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I’m a detransitioner, and the most common question I hear from parents who come across my work is some version of this:

“I have a kid who is just like you. What can I tell her so that she will stop this trans stuff?”

These parents are often hoping that, because I eventually changed my mind, I might know the article, argument, study, or personal testimony that will cause their child to change theirs.

I am probably the wrong person to ask about quick fixes.

In my opinion, there are no quick fixes to this gender stuff. There is no single article, argument, study about the potential harms to health, account of transition regret, or detransitioner testimony that will suddenly change your kid’s mind.

Perhaps that is my own bias. I identified as transgender in various capacities for 12 of my first 24 years. My mind eventually changed, but not because someone finally presented me with the correct argument. It changed gradually, in response to my broader development, increasing maturity, and some genuinely insane experiences I lived through while pretending to be a man in the Middle East.

My beliefs did not remain static throughout those 12 years. I experienced multiple shifts in my thinking about gender-related things within each year of my life from 12 to 24, and those shifts coincided with my broader development.

Those who know me well are aware that I do not believe my gender issues came out of nowhere. But I also do not see them as having been an innate fixture of either my cognition or my identity. Identity is not a permanent fixture for children or adolescents because it is actively being developed.

To be more specific, I think of my gender distress and confusion as yet another part of my long pre-existing history of developmental delays and precocities. I believe that history could accurately be described as an archetypal autistic developmental trajectory, even though, to this point, I have not been formally diagnosed with autism.

The confusion I had about sex and gender as a 12-year-old kid who became interested in the trans topic in 2011 and 2012, long before it became my generation’s zeitgeist, was far deeper than even my highly competent parents realized.

Because they did not understand how deep my confusion was, they unintentionally miscalculated which steps they needed to take early on. This contributed to the trans framework remaining the only salient way for me to explain my developmental differences and lifelong mind-body disconnect.

The older I became, the more entrenched and secretive I became about these thoughts and feelings.

My underlying issues were not addressed or properly diagnosed, even during evaluations that showed an extremely clear developmental pattern that clinicians, for some reason, were not picking up on. Some key needs of mine were therefore not met early in this process.

As a result, I became increasingly entrenched in the trans explanation and willing to make enormous sacrifices to pursue it. I had no alternative way to understand myself or what it would take for someone atypical like me to live a good life among other people in a society comprised of strange, unwritten rules, many of them sex-specific, that I was terrible at deducing and decoding.

In short: I believed I would fail at ‘being a girl’ forever.

By now, I have also worked with many different parents of gender-questioning kids in a consulting capacity.

We engage in a kind of collaborative strategizing in which we think through a myriad of complex contributing factors, evaluate each situation individually, and develop a plan for navigating the most immediate areas of concern or distress while also looking toward the future.

Every family I have worked with is at a different stage of this process. Every child has a different combination of temperamental features, sometimes developmental delays, sometimes developmental precocities, any number of varied autistic or ADHD traits, sensory preferences, emotional difficulties, strengths, weaknesses, fixations, social experiences, and family dynamics.

My lived experience and my work with families have convinced me that gender issues in preteens and teenagers can arise for many different reasons that neither side of the trans culture war explains particularly well.

These complex developmental and mental health issues require far more than a quick fix to mitigate. They will not be resolved overnight, nor will they necessarily be resolved through one hour of therapy every week, even with the best therapist.

Most of the necessary work will happen within the context of the parent-child relationship because that is where so much of a child’s development occurs, alongside their interactions with peers, clinicians, teachers, and the broader world.

It is therefore critical for parents and the clinicians who care for these young people to develop a far more complex and robust understanding of the intricacies of each case.

Parents need to know that they have more options than blindly affirming every conclusion their child reaches, avoiding the subject entirely out of fear of making things worse, or waging war on their child’s new belief system.

There is a far better middle ground.

So I cannot give you the sentence that will make your child stop identifying as transgender.

What I can give you is something more realistic and, I believe, more useful: a framework for remaining in relationship with your child, having conversations that do not become fruitless screaming matches, understanding what problems gender may be helping them explain or temporarily solve, and building the social, emotional, relational, and self-accommodation skills they will need in adulthood.

For many kids, scaffolding their development in these ways may help them find less invasive ways to meet their needs, so that the desire to transition lessens or disappears entirely. For those who still transition, their lives will be even more difficult if they lack these skills.

Either way, these are skills your child needs.

Your child does not need one perfect conversation, one magical intervention, or more time without the adults in the situation having a clear plan for how to help them.

Before I get into one part of that plan, I have one request. If you believe more parents need to hear that there are alternatives to both unquestioning affirmation and family warfare, please subscribe to this publication, share this essay with someone who may need it, and leave a comment. Commenting does not require you to disclose your family’s entire story. You can simply tell me which part of this video essay, resonated, where your family is in this process, or what question(s) you would like me to address next.

If you want access to the complete practical framework and future entries in this series, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribing, sharing, and commenting all help me continue this work and get it in front of parents who currently feel as though they have nowhere useful to turn.

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How Families Get Trapped in Unhelpful, Relationship-Damaging Cycles

By the time gender enters the picture, it can be incredibly emotionally difficult for parents, and emotionally (and sometimes sensorily) difficult for their usually intelligent and rigid adolescent kids, to have the conversations both parties wish they could have.

When the subject is raised, it tends to become explosive.

Because it becomes mutually explosive, and because no alternative is presented, families often fall into one of two patterns. Though, some families will oscillate between them both.

Some parents stop trying to broach the subject at all. They avoid the elephant in the room because they believe ignoring it is preferable to saying or doing something that will make the situation worse.

Other parents respond to their understandable panic at their child’s trans identity disclosure by waging war on their child’s new belief system. Gender becomes the subject of every interaction, and every conversation becomes an attempt to defeat the identity or prevent the feared outcome.

Both reactions are understandable. But, neither is sustainable.

In the absence of good, enlightening conversations between parents and their kids about uncomfortable but developmentally important topics, gender included, the child’s thoughts remain a mystery. The child is then tasked with dealing with complex distress entirely on their own, or at least feeling as though they are totally alone. Their distress will probably only escalate.

They may go online and find same-aged peers and a combination of well-meaning and totally unsavory adults who promise to help them achieve the only solution they currently understand as the thing that will make them feel better.

Over time, and in the absence of a change in the family dynamic, these kids can become increasingly certain that they simply need to kill time until they turn 18 and can make their own medical decisions.

Then the risk is that they fall into a system that does not assess the full causes of their distress, measure whether the individual understands the consequences of a transitioned life path, or examine their motivations for wanting to change sex.

This is the most common outcome I have seen, and lived myself, of using no intervention out of fear of making things worse and hoping that the kid simply grows out of this phase or distress on their own. And this outcome is so common, mostly because no alternative intervention has been proposed.

That approach of waiting and seeing how gender feelings naturally progress, may result in eventual distress resolution as a fluke for some of today’s teenaged kids, or for the non-affirmed early in life onset gender dysphoric kid (which is only a fraction of pediatric transition-desiring cases today). Maybe. But, I would not count on it working for your kid. Why?

If you have found my blog, it is probably because the way I describe myself as a kid reminds you of your own child. If this is so, I am guessing that your child may be particularly unusual in some aspect of their development. That might be diagnosable as giftedness, autism, ADHD, OCD, or various learning, speech, or motor difficulties.

For these children, more time alone to sit with their own unbridled thoughts can actually risk making them more entrenched and more certain that what they need is to intervene invasively in their bodies and lives. Especially if they have been presented with no other way to explain or address their distress.

Doing nothing in response to a kid’s gender distress is not a neutral response.

Complex developmental distress, confusion, and questioning are too multifaceted to reliably resolve through time alone, especially when gender transition is being presented as the only salient solution to it, everywhere in our culture.

But realizing that something must be done is only the first step in determining which actions would actually be useful at this current moment.

Parents who are parenting a gender-distressed child are in fact parenting their entire child. They are not merely trying to nurture or trying to defeat a walking, talking gender identity (depending on which approach they take). Thoughtful action means supporting the child’s social communication, sensory processing, emotional regulation, academics, relationships, age-appropriate independence, and other relevant life endeavors.

It also means looking at the entire family system and asking ourselves what skills the parents may need to learn alongside an adolescent whose developmental atypicalities may only now be contributing to a significantly more stressful family life.

There is a far better middle ground between avoiding gender because it feels too loaded or scary to touch and making it the subject of every parent-child interaction. Both panicked responses have far more potential to become relationship-damaging than the disagreement over gender itself.

Even if your family is already stuck in a cycle of avoidance, fruitless arguments, secrecy, or despair- that cycle can and should be interrupted.

And the most important skill is first and foremost, to learn how to have better conversations about hard things that stoke conflict.

What This Conversational Framework Is Designed to Accomplish

The goal of parenting any child through adolescence, whether autistic, gifted, gender-questioning, ADHD, or not, is ultimately to prepare them for their future endeavors, understanding the reality of who that kid is and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Where neurodevelopmental divergence exists, it is the job of the adults in the situation, namely: parents, clinicians, and educators to become more complex in their understandings of what all is going on. Your kid may be an exceptional genius in some areas and struggle in other realms of life in equally exceptional ways. It can be very difficult for some parents to accept the extent to which their potentially genius child’s weaknesses may constitute functional impairments in other areas.

The common refrain we hear a lot in this space sounds something like “my kid is so smart, how could she believe in something as absurd as the idea that she is really a boy?” In my opinion, that question is worth answering in earnest rather than treating it as a rhetorical question.

As I see it, it is precisely that combination of high intelligence and immaturity with developmental or emotional difficulties both endemic to and amplified by adolescence, which draws so many developmentally atypical kids into treating identity development as an intellectual rather than an embodied and intuitive task.

High intelligence alone can put kids and teens at odds with their peers. Then, if there’s a co-occurring mental health issue, a difficulty with social intuition (which usually looks like not picking up on social cues), the child’s robust logical faculties (which are also under construction at this stage) will try to substitute to bridge this gap. In today’s climate, the logical loop-de-loops of gender identity theory can be an enticing thought experiment to a kid who both likes to think and who finds themselves totally lost in a changing social landscape of middle or high school because they cannot keep up with the developmental trajectory of their same-aged and same-sex peers. Around adolescence, kids have the drive to explore various pursuits which will eventually become consolidated into their mature adult identities. In most cases, this occurs in the context of teenagers spending less time with their parents and branching off into peer groups.

However, for a teenager who finds other teenagers confusing or uninteresting because of an IQ difference which confers many downstream differences, and/or because they lack the social intuition and processing speed needed to parse the complex social and relational maneuvers which their peers are beginning to engage in, that drive cannot in most school environments, be actualized upon in an embodied way. In fact, such a kid is more likely to spend his or her day oscillating between a state of intellectual under-stimulation and sensory over-stimulation in school, which could contribute to living in a state of disassociation just to survive the day. At some point, a smart kid will become aware that this way of functioning is not normal.

And as it appears today, many of those kids will try to resolve that tension by searching for an answer which will help them solve their problems. That answer, for an increasing number of them, comes in the form of a culturally salient transgender identity. Unlike in the 2011-2012 school year when I as a 12 year old had to search for about two years before I stumbled on the concept of a female to male sex change, kids today are being handed it on TV, in all sorts of internet spaces, in school and in the broader culture. Most kids who hear about the concept of gender transition are unlikely to be seduced by it, because their developmental needs are already being met by their environment, and so their quest for identity development can quite easily occur within the more normative social landscape of a peer group who is similarly matched in terms of their development.

Rather than intelligence being seen as a protective factor against the development of gender dysphoria or a transgender identity, perhaps we should see it as one of the biggest predisposing factors. That is one of my theories about what could be going on with some of these kids.

One of the biggest uphill battles for parents of kids who are extremely gifted or precocious in some raw intelligence-related areas while being significantly delayed in others, namely social or sensory processing, is helping that child develop into a more well-rounded person.

Learning to have good conversations is part of that development. This applies not only to gender but to any important life topic involving disagreement, discomfort, or the need to discuss something unrelated to the one or two subjects on which your kid may be fixated.

The objectives of these conversations are therefore developmental and, frankly, more realistic than expecting one perfect argument to change your child’s identity.

You are trying to:

1. Keep the channel of communication between you and your child open.

2. Help your child build tolerance for emotionally difficult conversations.

3. Help both of you express disagreement without treating the relationship itself as being in danger.

4. Gather better information about what your child is actually experiencing.

5. Help your child develop emotional regulation, sensory regulation, perspective-taking, body awareness, and a basic understanding of how their brain processes information.

6. Maintain reasonable boundaries without teaching your child that becoming more secretive is the only way to become independent.

7. Expand your child’s world so that gender is not carrying the entire burden of identity, belonging, emotional regulation, and future meaning.

These are skills your parent-child dynamic will need regardless of whether your child continues identifying as transgender, is currently transitioning, desists, detransitions, or makes some other trajectory-defining decision as an adult.

What Successful Conversations Actually Look Like

Success does not necessarily mean your child agrees with you.

Early success looks like:

• Your child stayed in the room for ten minutes of a difficult conversation.

• Your child became angry about something you said but told you why.

• Your child returned to the table after taking a break to regulate their emotions.

• Your child corrected a perceived misunderstanding without insulting you.

• You maintained a boundary without screaming.

• Your child disclosed something valuable that they knew you did not want to hear.

• You learned that a supposedly gender-related behavior may also have a sensory component.

• You had one enjoyable conversation in which gender never came up.

• Your adolescent initiated a conversation about something difficult, and you stayed calm.

• Your kid started coming to you with their problems because you became a better source of emotional attunement and information than the chatbots they may currently be soliciting advice from online.

For clinicians, it is important not to become the only person with whom the young person can communicate. Part of the clinical task should be helping the family develop structures that allow the child and parents to speak directly with one another.

Clinicians can help families identify:

• Which subjects or relational patterns trigger immediate defensiveness.

• Which sensory conditions make good communication harder for both the parents and the child.

• Whether the young person communicates better while moving or using their hands.

• Whether the parent is asking genuine questions or delivering disguised arguments that their kid can probably see through.

• Whether a boundary is producing age-appropriate safety or simply encouraging better secrecy.

• Whether the teen’s world is expanding as they get older or becoming increasingly fixated around gender.

• Whether the family is equipped to address issues related to their child’s development outside of gender.

It is exceedingly easy for gender to hijack a family, especially one comprised of intelligent people with a research mentality who use information to process complex emotions and broader existential themes. This can happen within both the child and the parents. It is important to take note of this if you see this becoming an ever-present theme in your family life.

The framework that follows is intended to help families reset those patterns. Although these strategies explicitly take neurodivergence into account, they are not exclusive to autistic or ADHD presentations of adolescent gender distress.

I will use examples from families I’ve made various of these suggestions to as we have worked together, with identifying information removed, and reflections from my own life to explain the principles I think are most important. I will also give you the beginnings of a plan for beginning to use them right away.

The rest of this essay is available in full to paid subscribers.

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This written essay will also be accompanied by an audio recording of me reading it. Those listening should still scroll through to see the relevant images and links.

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TL;DR/Summary: If you’ve ever been told that you can solve your kid’s gender issues by either immediately transitioning them, or by just taking away the internet, changing schools, finding the right therapist, sending them an article written by a detransitioner like me, or by trying to win an argument about gender identity ideology with your kid, this essay is for you.

Because you are getting bad advice.

I say this as a life coach who works with parents of gender-questioning youth, and as someone who spent 12 years navigating my own gender issues inside of a family dynamic. What parents need in order to help their usually autistic or adhd, gifted or twice-exceptional gender-questioning, dysphoric or transgender-identifying kids thrive, is not one quick fix, or two, or five. They need a much more comprehensive roadmap for what is actually happening with their child, in their family, and they need better context for the developmental moment they are all trying to survive. It is only in the ability to think complexly that parents or clinicians will be able to help gender dysphoric young people to truly thrive.

As you can imagine, my essays take a lot of time and effort to produce and to bring to you. As a 26 year old independent writer, your support of my work through paid subscriptions is vital for me to be able to continue bringing my insights to you. You can upgrade to a paid subscription by clicking on the “subscribe” buttons in this post.

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There are no quick fixes to your kid’s gender issues.

My name is Maia Poet. I’m a few days shy of my 27th birthday, and I’m a Gen Z detransitioner. I spent 12 years of my life, from the ages 12-24, singularly fixated on pursuing the idea that turning myself into a man was my only path to happiness. I found myself in the Middle East, pretending to be a man, and then lived through some wars and terror attacks which made me rethink my priorities in life. This ultimately led me to quit my gender transition, otherwise known as a ‘detransition.’

You may know me from this blog or from any of the numerous podcasts I’ve told my story on, over the last two years and some change. Those of you who have followed me for a while know that over the course of my advocacy, I’ve received a predictable influx of hate mail and death threats.

But I’ve also received something much more interesting: a steady stream of questions from parents and clinicians who are trying to guide the next cohort of gender-dysphoric youth through their struggles.

With each subsequent interview I gave about my story, I began to grow increasingly bored with the sameness of the conversations, and so I tried to challenge myself by adding at least one new bit of my analysis or insight with each interview, just to spice things up. And for some reason, there were quite a few of you who listened and thought I had something valuable to say. That reaction surprised me more than getting the death threats!

A short time into my advocacy, parents began reaching out to me asking for my help in coaching them through parenting their kids through the turbulence of an adolescent gender identity crisis.

At first, I was hesitant to do so.

But when I had begun to unpack everything that had happened to me, and to reflect on it with slightly more distance and maturity, I began consulting with families.

When I began consulting with families one-on-one, I found their cases fascinating, and became immersed in this latest autistic fixation of mine: helping parents think through and problem-solve any number of really complex, heartbreaking, emotional, confusing, and even to embrace the joyful and deeply rewarding moments with their kids as the gender topic enters their family dynamics.

Pretty quickly in my work with families, I became aware that today’s parents are often stuck in a strange mirror image of the online world I inhabited as a gender-dysphoric 12-year-old adolescent in the 2011/2012 school year.

I was once online learning how to convince my parents to agree to let me transition.

Now parents are online trying to learn how to respond to kids like the one I once was, usually wanting advice about how to convince their kids out of it. As someone who went through really intense gender issues for 12 years after a lifetime of significant developmental issues, I re-immersed myself in the online worlds of parenting advice surrounding the topic of gender dysphoria.

I realized pretty quickly that there were two camps: one that tells parents to immediately transition their kids, no matter how young and no matter how psychologically or neurodevelopmentally complex, and the other, which tells parents that their kids have been swept up in a social contagion and have joined a cult.

