their child's life to be like. Everyone wants their kid to grow up and get a good job, start a family, etc. Most want grandkids. It can be difficult to come to terms with the fact that their ideas aren't necessarily going to come true, at least not in the way they thought they would.

It's a very toxic way of thinking. It comes from them placing expectations on you instead of giving you the freedom to be your own person. You transitioning challenges those expectations, and they don't like that.

Not long after I came out, my mom said something about this. I remember her saying, "I gave you that name. [Deadname] got a college degree."

"Mom, my name didn't get my degree. I did. A name is just a tool to identify one person in a sea full of other people. The changes you see are me being more content with who I am. At my core, I'm the same kid you raised. I'm just a better version."

This seemed to help some. It may just take time, too. I try to keep in mind that I went by one name and one set of pronouns for 25 years. My parents raised me as [deadname], who was a girl. ...admittedly, I'm starting to lose my patience, as it's been almost five years since I came out, but my mom is 66. She's trying.

This past Easter, but aunt told me that the last time she talked to my mom, she said that I was more pleasant and easier to be around now. This sounds bad without context, but for about a decade, I was angry, suicidal, manic, and explosive at times. My parents love me, but I was a lot to handle at my most unstable. In April 2019, the bipolar disorder was officially in remission. In December 2019, I came out. In July 2020, I started T. In March 2021, I moved back to my home state, roughly 20 minutes from my hometown. After so many years of thinking that they'd find me dead, I was finally stable, functional, and relatively happy.

This helps me maintain patience with my mom.

My mother is a strange person with weird perspectives on things, so it’s not surprising to me that her reaction was, “Oh! Okay, sure.” She correctly assessed that despite outward appearances, nothing really substantively changed about me. She is happy to see me more happy, and whatever changes came from my no longer repressing certain parts of myself were taken in stride.

I had another friend who did feel that grieving process, in her own eyes. She was worried there wasn’t a place for her in my life anymore, and felt like because of how she saw me as more outgoing and sometimes a bit of a lush now on social, I must be a completely different person. I don’t think our friendship is going to last, because I don’t think there’s much I can do at this stage to convince her that showing some midriff on my private instagram is not in fact the same as becoming an entirely different person.

What I’m saying is it’s a game of perspectives. And often, what we see is only that which reinforces what we already believe.

So here is my thought as a parent.

when you learn as a couple that a baby is on the way, it’s pretty normal to kind of daydream of what their life will be like. That ultrasound comes back and they give the gender assignment, and for a while that’s how the idea of the future looks.

some of us see that baby in the first moments of life and dump the expectations. I want to love this little person and make their life as good as it can be. This was me, I love my kids and genuinely wish only for their happiness.

(there is nothing like those first hours with your own child… and when I had the experienc, I found hate for people who hurt their children. Because I could not understand how anyone could look at that life, and decide to inflict pain and misery intentionally)

others hold on to those expectations. They picture the college their kid will go to, the job they will do, who the will marry, how many kids they’ll have... they get all upset if you live your life and not their fantasy.

another kind, I think are afraid, they know certain things in life are hard, and some things make it even harder. The’ve seen things in the news that scare them, and they are so afraid, they would rather try To force you out of it than live with their own fear, or put the work into learning to overcome that fear.

then the other kind are those who are either so religiously or politically indoctrinated or that they find those beliefs to me more important than their own kids.

my parents were centered only on themselves, if it didn’t benefit them personally, they weren’t happy. They were never satisfied, and made my childhood a hell that I’ll be in therapy for years more.

none of those are meant to be excuse, just things I’ve noticed over the years,

It’s because they care more about the version of you that they’ve made up in their head and what they want their idealized version of you to be and to do than they care about who you actually are 🤷🏻‍♀️

Grief is a valid emotion for any body about anything. Others don't have to "understand" just acknowledge it.

Now if someone feels responsible for causing the grief because they came out as trans wouldn't be fully fair to either people. Their grief maybe has to do with their expectations, or, beliefs about how the world was suppose to work out, meaning they grieve for the loss of their dreams or expectation. That is a valid loss actually.

A person can grieve and accept circumstance at the same time. It's a process of change and growth into a new perspective. That is the healthier response in an ideal world.

Emotions are valid and all anyone is responsible for when they belong to someone else is to acknowledge them. We own our feelings and others own theirs.

I hope this helps gives a way to look at human nature.

