Parents Magazine
needs to hear from you
Recently a number of articles published in Parents Magazine caught attention on Twitter/X. Two of those articles are below:
My Child is Trans - How Can I Support Them Without Messing Up (Published June 24, 2023)
New Study Shows the Dramatic Impact Validating Trans and Non-Binary Youth Can Have on Mental Health (Published November 15, 2023)
My Child Is Trans…
The first article outlines the financial, medical and emotional investment of parenting a “transgender child,” and highlights two stories of parents who decided to socially transition their children at a very young age. The author describes how one of the children expressed a desire to wear their hair in a style stereotypical of the opposite sex before the age of four. About a year later, the child’s parents felt that this continuing behavior meant their child was transgender.
The article then states:
The standard “watchful waiting” tactic of ignoring the child’s attempts to communicate their identity can feel to kids like sharp rejection from the people they love most. Instead, listen, support, and affirm.
If your child is old enough to read and write, learn together by meeting other kids who experience the same thing. If your child isn’t fully verbal or literate, lead story time with age-appropriate books and model positive expressions. Most importantly, let them know that you love them—no matter what.
There is so much here to unpack, and even more as the article goes on.
New Study…
The second article describes a study from the Trevor Project that revolves around things that can help a transgender or non-binary adolescent experience “gender euphoria.” At the end of the article, the author states emphatically:
The new Trevor Project study leaves no room for doubt: affirming your children is the best way to support them as they transition or come out to you. This is a happy, if fraught, moment for your child. As parents, our goal is their happiness and security.
“Parents can best support their trans child by educating themselves about gender identity and expression, actively listening to their child's experiences, and creating a safe and affirming environment at home,” Dr. Fenkel confirms.
This involves using proper pronouns and names, advocating for children in sometimes contentious school environments, and reaching out to therapists if you or your child need more support.
That a mainstream parenting magazine would publish this study as unquestionable truth about how a parent should respond to a child, adolescent or teen who identifies as transgender is deeply concerning.
Write to Parents Magazine
We ask you to take a few minutes to write to Parents Magazine. You can choose to express concerns about either of the above articles, or about their approach to this topic overall.
Please send your email to: contact@parents.com
Here is a sample of ideas for your letter:
1) Introduce yourself and share a little about yourself and your concern about this issue. For example, “My name is Jasmine, I am a mother, a lesbian, and a lifelong liberal Democrat, and I am concerned with the current practice of medical intervention for gender-distressed children and teens.”
2) Express your concern with something that stands out to you in one or more of the articles they have published - each of you who writes may have a different angle you would like to take.
3) For example: in the My Child is Trans article, you could express something like, “I am concerned that your article will lead well-meaning parents to interpret gender non-conforming behavior in very young children as a possible sign they are transgender. This could put their children at risk of irreversible medical interventions, when the alternative could have been to allow for their children to freely express themselves with hairstyle or clothing while still grounding them in the reality of their biological sex. What is more, many gay and lesbian adults report having been gender non-conforming as young children. What if the best intentions of supporting a “trans” child are actually leading parents to socially and medically transition children who would have otherwise grown up to be gay or lesbian adults?”
4) Speak to any part of this issue where you are personally connected or where you want them to dig deeper. For example, “I would like you to interview parents who have seen how taking the affirming approach actually erodes their child’s mental health rather than improving it.” Or, “I would like you to look beyond the surface of this issue and explore the growing voices of parents, detransitioners, and medical professionals in European countries who are raising the alarm on the lack of evidence for these medical interventions for minors.”
5) Include any links to articles that you may want to share. You could even include the links we included in the last Action Alert: “Youth Gender Medicine has Become a Hall of Mirrors,” from the Boston Globe and “Gender dysphoria in young people is rising - and so is professional disagreement.” from the British Medical Journal.
If you do write your email, please leave us a note in the comments! We would love to hear what you have shared with Parents and any feedback you may receive back from them.
Thank you!
Please send your submissions, tips, action alert ideas to LGBTcouragecoalition@gmail.com
Here’s a copy of the letter I just sent:
Hello,
I have two daughters who became indoctrinated by the transgender ideology they were exposed to when online due to school lockdown and online school during the pandemic. They were lonely and isolated, suburban, and white at a fraught time in America and transgender ideology casts you as a victim and special and unique.