One approach recommended essentially reversing the roles of the parents and the kids, by encouraging parents to pander to the inherent instability of their children’s and adolescent’s gender whims under threat of suicide. The other approach recommended doing everything in a parent’s power to shut whole thing down. Parents in both groups were seemingly quick to vilify those in the other. However, neither of these approaches actually treated the situation with the complexity it deserved. Seeing this, I became quickly disillusioned with the advice parents were giving each other.

It is almost as if, in their own ways, both the affirming and non-affirming parenting approaches had without realizing it, reduced their complex kids into merely walking, talking, transgender identities. This saddened me, and inspired me to write this blog.

In 2012, my parents had no resources available to them. My gender-questioning journey began a good few years before the rest of my generation’s autistic girls decided to do the same thing. But, rather than having no resources available to them, today’s parents of gender-questioning youth find themselves marinating in endless discourse about both gender-affirming and gender-non-affirming parenting strategies, trying to figure out which advice is loving, which advice is dangerous, which advice might get them somewhere, and which advice simply does not apply to their child.

Parents often find themselves trying to parent their kid through a gender identity struggle for far longer than they had initially expected. Even parents who affirm their kids’ trans identities usually greatly struggle with the consequences and complexities of this choice.

And then there are those parents who do not affirm their kid’s transgender identity. Some of these parents have made this choice from the outset, whereas others have landed on this decision as a result of first affirming the trans identity and then realizing that this decision had only made their kid’s struggles worse, and so had to walk it back. This essay will focus more on the parents who have made the choice to not affirm the trans identities of their kids, because I can speak to it from personal experience of being the kid in that dynamic and who now works with parents who have chosen to practice that approach.

Many parents come to believe that they are doing something wrong, when after an argument with their kid, they haven’t managed to change their gender-dysphoric or transgender-identifying adolescent’s mind about gender with relational brute force.

Some will try multiple quick-fix strategies and then resign themselves to the idea that their kid has been hopelessly swallowed up by a cult, which they are led to believe is why their kid becomes defensive around anyone who tries to poke holes in their trans identity claims.

Whenever I see this happening, I find it extremely depressing that parents are being encouraged to think in this way.

I do not believe that these young people are inherently unreachable from the moment they say they are trans, and their parents do not immediately affirm them. That unreachability usually comes as a direct result of other behavioral, (neuro)/developmental and family dynamic patterns which have been allowed to fester for an increasingly long time, because of how emotionally touchy this subject is. And I believe that this unreachability can be largely prevented or mitigated with a robust parenting and clinical strategy which thinks very differently about the experiences of gender distressed young people.

From my standpoint as someone who lived through the experience of growing up with intense gender issues for 12 years in addition to more longstanding neurodevelopmental ones, who now coaches parents of kids like the one I was, the one thing I can promise you, is that this will not be over tomorrow.

No matter what you say to your kid, no matter which article or study you may think to send them, no matter what: your kid’s gender issues will not be solved by some magic bullet. You and your child could be in this for a while.

I know no one wants to hear me say this, but in the spirit of accepting reality for what it is, please understand that how you parent your kid through this holistically matters way more than any proverbial dart you may want to throw at the board right now.

I understand why parents of gender distressed youth want quick fixes. Their fears for their kids are not irrational. The stakes of either facilitating a gender transition or trying to prevent it, are both high. Medical and mental health institutions are handling these cases extremely irresponsibly. But the fact that the institutional response is crazy does not mean that either parents or clinicians should think that responding from a place of panic is a sustainable successful strategy.

Sometimes responding from a place of panic looks like avoiding the gender topic altogether, affirming the trans identity immediately, or waging a war on the kid’s trans identity. All of these panic responses usually end up with trying at least one (if not more) of the commonly suggested quick-fix ‘desistance’ strategies parents find online. And usually, parents will spend years trying these quick fix strategies only to see their child’s mental health deteriorating.

The tension I want to explore here in the rest of this essay is: why parents reach for various quick fixes, why many of those impulses make perfect sense, and why still those strategies often fail to help young people when they are treated as the whole plan. I will start by illustrating how this dynamic plays out by reflecting on how it did in my own family.

I’ll use myself and my family as a case study to showcase why the quick fix strategies you are seeing online are probably not working for your autistic kid.

As a kid, my favorite hobby was research.

And as a kid who was born in the summer of 1999, for the first few years of my sentient life, my proclivity to latch onto highly age-atypical obsessions with rare medical conditions began after a more age-typical obsession surrounding the Guinness Book of World Records.

At first, I tried to memorize every record in the book.

Then I wanted to beat all of them.

Unfortunately for eight-and-a-half-year-old little me, I was remarkably uncoordinated. I had just a few years earlier learned to walk flat-footed after spending kindergarten in leg braces to correct toe-walking that had started in toddlerhood. So, after trying and failing to beat any of the records in the book, and now closer to nine than I was to eight, I stumbled across a page about the world’s tallest people.

Immediately, I became transfixed.

My mom had just told me that I was going through a growth spurt and had explained puberty to me. But I was still confused about the basic difference between fiction and reality, about the notion that puberty would turn me from a kid into an adult, about the idea that I was a girl in any permanent sense, and even about the fact that Shel Silverstein’s poem “Hungry Mungry,” in which a boy eats his way through the entire world and eventually himself, was a work of fiction.

So I thought, quite seriously, that perhaps I would grow abnormally tall and could try to beat the record for the world’s tallest person.

The year was 2008, and we had one home computer for the family to share.

I didn’t care about playing computer games like my brother did, though I did beg my dad for the latest version of Windows, which was on our school computers. I wanted the updated operating system because it had page breaks, and because I loved to write.

At that age, I had a basic understanding that I could use the internet to learn more about things I found fascinating. But I was still so slow with typing, and so unwilling to move myself away from the book I was reading all the way to the computer, and to redirect my attention toward a screen, that I had not really mastered those skills yet.

But I was so invested in beating this record, and so convinced that my early pubertal growth spurt might give me a “head start” in terms of growth and strength, that I needed to figure out how these people got so tall.

So I went online, having memorized the birth and death dates of America’s tallest man, Robert Pershing Wadlow, and China’s tallest woman, Yao Defen, and began to hunt and peck my way to glory.

There was only one documentary available on YouTube about the world’s tallest people, and so I watched it over and over and over again until I had committed all 45 minutes and 38 seconds to memory.

After watching it enough times, I got bored of it, but I couldn’t find any more videos.

I learned that they all suffered from something called “gigantism,” which was somehow related to this other thing called “acromegaly,” and down the rabbit hole I went.

Once I realized that being abnormally tall as a result of acromegaly, which is caused by a pituitary tumor, is really deadly and killed these people very young, I had many mixed feelings.

First, I felt guilty for even desiring such a thing.

Second, I was now paranoid that I too had a pituitary tumor because I was growing out of my clothes.

Thirdly, I had developed something of an emotional bond with China’s tallest woman at the time, Yao Defen, who had described living a life of physical pain, all sorts of medical issues, and social ostracism, only to have made it into her adulthood, becoming bedridden, and knowing exactly how she would die: because her heart was on track to outgrow her rib cage.

The more I watched and rewatched the documentary, the more compelled I became to figure out what could be done to help these people.

In my now nine-year-old mind, this meant that I needed to learn everything there was to know about this pituitary tumor and accomplish the feat of removing the so-called inoperable cases.

This fixation started out far more slowly than my future ones would, because so much of the research took place in medical journals that were not made for little kids and that I, with a then incomplete elementary school education, was incapable of parsing. I latched onto whichever words I could pronounce, and those became the subjects of other lines of inquiry I would fixate on until I could solve this problem.

I branched off into obsessing over the human genome because I learned that these things called genes could cause diseases. By the time I was ten years old and in fifth grade, my obsession with the world’s tallest people and the rare pituitary tumor that caused their condition had begun to rule my life.

At some point later, I fell out of love with that fixation because my inability to solve it was not something I was mature enough to cope with.

Then, around eleven years old, in sixth grade, I began to move away from acromegaly and more fully into topics such as Myers-Briggs personality tests, the nature/nurture debate, progeria, a condition of rapid aging, and then, as the academic demands of sixth grade reared their ugly head and I struggled to cut out the noise of my own thought experiments long enough to pay the slightest attention to what was going on around me, I became fully fixated on all things related to learning differences such as hyperlexia, various learning disabilities, and conditions like autism and ADHD.

Clearly, puberty itself was an incredibly confusing time for me, and I was trying to understand it through researching proxies of various growth and aging-related pathologies.

The bulk of my research before my 12th birthday was almost entirely analog. I used the internet mostly to look up more book titles about topics I was interested in, to read the occasional article, and to find relevant abstracts from medical journals which were pertinent to the medical condition I was fixated on that month.

But on my 12th birthday, in the summer of 2011, I got an iPad as a gift.

From what I recall, I didn’t have any yearning for an iPad. What I really wanted for my birthday that year was a really expensive college textbook about genetics instead. But when I got that iPad, my parents tried to relieve my disappointment by telling me that I could read hundreds of books on this new machine. And so, I quickly warmed up to it.

Both my parents and, seemingly, their whole generation were really naive about introducing little kids to free-range internet. Gen X thought that these mobile, internet-connected technologies were the way of the future and that their kids needed to learn to use them in order to be successful. They were not remotely aware that by giving their kids unrestricted internet access, they were in fact giving the whole world access to the impressionable minds of their children.

When I got that iPad, my tendency to research everything fascinating that entered my mind went into overdrive.

My lack of finger dexterity and motor skills no longer precluded me from rapidly getting my thoughts down in a way legible enough to reference later. Now I was free to explore whatever interested me.

Over the course of the next six months, my research into all sorts of new rare medical conditions got deeper. I was introduced, at a much more rapid rate, to the fact that there were an endless number of additional rare medical conditions I could research.

That said, the algorithms back in the 2010s were infantile compared to those that kids are using today.

But for those who have made it this far, you know now that during my seventh grade year, I stumbled across one rare medical condition that simply learning about altered the course of my life profoundly.

And that rare medical condition was called “transsexuality.”

Much like with my obsession with the rare pituitary tumor that causes gigantism and acromegaly, my obsession with transsexuality included learning about the theories about the biological underpinnings of the condition. My previous deep dives into the pituitary gland had taught me that one of its functions had to do with the secretion of growth and sex hormones. When I learned that transsexuals needed to be on cross-sex hormones for the rest of their lives, I wondered whether there would be a way to alter trans patients’ pituitary glands themselves, so they would not need to make regular trips to the pharmacy.

In addition to an obsession about the biology of transsexuality, I became fixated on the patients’ life stories. I found something highly relatable and resonant in the ways transsexuals described their lives. These adults who were in their 20s described having lifelong feelings of being very different from others of the same sex, being disconnected from their bodies, and not knowing why until they came across the possibility of a female-to-male “sex change.”

These young adult transsexuals described, in such detail, their fraught experiences with embodiment. I wondered if the condition these adults were describing was something I experienced too.

The transsexuals whose stories I watched on YouTube described really niche experiences that I had never heard anyone else mention before. For example, one described experiencing a disconnect with her body as she looked in the mirror. And I too shared the experience of looking into a mirror every day as I washed my hands, and being surprised that when I moved my arm, the reflection did too.

Puberty only made that pre-existing disconnect worse.

Looking back on it as an adult myself, this specific type of mind-body disconnect is not even remotely uncommon in autistic people. And neither are gender non-conforming behaviors. But the fact that so many of these trans people I was watching online, many of them in retrospect clearly autistic themselves, had labeled this disconnect as the evidence that separated trans men from tomboys and lesbians, I began to understand myself as someone who tragically was afflicted with having a male brain in a female body.

Everything that had once been deeply confusing to me about myself had finally made sense.

And there was a solution proposed.

That I could become a man, and finally become “normal” without needing to sacrifice my personality, interests, or quirks.

And to a 12-year-old like me, it seemed like a great idea.

I couldn’t wait to share this discovery with my parents.

However, when I confided these feelings in my parents, they panicked.

When I was 12, my parents took away my internet access because I had become so obsessed with all things trans that I had adopted it as a self-concept.

We got into a series of arguments about the trans topic, then about matters of personal style and appearance, and then we stopped talking about anything emotionally meaningful altogether.

Did that make my gender transition fixation go away?

No. Of course not.

And let me tell you why:

Pretty quickly into this whole thing, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to convince my parents into entertaining this latest twist and turn at the beginning of my adolescent identity developmental period. Even me thinking about it made them really upset, and the consequence of that was that I, being a very sensitive kid, became even more upset and that my life became measurably worse.

Instead, I chose to be pragmatic about it.

I used the internet at school to find trans-related anthologies from the 1990s and early 2000s in libraries and bookstores around the city. Because I have a nearly photographic memory, I could easily refer back to the previous information I had consumed about how to bind your breasts using normal household objects, and perfected that in secret. Now that the trans topic had become totally taboo, I became even more fixated on it. My parents thought that by avoiding the subject while making comments about my atypical appearance, time would solve this problem. In fact, time did not make me grow out of my trans identity. Time, in the absence of a clear parenting plan for how to help me, only caused me to grow further and deeper into my trans identity.

In retrospect, there is no way my parents could have predicted that their once happy and compliant child would become so sneaky and resourceful in pursuit of researching something. They also could not have expected that this would be so different from the usual teenage phases that come as quickly as they go. It was 2012, and this was unheard of. It is precisely for this reason that I am reflecting on it here.

The reason I became so fixated on transsexuality as a 12 year old is because I had an underlying emotional, intellectual and developmental need to understand myself and I had pre-existing vulnerabilities which made it impossible for me to do those things in a more typical and embodied way. Shutting down the trans topic because it was uncomfortable to think about or talk about, did not make any of those things disappear. What that strategy did do, was to make me feel that it was not safe for me to confide my feelings in my parents.

Kids and teens who do not feel they can confide in their parents about their emotional and life problems will go elsewhere to meet that deeply human need. They will confide in their friends, find new ways to go online, or find any adult who will listen. And that isn’t simply because the kid has been ‘groomed’ or ‘brainwashed.’ It is a sign that they have a need going unmet, and they are earnestly just trying to solve their own problems. Unfortunately, at those young ages, they cannot actually solve their own problems effectively. They will find a maladaptive coping strategy of any kind, and they will stick to it with ardent fervor, because they are distressed and immature.

The longer that goes on, the more entrenched, unmovable and intertwined this maladaptive coping strategy becomes with the adolescent’s self-concept. When parents do not have the many tools and comprehensive supports they need in order to meet their kids where they are at, with a (neuro)developmentally informed and emotionally attuned parenting approach, teenagers will try (and fail) to figure these things out on their own, with no guidance from the very adults who have their best interests in mind. And that is where I see the biggest danger.

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this essay, why my journey of gender questioning took 12 years and the traumatic aftermath of two middle eastern wars for my trans identity (and my identity as an Israeli-Palestinian peace activist) to fracture so significantly that I deprioritized pretending to be a man. With every passing year of my development where the subject was totally ignored, my pre-existing vulnerabilities only compounded. At that point, transition became the only way I was able to learn much of what I needed to, in order to eventually become a somewhat more embodied, less confused and more well-rounded version of myself at nearly 27. But by the time I desisted and detransitioned around 24, I had already lost half of my years of really important development to pursuing an idea which ultimately damaged my body and honestly sort of traumatized me.

I have arrived at my opinions about the types of parenting and clinical supports that I believe gender dysphoric youth (particularly the neurodivergent ones) need, not as someone who is simply theorizing about gender-distressed youth from the outside. I hold the opinions I do because I was once that kid, that teenager and that young adult.

I was once that kid who became obsessed, then secretive, and then unreachable. I too, was once the 12 year old who interpreted my parents’ panic around my trans identity as proof that they could not understand me and did not want to try. My parents had only the best of intentions, and are highly capable people. But they had some considerable generational blindspots and no guidance available to them. Not only did I eventually embark upon the social transition process as soon as I turned 18, after spending much of my adolescence secretly binding my breasts, but because this had become such a power struggle in my family, our relationship was perhaps only salvageable due to the fact that I was living far away in a foreign country.

And it is for that reason that after I detransitioned, moved back to the States and began trying to mend my relationships with my own parents; when I began seeing some of the advice being given to parents of gender questioning kids like the one I had been, sometimes by other parents, I found myself pretty disheartened by the state of it.

And so I created this blog to reflect on it all.

The Common ‘Quick Fixes’ Parents of Trans-Identifying Youth Are Offered

When I talk about quick fixes, I do not mean that every one of the strategies I will cover in this essay which parents often try, is always wrong in every circumstance.

The snippets of generic parenting advice I’ve listed below range, in my opinion, from really bad ideas to ideas that may have some merit, but only when they are practiced responsibly and only when they are part of a much more targeted and individualized family-based work.

The five quick fixes I see parents being offered most often are: to control the flow of information, to try to win the argument, to outsource the problem, to shut it down or affirm it completely, and find the one real cause of why this is happening.

As someone who has worked with many families by now, the thing I can say with most certainty is that every single situation is highly variable, even though they all follow distinct patterns.

Quick Fix #1: Control the Flow of Information

The first quick fix I see parents trying is to control the information inputs that the kid is using to explore or obsess about all things ‘trans.’ I’ve seen parents being told to just: take away the internet, remove the kid from their school, cut off the teen’s trans friend group, block every trans-related piece of content, and assume that if the source of the bad idea disappears, the identity will eventually disappear too.

I understand why parents reach for this strategy. Internet communities, ideological teaching at schools and peer groups who collectively obsess over these ideas are all influences on impressionable and young people. And no parent should be expected to let their child marinate endlessly in online spaces that are actively teaching them to hate their body, distrust their parents, and interpret every developmental difficulty through the language of gender identity. I get it.

But I also see this cluster of strategies as being incredibly short-sided and unsustainable. Where this level of authoritarianism does yield positive results, it mostly does so by staving off immediate influence in very young kids: think pre-teens, who usually already have good family relationships and who are not autistic, particularly gifted or particularly obsessive. Very few gender distressed youth who come to their parents disclosing this, fall into that category. Using this approach with most of the types of kids who develop gender dysphoria, all of whom will eventually age out of the point where it is developmentally healthy for their parents to control everything about their lives, is by definition only a quick fix, at best. But if you see any of your kid in how I described myself as a kid, you should be very careful with this because unless you course-correct pretty intentionally, this will become the source of totally unnecessary power struggle.