Many couldn't see signs this is how their child felt inside all along, and so it seems like a drastic change. Not all mourning comes from a big loss, but all change implies something is no longer how it used to be, how you expected. I think an important aspect in helping them is showing (either you, a support group, therapist, whatever) that you're still you, and that aspect of you that changed is for the better. They haven't lost you  and I get this must feel bad being at the receiving end, but it probably has to do with how plingrained is gender in society and how big and "unexpected" of a change it seems to so many people

I can understand this. Your parent loves you. They love your hands, your face, your voice, your shape, your spirit. The thought of waking up one day and never seeing you as you currently are can feel like a loss. That last part, your spirit, is the most important thing and that’s what makes transition so important — all the other superficial things can change as long as the essence of You remains and thrives. But some people still feel a deep ache when they think about losing the you-as-you-are and they worry that they will miss those parts of you profoundly.

At the end of the day, I have found that for most supportive folks, this is an anticipatory grief more than anything. My own mom was devastated at the thought of never hearing her “daughter’s” “sweet, feminine voice” again. But when my voice actually dropped, she adjusted quickly, because at the end of the day, it was still MY voice and that’s what mattered most. I truly don’t think she gives a fuck these days.

From personal experience, I believe it has to do a lot with the fact that they are happy with the UNHAPPY, version of you now, because this version of you is stereotypical 'right'.

When you challenge that way of thinking, everything in their brain freaks out, because you want to change, which will affect their happiness, at least that's what they believe. This is my parents to the T. If you challenge them in anything, you are making them unhappy. What they don't understand is that the lack of support is going to drive their child away, no matter what sex they are, and possibly lose them forever. Sadly, they usually choose to lose their child and be right, than show support and have a child trasition and be happy within themselves.

I'm really sorry you're going through this. I hope they decide to support you in the end, even if they don't fully understand what you're going through.

I don't have an explanation for this, though I agree with the folks who have talked about parents connecting emotionally to a projected version of you rather than the real you. I will share what I told my parents when they came to me with these feelings to help us all get through it.

"I am not your therapist. I am going through massive changes and coming to terms with my own identities right now. I don't have the capacity to help you through your emotions about it as well. Please find a support group like a local PFLAG chapter and talk to an affirming therapist if you need more support. I need you to be here for me right now, and you can't be that support for me if I'm having to be that support for you."

For what it's worth, my mom never got over the fact that I'm not six years old anymore - this is not hyperbole or anything, she has literally and repeatedly complained to me about that, and I was way over 30 years old at the time.

I suspect that a lot of parents don't really view their children as people, but as... property? an extension of themselves? I honestly don't know. It's weird.

I have a son who was AFAB. I am mtf myself. There is still a profound sense of loss involved. We had nicknames and sayings together, developed from early childhood, which were just gone, because they were all based on or rhyming with a deadname. I still miss those.

That said, there's also pride. Pride that he loves us enough to be himself and let us know. Pride that we've made him feel like family is a safe space. And, of course, there's still love. Love that leads us to support him, love that compelled me to take on religious protesters and make them cry at a Pride parade. He's still my kid, still the same child that I ran around with, pushed on swings, went rock climbing with, etc. It's possible to feel two things at the same time.

Parents of transgender children might feel like they are losing a child when their child comes out for several reasons:

1. Expectation vs. Reality: Parents often have a mental image of their child's future based on the gender they were assigned at birth. When a child comes out as transgender, it can feel like the loss of those expectations and dreams.

2. Identity Shift: The child's gender identity may not align with the parents' previous experiences and memories associated with their child’s assigned gender. This can create a sense of mourning for the child they thought they knew.

3. Societal and Cultural Influences: Many societies and cultures have strong norms around gender. Parents might struggle with societal perceptions and pressures, leading to feelings of loss or fear about their child's future.

4. Fear for the Child's Well-being: Concerns about the difficulties and discrimination their child might face as a transgender individual can cause parents to feel anxious and protective.

5. Personal Adjustment: Adjusting to new names, pronouns, and expressions of gender can be challenging and may feel like losing the familiarity of the past relationship.

These feelings are part of a complex emotional process, and with time, many parents come to accept and support their child's true identity.

Life is hard enough I think as parent knowing your child wants to change gender it brings so many problems and questions from others I can understand parents just wish tto not have to go through such painful changes in there lives Also suicide rates Skynews rocket for people acts they have changed gender so parents can also be worried if mentor health problems or hospital suicide if after the change the stress is to much for you to handle so coming out is operning large can of worms and long hard gurney that can lead to them losing there child

Well don't know if you have seen it ... here  might be some explaining resources that could help you too and there are also hints there concerning looking for support. Talking with a few others about what they did, and what helped them may also be a good idea.

hugs

Most parents will grieve because they're losing the child they've known for a long time and they're getting a new one so it does take on time to adjust. I've seen the same thing with spouses who transitions and grieve for the loss of their old spouse and hopefully will it comes accept their new spouse. But parents also need to remember this is not about them it is about their child and supporting them.