Re-educating 'diverse' families

A San Francisco nonprofit belittles the parents it claims to serve, depicting them as marginal and ignorant

“Parents from culturally and religiously conservative backgrounds lack access to accurate information about how to support their LGBTQ children”

That’s from a curious slide deck that the director of the Family Acceptance Project, based at San Francisco State University, presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics conference in mid-October. The deck was donated to LGBT CC by a pediatrician who had access to the session’s materials. It reads like a textbook case of white saviorism with potentially devastating consequences (if any of FAP’s target families actually take it seriously).

According to the deck, FAP aims to “[s]trengthen and help racially and religiously diverse families to support their LGBTQ children[.]” Racially diverse, read literally, should mean families of all races. But the slides repeatedly contrast FAP’s target families–whom it refers to alternately as conservative, religious, or racially/ethnically diverse–with others who don’t share their deficits. Allow me a moment of wild speculation: FAP’s director, a social worker by training named Caitlin Ryan, is actually using “racially diverse” as a euphemism for “not white.”

Ryan understands racially diverse people because she went to Smith:

The presentation contains copious filler (“Research … shows that families play a critical role in contributing to health risks & promoting well-being for LGBTQ young people”) and dubious social science data about suicide (a chart illustrates that higher “acceptance” by parents correlates with “Less Ideation”). So I’ll just show you a few slides that stand out. Visit FAP’s website to read its publications in full.

FAP shows us how it views the “social environment”:

This slide presumes that (1) a “mainstream community” exists and (2) “racial/ethnic communities” and “congregations” ain’t it. How does FAP determine who belongs to the mainstream community? It’s everyone who thinks like Caitlin Ryan, I guess. Also, people who are secular and not ”ethnic.”

Here’s FAP’s glimpse into the mind of a conservative parent:

Notice what’s missing: fear of the health risks, complications, and side effects associated with medical interventions performed on kids who identify as trans. In other words, FAP doesn’t acknowledge rational concerns that many “conservative” parents no doubt hold. Instead, the FAP strawmans their position, profiling them as confused, intimidated, and controlling.

In fact, the slides never address medicalization. FAP appears oblivious to this feature of trans life, even though another deck from the same conference blandly asserts that 20-30% of gender-nonconforming kids will start hormone therapy. Instead of taking a position on whether parents should support medicalization, FAP vaguely prescribes: “Support gender expression[.]”

It also denigrates behaviors like “Prevent[ing] youth from … participating in LGBTQ youth groups, services[.]” I suspect FAP is, once again, trading in euphemisms. In 2023, LGBTQ services include hormone therapy.

FAP recommends reducing health risks by attending a powwow:

Many parents really do react poorly to their kids’ homosexuality or gender-bending. I support researchers mapping that out and trying to address it. But these slides suggest FAP is on the wrong track.

First, their implicit message is that the only “rejecting” parents we need to worry about are religious, conservative, or “racially diverse.” The slides never cite studies showing these groups are less supportive or informed than secular white liberals, yet they insinuate it throughout. This is gross and irresponsible.

Second, the slides don’t mention medicalization. FAP’s services can’t possibly be useful for families of kids identifying as trans if it’s not going to talk about the most momentous choices they face.

Third, the slides smush gay orientation and trans identity into one big “LGBTQ” blob. Only one slide teases them apart: it claims that gender identity develops around age three, whereas “Children increasingly identify as gay, ages 6-10[.]” The slide concludes: “Provide guidance on sexual orientation & gender identity as part of well-baby care[.]” This sounds like a play for market expansion; I hope the Endocrine Society isn’t taking notes.

As far as LGBT CC can tell, none of the sessions at this year’s AAP conference addressed gay kids as a population distinct from trans kids, even though a boy dating another boy has radically different medical needs from a boy taking estrogen and feeling distressed by his penis. I think it’s fair to say American pediatricians lack access to accurate information about how to support their LGBTQ patients.

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