Just because you may feel guilty that you got your 12 year old kid an iPad and unaware of the dangers, let them roam free on it; it does not mean that taking away your child’s ability to ever use internet is the most sound thing to do now. This is especially true if there are other siblings at home who are still being allowed to use the internet as much as they want. If there is already a rivalry between those siblings, or if they are close in age, the gender questioning kid will very immaturely, but understandably from their vantage point, believe any number of possible things, including:

1. That you are favoring their sibling. If that sibling happens to be of the opposite sex, this will probably only further be used as confirmation that your child’s life will be easier or better if they were the opposite sex. And this may become the subject of their rumination even in absence of further internet usage.

2. That you are punishing them for telling you how they feel. Parents often will take away their kids’ phones or computers as a consequence for bad behavior. If you have done that before, consider carefully whether you are contemplating this particular move because you have such strong negative feelings towards your child in the wake of their trans identity declaration and that you are trying to somehow punish them, or whether you are just engaging in some Gen X wishful thinking that taking away the internet will make the thoughts your child now has, to just go away on their own. In any case, it is important to be realistic about how this will land for your kid and to what extent the trade-off is worth it. If this move is framed as a punishment for the type of content they have been looking up, or interpreted as such, your kid will quickly learn that it is not in their best interests to tell you things anymore. The internet is meeting at least one need in your kid’s life right now. Removing it without anything to replace it is a recipe for disaster, both in the short-term and in the long term. Developing an adversarial dynamic with your emerging adolescent will make your family life measurably more difficult in just a few years. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t ever make this move, but if you do, I want you to be aware of the potential consequences.

I do think it is healthier to take your kid’s gender and life distress as a potential sign, however, that something needs to change. Maybe your whole family needs to rethink its over-reliance on internet usage, and to find other things to do in its place. Because truthfully, there is so much more useful stuff you could be doing to bond as a family.

Also, it’s important to consider the future. By the time your kid has hit their teen years, and in particular by the time they get to high school, it is both unhealthy for them and unhealthy for you to seclude your teenager from every aspect of the world you find objectionable. 13 year olds are different from 14 year olds who are different from 15 year olds and so on. All of those kids are very capable of finding this information on their own. And all of them already know that gender transition is a possibility and that someday they will turn 18 and be able to do it. Gender transition as an option is so culturally popular that it helps no one to pretend that it does not exist. Once the seed has been planted, it must actually be contended with.

Otherwise, you run the risk of your younger teenager becoming totally secretive about their lives. And that is precisely when as an older teenager, they will make their worst decisions.

It is important to contextualize the period in which most young people these days present with gender issues: in their pre-teen and teen years.

Traditionally, teens had freedom to rebel or push back against their parents in ways that their parents never found out about.

But today, kids of all ages are allowed far less real-life freedom than kids of prior generations, and are allowed nearly endless access to freedom in the disembodied Wild West of the internet.

They tend to have fewer life and social skills than kids of the same age did in generations past, precisely because their development has taken place in a disembodied way.

So often, when they get this healthy adolescent urge to push back against the authority of their parents, they do so while being stuck at home, unable to leave the house and retreat to a group of their peers, unable to rebel in a way their parents are unaware of.

I can see why taking an almost authoritarian level of control becomes so tempting.

Parents today are trying to control a developmental process that used to happen more often in bedrooms, friend groups, malls, parking lots, bad poetry, and awkward adolescent experiments, but is now happening inside an institutional and digital world that can escalate it into something medically and socially consequential.

So while the impulse to exert the utmost control makes sense under the circumstances, it is really important to slow down and think through this stuff. Age-appropriate boundaries and age-appropriate freedoms are important for your child’s development.

But locking your kid’s world down after they declare a trans identity to you, still does not help to resolve their underlying strife. That strategy in isolation is both unsustainable in the long-term and it still does not answer the more important questions which should ideally be answered before your kid turns 18:

1. Which developmental problem(s) is this identity currently solving for this child?

2. What is my kid using this to cope with?

3. How can we meet those needs in more adaptive ways?

Quick Fix #2: Win the Argument

The second quick fix parents often try, is that they attempt to win the argument: they will try to send the right article, to find the most compelling detransitioner testimony, to suggest the right book about cults or gender ideology, or sit the kid down and logically dismantle their entire belief system.

Maia’s Substack

I'm a Detransitioner. Stop Sending My Essays to Your Trans-Identified Kid.

Note: the play button at the top is not a decoration, it is a recording of me reading my essay…

Read more

a year ago · 89 likes · 50 comments · Maia Poet

Again, I understand the impulse.

Parents often feel like if their smart child could just see the contradiction, the danger, the social contagion, the ideology, the medical risks, or the incoherence of the claims they are repeating, something would click.

As I see it, the truth of why your kid isn’t responding to their parents’ well-intentioned factual and logical eviscerations of gender ideological thinking is actually far less bleak than parents are being led to believe:

That you cannot reason someone out of that which they came to believe due to emotional yearning. You cannot meet an unmet developmental need or impulse through relational brute force. There is a reason that your kid specifically is exploring this subject, even though his or her entire class was exposed to the same idea and they gave it no mind. That is worth exploring.

And also, because frankly, parenting an adolescent is different from parenting a younger child.

Younger children can be Pavloved into obeying their parents because they are entirely dependent upon them for survival.

Adolescents are in a different stage of life, where not only does the strategy of just saying “no” often fail to get the behavior you want, but it is actually far more likely to encourage it.

Why?

Because adolescents, unlike small children, are beginning to form the basis of their mature identities as human beings who aren’t just the children of their parents.

In order to complete this process of identity formation, teenagers will usually separate themselves from their parents through boundary testing, risk taking, sneaking around, pushing their parents away emotionally, secluding themselves in their rooms, and by adopting new beliefs.

And usually these new beliefs are not compatible with their parents’ for this reason.

Those beliefs, be they about gender or about religion, politics, music, philosophy, or anything else, become the basis of that young person’s identity.

All of that can be really annoying or even heartbreaking to parents, but it is entirely normal.

The types of exploration which gender-questioning youth are engaging in are actually at their core a normal aspect of adolescent identity development.

What is not normal, however, is what the adults are doing in response.

If the trans identity serves the function of a solution to pubertal distress, social confusion, sensory issues, shame, loneliness, obsessive thinking, or the desperate need to make the self coherent, then treating it as an inalienable truth to be reified through the potentially lifelong medicalization of an immature person is patently irresponsible. However, in this circumstance, treating the youth’s new transgender self-concept as a bad argument to be defeated will, make the child defend it more intensely.

Many of the “winning an argument” strategies that parents suggest to each other online can advance a rupture in the parent-child relationship and cement a power struggle in which the kid becomes increasingly fixated on the notion that gender transition is their only path to peace and happiness in adulthood, and then increasingly determined to prove their parents wrong by sticking ardently to the conclusion they came to as an adolescent.

You do not want the situation in your family to get to this point.

When kids get to that stage in a power struggle with their parents over something as significant and consequential as the desire to alter their bodies and lives in line with a transgender identity, everything in that parent-child dynamic goes off the tracks.

If you are in such a situation, hope is not lost.

For as long as both parties are alive, relationships can be repaired if thoughtful effort is put into mending them. This is one of the things I spend most of my time helping parents with. It is entirely doable. It just takes creativity, patience, time and open-mindedness.

Quick Fix #3: Outsource the Problem

The third quick fix I see suggested often, is to outsource the problem: usually by finding a therapist who won’t affirm the trans identity and let that person handle it so you don’t have to.

I want to be clear about something: putting your kid in therapy for their gender issues is a hugely mixed bag.

Just because social and medical transition come with their own dangers, it does not mean that a psychotherapeutic intervention is some kind of inherently safer or more neutral alternative. Just because a therapist understands the basic fact that sex cannot be changed, it does not mean that therapist will be a good fit for your kid. The only cases in which therapy is helpful are when the kid wants to be there, and where the therapist can succeed in building rapport with your kid while actually being skilled at their craft. From personal experience, there are exceedingly few good therapists who are skilled at working with exceedingly high IQ teenagers who lack social skills and have gender issues. Finding them is like finding a needle in a haystack. And bad therapists, or therapists who are bad for this population, are a dime a dozen. If sending your kid off to a therapist is the only strategy you are using, you are running the risk of wasting valuable time putting all the eggs into this one basket when the therapist may either be incompetent, not a good fit for your kid, or as was my case, I simply refused to cooperate with them because there was not enough family trust for me to presume that my confidentiality would be respected by a therapist picked and paid for by my parents.

But even a good therapist who works with gender distressed youth cannot substitute for parents understanding their own child, their own family dynamic, and the developmental problem in front of them.

In addition, many of the young people I met over the course of my time in trans communities, needed a lot more help than a weekly session with a therapist.

If therapy is involved in your overall parenting strategy, do not assume that sending off the ‘problem’ child to a gender shrink will magically solve the problem. The families I have worked with who see the best outcomes are those who diversify their strategy by seeking the guidance of a number of people, including: family therapists, adolescent psychologists, psycho-educational evaluators, speech and occupational therapists, and various life coaches, including myself. If you are unsatisfied with the advice you are getting, you are well within your rights to check-in with yourself and your partner, and to seek as many second and third opinions as possible. Everyone has their own differences in approach, because therapy and coaching are crafts more than they are sciences. Every human being has their blindspots, and so the most comprehensive approaches tend to unearth the most pressing ones quickly enough to be useful.

Taking a comprehensive approach, rather than a quick fix approach to your kid’s gender issues can involve sending your kid to a therapist, but it should not be limited to that. Your kid may need more comprehensive developmental support that you may not have considered until this gender stuff entered the picture. That is a common revelation which many of the parents I’ve worked with have come to. In addition, you will need support too. That could be a life coach like me, a therapist you trust, a pastor, or a group of friends.

Quick Fix #4: Shut It Down or Affirm It Completely

There are two broad relational approaches that most parents are aware of, which they use to respond to their child’s gender distress: either to try to shut it down or avoid it (non-affirming) or to facilitate it through social and/or medical transition means (affirming).

These mistakes are mirror images of themselves.

One side treats the child’s words as meaningless because they are immature, borrowed from online spaces, highly ideological, or factually wrong.

The other side treats the child’s words as unquestionably true because they are emotionally intense.

I am not interested in either approach because I think they are both incredibly unhelpful.

A child can be wrong about the conclusion that he or she has come to, while still be communicating something meaningful. That’s why I am far more fond of a truly exploratory approach.

For better or for worse, when your kid is in their teens and early twenties, these are the frustrating developmental waters you are all swimming in.

So, when parents approach the emotional disclosures their gender-questioning kids make with a degree of genuine curiosity and desire to understand what their kids are saying, rather than based on the assumption that their kid is a hopelessly brainwashed cult lemming, I can guarantee that the quality of your interactions will with your kids will improve.

Because I was once the kid in one of these dynamics, I can often act as a translator between your perspective and that of your child. If your child has an atypical, autistic or adhd neurodevelopmental trajectory similar to the one I have described extensively on this blog, I can help you navigate the additional landmines this predisposes your family dynamic to. But in all honesty, every situation benefits from more genuine curiosity than it ever will from another trans debate around the dining room table.

Quick Fix #5: Endlessly Search for the One Cause

The fifth quick fix I am describing is more disjointed than the others, and it usually looks like trying to find the one cause as to why all this all happened: it is the internet, it is the school, it is my kid’s other 12 year old friend, it is the bad therapist, it is the other kid’s parent, it is the “cult”. And then, to chase it to the exclusion of examining other unhelpful patterns in the situation.

There is never just one reason why a young person develops gender dysphoria or a desire to change their outward appearance to more closely resemble that of the opposite sex.

Usually, there is a perfect storm of factors.

Attributing your kid’s trans identity to “we’ve failed as parents,” or to “it’s the internet’s fault,” or to “it’s the fault of this other 12-year-old kid who has clearly influenced my daughter who otherwise wouldn’t have fallen into this,” will never give you the full scope of information you will actually need to help guide your kid through this time in their life.

Secondly, the kids who are attracted to trans identities are very psychologically, neurodevelopmentally and sometimes even medically complex.

Some of them simply identify as transgender or nonbinary and have no dysphoric or distressing feelings about their sex or associated expectations, while some of them are highly distressed and desire a social and medical transition as soon as they find out such things exist. Some of them stay fixed in one trans identity whereas others move around between various flavors of non-binary, and sometimes into a more binary cross-sex identity.

Some of these kids have complex mental health needs, family upheaval, or early-life trauma, whereas others have neurodevelopmental conditions like autism and ADHD. And some have all of the above.

In any given case, in addition to the inherent turbulence of adolescence which acts as its own major predisposing factor, there could be any number of these other factors in any given case.

Thirdly, parents seeing their kid’s birth sex identity rejection tend to blame themselves for their kids having come to the conclusion that they are not, in fact, the boy or girl their parents brought into the world and raised from birth, or that their parents chose to bring into their family through adoption.

Either way, there is a tendency of parents whose kids reveal a transgender identity to believe that their child’s violation of their expectations is somehow their fault.

I do not believe that living in either self-blame or in a state of blaming everyone else, in response to a teen’s trans identity, is in any way helpful. Blaming yourself, the internet, the school, or the “trans cult” does not give parents enough of a map for how to actually help their kids.

The truth of the matter is that:

There is no quick fix or shortcut through adolescent immaturity.

There is no quick fix or shortcut through complex mental health needs.

There is no quick fix or shortcut through complex family dynamics.

There is no quick fix or shortcut through neurodivergence-related needs.

And there is certainly no quick fix or shortcut through the task of helping a struggling adolescent become more mature, more embodied, more socially grounded, and more capable of living in reality.

The more intelligent and developmentally uneven the kid, the more difficult the task of parenting them through the turbulence of adolescence becomes.

Why Autistic Identity Development Makes Your Work as a Parent or Clinician More Complicated

Exploring the parenting angle has been an especially natural place for my mind to go because I have had an almost 20-year-long obsession with parenting discourse.

It started when I was around eight years old, when I discovered that reading my parents’ stash of parenting books could get me out of reading inane fictional books with social-emotional plots I neither comprehended nor enjoyed.

In retrospect, it should have surprised no one that as I read parenting books centered around parenting adolescents, as a pre-teen myself, I took the bullet point of “identity formation” as a literal mandate and became obsessed with topics such as autism, ADHD, various learning disabilities, the gay rights movement, and quickly thereafter, all things “trans.”

In my consulting work with parents, I have seen firsthand that there is a massive gap in the resources available to parents who understand the importance of not brushing this gender stuff under the rug and who are trying to create a genuinely exploratory environment at home with their kids who are specifically twice-exceptional: who are both unusually gifted, and who have learning disabilities, physical disabilities or developmental delays in addition. Everyone seems to have forgotten those kids. They are usually failed by both special education and in gifted education programs because of how complex their needs are. And parenting this type of kid in a way that meets all of their needs is exceedingly challenging as a baseline, whether they get into the gender stuff or not. I know this because I was that kid. Many of your kids share that pattern, so I will speak to it briefly.

A brief note on the previously-compliant kids whose parents didn’t have any issues with them until gender entered the picture around adolescence:

Many of the families I have consulted with one-on-one describe having kids who were largely compliant before gender entered the picture, but are now behaving in ways which aggravate their parents.

There is a tendency of some parents to attribute this behavior change to the trans identity.

I disagree with this framing.

It is not a secret that adolescents are often a pain in the backsides of their parents.

The fact that a previously compliant kid is trying to assert him or herself for the first time through the trans identity seems more likely to be a developmental response of adolescence, rather than as I’ve seen argued in many parenting groups, evidence of some kind of cult brainwashing.

Whether your 14-year-old says “mom, you’re such a transphobic bigot” or “dad, I hate you” in response to being told ‘no’ to doing something they really want, you must understand that though your gender-questioning kid is using different words, they are in fact saying the same thing that teenagers have said for years to their parents when they don’t get what they want.

That doesn’t make it okay, but it is normal and annoying teenage behavior.

Something else I’ve noticed is that many of the gender-questioning kids whose parents I’ve spoken with will fully meet this angsty teenage developmental milestone far later than their other siblings have.

Then, when gender enters the picture, the kid also starts becoming secretive and wanting to hang out with their friends more than with their parents.

And for some of these kids, this happens closer to 15 or to 16 than to 11 or 12.

It becomes natural for parents to attribute this to gender cult brainwashing, when it is far more likely that your kid’s gender experimentation and their annoying behaviors are all a result of the same underlying mechanism: adolescence.

It’s just that it seems particularly out of character for some of these teenagers to behave in this way because they have hit certain psychosocial milestones later or in a more atypical way.

Most kids realize that they have knowledge that their parents do not at a much younger age, when they have the sense to sneak a cookie when their parents aren’t looking, and what gives them away are the crumbs on their face.

Usually, when confronted about it, the kid will lie, saying that they did not take the cookie without the permission of their parents.

The kid telling that lie is good evidence that they have reached a really important cognitive milestone in that they understand that they have access to information which others, in this case parents who were looking the other way, do not have.

A kindergarten-aged kid who sneaks sweets without their parents knowing will occasionally be confronted by their parents, who can use that as a learning opportunity to have any number of other conversations about health, telling the truth, moderation, and why it is they have instituted the rules they have.

However, a kid who does not engage in age-appropriate non-compliance and boundary testing in regards to something like stealing sweets without permission will probably get the urge to do that later.

And when they do, not only may it be their parents’ first time dealing with their child’s boundary testing, but because the kid is older, the stakes are much higher.

Between the ages of 10 and 12, I had just begun to realize for the first time in my life that if there was something I really wanted to learn more about, or to do, and my desires were at odds with those of my parents, I could find covert ways to do what I wanted to do in secret from them.

It started when I began attending public school in fifth grade and ordering hot lunch, which came with two options of milk: regular and chocolate.

One day, excitedly, I told this to my parents.

They responded by telling me that I was not allowed to choose the chocolate milk because it was unhealthy.

Looking back on old pictures, I was in a growth spurt and beginning to put on more weight, which certainly concerned my parents.

Then, they told me that if I did choose the chocolate milk, they would know, and would begin sending me to school with whichever soggy sandwiches I was getting before.

Naturally, that was an outcome I wanted to avoid.

But also, I had tasted the chocolate milk.

I had become accustomed to drinking it every day at lunch.

It gave me so much joy.

I tried my hardest to obey my parents’ decree and returned to drinking the regular milk.

But eventually, one day, I snapped. I decided to run back into the lunch line and swap the regular milk for the chocolate milk.

I was so gripped by the paranoia that my parents would have somehow found out that I picked the chocolate milk that I could not focus on anything else that day.

When I came home from school, and no one had confronted me about the chocolate milk, I decided to try it the next day.

And then the next.

When I realized that my parents could not in fact know whether I selected a regular or chocolate milk with my lunch, I felt I had unlocked a whole new world of potential.

I began to hone my craft of secrecy from then onwards, whenever a desire of mine conflicted with that of my parents.

