When you lose a child, there are rituals. Or—in the absence of rituals—there are understandings.
If your child dies in an accident, everyone comes to the funeral: aunts and uncles, long-lost childhood friends, favorite teachers, junior-varsity coaches. There are flowers and tributes and frozen casseroles. Even if no one knows what to say—even if there is nothing that can be said—people want to find the right words.
If your child retreats into the underworld of addiction, there are support groups in church basements with folding chairs and watery coffee and other parents who feel every bit as helpless as you do.
If your child cuts all ties and disappears into a cult, no one thinks you should inscribe their new name on all your old memories—much less join the cult yourself.
But when a child comes out as trans, parents are supposed to celebrate a drastic change in their child’s personality, radical new beliefs, a gleeful assault on their healthy bodies, and a sharp contraction of their future possibilities. Parents who fail to greet these developments with sufficient enthusiasm and submission may find themselves cast out of their children’s lives.
When it comes to gender, every ritual and understanding breaks down.
Over the summer, I spoke to three mothers who find themselves estranged from their adult children. Their stories raise uncomfortable questions about what transition entails: not a constructive transformation of the self, but a destructive rejection of the self.
This attempt to eradicate the old and despised self puts every close relationship at risk. Friends, lovers, and spouses must go along, rewriting their own life histories in the process. “Affirming” photo-editing services turn little girls into little boys, and vice versa. Some couples stage new wedding photos to replace the old ones, as though they had wed with knowledge that came only later. Friends must pretend that certain experiences—the slapstick horrors of puberty, say—had never been shared, or else that these experiences were shared, even when they were not.
No one’s presence is more troubling to the revisionist than that of parents. No one’s presence is more troubling to a young person engaged in an act of self-destruction than the mother who will never see torn flesh as liberation.
Parents who have lost adult children to estrangement have been largely absent from broader conversations around gender and transition. In many cases, parents must shut themselves out of the conversation. Any hope of reconciliation with their child hinges on their silence—or on their anonymity, if they cannot keep silent.
When parents do speak, their stories may trouble even those who might otherwise be expected to understand. Many critics of youth gender transition feel uncomfortable talking about adults. Perhaps it feels more enlightened to say: Of course, adults are free to make those decisions. Then we don’t have to talk about what transition really entails, just why it’s not appropriate for children. But either transition is safe, effective, ethical medical care or it isn’t.
Either rejecting oneself is good or it isn’t.
Meet Jane, Jo, and Andrea
“I equate it to a heroin addiction,” Jane says. “Your child is in danger. They develop a different personality. They don’t talk to you. They’re not honest with you. They’re completely controlled by this element that takes priority over everything else in their lives. But… it’s like a heroin addiction where everybody is saying that heroin is really good for your child and of course we want them to have access to it and it’s wonderful that they love heroin so much.”
Jane’s daughter adopted a nonbinary identity at 17 and began identifying as a boy a few years later. She was a gifted young musician. Jane asks me to call her daughter Laura, a name borrowed from the Little House books the two read together. “She was accomplished, she had close friends, she was academically gifted, she was interested in so many different things. And this just sideswiped her and stole her life…. this idea was suggested to her at school and online: you might be trans. It’s like telling somebody: I have the key to why you’re unhappy and awkward and uncomfortable. If you follow this path, you’ll escape these feelings. She always had big feelings and had struggled with cutting and disordered eating as a teenager. Things were not easy for her. But by her late teens, Laura was thriving. Before she came upon this idea, she was OK. I think the idea of being trans planted a seed of doubt in her mind that she was OK.”
Jo’s son, “Drew,” came out as trans three years ago, in his mid-30s. “And all of a sudden, this person you love and adore hates you. It’s not just that they’re gone—it’s that they hate you. We were very close—Drew and I—and that is the biggest loss. He took a piece of my heart away with him.”
Andrea’s son, Isaac, was “always a builder, a creator, always in the physical world making things,” she remembers. Then he changed, retreating from the real world in ways that worried her. “Something must have happened during his second year of university. He’d been living with roommates and then, all of a sudden, he wanted to live on his own. He started spending all his time online.” She paused. “He came home for the summer. He left a letter for us on the dining room table in July of 2018. And within a month, he’d moved out. We haven’t talked to him since Labor Day 2018. We know he started hormones. I’m not sure I want to know what else he’s done.”
All three mothers believe that the medical system has failed their adult children. “If you walk into the ER, it’s the doctor’s job to say no,” Jo says. “Look, I have some medical issues. Doctors question me all the time. Is that not what medicine is for? Psychotherapists are supposed to be the gatekeepers.”