My girls were, and still are, as the younger one is only now 13, searching for their identity and belonging (the *normal* role in childhood development of identity vs role confusion, Erik Erikson—child development specialist).
This has been exploited by troubled individuals who cast transgenderism as the solution to my girls’amd otber youngsters’ normal teenage angst.
And some folks get a lot of special attention for it. I believe some parents, a la Munchausen disorder, get a lot of attention and take a weird sense of, no pun intended, pride in socially transitioning their child.
That a national magazine would publish such specious information casts extreme doubt in my mind upon the validity of your actual parenting knowledge. Please be smarter.
The sources *are* the ones who are vetting the information. That’s not unbiased research. C’mon.
My daughters have been harmed by this ideology. I have seen other kids and families also harmed by this.
Your publishing of these transgender ideology articles that push social affirming of kids, with the implicit emotional blackmailing of parents, that their non-suicidal children, will become suicidal if they are not affirmed, is so woefully wrong, that it just really takes away your credibility as a parent’s resource.
Please retract the articles and publish parent’s letters who have objected.
This is an unfolding medical scandal and you are on the wrong side of history.
I signed it with my real name and as my title “Mother”.
The letter was really off the cuff as I typed it on my phone here in the US as we get ready for the big national holiday here of Thanksgiving while I’m in my car getting ready to head in to the grocery store.
Thank you to LGBT Courage Coalition for bringing the articles to all of our collective attention.
I will continue to write letters, as I have to my congress person (who reached out with a survey about the constituents concerns and one was “LGBT” rights), the attorney general of my state (who has said that transgender books MUST BE taught to elementary school children), and I will continue to go to my children’s public school (where the curriculum is TEACHING about group sex and anal sex and that there are “dozens of genders”), and let the pediatricians and psychologists know they’re really harming children with the way that all of this is being approached.
I sent a letter
Good morning,
I am a parent of a teen who expresses gender-noncomforming behavior. When I read your article titled: My Child is Trans-How Can I Support Them Without Messing Up? (published June 24, 2023), I became quite alarmed. I was a gender-nonconforming child myself, and never once did I think that I was trans. I have grown to accept myself as a woman and I enjoy a happy and healthy life. After reading your article and seeing that “watchful waiting” was considered a sharp rejection of my child, I was stunned. The article would lead me to believe that I must affirm my child as a different gender just because she likes to wear pants and enjoys more technical fields? I found this extremely alarming. According to this, I am harming my child by allowing her to grow into herself as the person she is with the body she was born with and I need to affirm her as a different gender. One that would require her to become a lifelong medical patient.
Thankfully, I know better. I grew up in the time of “Free to Be You and Me” where I learned that it is perfectly ok for a boy to like dolls and a girl to run faster than boys. That we are all people who should be respected and loved for who we are; NOT that we needed a lifetime of medical intervention to be our authentic selves. But how many young, new parents are reading this and thinking that this is fact?
In a subsequent article, New Study Shows the Dramatic Impact Validating Trans and Non-Binary Youth Can Have on Mental Health, (published November 15, 2023), sites a study by the Trevor Project that suggests that parents must socially transition a child as soon as they come out to you. A social transition is a very big deal. It sends a child down a path toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and eventually surgery. Surely you know that this is not a way to validate self-expression, especially since many potentially gay and lesbian children express opposite gender behaviors (also those who are not gay, for the record).
You are encouraging a whole new set of parents to look at their son who wants to wear nail polish to think that he is really a girl inside? I have taught preschool for many years. The number of boys coming to school in nail polish or putting on heels during dress up play has absolutely no bearing on their gender. It is play, plain and simple.
Please stop with this harmful writing. It is leading to what is going to be the largest medical scandal of our lifetime and too many innocent children and families will be destroyed by it. I would also suggest that you be much more careful who you get your information from and use your own critical thinking skills. The large uprise in young people being influenced by social media and now teachers and psychologists to believe they were born in the wrong body just does not make sense. I beg of you to please stop and do actual research on this topic before you enmesh yourself with these frightening articles.