That story is funny because the stakes were low.

A child learning that her parents do not know everything is a normal part of growing up. A child learning that she can conceal a desire, test a rule, break a rule, and survive the experience is also a normal part of growing up.

The trouble is that when this same developmental process begins happening in or slightly before adolescence, perhaps due to a developmental delay, the stakes are no longer about chocolate milk.

They are about sexuality, embodiment, peer belonging, internet communities, politics, religion, risk-taking, and identity.

And when the content is gender, many adults lose the ability to recognize that some part of what is happening is developmentally normal, even when the specific form it takes is frightening, consequential, or unhealthy.

And because that type of boundary-testing happens so late into development, parents have not had to set reasonable standards of discipline for that child, nor have they had the experience of putting down a boundary and sticking to it.

This complicates the dynamics a lot. But this is a special needs parenting issue, and not a gender issue.

So, at the age of 12, when my parents had taken away my internet because I was researching something that gave me the first sense of clarity and hope I had yet discovered to explain the objective oddities of my own development, I became newly invested in finding more covert ways of researching my latest autistic special interest surrounding all things “trans.”

Now that the trans topic had become totally taboo, I became even more fixated on it.

Unlike most of my previous fixations surrounding other rare medical conditions, namely brain tumors and neurological conditions, where my parents encouraged my curiosity and intense research desires, despite the fact that it was an odd thing for an eight-year-old to become fixated on, I was now prevented from doing the same type of incredibly intense research into this new trans topic of my interest on the grounds of it being something that I was supposedly too young to learn about.

My fixation on learning everything there was to know about transsexuality as a middle schooler was both intellectual in nature, similar in kind to my other medical obsessions, but it was also different in that there was a more complex emotional component to it which coincided with the natural developmental driver to figure out who I was and where I fit in, in the world.

I discuss that far more in depth in my essay titled “Is my autistic kid really transmasc, or just masking her autism?” for those who are interested.

Because you are all mature adults, I’ll level with you:

Clearly, the affirmation-only practices that comprise today’s gold standard of gender medicine have thoroughly forgotten that adolescence is a time of rapid and turbulent physical, sexual, and psychosocial development, and that it is irresponsible to unquestioningly funnel such complex young people down a highly consequential, life-defining trajectory as this.

That schools are socially transitioning kids, whether with or without the consent of their parents, is also remarkable, considering that social transition is a consequential intervention which school staff are now doing outside of a clinical setting.

That so many medical institutions have adopted the most irresponsible and careless, one-size-fits-all approach to gender dysphoria, while pretending that the evidence base underpinning these interventions is settled science when it is in reality of extremely low quality, and that they can in many places coerce parents both emotionally and legally into allowing their minor children to be experimented upon, is really not normal.

But I do think it is possible for a parent to correctly identify that the institutional response to adolescent gender distress is crazy, while also responding to their own child in a way that makes the situation worse.

The distinction I want parents to understand is this: the fact that the affirmation-only model has lost its mind does not mean that you will also make your wisest choices amidst this panic.

The fact that schools and clinicians are acting irresponsibly does not mean that every act of parental control or authoritarianism, or going the other route and avoiding the subject altogether will be sustainable as your kid gets older.

It means that you will need to be very strategic about how your family handles these potential landmines.

The fact that the stakes are high does not mean that the child’s developmental reality disappears.

My trans identity and the steps I took to embody it were by far the most life-defining and health-destroying pursuits I could have possibly dreamt up from among the series of my many middle school thought experiments.

For some of us, identity development can become unusually literal, unusually cognitive, unusually obsessive, unusually rule-bound, and unusually disconnected from the ordinary embodied and social processes through which adolescents usually go through to figure out who they are.

Many adolescents try on identities.

But autistic adolescents may not “try on” an identity in the same flexible, socially intuitive, developmentally temporary way.

A concept that might remain fluid or experimental for another teenager can become a theory of the self.

And once it becomes a theory of the self, it can become something the child feels compelled to defend, systematize, embody, and prove.

I suspect that for this reason, autistic teenagers are more likely to fixate on their gender issues than other gender dysphoric teenagers do.

For this reason, they need way more guidance from their parents and from specialists who can help them patch up any developmental delays to their best ability.

This is especially true when the young person is bright but developmentally uneven; verbally sophisticated but socially immature; intellectually intense but emotionally delayed; deeply uncomfortable in their body but lacking the language to describe sensory, social, sexual, or developmental distress in any other way.

When I look back at my own life, I can see how easy it was for me to mistake a compelling explanatory framework for self-knowledge.

I was not merely “exploring.” I was building a theory of myself. And then I was trying to live inside it.

That is why I am so skeptical of quick-fix advice that treats the gender identity as either a simple delusion to be argued away or a sacred truth to be affirmed without question.

Both approaches miss the developmental function the identity may be serving for a particular child.

To mitigate that, I’ve begun crafting a series of neurodivergence-specific parenting strategies to help parents begin to think about how their autistic and ADHD kids may be experiencing embodiment around adolescence, and to explore the many ways in which specific autistic and ADHD traits act as their own predisposing factors.

Because that is the biggest missing piece I keep seeing.

Everyone now seems to know how autistic this cohort of young people is, but very little of the advice parents receive is actually informed by that fact.

And when parents of autistic, ADHD, or gifted kids take advice that may work well enough for non-autistic adolescents or for more typically developing ones, it can sometimes fail them badly. So, if you’re parenting a kid in this category, do watch my series and comment your questions or thoughts on this post.

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There is a better way forward than cycling through quick fix strategies and being disappointed when they don’t work

So no, I do not believe there is a magic sentence.

I do not believe there is one article, one detransitioner testimony, one book, one therapist, one change of school, taking away the internet for one child, one argument, or one perfectly calibrated parental response that will “snap” a child out of this gender stuff in an instant.

To recap: some of these quick fixes I have mentioned should just be avoided, but any number of these things can be intentionally integrated into a broader parenting and clinical response. It really just depends on the individual factors of the situation.

If there were a quick fix that could resolve your kid’s complex developmental distress, none of us would find ourselves here now.

I hope this actually gives you some solace, in knowing that there is not one thing you say that will make or break your child’s entire future in this regard. That said, you could be in this with your kids for a very long time, and how you show up for them in these moments will define so much of your relationship going forward.

Because ultimately, your child does need guidance as they go through confusing and difficult life circumstances. What you have control over as the parent is whether you’ve done your part to increase the likelihood that as your adolescent gets older, they will still come to you with their life problems and to seek your guidance, rather than trying to seek guidance from within online communities of strangers who do not have their best interests in mind.

In all cases, the real work you will be doing with your child throughout this journey is much slower, more developmentally informed, more relational, and more specific to the child in front of you.

No parenting advice column will actually be able to help you get that level of depth.

Two things can be true at the same time:

Your kid’s gender questioning process could be a phase, or a response to a developmental struggle, or an attempt to cope with complex life distress, while also being unlikely to just go away on its own if nothing in the family system, developmental landscape, educational context, mental health or developmental support, or parent-child dynamic changes to meet your complex child’s special needs.

That is why it is so important to come up with a plan for how your family will handle this situation, ideally in the early stages.

Getting the necessary supports in place as early as you are getting an inkling that your developmentally atypical child is struggling to meet any number of milestones is your best chance at guiding them through life before they, being teenagers, shut you out and start seeking advice entirely from their peers.

But coming up with a plan later is objectively better than never coming up with one at all.

Many parents come to me after months or years of feeling frightened, frozen, confused, or reactive.

Some have delayed creating a plan because everything feels too chaotic and scary. Others did not realize how deeply connected their kid’s gender questioning process was to his or her objectively atypical development. They thought their kid’s high intelligence would eventually kick in and the problem would solve itself.

And when time elapses, and the autistic or gifted kid only grows further and deeper into the trans identity which they have nurtured as an elaborate escape fantasy, it is not uncommon for parents to panic, which in turn causes their sensitive kids to panic, and then everyone becomes miserable and hopeless. This type of crisis situation is usually totally avoidable, in my opinion.

Once I sit down with parents and help them to slow things down and to map the moving parts clearly, creating a plan is exactly what helps them stop parenting from panic.

The families who come to me are not reckless, indifferent, or checked out.

Quite the opposite.

They are thoughtful parents who have already spent months, and sometimes years, trying to understand what is happening with their child. They have read all the books. They have joined all the parent groups. They have listened to all the gender podcasts. They have talked to therapists, schools, friends, spouses, and sometimes even lawyers. And still, they feel like the advice they are getting does not quite fit the child in front of them. Or in some cases they are beginning to realize that their immersion in endless gender-related content has become a barrier between them and their child, and they would like my take on a healthier way to move forward.

Some parents come to me because their child’s gender issues seem to have appeared “out of nowhere.”

Their daughter was anxious, intense, socially awkward, rigid, academically gifted, sensory-sensitive, or had social-emotional communication delays for years, but none of that was understood as part of a coherent developmental picture with predictable areas of developmental struggles by the teachers or clinicians who overlooked autism spectrum disorders or ADHD as potential explanations. Then gender entered the story, and suddenly every prior difficulty was retroactively assimilated around this new identity, which then creates fertile ground for more developmental difficulties.

Others come to me because their child was largely compliant until adolescence.

These are the kids who did not have the ordinary childhood phase of sneaking cookies, lying badly, breaking small rules, testing boundaries, and learning that their parents did not know everything. Then, around 13, 14, 15, or 16, the child suddenly becomes secretive, argumentative, dismissive, ideologically rigid, and more interested in friends or the internet than in family life.

Because this shift happens at the same time as gender, parents understandably attribute the whole behavioral change to the new gender identity. But often, what I am seeing is a late and atypical version of adolescent development.

Some parents are being given two completely opposite pieces of advice by different people and institutions.

The school may be socially transitioning the child. The therapist may be telling the parents that affirmation is the only safe and loving response, or the therapist may give the impression that they practice an exploratory approach while actually just secretly affirming the trans identity while doing no meaningful exploration. And then, they may also be in online parent groups which are telling them to remove the internet, pull the child from school, and treat the whole thing as cult brainwashing.

Meanwhile, the parents are trying to figure out what is actually true about their own child, without either surrendering their authority to institutions or turning their home into a battlefield.

Some come because their child is autistic, ADHD, gifted, or developmentally uneven, and the standard advice they have gotten does not help them.

These are the kids who tend to sound far more mature than they are, which makes it very easy for adults to either overestimate their capacity for insight, or to underestimate the extent of their suffering.

Some parents who come to me are not sure whether they have been too permissive, too strict, too passive, too reactive, too trusting of professionals, or too afraid of being blamed.

They do not need someone to tell them that everything is fine. They also do not need someone to tell them that their child is hopelessly lost. Neither of those things are usually true. They need help slowing down, mapping the moving parts, and figuring out which problems are gender problems, which are autism or ADHD problems, which are family-dynamic problems, which are school problems, and which are ordinary adolescent-development problems being discussed in the language of gender.

Some families have already tried one or more quick fixes, and yet their child did not become less distressed.

The strife of their family’s situation did not resolve, because the child’s alternate gender identity was not simply a bad idea sitting on top of an otherwise functional set of life circumstances. It was often serving some function inside that child’s valiant attempt to cope in the only way they know how.

And some families I work with are not in immediate crisis, but they know they need a better plan.

They may have managed to avoid the worst forms of escalation, but they still need help thinking through how to reduce the centrality of gender, how to support independence without capitulation, how to talk to schools and therapists, how to set boundaries without turning every boundary into a war, and how to help their child mature into someone more embodied, more socially grounded, and more capable of not just living, but thriving, in reality.

What most of these families have in common is that they are trying to parent a complicated child through a complicated developmental period, while receiving advice that is either too ideological, too generic, too panicked, or too disconnected from the actual child in front of them.

And delaying some kind of family-based intervention risks the situation descending into chaos as the distressed kid becomes even more distressed and the conflict tears the family apart.

If a neurodevelopmentally or developmentally informed approach is not taken, the child’s underlying needs may continue not being met.

A kid whose gender issues have been lurking in the background for months or years without the subject being meaningfully explored, is way more likely to turn 18 and immediately begin making rash and highly consequential life and medical decisions with little to no insight into their motivations and little to no communication with their parents, simply because their distress has been allowed to incubate, because they feel alone, because they have been ensnared in an unhelpful power struggle, and because they are unable to envision other options because nothing else has been modeled. That is what happened to me. That is the outcome I hope to help you all avoid with your kids.

It is really important not to lose sight of the fact that you are not parenting a walking, talking gender identity.

You are guiding a whole child through different stages of life. The more complex your kid is, the harder your job is. Parenting your kid through their gender crisis is effectively just parenting your 21st century kid through adolescence and neurodivergence. Each of those things are difficult on their own, let alone in combination. Getting yourselves a whole village of people who will be on your’s and your child’s side will be critical to helping you retain your sanity through this process.

If my approach and the level of analytical depth I provide on my Substack resonates with you, I think my approach to parent coaching could be useful to you.

I bring together a combination of logic, personal experience, the research I have done into all things related to gender and neurodivergence, and the patterns I have seen across many families and across the many young people I met over the course of my time being trans, to help parents understand what may be happening underneath the layers of confusing language, and how they might respond more effectively and in a structured way.

Much of the advice I give families individually is based on the specifics of what they tell me about their child, down to the level of their child’s special interests, because I believe that entering the world of your autistic child’s special interests is probably the only real way to truly connect with them, or to facilitate necessary development where it is not happening on its own.

I like to collaborate with the families I work with, because I realize that once we strip the panic away, you guys actually do know a lot more about how to help your kids than most of you give yourselves credit for.

Many parents leave our conversations feeling calmer and more confident, because things that were once confusing finally make a lot more sense, and because we create an individualized plan for how to move forward.

Sometimes parents will say something like, “We’ve been in this for five years, and no one has ever explained why our autistic daughter does these things in a way that actually fits everything we know to be true about her.”

That is the work I care most about; not giving parents a magic sentence, and certainly not pretending there is a one-size-fits-all answer.

But helping them understand their child and their family clearly enough that they can parent from a place of steadiness, joy, confidence, and love, rather than fear, appeasement, or panic.

Parent coaching helps us look at where you are on the map and decide where to go next.

Regardless of where you are in this with your teenager or young adult kid, I have probably navigated that given juncture in my own life, considering that my trans identity spanned 12 years of my life.

If you are interested in doing parent coaching with me, you can set up a session with me by sending me a message on substack or by emailing me at officialpeacepoet@gmail.com

Final Notes:

As always, thank you for reading my essays and engaging with my work.

And especially, thank you to those who chose to support my work with paid subscriptions.

You all help me make it possible to spend an extremely long time autistically fixating on ways to help you to help your kids.

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Please do comment whatever comes to mind as you are reading my work, or restack any of your favorite quotes from my essay with your own thoughts.

Your thoughts and questions are a huge dopamine boost after spending 30+ hours writing and editing each essay. And some of you guys ask such awesome questions that I will answer them in a Q&A.

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How do I “plant seeds” with my gender-questioning child without making it obvious that I’m talking about gender?

I understand why so many parents ask this question. When your child has adopted a transgender identity, especially if they seem suddenly certain, unreachable, or immersed in online/trans peer culture, it is tempting to search for the perfect sentence, the casual comment, the indirect question, or the little “seed” that might make them stop and think differently.

But parents of particularly intelligent gender questioning kids need to be very careful.

Your child is not stupid.

If they already feel that they are being watched like a hawk, micro-managed, judged (this is a common sentiment in teenagers), or locked in a power struggle with you, they will usually sense when you are trying to steer them indirectly. What you may see as a brilliant chance to subtly comment about a seemingly unrelated topic, your kid may catch onto, and experience as a type of manipulation.

And once that happens, they will probably stop talking.

I am saying this from my perspective as a detransitioner who is now 26, but for 12 years of my life, from the ages of 12-24, I navigated my own process of gender questioning within my family dynamic. On this Substack, I reflect on what my parents did well, what they could have done better, and why. I also reflect on my own thought process about these topics over the course of those 12 years in which I learned, grew and matured for many years actively in transition. And of course, I focus a lot on how these aspects of parenting a kid through a gender crisis intersect with issues of neurodivergence.

By now, I’ve also worked with over 100 families one-on-one in a coaching capacity, whose kids find themselves in a similar situation to the one I was in. It has become clear to me that what happened in my own family when gender questioning entered the dynamic is not even remotely unique. However, it has become equally clear to me that each child and family dynamic is very unique. The unique aspects of each situation must be accounted for in making the type of individualized plan that I personally believe families often need in order to stay sane as they navigate these delicate matters most successfully- particularly as their kids grow up and enter new stages of life.

In the video for paid subscribers, I talk through why I think “planting seeds of doubt” is probably the wrong framework for parents of neurodivergent kids to think about how best to approach the the topic of their child’s trans identity, with their child. I also cover what I believe is far more important for parents to consider trying instead.

I cover why poking holes in gender ideology is exceedingly unlikely to change a trans-identifying child’s self-concept, why their age and developmental stage matter in how parents approach these topics, why neurodivergent kids or kids with above average IQs often need a very different approach, and how parents can ask better questions without turning every conversation into a debate (or without being baited into it by their teenager).

The real goal in parenting your adolescent through a gender crisis is not to ‘trick’ your child into experiencing doubt about an identity he or she has built as a disembodied thought experiment. That type of earth-shattering doubt can only come from lived experience. Instead, you will be most able to guide your child in this aspect of their identity development by becoming someone your child feels inclined to think with and to confide in. And when your child has additional needs related to their attention, or if they have a social disability like autism, in order for your approach to be successful, it must account for those things.

That means it is of the utmost importance for parents to learn how to enter their child’s inner world, to understand what they are actually trying to communicate, to set age-appropriate boundaries, and how to preserve enough trust that real conversations become possible again.

For paid subscribers, this video from my LIVE Q&A goes deeper into:

• when the strategy of “planting seeds” backfires (and why)

• which lines of questioning are actually useful in giving you the most helpful information about your kid’s mindset

• how to talk to a child whose transgender identity has become a special interest

• why the strategy of trying to overtly or covertly debate your kid out of their transgender self-concept does not work

• how to balance boundaries and relationship

• how to know when generalized advice is not enough, and when it is wise for parents to develop a more specific, individualized plan for their family.

For parents who need help in applying the concepts I discuss in this video to their own child, I also offer private coaching sessions.

Because ultimately, no two kids or two families are the same. The right approach in the case of each family will depend so much on your child’s age, temperament, developmental history, their relationship with their special interests, medical history, peer environment, and the current state of your parent-child relationship.