“We all know it’s not possible to change sex—so what are we doing?” Jane asks. “I think everybody deserves evidence-based medicine. Why would that change when someone turns 18 or 25 or 30?”
Estrangement as a Badge of Honor
When it comes to estrangement, there’s the assumption—sometimes spoken, sometimes left unsaid—that the punishment must fit the crime: if a child comes out as trans and then cuts out a parent, then the parent must have rejected their child or else transgressed some fateful boundary. But this assessment misses how casually estrangement is spoken of these days, especially—though by no means exclusively—in trans spaces. Online trans communities are full of incitement, where expressions of loving concern from parents provoke fierce reactions:
“These people don’t deserve you in their lives.”
“Losing everything to find something better is what you might need.”
“Frankly, they don’t deserve to know the REAL you.”
“They don’t love you for you. They love the idea of you they have in their head.”
Trans influencers like Jeffrey Marsh devote a significant amount of airtime to urging followers to go “no contact” with parents and family members as an empowering act of “self care.” There is a mute-and-block mentality at work here, which flattens and filters relationships into wanted and unwanted communications. There is little discussion or appreciation of the toll of estrangement. In place of one’s “family of origin,” young people talk of embracing a new, accepting “glitter family” that seems more abstract than actual. “If they won’t love you, I will,” one Internet stranger promises another. But what does “love” between virtual strangers entail?
For trans-identified young people, estrangement shows how serious you are about your new identity. You may have doubts about transition, sure, but you wouldn’t cut off your family over nothing. Estrangement proves you mean it.
“I went into this thinking, OK, maybe there were things we did that led to this, maybe the blame does lie on our shoulders,” Jane says. “But at this point, I’ve spoken to hundreds of parents in the same situation as us and they’re left, right, attentive, distant, single, divorced, married, big families, only children, homeschooled, didn’t homeschool… the only common thread is that all our children had access to screens. The culture was just stronger than all of us as parents.”
“What do you do when an open and loving relationship switches to ‘you will walk this line’?” Jo asks. “All of a sudden, everything I say and do is wrong.”
The Silence of Parents
Children control the narrative, coming out on social media, speaking in the glossy, facile language of self-discovery, and seeking sympathy from aunts and uncles, for whom it’s easy to say all the right things.
“Your child goes very public with this,” Jane says. When parents raise concerns or push back—no matter how gently—and the relationship breaks down, “the narrative is that something is wrong with the parents. That your parents rejected you. And that’s the narrative no matter how far down the line you go with your child as a parent, no matter how many times you say ‘yes’ to your child. Your child keeps pushing until they hit whatever point the parent is finally going to say no. We put up with verbal abuse, theft, extreme mood swings, erratic behavior, increasingly irrational demands, and deteriorating mental health. The worse she felt, the more she went back to the ideology. It’s like you drank the poison and got sick, so you think drinking more will cure you. We kept picking her up, we kept coming back. But she had to keep pushing until we finally said ‘that’s enough.’ And then she could say: ‘my parents rejected me’ and not ‘I rejected my parents.’”
Jane describes a policy of unilateral disarmament, a refusal to go “on the warpath” against her child. “What parent—” she stops and starts. “I could never publicly malign my own child, even though my child maligned me publicly, even though she wildly mistreated us. I have not defended myself. I have not explained. I have not revealed anything. That’s not who I am. I don’t want to be in a battle of truths with my own child. I’d rather let her tell her story and get out of the way because I love her. I’m not out to crush her. Even though she’s out to crush me. Even to my own family, I won’t go into the details, because I want to protect my child. In order to tell my story, I would have to include the truth of what she did and what she became, and I can’t imagine doing that publicly. Even if I weren’t worried about what that would mean for my future relationship with my child, it’s not in a mother’s bones to do that.”
Parents suffer in isolation. “Nobody has seen my husband and I lying on the floor sobbing, the sleepless nights, my husband saying every day that he doesn’t want to be alive,” Jane says. “Nobody hears that. We all look normal on the outside. But we’re not normal on the inside.” For years, it took everything I had just to get out of bed in the morning. I barely recognize myself. I always said every moment you have is a gift, but now—for both my husband and I—if I’m a balloon, then all the air went out of the balloon. If I’m a piece of paper, I’m crumpled in the corner. I’m made out of the same material, but I’ve changed.”
“It’s so psychologically destabilizing,” Andrea agrees. “It’s like saying the sun rises in the west. And then the rest of the world tells you you’re a terrible parent, a terrible person.”