If you’d like to do a parent coaching session with me, to work through these complexities, you can reach out to me via my DM’s on Substack or (preferably) send me an email at: officialpeacepoet@gmail.com

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

As always, I very much appreciate your support of my work through your paid subscriptions, your comments and your re-stacks and shares. Your support is how I am able to produce this content.

Let me know your thoughts and questions in the comments, or in the re-stacks.

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In this essay and in the LIVE video, we have a raw and honest discussion about how disagreements about a child’s gender identity, or any number of other significant life choices a kid can make, which deviate from their parents’ expectations or desires for their child, can become flashpoints for various flavors of relationship strain and estrangement. I also discuss what it took for me and my parents to come back together after periods of extreme strain on our relationship both related to and unrelated to my transition.

Jane and I sat down and talked honestly about our lives, about the role gender questioning played in our respective family dynamics, about what it is like to grow up developing an identity in disembodied circumstances that do not make that easy, and about what it actually takes to come back from rupture. I spoke from the perspective of the kid in the dynamic, someone who navigated gender questioning within my own family for twelve years, who went through both transition and detransition, and who had to do a significant amount of work alongside my parents to get our relationship to where it is now. Jane spoke with a level of self-awareness and insight that I found genuinely refreshing; the kind that does not come from reading the ‘right’ forums online, but from actually sitting with hard questions long enough to understand them.

We covered a lot of ground. Both of us got personal in ways that I think will land for parents who are in the middle of this, including those who are in periods of low to no contact and are not sure what to do with that. We arrived at conclusions that I think are actually applicable to the situation of parenting a kid through various stages of gender questioning, transition, and detransition.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I found it one of the more honest exchanges I have had on this subject, and I hope it gives you something real to work with.

This video will be available for paid subscribers, and this short essay will be available for everyone.

When gender identity questioning enters a family dynamic, whether in middle school, high school, or young adulthood, it has a way of becoming a fault line. What started as a tearful conversation in which I as a 12 year old in 2012 disclosed to my parents that I was struggling with questions around my gender, became an increasingly contentious power struggle that agitated my family for the next 12 years. The subject became so painful for everyone, that it was something we rarely talked about. And when we did, it became a source of explosive arguments which did not serve any of us. The longer this strain continued without an attempt to repair the relationship, the easier it was for all of us to just stay silent and to stop talking to one another… about much of anything.

Sometimes this takes the form of low or no contact, which can happen in any direction. Sometimes the young person pulls away. Sometimes the parent does. Sometimes it is simply too painful for both parties to be in the same room, and the distance between them becomes a kind of default that neither party officially chose. Whatever form it takes, it tends to feel permanent for those on the inside even when it is not.

I am speaking from personal experience when I say this: estrangement is not the inevitable outcome of disagreements between parents and their adult kids about gender identity or gender transition. It also does not need to be permanent.

Speaking as someone who was the kid in this dynamic, I do not think the people on either side of these family-child ruptures are villains.

Parents who panic and say the wrong thing, are not monsters. They are people who love their kids and are watching something unfold that terrifies them, without a roadmap for how to respond and usually, without anyone in their lives who truly understands what they are dealing with. And of course, the prospect of the type of change their trans-identifying kids want to undergo, shatters something at the core of their evolutionary programming which can make it hard for them to engage with their kids, because they may not recognize them anymore.

The parents in these situations are often not adequately supported in navigating their own emotional turmoil during these times, and instead experience a lot of pressure from others in their lives to disregard their own experiences and concerns. This is particularly true for parents raising their kids in progressive environments. Sometimes both parents are not on the same page about how to handle the situation. When these things happen, their kids tend to find themselves on the receiving end of all it, even when this is not developmentally appropriate for them to contend with these matters, and so they cannot cope with the pressure of it.

The adolescent or young adult kids who pull away from their parents in the wake of these increasingly fractious disagreements over a myriad of life choices, including the decision to transition, are not evil either. They are usually quite vulnerable young people who have reached out to their parents in earnest, with something that felt enormous to them and the panic-driven reactions of their parents get interpreted by the kid as a response that confirmed their worst fear; that their parents are rejecting or abandoning them. This too is destabilizing for the kid, especially if the kid, like me, was about 12 years old at the start of this. To such a kid, it feels as if the people who were supposed to be their safe harbor are not safe anymore, or that they are unable to provide the emotional stability needed to assure their kid that everything will be okay and that they are not in trouble for sharing their feelings with their parents, even if the parents do not agree with the conclusion their middle schooler has come to. In the case of the older adolescent or young adult kid, this can take on a different flavor; which is that, they may see their parents as rejecting the emerging adult version of who they are becoming as they are asserting their right to make their own choices. What complicates this, is that today’s adolescents have way less independence to experiment with stupid but relatively inconsequential endeavors away from the watchful eyes or the cell phone tracking of their parents. And in addition, young adult kids are also in many ways, still very much dependent on their parents, due to broader cost of living challenges. So there are lots of things to navigate at these junctures.

Two things can be true simultaneously; both parties are usually doing the best they can with what they have, and that when frightened people interact with other frightened people whom they love very much, it is not difficult to meaningfully damage those relationships by saying and doing regrettable, emotionally-charged things. Where there is a combination of robust developmentally-appropriate boundaries (and associated freedoms), a baseline level of stability, mutual respect and emotional resilience in a family, these exchanges do not tend to tank the entire relationship. Where those things do not exist, they must be actively developed so that the family relationship does not erode over a series of political or ideological disagreements and over what is at its core, angsty adolescent behavior.

What I have also come to understand, from my own experience and from working with ROGD families, and from navigating these issues within my own family dynamic, is that gender identity questioning rarely ruptures a relationship entirely on its own. It does however, tend to turn up the heat on everything that was already simmering. The communication patterns that were already strained become increasingly impossible to navigate, using the same, rusty tools. The unspoken expectations that were already there become explosive flashpoints. The emotional needs that were already going unmet become further exacerbated. Gender is often the most obvious presenting issue, but it is almost never the whole story. Understanding that is actually useful, because it means there is a lot more to work with than most people realize.

It also means that estrangement, where it does occur, does not have to be permanent. A strained relationship is not the same as a severed one. Spirited disagreements about gender do not automatically mean no future relationship. Even extended periods of low or no contact do not have to be the end of the story. If you find yourself in online spaces or in real life communities which convince you that this is the case, those communities are not going to help you repair your relationship with your child.

The parent-child relationship is one of the most primal bonds there is, and in my experience, most kids, whatever they are doing on the surface, are not actually trying to lose their parents forever. They are trying to survive a crisis that feels otherwise unsurvivable, and they are often just trying to assert the independence they are developmentally wired to crave and that our culture has basically denied them the chance to experience in less invasive ways.

And most parents, whatever it looks like from the outside, are not trying to drive their kids away. They are trying to protect them in the only way they currently know how, and against the backdrop of a distressed kid and a sea of largely incompetent clinicians who are allergic to the idea of differential diagnosis and will mindlessly set their kid down a consequential path with many irreversible consequences that the kid, depending on their age and stage of development, is incapable of properly assessing for themselves.

What the situation actually requires is a strategic, compassionate, and practical approach. Not endless arguing. Not pretending the subject does not exist and hoping it resolves itself, all the while becoming more anxious when it does not. Not being paralyzed by fear of saying the wrong thing and therefore saying nothing at all. Not outsourcing the relationship to a detransitioner’s essay or video testimony sent via a text message. Those approaches do not work, and most parents who have been in this long enough already know that.

What actually works here takes effort, grounding, and a willingness to develop an individualized strategy which will involve playing a longer game than most people feel capable of playing when they are in the acute phase of this. It also takes being honest about your own role in the dynamic, both for better and for worse, which is genuinely hard to do when you feel like the wronged party. But it is the work that needs to be done. There is not really a version of this process that goes well without it.

That is what this conversation is really about.

And if you are a parent of a gender questioning young person who wants to think through your specific situation with me, including the family dynamics, the practical next steps, and how to navigate whichever stage of this you are currently in, I offer one on one parent coaching sessions. The goal is always to find approaches that are practical, creative, and compassionate, and that are built around your actual kid and your actual family, and which accounts for special needs associated with conditions like autism and adhd, rather than simply a generic framework.

Send me a DM on Substack to book a session.

I will be doing more live conversations with paid subscribers about topics that are too personal for a public post, in addition to working through specific questions you send me. Always feel free to send them.

To watch this video and join future ones, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your paid subscriptions are what makes it possible for me to create this content.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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This is a first of its kind series aimed at helping parents and clinicians of specifically autistic, adhd kids. In non-diagnostic terms, we can call these youth: highly sensitive, gifted, anxious, twice-exceptional (smart kids with co-occurring learning or physical disabilities), obsessive kids navigate their special needs alongside a gender identity crisis. I’ve been so excited to bring this series to you all, because so many of you asked for it. I’m a few hundred hours into building this series by now, and I’ve got lots more planned.

I am able to produce this content because of your paid subscriptions and because of your donations.

Please consider commenting, sharing and re-stacking this post to help support my work by getting it to those who may find it beneficial.

About Me:

(for those who are new to my work)

Hello everyone. For those who don’t know me, my name is Maia Poet. I’m 26 years old, and I’m a detransitioner.

For 12 years of my life, from the ages of 12 to 24, I identified as transgender. My so-called gender journey began in its most intense form around the 2011–2012 school year, as a 12 year old seventh grader. I spent the next 12 years navigating my gender questions inside my own family dynamic and outside of it. And no matter what my parents said or did, no matter how clearly they expressed their concerns about my desire to transition, that desire did not simply disappear. My parents even sent me to study abroad in the middle east hoping that being outside the context of an American college campus would make me reconsider the gender transition I had already begun, which was at that point seven years in the making. Instead, I constructed a whole life for myself in which I lived as a man in orthodox Jewish, Palestinian Muslim and more broadly secular spaces within Israeli society.

I organized my relationships, my social world, and my sense of self around the assumption that transition was the thing that would finally make my body feel livable, and that it was something I would have to do for the rest of my life.

But over time, as I lived it, that story I was telling myself began to crack

Some of those cracks came from living through extreme experiences; including living through rocket fire in Israel in May of 2021 and later the attacks of October 7. Those experiences forced me to confront questions I had been avoiding: What would it mean to be medically dependent on more than just my ADHD meds during a crisis? What would it mean to recover from intense, elective surgery in a world where I might need to run for my life without warning? What had I actually been asking my body to endure with the years of breast binding?

After October 7, I returned to the United States, significantly more traumatized than I had ever been before, and now in addition to dealing with that, I had to figure out what it meant to be a woman after having spent most of my sentient life under the passionate conviction that I would never need to be one. When I eventually decided to quit the gender transition I had invested the entirety of my adolescence into planning, as a way to stabilize myself through embodied, sensory discomfort that I had always experienced, for as long as I could remember, and which had only gotten worse with every year of life, I realized that there was a deeper problem I needed to confront.

The deeper problem was this: even when I decided to detransition, the discomfort I experienced in my body did not magically go away.

I did not quit my gender transition because I suddenly loved my body. I did not quit my gender transition because I loved “being a woman” (whatever that even means).

I did not quit my gender transition because I suddenly felt drawn to embodying the sensory hell of femininity, through painful beauty rituals, obnoxious, thick long hair that uncomfortably tickles my neck with every slight movement, with tight clothes, with makeup, with jewelry, or with any of the things that had caused me so much visceral sensory distress whenever I felt required to do it for the sake of pleasing other people at the expense of my own sanity and physical comfort.

I quit my gender transition for the same reasons that I had initially embarked upon it: out of a highly intellectualized, disconnected space from my body, in which I was trying to solve a problem that the whole time, I was attributing to the rightness or wrongness of my sexed body based on various sex-atypical personality factors and out of a total lack of self-awareness about the root causes of my intense embodied distress and psychosocial confusion.

In other words, though I eventually realized that there is no such thing as being literally born in the wrong body and experienced enough external trauma to make me understand the unsustainability of the lifestyle required to live as a woman who was hell-bent on convincing everyone she was a man, I still felt no more clarity about how to actually live a better life. I still had so many questions about why I was such a highly atypical type of woman in terms of my preference for logic over emotion, which is in fact an extremely alienating quality in female friendship groups, about why even amongst lesbians, I would be constantly referred to as being ‘male-brained’ and about why I still felt just as much of an odd duck in social interactions with other females that I do not experience while socially interacting with men.

Neither transition nor detransition alone offered me a pathway to truly living happily in my body, which even prior to puberty, felt like such a miserable and unpredictable place to be. In order to make my detransition stable and sustainable, rather than something which was constantly vulnerable to backslide, I knew something needed to change. And for that to happen, I needed to be very honest with myself in a way that has appeared to anger everyone on all sides of the trans issue. So, here it is:

The breast binding I did for a decade in order to pass as a man, did in many ways, make my body a more bearable place for me to exist in. But as soon as I stopped doing it, I was confronted with the extreme pain and damage this practice had inflicted on my body because I no longer had the compression I relied on to calm my brain, nor the brace that my body had effectively relied upon as it grew. Living in the male social role amongst my peers was far easier for me than being a weird girl who didn’t pick up on social cues and therefore relied on robust logic as a stand-in for the intuition I did not possess.

However, this too came with living a life of bureaucratic annoyances and the constant worry of what would happen if someone found out the truth. There is something inherently difficult about trying to pass oneself off as the opposite sex while desperately not wanting other people to know, especially for those who don’t want to transition to be “trans” but want to transition to be “normal.” This type of difficulty does not go away, even in the most trans-inclusive environments, because it is a more personal dissonance which comes from desiring that which cannot actually be achieved. It is a frustrating experience to be a really abnormal member of your own sex. But, my own experiences have taught me that it is even more frustrating to experience some version of social normalcy in the opposite sex role, only for time and nature to eventually reveal to you that something about you is also fundamentally different from the sex group in which your natural mannerisms and ways of thinking are more acceptable.

But at the same time, detransition alone had not cured that discomfort either. I spent the almost first two years of my detransition deeply traumatized by living through war and terror and witnessing horrors beyond my comprehension, being no more connected to my body than I had when I was still trans and actively trying to obscure my sex characteristics.

So I began asking myself a different question.

Instead of asking, “What gender am I supposed to be?” I started asking, “Why has my body always felt so unbearable to live in?”

And that question changed everything for me.

Because when I looked back at it honestly, the gender distress I experienced had not started with gender at all. Before I was gender distressed, I was not developmentally aware of the fact that I was female in any permanent sense, due to a delay in my developmental understanding of sex constancy. I had many developmental delays. I was too confused to understand that I was now a girl and would necessarily become a woman, to have been distressed by it at all. And when that process started happening, my confusion about that fact turned into distress. That isn’t to say that prior to puberty, I wasn’t living in a constant state of low-to-moderate distress. I was born prematurely.

Some of my earliest memories took place in doctors’ offices, where medical professionals were trying to address a long list of developmental delays, neurological issues, and body-based and speech-based difficulties. I was also gifted and sensitive to almost all forms of sensory input. I was a toe walker who spent kindergarten in leg braces. As soon as my toe walking was somewhat corrected, I began to compulsively pull out my eyelashes whenever it felt like the threads in my clothes were attacking my skin. The combination of all of these traits; both the disabilities and the giftedness, meant that my body felt like it constantly malfunctioned in ways that got universally worse with the onset of puberty, and that I had the type of brain that would not stop until it found the answer for the myriad of problems which my clinicians treated as a series of one-offs which caused a great deal of suffering that no one had an answer for. I began to need an answer when I was about ten or eleven. I was already a few years into an obsession with a rare brain tumor that caused people to grow super tall, and the older I got, the more my search became fixed on trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I came to find many correct answers, which were not taken seriously. And then, I came to the wrong answer. That answer to my life of struggles was that I was born with a “male brain in a female body” was taken very seriously. But unfortunately, not in ways that actually addressed a single one of my root problems. That set me up for a far more protracted state of confusion and vulnerability when I did embark upon the process of transition, even though it was a path that my parents thought they could prevent me from altogether by making their disapproval clear and hoping that time would do the rest.

What I eventually came to understand is that much of what I had experienced as gender dysphoria was actually tied to autism, sensory processing issues, poor body awareness, a type of social alienation that I was not fully aware that I was experiencing, and from a nervous system that had never learned how to feel safe inside my own body. Those aren’t things that kids just “grow out of” because you’ve told them “no” to their desire to transition. Those underlying problems need to actually be addressed for what they are.

This video is about that process in my own life: how I came to understand my gender dysphoria through the lens of autism, ADHD and sensory distress, and how that understanding helped me heal in a way that transition never did and detransition alone could not.

In addition to reflecting a lot on how my own thinking about my life has changed as I’ve grown up, I will provide a brief understanding into the earliest stages of my parents’ approach and their thought process because I think that both the perspectives of the parents and of their kids have a lot of analytical importance.

In many ways, I write the things on this blog that I wish my own parents would have understood about what I was going through, but that I was incapable of expressing to them as a very confused kid.

Until recently my parents thought that my gender issues were some random, out-of-the-blue indoctrination situation which, had they never gotten me an iPad, would never have afflicted me.

For more than a decade, that was their only working model of the situation. Though in reality, my gender issues were the entirely predictable outcome of having lifelong interactions with incompetent medical professionals who improperly diagnosed me and failed to properly treat or contextualize the neurodevelopmental issues that everyone already knew I had.

My parents had no way of knowing that my history of developmental delays and precocity could manifest themselves in this way, and it did not initially occur to them that these previous defining life experiences had anything to do with my gender issues. Lack of a proper diagnosis of what appears to be very clear autism, left both me and my parents without a way to understand that my challenges accurately rather than as a series of character flaws and harmless quirks. These initially harmless quirks, like not learning to tie my shoes until the age of 14 despite a years-long fixation with rare brain tumors starting in elementary school, followed a pattern of incredibly uneven development that would explain a lot about the types of supports I could have benefitted from to prepare me for the transition from childhood to adolescence, and from adolescence to emerging adulthood.

The truth was, that in 2011/2012 I was the 12-year-old specifically seeking out information about female-to-male gender transition because it had become my latest special interest alongside tons of other fixations in medical oddities, and also because it met a need for some clarity and a pathway out of my intense confusion, and promised an end to my suffering– if only I could just get my parents on board.

My parents thought my new iPad was the problem, so they removed my internet access. Their thinking about this whole thing was very Gen X: if the thoughts happened while the kid was on the interwebs, being exposed to something, taking away the interwebs will prevent the thoughts from continuing. But the truth was, that the seed was already planted. I was already a seasoned reader of non-fiction and medical publications, which I could access regardless of whether I had the internet. I took it upon myself to spend hours in libraries and bookstores finding printed content about all things transgender, much of it written in the 1990s and 2000s. Nothing my parents did to prevent me from consuming more of these patients’ life stories, information about medical procedures or theories about what caused transsexualism, achieved anything positive. My search for answers just went underground, powered by the strength of my lifelong autistic and adhd typical patterns of intense hyperfocus. I was the type of kid who read parenting books to understand my peers and to predict what would happen in my own development. I have always, for better or for worse, had a tendency of intellectualizing my life both as I lived it and instead of living it.

I stuck to this idea that I should have been born male so ardently, for so long, despite my parents’ non-affirmation, because their strategy, especially in those initial stages, did not treat the experience I was going through as formative, profound, and as a possibility for real connection. They panicked. And in the absence of real help (there was nothing for parents back in those days), they parented from that place. The way the situation was handled was largely unpleasant for everyone involved, to put it mildly. Of course, now I understand why. But I do think that with more intentional tools back in those early days, both me and my parents would have gotten much more clarity about what was actually going on with me.

The lack of a good working model of what was going on with me, either in the form of an ADHD diagnosis, which was still two years away, or an autism diagnosis, which I am only now in the process of pursuing, left my parents ill-equipped to meaningfully help me uncover the sources of my suffering and to help me with the issues I was actually dealing with.

The longer those needs went unmet, the more ardently I stuck to the idea that I could only ever be happy if I managed to make my female body “match” the male brain I thought I had. I did not have an alternative explanation or an alternative path presented to me. Trans was it.

Within a few years, an entire generation of autistic girls would do something similar. They too would come to think they had male brains in female bodies, which, from the perspective of a young autistic girl, can make perfect sense as an explanation for why she is so different, why she is suffering at the critical developmental inflection point of puberty, and what she needs to do to fix her own problem.

Because my own parents, despite their incredible competence and best intentions, were operating from a thoroughly incomplete model of why I was doing this, out of no fault of their own, but rather because the clinicians responsible for my care at multiple points throughout my life totally dropped the ball. But as a result, the actions they took to “solve” the problem not only failed to help me reconcile with my body in any way, but actually made our relationship worse.

When parents and clinicians rely on strategies based on a misunderstanding of what the young person is actually going through, they will be ill-equipped to understand the full scope of the root causes of that young person’s distress.

In the culture war around trans issues, gender dysphoria is often framed in one of two ways. Either it is treated as an organic medical condition that has always existed, but now has more awareness, so more of its sufferers are more likely to seek treatment, or it is treated as an indoctrination issue where the young person’s conclusions must simply be argued out of them.

I think both framings fundamentally miss the point by failing to account for really informative trends we see in terms of temperament and diagnosis within a large sub-population of gender distressed youth.

We know that conditions like OCD, ADHD, and autism are highly prevalent in this population. In non-diagnostic terms, we know that many of these kids are gifted, highly sensitive, impaired in the realms of attention and social interaction, and sometimes dealing with learning disabilities. We also know that certain subpopulations, namely girls and young women who are now overrepresented in gender dysphoric patient populations have often been misdiagnosed, undiagnosed, or treated for the wrong conditions even before their gender dysphoria appears.

In my coaching and consulting work with families, it has become abundantly clear to me that parents are trying to do right by their autistic and ADHD kids, whether they have allowed some degree of transition, or whether they have not allowed any of it. In many cases, these kids fall into a higher-functioning ASD or ADHD profile where, even if a diagnosis does happen, families are rarely given practical tools for how to parent the whole child through the complex distress of puberty, neurodevelopmental impairments, above-average intelligence, social confusion, and body distress.

What I’m hoping to accomplish in this neurodivergence-informed ROGD parenting series

Though I often use myself as a case study on this Substack, this video and the neurodivergence-informed parenting series I am building here will not be only about my personal story of navigating my own gender issues. It is also my attempt to introduce what I believe could be a very useful conceptual framework for understanding some cases of gender dysphoria in young people, especially young people who are autistic, ADHD, gifted, highly sensitive, anxious, obsessive, or struggling with sensory processing, body awareness and attention issues.

I wanted to create this series to help parents and clinicians think more carefully about the many ways that traits associated with autism, ADHD, giftedness, OCD, anxiety, sensitivity, sensory processing differences, and sensory integration issues can shape a young person’s relationship to their body. I think the current literature base around how to support gender questioning youth with neurodevelopmental conditions is sorely lacking despite the notably high prevalence of these comorbidities in this population.

The central idea I want to explore is that gender dysphoria can be a real experience that manifests very differently in different types of people, and for a variety of different reasons, without necessarily being the correct explanation for the type of treatment (in this case, social and medical gender transition) that the individual would always experience the most lasting and comprehensive benefit from.

I am far from the first person who has tried to parse through the adolescent gender dysphoria phenomenon experienced by today’s youth. Psychotherapist has been working on a series which I see as having a prudent conceptual understanding of gender as serving a metaphorical rather than a literal utility, the meaning of which is worth unpacking as it pertains to each individual experiencing it. In many ways, my thinking has been largely inspired by the brilliant intellectual scaffold she has proposed. So, Sasha, if you are reading this essay or watching this video, thank you.

Reflecting on my own experience, when I was a 12 year old kid who latched onto the idea that I was “born in the wrong body” I did not even know what metaphors were yet, let alone that my entire emerging self-concept had come from one. I would learn about metaphors in the following academic year. However, I was also a 12 year old kid who was known to take everything literally, including most figures of speech. Around middle school I did not understand why all of my classmates were beginning to use words with established dictionary definitions to mean the literal exact opposite of said established dictionary definitions. I was the kid and the young adult who took every metaphor literally.

I want to offer parents and clinicians this series of neurodivergence-informed strategies as one potential way to look beneath the gender explanation and to ask better questions that the autistic and ADHD young people in their care are most likely to actually understand, despite their challenges with attention and with highly literal thinking and communication styles, which tend to make their experiences in traditional talk therapy pretty unsuccessful. My series will be explicitly tailored to understanding the potential role of those neurodevelopmental differences in the overall presentation of a young person’s experience of gender distress. In this series, I will be drawing on my own experiences as well as making a bunch of inferences from my 14 years on both the inside and on the outside of trans communities in two countries with people around my age, and with similar comorbidities to mine.

Important limitations

I need to add a series of disclaimers here.

This series will be offering pretty general advice on a niche topic which is relevant to many parents and clinicians caring for this cohort of young people. However, general advice cannot replace individualized strategy which in any given case could require more support than what I am offering here. This series also cannot replace the full range of medical, mental health, psychiatric, or developmental support your child may need. Though that should go without saying, I feel compelled to say it.

The tips in this series are supplemental parenting tools that I’ve dreamt up as the result of a lot of thinking, talking, researching and working with families as I experience random creative impulses that have somehow managed to help families a lot. These tips are meant to help parents of neurodivergent youth (who often but not always have similar traits and/or diagnoses as their kids) to create a calmer home environment, strengthen the parent-child relationship, and develop a better working model of what their child may be going through or trying to express. My advice is made to help parent-child relationships around contentious issues like gender questioning, to experience joy throughout this process with your kids. These tips, I hope, will also be useful for clinicians who want to incorporate a more neurodevelopmentally informed lens into their work with gender-distressed young people.

This series is primarily for parents who have tried the quick-fix ROGD parenting strategies suggested to them online and are not impressed with the results. It is for parents who want to better understand how their child’s special or additional needs may be getting subsumed into the framework of gender dysphoria or transgender identity, so they can figure out other possible ways for how to meet their kid’s additional needs.

Because this video and the ones that follow are intended for a general audience, I can only begin with a broad framework and make it more granular as the series continues. I cannot possibly account for every child’s age, sex, temperament, developmental history, sensory profile, peer environment, family dynamics, or specific form of distress.

The way this framework applies to a sensitive 10-year-old girl overwhelmed by puberty will be very different from the way it applies to a sensitive 15-year-old boy or girl with traits or diagnoses of conditions like autism and ADHD, a long history of feeling alienated from other boys or girls, and years spent socializing in unknown internet forums with unknown people of unknown ages, being exposed to a myriad of age-inappropriate content.

It will look different again for the family of a 17-year-old applying to colleges, an 18-year-old already there, or a young adult in their early to mid-twenties struggling to launch into adulthood due to any number of factors, including neurodevelopmental disability. All of this will look different in cases where there is estrangement or an attempt to re-connect from it.

That is where individualized support matters.

To stay sane throughout this process, wherever you find yourselves, you will benefit from having a whole village on your child’s team and on yours. This can include extended family, friends, and ideally competent medical and mental health professionals, speech therapists, physical therapists or occupational therapists (where necessary), in addition to any kind of pastoral support (if that’s your thing).

If you’d like my help as a part of that team in thinking through your specific child, your specific family dynamic, and your specific communication challenges, and next steps, I offer parent coaching sessions. In those sessions, I help parents think through how to communicate better, build critical thinking and communication skills, reduce escalation, and set boundaries in a way that respects both the wishes of the parents and the needs of their child. Notably, I do this from a neurodevelopmental divergence-focussed lens and from the perspective of someone who was a kid navigating these things within my own family dynamic for an exceedingly long time.

I also help parents think through how to support their kid’s pursuit for embodied comfort and age-appropriate autonomy without reinforcing the idea that the child’s brain or body is literally wrong, and without getting pulled into endless, fruitless arguments about trans issues around the dinner table.

You can send me a DM if you’d like to work together.

The types of questions this series will and will not explore:

The questions I am not interested in answering in this series are those along the lines of, “How do we force our child to stop identifying this way?” or “what can I say to my kid or show my kid that will snap them out of this?”

Mostly because unlike small children, adolescents and young adults cannot just be forced into doing everything their parents want them to do. And also because human beings are not known to change their opinions on the basis of facts, especially when those opinions were not formed on the basis of facts, but rather on the basis of emotional yearning. That is not to say that reasonable boundaries delivered respectfully and explained clearly, are not important parts of any good parenting strategy. They absolutely are, and we can work on those things together.

Nor am I interested in questions like, “How quickly do we affirm this child’s interpretation of their distress and progress along the social and medical transition pathways?” Because I see that as being a reckless and harmful approach which fails to account for individual complexity.

But, I am interested in questions like:

• What sensations are hardest for this child to tolerate?

• Is this child overstimulated, exhausted, hungry, socially overwhelmed, hormonally dysregulated, or in pain?

• Does this child/young person even remotely understand what their body is telling them?

• Is this child struggling with puberty, embodiment, being perceived, or sexed social expectations?

• Are there signs of autism, ADHD, OCD traits, giftedness, anxiety, sensory processing issues, or poor body awareness that we should incorporate into our understanding of how to help this kid experience less unnecessary struggle as he or she navigates adolescence?

• Is this young person potentially confusing social alienation with an issue around sexed embodiment, or are they co-occurring?

• To what extent is this youth’s presentation of gender or sex dysphoria related to his or her sensory processing delays, or any co-occurring physical disabilities?

• What would help this child feel safer, more regulated, more communicative, and more functional in the body they already have?

• What is this kid trying to communicate with the gender ideological script they are trying to speak to you through? Which types of communication is the kid already good at, and how do we use those to help scaffold his or her continued development?

• Why are they using scripts rather than their own words, in the first place?

• And many more.

The goal of this series is not to force a particular outcome. Some young people may still pursue social or medical transition no matter what their parents do or do not affirm, when they are older. Those young people still deserve to have the skills I will be covering in this series, because they are important and will help them to make more responsible and informed choices. Others, and I suspect, the majority of today’s gender dysphoric youth may find that non-invasive approaches, such as sensory accommodations, body literacy, emotional regulation, good family communication, and developmental support, will reduce their distress enough that transition no longer feels necessary or no longer feels like the only solution. Either way, the impacts of these underlying autistic and adhd traits on the youth’s experiences of socialization and embodiment need to be understood much more seriously both by their parents and by the clinicians responsible for their care.

This series is for parents of sensitive boys and sensitive girls. It is for clinicians working with distressed young people. It is for families trying to understand gender distress without rushing into either affirmation or endless confrontation. It is also for anyone trying to understand how autism, ADHD, OCD traits, anxiety, giftedness, sensitivity, sensory processing issues, or sensory integration problems can shape a young person’s relationship to the body during critical points of their adolescent development and into emerging adulthood.

Some of these kids in question will have formal diagnoses. Some only have traits of these conditions. Some have never been properly evaluated despite meeting diagnostic criteria. Some may simply be described as intense, sensitive, rigid, gifted, anxious, obsessive, avoidant, or easily overwhelmed. Whether or not a child or young person has a formal diagnosis, these traits can shape how they experience puberty, embodiment, social belonging, distress and identity development.

I also want this series to help parents and clinicians develop better conceptual frameworks and more stable protocols for reducing distress that young people experience in their bodies. A stable protocol cannot be built around ideology alone (either gender affirming or gender critical). It has to be built around the young person’s actual developmental, sensory, emotional, temperamental and family dynamic profiles.

That means looking at patterns around school, peer conflict, puberty, menstruation, clothing, sleep, food, screens, family communication, sensory overload, poor body awareness, social alienation, emotional interpretation problems, hormonal triggers, developmental delays, and environmental stressors.

Before we ask whether a given young person needs to change their body or their social role, we should ask whether anyone has helped them understand the body they already have.

For paid subscribers, I’m going to explain my framework more concretely: how sensory issues, poor body awareness, puberty, social alienation, and emotional overwhelm can become interpreted as gender dysphoria, and what parents and clinicians can begin doing differently in their work with these populations.

There are no quick fixes to any of these things. But with a better framework, I hope the whole thing will feel less daunting.

This video will be the first in a long series of neurodivergence-specific parenting tips for helping your child through gender dysphoria. In this first video, I will set up the framework and the skills I hope to cover throughout the series.

Your input will be helpful as I build this out. So pause the video or your reading for a moment and jot down whether anything I’ve said so far resonates with you. Write down any specific questions you have.

The rest of this video, and the more comprehensive tips I will publish as I finish each section of this series, will be available in full for paid subscribers. There, I can begin giving more granular advice about some really niche topics.

As part of this project, I will also host periodic exclusive Q&As aimed specifically at parents and clinicians, so I can hear your questions and get your input about what else this series needs.

So, if you like my approach and you’ve decided to support me through a paid subscription, now would be a good time to pause the video, grab a fancy little drink, your headphones, a notebook, and something to write with.

If anything I say jumps out at you, please write it down and send it to me as a comment or as a restack on this post so I can keep track of everything.

Thank you for your support. Now I’ll move on to the paid section.

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A parent’s or clinician’s introductory guide to decoding their sensitive, gifted, twice-exceptional, autistic, adhd kid’s gender distress:

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As you can imagine, my essays and videos take a lot of time and effort to produce and to bring to you. As a 26 year old independent writer, your support of my work through paid subscriptions is vital for me to be able to continue bringing my insights to you. You can upgrade to a paid subscription by clicking on the “subscribe” buttons in this post.

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Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with , , , and !

What does it mean to say that someone is autistic? Does the label help or harm the person it’s being applied to? I started this live stream pretty impulsively, honestly, because of some discourse that was raging on X. But what ended up unfolding over the next three hours turned into one of the most honest and wide-ranging conversations I’ve had on this topic.

I’m Maia, a 26 year old who reflects on her experiences of gender dysphoria, transition, detransition, autism and ADHD to help parents and clinicians caring for today’s gender questioning autistic and ADHD young people, to better understand and meet the special needs of the young people in their lives.

In this LIVE video, I’m joined by co-hosts: , a trans man and prominent gender-critical thinker on X; , a 65-year-old trans woman who transitioned in the early 2000s; and , a 22-year-old Jewish woman raised in an ultra-orthodox community, with a deep interest in psychology.

Together we explore the surge of women (especially in their 30s and 40s) seeking late autism diagnoses, and we engage the question being asked a lot these days; does this represent a genuine epidemic of underdiagnosis finally being corrected, a new social contagion among women, is both?

Along the way I share a lot of my own developmental history as a premature baby with unrecognized (and significantly impairing) autistic traits which only caused continued issues as I got older, notably including pretty severe gender dysphoria for over a decade. In this LIVE we get into the deep connection between autism and gender dysphoria in adolescent girls; how the autistic emotional experience differs from neurotypical empathy in ways that are frequently misread as coldness or narcissism; the myth of robust historical gatekeeping in gender medicine; and why understanding the etiology behind a cluster of traits matters just as much as understanding the impacts of the traits themselves; especially when it comes to how they are treated clinically. This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a long time, and I think what came out of it surprised even me.

Detailed Timestamp Breakdown (according to an AI)

00:00:07 – 00:02:00 | Introduction & Guest Welcome Maia opens the live stream, waits for guests, and introduces Aaron Terrell as co-host.

00:02:00 – 00:05:15 | Aaron’s Introduction & Background Aaron is a trans man involved in the gender-critical movement (these days largely on X)who is concerned about the medical harms of transition and gender ideology. Aaron’s focus is on understanding what draws people toward gender ideology, with a particular emphasis on the autism-gender dysphoria overlap and theorizes about its connection to the phenomenon of auto-sexuality.

00:05:15 – 00:09:15 | The Christina Buttons Article & The Autism Diagnosis Discourse Maia explains the impetus for this live: a Free Press article by Christina Buttons titled “I Thought I Was Autistic. I Was Wrong.”

The Free Press

I Thought I Was Autistic. I Was Wrong.

In 2019, I was 30 years old, living in Los Angeles, sharing an apartment with my two cats, and working remotely as an artist. Most of the people my age I knew at the time were setting down roots: getting married, building families. Meanwhile, I spent almost all my time alone, surrounded by plants, animals, and murals. I had no desire for anything else. I enjoyed having a space where I could keep the world, and other people, at a manageable distance…

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4 months ago · 225 likes · 134 comments · Christina Buttons

Maia outlines the controversy it sparked; is the wave of women seeking autism diagnoses a social contagion, or are these genuinely underdiagnosed women finally finding language for their struggles?

00:09:15 – 00:11:05 | “Two Things Can Be True at Once” Aaron and Maia agree that both the social contagion explanation and the underdiagnosis explanation can coexist. They distinguish between autism self-identification (finding language for pre-existing traits) versus trans social contagion (adopting an identity and then developing its associated symptoms).

00:11:05 – 00:16:35 | The Problem With Over-Diagnosing & the Utility of Labels Aaron questions whether giving people, especially high-functioning individuals, an autism diagnosis is actually helpful. Aaron discusses the experience of autistic traits were “bullied out” through social conditioning, and argues that over-identification with a diagnosis can be more harmful than beneficial. Aaron contrasts this with Maia and Christina, whom Aaron sees as more significantly impacted.