“We know what happened in our family,” Jane says, firmly. “Sometimes I think, ‘When I die, what will be left?’ When Laura was growing up, I filled books with everything she said. I was utterly charmed and enamored with her. Someday, she’ll have her hands on those books.”
As we talk, it becomes clear that there are so many things for parents and children to disagree about when it comes to gender. What does it mean to respect someone? What does it mean to love someone? What does it mean to lie? What does it mean to be true to yourself?
Who Do You Tell?
Nobody knows exactly where to begin. Every story that starts out in one place—tidy and contained—sprawls. Past, present, and future run together. In their absence, these children inhabit every age at one and the same moment: the longed-for baby, the happy child, the difficult adolescent, the troubled young adult who now lives who knows where and does who knows what.
As we speak, Jane, Jo, and Andrea reflect on how they were brought up and what they tried to do differently as parents. Jo grew up in the 1950s in a conservative part of the United States. “Feminism didn’t make it there,” she says with a wry smile. “If you were a woman, you could be a secretary or a teacher or maybe you should just stay home.” Jo opted for none of the above, going away to university where she studied to be a psychotherapist, with a focus on families and attachment therapy. When she had children of her own, she was determined to spend as much time with her boys as she could. But after Jo and Drew’s father divorced, Drew would “push me away and push me away. And I would show him that’s not going to work. I’m not going anywhere.” Still, she worried that Drew had internalized the belief “that there was something wrong with him that made his dad not want to be with him.”
After college, her son struggled to find his footing. “We kept picking him up and helping him start over.” Jo and her husband—Drew’s stepfather—bought a big house so that there would always be room for Drew, who moved into the basement. But at a certain point, Drew stopped going to work and started behaving strangely: “He just changed. My loving, caring son turned into this manic, angry, surly person. It was clearly a mental health crisis.” Unfortunately, his gender-affirming therapist didn’t agree. With his therapist’s support, Drew started taking estrogen. His mental health continued to unravel as he retreated further and further into his online world. His volatile behavior made him difficult to live with. “It felt like we were playing out some script that we did not want to play out. We tried so hard to hang on to him, and in the end we had to ask him to leave. We haven’t heard from him since. He lives 10 minutes from us, and we just never saw him again.”
The home where Jo and her husband had lived with Drew haunted them. “We had bought this house so that we could all be together… it became this prison of memory for us.” Ultimately, they sold the house and moved to a new community. “And I just kind of lie. Sometimes I say I just have one child. I’ve never done that before. It feels like a horrible betrayal. But who is safe? Who will understand? I feel wrong, lying. But the idea that we would be understood for what we’ve been through is…” Her voice trails off. She can’t imagine being understood in this way. “Who do you tell?”
“The depth of anguish and loss isn’t something easily communicated,” Jane says. “There aren’t really any containers big enough to hold it, only other mothers who are going through the same thing.” Jane mentions a mother she knows who turned to Al-Anon for support. “She just doesn’t tell anybody what her child is addicted to.” Nobody asks.
“Not only do you lose your child—you lose your family, your friends,” Andrea says. “You lose your faith in doctors and institutions. It’s like you’ve joined the Witness Protection Program and you’ve got to move to a new place with a new identity and you can never talk about your past.”
Moments of Doubt
All three women described moments when their children expressed doubts. One night, Drew turned to his mother and said, “Mom, I think I’ve just fallen into this gender hole. I’ve gotta get out of it.”
“He was talking about his doubts, feeling caught in something. This other part of him was awake for five minutes,” Jo remembers. “Who is listening to that part of him? That’s the therapist’s job, to speak to that other part, to help explore that struggle.”
Jane’s daughter, too, resurfaced for a brief moment: “She was so deep in this world of being trans that she could barely talk to us,” Jane says. “She hated us. But there was this one night she walked by a children’s concert in a park and heard all these folk songs I used to sing to her and watched the children dancing, and as she was driving home, she called me and she said, ‘I think I’ve been wrong. I think I want to have kids someday, I think I want to be a teacher. I forgot all those songs you used to sing for me and then I remembered.’ And she was crying. And she was totally back.”
The moment was fleeting. “It lasted half an hour. And then she went to a party with all her trans friends and screamed at us and left. She was back to being sad and angry within the hour. That is what this belief system does to these kids. It takes their real selves and crushes them. She didn’t have any support for that self that loved to see children dancing. Now she’s back to being that person who thinks she never had a childhood, someone who never wanted to have children of her own.”