00:16:35 – 00:26:00 | Maia’s Developmental History Maia shares a detailed personal history: premature birth, NICU stay, never crawling, toe walking, Botox injections and leg braces in kindergarten, the Montessori teacher who misunderstood Maia’s routines, an obsessive love of cats, and the crushing disappointment of not getting cat-patterned leg braces. This section is rich with firsthand illustration of early autistic presentation in girls.

00:26:00 – 00:30:00 | Why Maia Wasn’t Diagnosed: Girls, Speech, and Precocity Maia explains why her autism went unrecognized; there was no speech delay (in fact Maia was verbally precocious and bilingual), Maia engaged in echolalia from children’s books (including the phrase “oodles and oodles of creamy butter, please”), and the premature birth allowed clinicians to attribute every developmental irregularity to being a preemie rather than to a broader neurodevelopmental pattern.

00:30:00 – 00:34:00 | Trichotillomania, Psychotherapy, and the “Trickster” Story Maia describes compulsively pulling out eyelashes, visiting a psychologist who asked Maia to draw “the trickster in the brain,” how the intervention failed, and how Maia transitioned from eyelash-pulling to compulsive hair twirling after being medicated for ADHD at 14.

00:34:00 – 00:40:05 | Sensory Motor Planning as the Root of Autism Maia theorizes, drawing on conversations with speech-language pathologist that all autistic deficits may be rooted in early sensory motor planning difficulties, which lead to a perception of the environment as unsafe, rigid and repetitive behaviors for self-regulation, and subsequently underdeveloped social intuition.

00:40:05 – 00:48:55 | AuDHD, Diagnostic Labels, and the Risk of Hyperfixating on Categories Aaron and Maia discuss the increasingly common “AuDHD” co-presentation, and both caution against becoming so fixated on diagnostic labels that we miss the larger phenomenon. Aaron draws on a background in history to argue for looking at the full constellation of psychological, cultural, and neurological forces rather than seeking a single cause.

00:48:55 – 00:54:45 | A Psychotherapist’s Self-Aware Comment from the Chat Maia reads a comment from a psychotherapist in the chat who admits to being confused about autism and wary of over-diagnosing. Aaron and Maia discuss this as a rare and encouraging example of clinical humility, and the broader problem of psychiatry going “full hog” into labeling everything.

00:54:45 – 01:01:00 | Autism as a Defense in Criminal Cases A viewer asks about autism being used as a criminal defense (referencing UK case Nathan Fake and a CSAM ring). Aaron and Maia distinguish between cases of genuine social misunderstanding (e.g., misreading consent cues) versus premeditated criminal acts where autism cannot and should not be a mitigating factor. They also briefly discuss Neil Gaiman’s use of autism as an explanation for alleged sexual misconduct.

01:01:00 – 01:12:00 | Autistic Empathy: Physical vs. Emotional Suffering Aaron and Maia explore the often-misunderstood empathy of autistic people; highly attuned to physical suffering in others but frequently appearing cold in emotional situations, not from indifference but from genuine difficulty identifying and responding to emotional states. Maia describes a childhood inability to distinguish emotions from physical illness, for example coding a lump in the throat as a cold symptom that could be resolved by drinking water.

01:12:00 – 01:22:30 | Problem-Solving vs. Emotional Validation in Relationships Aaron and Maia both discuss the relational challenge of being “fixers” rather than emotional validators, the instinct to analyze and solve a partner’s problem rather than simply saying “I’m so sorry.” Both identify this as feeling more caring, even though it’s often received as cold or dismissive. Maia connects this to a hyper-literal language use across multiple languages.

01:22:30 – 01:35:00 | Jillian Joins: Long-Term Transition, Disillusionment with Medicine Jillian (65, trans woman, transitioned starting in 1998, continued into 2001–2003 in Seattle) joins as a co-host. Jillian describes how the Seattle gender clinic in the early 2000s was pushing people through transition quickly, which challenges the myth of robust historical gatekeeping. Jillian expresses deep disillusionment with the medical-industrial complex broadly, from gender medicine to cancer treatment to statins.

01:35:00 – 01:48:00 | Jillian’s HIV Vaccine Trial, MS Diagnosis, and Steroid Psychosis Jillian recounts participating in an early mRNA HIV vaccine trial, subsequently testing false-positive for HIV, developing MS, experiencing a full MS attack, and then suffering steroid psychosis from treatment — which the neurologist refused to acknowledge. Jillian later reversed much of the MS progression through a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet and intermittent fasting.

01:48:00 – 01:55:30 | For-Profit Healthcare, Insurance Coding, and Systemic Medical Failures Jillian and Maia discuss how profit-driven healthcare structures — insurance codes, billing algorithms, AI-driven claims management — systematically deprioritize individual patient care. Maia clarifies that the problem isn’t individual greedy doctors but structural incentives.

01:55:30 – 02:03:00 | Autistic Girls, Trans Identity, and Social Legibility as Males Aaron and Maia discuss why trans identity specifically appeals to autistic females: male social norms are more explicit and rule-bound (appealing to systematizing minds), social quirks are less conspicuous when read as male, and boys’ social interaction (while involving more sudden physical contact) lacks the intimate, confusing touching norms of female peer groups.

02:03:00 – 02:09:30 | Malka Joins: CPTSD vs. Autism: Malka, a friend of Maia’s who grew up ultra-Orthodox Jewish, raises the question of differentiating Complex PTSD from autism in women. Malka argues that relational and developmental trauma can produce traits that look autistic, and suggests that the trans phenomenon and even autism self-diagnosis can sometimes serve as ways of avoiding confronting trauma narratives.

02:09:30 – 02:22:00 | Intergenerational Trauma, Orthodox Judaism, and Autistic Traits Malka and Maia explore the overlap between Jewish communal neuroses especially in Ashkenazi communities shaped by Holocaust trauma, and traits we might call autistic: rigidity, systematizing, hyperfocus on rules, hypervigilance, and high IQ clustering. Maia discusses the selection pressure theory (the most paranoid, neurotic Jews survived genocides), and the way Orthodox Judaism’s ritualism may reflect or encourage autistic-style behavior.

02:22:00 – 02:30:00 | Malka’s ODD Diagnosis, DSM Reform, Sensory Processing vs. Autism Malka reveals having been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder as a teenager, which both Malka and Maia find absurd and emblematic of psychiatry’s failure. They discuss the need for DSM reform and distinguishing sensory processing disorders from autism, ADHD social difficulties from autistic ones, and calling for etiology to matter in diagnosis rather than just symptom clusters.

02:30:00 – 02:42:00 | Autistic Language Use, Multilingualism, and the Layers of Social Interaction Maia reflects on why speaking four languages feels necessary, in part because a hyper-literal communication style requires the largest possible vocabulary to express precise sentiment, and non-literal communication (sarcasm, backhanded compliments, social signaling) feels both incomprehensible and pointless. Maia notes only becoming aware at nearly 27 of how many social layers most people navigate effortlessly.

02:42:00 – 02:52:00 | Closing Notes: N-Acetylcysteine for BFRBs, Upcoming Content Malka shares that N-acetylcysteine (NAC) has substantially reduced skin-picking (a body-focused repetitive behavior), citing small clinical trials. Maia announces work on a neurodivergence-informed ROGD parenting series, which will be available in full for paid subscribers. Your input is critical in helping me build the types of lessons that will help you and your kids succeed in life and to better understand one another. My comment section is always open.

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Conclusion

What I keep coming back to after this conversation is that a diagnostic label does not always entail self-understanding, though for some people it allows for that development to occur. Whether we’re talking about autism, CPTSD, gender dysphoria, or any other framework I use to make sense of human suffering and difference, a diagnostic category only becomes useful when it opens a path toward actually understanding the person; their developmental history, their sensory experience, their relational world, and the cultural forces shaping all of it. When it short-circuits that inquiry instead of deepening it, we’ve missed the point of labeling what are essentially personality traits in cases where impairments don’t exist (or where the impairments are cultural moreso than personal).

I’ve spent a lot of time on my Substack trying to dissect what it actually feels like to grow up with an autistic mind and an autistic body; not as an abstraction, but by analyzing the experience trait by trait, developmental stage by developmental stage. What this conversation reinforced for me is that we don’t have simple answers yet, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something akin to snake oil. What we do have, is the ability to ask better questions, extend more charity to people who are genuinely struggling, and hold the complexity of all this without reducing it into unhelpful sloganeering.

The conversations we are having about gender and autism, are happening now far more commonly than they have in the past: in live streams, on Substack, among people who have firsthand skin in the game. Those of us most affected by these medical, diagnostic, therapeutic, educational and institutions in both the realms of gender medicine and in that which pertains to autism support services, are now old enough to tell our stories and to fight for those who still have yet to grow into their adult selves, to get the standard of care which they deserve. I’m grateful to Aaron, Jillian, and Malka for showing up and thinking out loud with me, and I’m grateful to everyone who stayed in the chat for three hours on a weekend.

Now, for some announcements.

Important announcements:

Are you looking for autism and adhd specific parenting tips?

If so, I’ve been working on a series of lessons tailored to your family’s needs. It’ll be available in full for paid subscribers. Subscribe now to lock in at the lower price.

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Is your kid navigating gender questioning and neurodivergence, and you’d like my two cents on how best to support him or her?

If so, I offer parent coaching sessions to help you figure out how to best to navigate your specific child’s situation, in a compassionate and practical way. If this is of interest, please DM me.

Please share, comment and repost this article to give it traction in the algorithm. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on anything I’ve written here and/or any of your ideas on which topics to include in my upcoming ‘neurodivergence’-informed parenting series.

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“My kid came out as trans. What (the hell) do I do now?” is probably a question you’ve Googled at least once in your lives, if you’ve managed to find my Substack.

If you’ve found this post, you’re either a parent of a kid who; identifies as trans, is experiencing gender dysphoria, is pursuing gender transition or you’re a clinician working with this population, consuming tons of information including many perspectives of transitioners and detransitioners, and you’re trying to understand what to do next to help the young person in your care. Or perhaps you’re just interested in the stories that people with experiences like mine have to tell. In any case, welcome to my Substack.

My name is Maia, and I am 26 years old. From the ages of 12-24 I was convinced I was born in the wrong body.

During that time, I lived an existence which ranged from the relative mundanity of navigating middle and high school with extreme autistic confusion about reality itself, beginning the process of binding my breasts, eventually getting diagnosed with ADHD and medicated for it, finally learning to tie my shoes at the end of my freshman year of high school, becoming a high school debate champion, going off to college, quitting debate because the college debate circuit sucks, secretly beginning the gender transition I'd been planning for six years that my parents were very clear they disapproved of — hence my secrecy — all the way to the insanity of my parents sending me to the Middle East for a study abroad hoping I'd quit my gender transition, only for me to continue my elaborate cosplay.

For the next half decade I pretended to be a guy in the risky environments of orthodox Jewish and Palestinian Muslim communities in Israel. Not a single article or detransitioner testimony that my parents sent me made a dent. And they tried that. A lot. It actually took not one but two wars for me to become so disillusioned with the impracticalities of transition that in the wake of moving back to the States after living through the horrors of October 7, I decided to quit the gender transition I had spent half of my young life, planning my forever around. And now I talk about it. A lot.

I started telling my story on podcasts about six months after I quit my gender transition, and much to my surprise, people thought my life story was remarkable and wanted to hear more of my reflections. In retrospect, I can understand why my stint of living as a pretend man in the Middle East was interesting to a Western audience, though at the time I thought my life was pretty normal.

But that aspect of my life isn’t even what I spend most of my time these days thinking and talking about. I’ve moved off of the podcasts, which I went on far too soon, without enough time to adequately process everything that happened to me, and now over to this blog. Here I write about the overlap between autism and ADHD and gender dysphoria, and provide advice to parents and clinicians trying to figure out how best to help the young people in their lives. I also work one on one with ROGD families and give them my two cents about how to help their kids navigate the profoundly difficult process of trying to figure out which gender they are and what that means about how they ought to live their lives. All of these things are fundamentally complex, highly intellectualized thought experiments occurring in often very young people who lack the life experiences which adolescents in a healthier time routinely used to develop an eventually stable adult identity. Their parents are understandably concerned, and often even quite panicked. Just like mine were back in 2012 when I came out to them as trans.

So truthfully, neither the teenagers nor their parents who are going into this experience of navigating gender dysphoria in a family dynamic really want to be there. Yet here we all find ourselves.

So, parents, understanding the high stakes of how they handle this, go online. Just like mine did back in 2012.

What the internet tells parents of kids who come out as trans

There is a lot of content available right now for concerned parents of trans-identifying kids that simply did not exist when my parents were trying to figure out how to help me when I came out to them as trans in 2012 as a twelve year old. Nowadays there are internet forums, blogs, podcasts, books, Substacks, therapists, parent support groups, clinical resources, online classes, and various parent coaching programs.

Most of the content available to parents of newly out transgender-identifying or gender-questioning kids falls into one of two camps: either it affirms the trans identity without question and tells parents to get on board and immediately get onto the chemical and then surgical castration or breast amputation train, or it treats the trans identity as an ideological contagion and tells parents to resist it by any and all means necessary, including by removing internet access of the gender-questioning child specifically and isolating them from most if not all of their friends who either also think they're trans or who will, out of a pro-social impulse, go along with it because your child is in fact their friend.

There is very little nuance available to families, nor are there many in-depth analytical explanations to help parents understand how their well-intentioned parenting strategies — be they affirming or non-affirming — are likely to land with their kids in the long term, and critically, why. Parents who want to find this type of nuance have to spend additional hours of their time desperately searching for it. So quite often, they do.

These days, parents of newly out trans teens find themselves eyeballs-deep in various online forums with their peers, trying to discern these nuances from the accounts of other parents of other kids, trying to conjecture about whether any of it applies to their kid. Sometimes they find themselves in forums vehemently opposed to any questioning of the validity of the child’s trans declaration, and other times they find themselves in forums which are vehemently opposed to those other forums.

Very quickly, parents of gender-questioning kids end up drowning in so much information that gives them such conflicting messages that they feel they might explode from the overwhelm, as they are trying to manage the needs of one very distressed kid alongside the needs of the others. Both sides of the culture war on trans issues are telling parents that failing to do the thing they recommend will mean that they are failing their kid and dooming them to harm.

Both in parenting forums on pro-trans Reddit and in all sorts of ROGD parenting forums, I have noticed some clear trends in the profiles of the kids, as described by their parents: complex mental health needs of various kinds, but notably a lot of ADHD and autism. Parents of such kids still overwhelmingly find themselves online, often first going to trans kid parenting forums r/cisparenttranskid on Reddit, being told to unquestioningly affirm, and then realizing years down the line that the nature of their kids’ specific ADHD- and autism-related difficulties continue to cause additional problems as they go along the social and medical transition pathways.

Parents who affirm their kids’ trans identities are being asked to navigate both the demands of regular life and the additional (special needs) of their autistic kids’ developmental delays, while also being tasked with deciding whether to consent to experimental treatments on behalf of kids who are very young and who, because of their additional social, emotional, communication, and sensory processing deficits, are even less equipped to communicate anything clearly with their parents. It is not uncommon to hear in those pro-trans parenting forums, how difficult it is for parents to make decisions that will impact their child’s future fertility, especially when their child is autistic and struggles to clearly articulate their “gender goals.”

So even for those parents who choose to partially or fully affirm the transgender identities of their kids and aren't attempting to navigate a million rainbow-colored institutional landmines, they too are faced with a lot of challenges endemic to the gender transition process and its many unknowns. Years down the road of gender affirmation, some of the parents in these online groups will discuss that their affirmed trans kid has become a mostly happy trans adult who unfortunately is also increasingly becoming a raging alcoholic, has deteriorating mental health, and is estranging from them or other family members due to "minority stress" and "internalized transphobia." Some might call these fancy words for doubts, regrets, or, more neutrally, unresolved underlying mental health issues. In the many trans-affirming parenting chats I've been in over the last almost decade and a half, there are also transitioned adults who describe mostly positive experiences of transition. Occasionally, teenagers will find themselves asking the once-ambivalent but currently affirming parents of adult transitioned kids for advice on magic words to tell their own parents to get them to affirm. There's a lot going on in these Reddit and Facebook forums, and notably, a ton of panic.

But then there are the parents who do not want to affirm the gender identities of their kids, and they are similarly met with parenting guidance that tells them to just say no, and to "hold the line." And years down the line of just saying no and holding the line, taking their kids off the internet, forbidding them from communicating with their trans-identifying or trans-supportive friends, their kids are still just as hell-bent on transitioning as they were before, their family relationships are suffering, and their kids are still failing to develop the necessary social and life skills they need to prepare for adulthood, and to responsibly navigate the very medical institutions their parents had thought that their “holding the line” strategy would prevent them from ever needing. Skills which are difficult enough to develop for fully mature, mentally stable adults with no social communication delays, let alone for a fresh eighteen year old autistic girl or boy. And then the parents who did everything they thought they were supposed to do begin to panic, because though for some other parents (who notably, do not describe their kids as having autistic traits) this strategy may have worked, for a lot of the parents I speak to whose kids are autistic or who have moderate to severe ADHD, this advice does not tend to yield positive results because it does not get to the root of the distress. I have more theories as to what explains this difference, based on my intimate understanding of the mental models of different types of trans identifying young people I have met over the last 14 or so years both online and in real life, and will touch on this briefly at the end of this essay- though it warrants an in depth explanation at some future point.

Something else I’ve noticed in my interactions with parents or my close following of trans-related parenting blogs over the years is that sometimes, some months or years into a younger kid’s gender questioning, parents will take this as a sign to get their kids diagnosed with autism. But the autism organizations are really woke, and so feel unable to help the gender questioning kid with their actual autistic problems without going against the parents’ wishes to not affirm the new gender identity over the course of diagnosis or any relevant support programs. Other times, if you are like my parents, you will see your kid getting an autism diagnosis as an unnecessarily stigmatizing step, and will instead send your kid to the first gender critical therapist you can find, hoping that will do the trick. But here’s the thing: if your kid is autistic, and their therapist cannot recognize it because they lack a good working model of autism, there is a chance that your kid, like me, will not have adequate social or emotional understanding to benefit from psychotherapy as an adolescent or as a young adult. If a clinician relies on entirely sterilized diagnostic language and is unable to make the diagnostic criteria of autism and adhd “come to life” in a way parents can see within their own kids, your kids will not thrive under their care. That is my opinion. And also, let’s be honest. Therapy will only work if your kid wants to be there, and only when any underlying strife in the family dynamic is also addressed simultaneously. It does not feel good to be seen as the lifelong problem child in your family who always gets sent to some kind of psychotherapy and comes back to a home environment where nothing has changed. I really do see family-based interventions and parenting-based interventions rather than a sole focus on the adolescent’s gender distress as the problem to be ‘fixed’ either through affirmation or non-affirmation, as being the future of any responsible clinical response to these situations of pre-adolescent and adolescent gender questioning.