She remembers another conversation, when Laura called her in tears, saying “‘I said too much, and I can’t take it back.’ And she wouldn’t tell me what she’d said, but I know it was that she said she was trans. She knew she couldn’t get out without humiliation. She was trapped by the expectations and enthusiasm of everyone around her. And trapped by her own grand public statements.” For someone who has come out so publicly, it can feel as if there’s no way out. “How can you tell everybody you changed your mind?” Jane asks. “There is so much shame: five years of your life. Cutting people out of your life. These are extreme acts. How can you then turn around and say: ‘I shouldn’t have done that’? She cemented herself and then everybody else helped her cement herself. Everybody was so invested in this identity. So many people in my daughter’s life made it harder for her to step away from this, if that’s something she ever wants to do.”
“My kid, the kid I knew, it makes no sense,” Andrea says. “That’s why it’s so destabilizing. The kid I knew would laugh at this and think this is stupid and then he’d go build something.” She sees her son’s trans identity as a mask he uses to hide from himself. “We love Isaac. That’s our child. But this other person isn’t our child. We still hold onto the love we have for Isaac. But this other person is just a stranger.”
“This is how we know that something unnatural is happening,” Jane observes. “All of us knew our kids to be connected, thoughtful, self-reflective, emotionally intelligent. We had had all the hard conversations. There’s a history of estrangement in our extended family, an inability to have hard conversations, to talk across differences and tolerate conflict. People chose to just never speak again. So we always said: that pattern stops with our family. In our family, we talk things out. In our family, we don’t do that. We can talk through it. We can do hard things. You never have to be afraid to come to us. And all of that just got swept away because this new person came in and inhabited my daughter’s body. All those values—lost. All those memories—forgotten. It wasn’t her anymore. The Laura I knew, the person I hold in my mind… I don’t know if that person still exists.”
What’s the Goal?
When it comes to estrangement, everyone has advice. Write a letter, submissively ceding to the child’s every grievance. Apologize for everything. Accept the transition. Cede everything. No matter what the advice is, Jo says, “I never hear: and then their child came back home.”
“What’s the goal?” Jane asks. “To maintain a relationship with my child at all costs? To debase myself, tell falsehoods, agree with falsehoods, to retain this relationship regardless of what it looks like? I’ve said to myself that I would do anything to get my daughter back. But when it came down to that and she said you must admit that you’re a bigot and a transphobe, I couldn’t agree to that. This experience has, in a way, destroyed my identity as a mom. But if I also allow it to take away all of my ethical principles as a person, then I don’t know who I am any more…. As a parent, sometimes you do or say things not because your only goal is to rescue your child. Sometimes you’re trying to rescue yourself, too, so that you can live with yourself. And that might mean that if this is the last chance I have to speak to my child, I need to say to her: ‘You may be severely damaged by this.’ Or else I won’t be able to sleep at night.”
In Drew’s new circles, Jo says, “you get a chip for every year that you don’t talk to your parents. You get to say to your new friends: look at me, look how strong I am. Our children have to kill the past. That means they have to kill us, because we represent the past. So do we keep showing up for them to remind them that they have a past, even though that makes them angry?” She pauses. “As a mom, I just want to pick him up and say: ‘Come back, we’ll help you, you don’t have to keep doing this, you’ve done to us what your dad did to you. I understand what you’re doing. But come back. I love you.’ And there’s no place to say that. There’s no way to reach him now. That, to me, is the hardest thing. For a couple of years, I thought I could find a way in. I thought: ‘I’ll do anything. I’ll lie if I have to.’ And now I realize there’s nothing I can say. I have no voice.”
Jo, Andrea, and Jane worry that efforts to close the distance risk pushing their children further away. “Everything in your bones says: Go, put yourself in between your child and whatever it is that is trying to harm your child.” But, she says, “we can’t go chasing after our children, because the more we chase, the farther away they run,” Jane says. “I did chase after her for years. I could never catch up. So you stand in one spot and hold out your arms and hope they come back to you. But to everybody else it looks like you’re passive. No one but my husband and myself will ever know the lengths we went to to try to keep the connection.”
The Story of Estrangement
It took me a long time to write this article. The words wouldn’t come together. As a narrator, I am supposed to give the story a shape, a meaning. But no matter how I tried to tell it, I left things hanging and nothing made sense.
Maybe that’s the story of estrangement, though.
It’s like a bad dream where nothing makes sense—like those dreams where you speak and no one can hear you, or else everyone hears the wrong things, all the words you didn’t say, loaded with all the wrong meanings. But it is not a dream.