The prospect of parenting a kid through a gender crisis causes understandable panic in both parents who want to affirm their kids’ transgender identities and those who do not. I feel for parents these days, because you are surrounded by insane amounts of ideologically motivated and generic parenting advice, most of which does not even attempt to answer the deeper question of why so many autistic and ADHD youth like yours, identify as trans, and what that means for both effective parenting and for clinical work.

There's a huge gap in resources for parents of gender-questioning or trans-identifying teens who are also autistic, ADHD, gifted, or twice-exceptional.

To better understand that profile, you can read my last essay, titled “is my autistic kid really transmasc, or just masking her autism?”:

There’s a huge gap in resources for parents of gender questioning/trans teens who are also autistic, ADHD, gifted and/or twice-exceptional.

Here is what I think is severely missing from the current available resources for parents of at least half of the youth experiencing gender dysphoria: neurodivergence-specific parenting strategies, informed by the perspectives of transitioners and detransitioners who navigated these very issues in their own family dynamics with their parents as kids, teens and young adults, and who have since reflected on those experiences with maturity. I see this gap in several areas:

1. The ROGD parenting support gap. The conversation around rapid-onset gender dysphoria has produced a lot of valuable material about what is happening at a population level. We now know that the Gen Z trans phenomenon skews heavily female and is more attributable to social contagion than to an organic medical phenomenon. We know about gender ideology in schools, and about the low-quality evidence base of the interventions recommended by leading gender clinics. Very little of that framing tells a specific parent what to do on a Tuesday when their kid comes home from school in distress, perhaps months if not years into an adolescent identity crisis. There are now attempts to fill that gap through really comprehensive ROGD parenting courses and coaching programs for parents. But these materials are not focussed on the unique profiles of twice-exceptional, ADHD, and autistic kids, whose experiences of embodiment are inherently fraught due to significant sensory processing difficulties, which especially in girls, are well known to be more severe, more masked and which tend to get way worse at puberty and in other times of great hormonal fluctuation. The lack of focus on the role of sensory issues in gender dysphoria treatment alone makes any strategy which does not account for this as a baseline, very limited in its effectiveness at reducing bodily discomfort which these kids will experience regardless of whether they believe that they can or should try to change their sex. In other words, failure to address underlying sensory processing issues will mean that whether the kid desists, persists, transitions or detransitions, the sensory issues that are making their lives miserable now will only continue to impair their development. Having heard about the advice that some of the families I've worked with have received from previous professionals, I often think how well those strategies could have worked — if only the kids their parents describe did not have such fundamental struggles with understanding their emotions, with the basics of social communication, with executive function, and with sensory processing. The practical roadmap for parents of trans-identifying kids with special needs associated with neurodevelopmental conditions like autism and ADHD — and also with unusually high IQs or giftedness — which explicitly accounts for those differences, does not yet exist. I will be building that roadmap on this Substack.

2. Gaps in autism services: Most social skills curricula for autistic kids are built for kids with obvious support needs: kids who have been visibly struggling from a young age, who may be less verbal, who have already been identified diagnostically. The kid I am describing is not that kid. Your kid can monologue at you for hours about some niche within a niche topic without asking a single question. Your kid can debate philosophy online for three hours. Or perhaps conversely, your kid struggles to initiate a conversation about something outside of their special interest, or always tries to bring back every unrelated topic to their special interests. I was that kid. Your kid has probably been considered mostly fine, but highly intelligent, unusual and socially quirky for most of their life, and is only now being seen as really struggling as the demands of adolescence increase, especially if your kid is a girl. The autism services world has almost nothing tailored for this profile, and what little it does have was not designed with gender distress in mind, despite this specific autistic and ADHD profile being so uniquely susceptible to it. Many of the parents I've consulted begin to understand only from the moment their quirky, sensitive, developmentally uneven but simultaneously gifted kids come out as trans, that those kids might actually meet the diagnostic criteria for autism. And it is truly saddening to hear how torn these families are about even getting their gender-distressed kids evaluated, precisely because of how gender-affirming autism services tend to be, especially in big cities. Functionally, this means that parents are stuck. They know their kids have special or additional needs, even if, like my parents, they would never want to use that word to describe their kids.

3. The gender clinic gap in legitimate autism awareness. The clinical pathway most commonly offered to trans-identifying youth (at least in the United States) does not properly assess for autism and ADHD, does not account for the full scope of a child’s developmental needs, and does not have good answers for parents who are concerned. Many of the families I work with have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that questioning a trans identity is harmful and that the only responsible path forward is affirmation and eventual social and medical intervention. Whatever one thinks about that as a policy position, it leaves parents who have legitimate concerns about their autistic child’s capacity for informed consent, especially from the moment they turn 18, with nowhere to go.

   

4. The therapy gap. I'll speak from my own experience as someone who grew up basically raised by speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and psychotherapy of all kinds. Most therapists are totally incompetent, and most parents seem to believe their kids are getting something incredible in therapy that they themselves cannot give their own kids.

   

   My own parents sent me to a few gender-critical therapists alongside plenty of other therapists for non-gender-related things, mostly for my myriad of developmental delays. The only good experience I've had in psychotherapy was with a therapist I already wanted to work with, after I had already realized I didn't know how to work my way out of the gender transition I'd invested half my life into. I made that decision by myself. There are some real gems of therapists I’ve met in the gender space who are very skilled and enjoyable people. That said, kids who already spend most or all of their free time being "fixed" by a plethora of mostly incompetent clinicians for most of their lives, which was my exact situation due to my developmental delays, tend to continue to feel that they are fundamentally broken. That does not help them develop the confidence or the skills to understand themselves as flawed but not broken human beings. Sending your gender-questioning kid off to therapy, even to a "safe" therapist, should not be taken lightly. Treat psychotherapy as seriously an intervention as you would a psych med, because therapy can actually make people feel worse and more hopeless. That has happened to me a ton, and I know I’m not alone. It is especially important to consider re-evaluating an over-reliance on sticking malleable teenagers in talk therapy, because most of the time the kid does not want to be there, and absent a serious mental health issue, it would be wiser to spend that time and money building a relationship with your own teenager.

5. The parent coaching gap. The families I work with are often not looking for someone to tell them what to think about gender. They have already done that thinking and have come to their own conclusions. What they need is someone who understands this specific profile from having lived it and studied it to better understand themselves and the other youth in that cohort, who can help them communicate with their child more effectively, and who can give them practical tools that are actually tailored to the way their kid’s brain works. There are a couple other parenting programs and parent coaching services available for ROGD families. While it is clear to me that for non-autistic, non-adhd kids, some of these services are really helpful investments of time and money for their parents, I haven’t found one that specifically caters to parents of autistic and adhd kids, who in my experience and based on extensive deep dives into the literature, are quite likely to themselves also have traits (if not diagnoses of) the same conditions. This added layer of complexity makes it critical for parents of such kids, and for the therapists working with families in these cases, to have a far deeper understanding of how various aspects of life are experienced by autistic and adhd people, intergenerationally. The importance of neurodivergence-specific parenting support for parents of gender dysphoric kids should not be underestimated. For this type of understanding to be achieved, the DSM-5’s diagnostic criteria must be brought to life. These experiences must be written about and studied deeply, freely and absent from ideological bias. That is something I plan to explore further in my upcoming series.

6. The detransitioner perspective gap. There is a growing body of detransitioner testimony available online, but most of it is narrative rather than analytical. Naturally, this format appeals to parents, who in the absence of actionable strategies (or out of sheer desperation) often send these to their kids, who do not receive them well. Someone else's transition regret is not going to speak to your twelve-year-old or to your high schooler. Your kid is trying to communicate something to you with the only words they have been given by our society. I was in your kid's position fourteen years ago. I found detransitioner testimonies on my own while still trans, and as an adult. I engaged with them not because my parents sent them to me, but because I had already lived through the first of the two earth-shattering events that made me rethink my life, and as I did, my algorithms followed suit. Those stories were helpful in thinking things through, but watching them still did not make me detransition. They actually made me so sure I was a true transsexual because the presentation of my gender issues was so different from those of girls who realized they regretted transition because they’d been denying themselves the femininity which I thought was a sensory and social hell that I was trying to desperately escape the expectation of performing. Watching detransitioners’ testimonies in the beginning made me more compelled to continue my gender transition despite my own increasing ambivalence because I was never given the skills needed to recognize my own ambivalence or my own doubts. I write more about this in my essay "I'm a detransitioner. Stop sending my essays to your trans-identified kid."

   What is compelling for adult parents to watch is usually in no way compelling to their kids, who are in very different life stages. What would be far more useful to kids is something different: parenting and clinical strategies derived from an actual framework based on the inside experience of someone who was once happily trans — describing not just what happened, but why it happened mechanically, and what might have successfully interrupted it at different stages of development.

7. The autism/gender dysphoria overlap research gap. Research on the overlap between autism, ADHD, and gender dysphoria has grown significantly in the last decade. That finding has made it into academic journals. It has not made it into anything practical that parents can actually use on a Tuesday. Nor has anyone come up with anything resembling an intellectually rigorous explanation. That’s what I’m hoping to do here.

All of those gaps point to the same thing: there is a specific population of kids who are bright (but may have learning disabilities of different flavors), who are so sensitive (to sensory input, including often the emotions of others) that they struggle to understand how to parse and describe their own emotions, who are either socially anxious, or too socially oblivious to be socially anxious, but they lean towards perhaps being more sensory-anxious, who are ‘neurodivergent’ in ways that may or may not have been formally identified, who are experiencing gender distress in a way that is deeply connected to their neurodevelopmental profile. And there is almost no practical resource that addresses all of that together, from the inside, with enough specificity to actually be useful for parents, rather than just to seem useful.

This brings me to the deeper problem underpinning all of these gaps.

One side of the culture war, the trans-activist side, takes a child’s words far too literally. The other side, the gender-critical one, dismisses the child’s experience too quickly. The trans-affirming side over-ascribes wisdom to the young child. The gender-critical side removes too much agency from the teenager. And in both cases, the actual drivers of the young person’s distress remain untouched. This is why it is important for parents to not allow the culture war’s talking points to parent your kids, no matter how tempting it may be, especially in intellectually oriented Jewish families like mine (because, who doesn’t love a good debate?)

There is also a tendency to talk about “the trans community” as if it is a single, unified thing. Speaking as someone who was an insider for twelve years, online and in real life, in both the West and the Middle East — and now two years an outsider who has self-selected for a more self-aware and multigenerational group of transitioners: it just isn’t.

There are multiple trans subcultures, and they are constantly at odds with each other. Some are more gender-ideological, others are classical transsexualists, others are simply friend groups with heterodox beliefs, and some are even explicitly gender critical. Some trans communities are really dysfunctional, toxic and bring out the worst of humanity’s traits. Others are way less dysfunctional. The same is true of detransitioners’ online and in real life communities. Treating all of it as one thing prevents parents from understanding what their child is actually engaging with, and more importantly, why. And without that understanding, you cannot intervene effectively.

“Maia, what can I say or do to snap my kid out of this????”

(This section will be very, very honest and blunt. If this isn’t your thing, don’t read it. If it is, welcome to my Substack.)

Here is my honest answer to that question.

I tend to dislike giving generalized advice to parents who ask me for it when I know absolutely nothing about their kid or the family dynamic, because each of these situations, though they share patterns, are actually very different.

I’ve spent 12 years inside trans communities online and in real life, in the West and in the Middle East, and have watched these communities from the outside for the past two and a half years since my detransition. I know plenty of detransitioners whose family relationships don’t improve after detransition, because of the hurt accumulated on both sides, and the incapability of one or both parties to work through that maturely. I know kids from gender-affirming families who are estranging from those affirming parents because of pre-existing dysfunction that the gender transition never addressed. It is never as simple as “my kid will certainly estrange from me if I disagree with them about gender.”

I’ll say something that I think gets lost in most advice you’ll find online: the cultural context in which you’re raising your kid matters enormously, in ways no parenting forum will ever address. If there’s anything I’ve learned from pretending to be a man in the Middle East for half a decade, it’s that the West and the East each have their own unique version of insanity: both attributable to ideological dogmatism, and each shaped entirely by whether that society runs on individualism or collectivism.

The Western culture of hyper-individualism in which you’ve chosen to raise your kids carries a specific cultural hazard: families becoming untethered from their roots and engaging in estrangement over things like hurt feelings. In its most extreme form, it’s considered acceptable to abandon your family over an ideological disagreement. In its less extreme form, you get people who are free to live as they please and to be as eccentric or as normal as they wish to be.

In the most extreme form of Middle Eastern collectivism, you get honor killings. I have had Palestinian friends who were honor killed by their fathers or uncles for being gay. I have a friend whose childhood classmate was raped by her own brother in middle school, and her father killed her for bringing disgrace upon the family, despite the fact that she was the victim. Those Middle Eastern societies don’t have widespread gender confusion precisely because everyone has agreed on which sex class gets raped and killed, and which sex class does the raping and killing. To Westerners, that mindset is unconscionable. To this type of Eastern mindset, letting your kids be gay or trans (and still alive) is equally unconscionable.

In collectivism’s less extreme form, you have a society that is restrictive by Western standards but where ideological disagreements don’t tend to cause family estrangement; largely because nobody is permitted to voice them. Nursing homes practically don’t exist, because children are taught from early on that they have a duty to care for their parents in old age. For those of you who, like my parents, are immigrants: there is a reason you chose not to raise your kids in those societies. By choosing the West, you chose constant change, chaos, and instability in exchange for freedom and opportunity. That includes your kid’s freedom to do things you profoundly disagree with. And your freedom to decide how to respond. The greatest wisdom I’ve gleaned from my Eastern European roots is that unlimited freedom scares the living daylights out of people. People need constraints to function in an existence tethered to gravity rather than one floating aimlessly through space, but not so many restrictions that they suffocate. Our Western societies have not achieved this balance even though we are more capable of doing so than our Eastern counterparts.

There are far broader societal themes that need to be unpacked to understand the full scope of how we’ve gotten here. Maybe, as extremes go, it’s preferable to live our type of insanity than to live in a society where honor killing your child for disobedience is considered acceptable. There is always a way back from estrangement, for as long as both parties are alive. That’s my point.

Now. Anyone who promises that your kid will change their identity if you just use their strategy is selling you snake oil. Neither I, nor anyone else can make that promise. It is easy to manipulate the circumstances of children and pre-teens. It is much harder to manipulate the those of mid-to-older teens and young adult dependents. It is impossible to change the minds of self-sustaining young adults into making the decisions you think are best for them. At some point, they will have to learn through trial and error, and the state of their relationship to you will be the difference between them making really dumb choices versus making potentially catastrophic ones. I want to be very clear: I do not believe that anything as complex as adolescent identity development or gender distress has an easy or quick fix. That is not how reality works. And that is not what I’m offering.

You could try every strategy in the book and your kid might still transition.

There comes a time when parents cannot control the choices their kids make, and that time arrives far more quickly than most parents realize. The best thing a parent can do is understand this fact and build it into their parenting strategy from the moment their kid first confides this level of distress in them, at any age. Trying quick fixes and then becoming more radical when they fail is certainly something akin to a strategy — but it will very likely make things worse, not better. This includes: sending your kids my articles or those of other detransitioners instead of sitting with your child and his or her feelings. Sending studies about medical harms instead of having a face-to-face conversation. Taking your kid off the internet the moment they have thoughts you don’t like, while allowing everyone else in the house to continue their overreliance on it. Telling your kid they’re in a cult. Trying to convince them they’re wrong by telling them how much of a girl or boy they are, and showing pictures of them as toddlers in gender-typical outfits you chose for them. Restricting their social world to nothing. Forcing them harder into gender conformity. Telling them how upset their thoughts make you feel. Mourning your living child in front of their face. Enlisting siblings to convince them out of it. Withholding warmth because their appearance upsets you. Penalizing them for speaking honestly to you. Telling them they are wrong about their feelings. All of this is as relationally inappropriate as letting your teenager run the household while allowing them to make medical decisions they are developmentally incapable of understanding. To successfully navigate this, boundaries and warmth must coexist.

If there’s anything I wish someone would have told my parents back when I was 12, it would be this: “You are neither parenting a bad idea, nor are you parenting a walking, talking gender identity. You are parenting your whole child. Your child is struggling and she does not know how else to communicate this to you. Your duty is to help her learn how to use her words, rather than to argue with someone else’s words she is using as an echolaileic script just like she did as a toddler.”

The truth is, that your child who already has special needs, will eventually become an adult who will need a lot more guidance learning life skills and social skills than other people his or her age. This alone makes your child more vulnerable than their same-aged peers at any age. Not even the most compelling (to you) gender critical article will ever give your autistic, ADHD, gifted or twice-exceptional kid those life skills which they will need to stop being vulnerable to the manipulations of others because they probably lack the social intuition or attention span to understand that sometimes, people manipulate each other.

If your trans-identifying kid has sensory processing issues or extreme sensitivities, those will never be solved by a dinner table debate about trans women in women’s sports. What they need are parents and clinicians who help them become aware of how their sensory sensitivities impact their experiences of embodiment — with the eventual goal of helping the young person build their own non-gender-related understanding of how to feel better in their bodies. Every autistic or ADHD person will need this skill as they move through adulthood, regardless of whether they transition, because otherwise, transition will likely subsume their unconscious attempt to meet those needs, and they will probably lack the self-awareness to understand anything about their own motivations.

People who lack self-awareness are unlikely to make rational decisions, no matter how high their IQs are. In the absence of these skills, it could take your kid literally living through a couple of Middle Eastern wars to realize that comfort in one’s own skin, when the actual source of that discomfort is a sensory processing disorder, will never be mitigated by gender transition, no matter how hard they try. I know, because that is what it took for me. But first, your kid needs to know that sensory processing issues can really make them that miserable. That this level of misery is not normal. And that there are non-invasive alternatives — ones that parents can make genuinely attractive to their kids without needing to dismantle their entire trans identity to do it.

If your kid has autism or ADHD, they will need more of your help than your other kids to make it into adulthood, and it may take them longer to get there. They will need far more targeted guidance than anything you’ll find in either a trans kid or ROGD kid parenting forum that doesn’t explicitly cater to smart kids with special needs.

I would advise every parent who is drowning in gender content to stop consuming it. If gender has become main rationale for increasingly more of your parenting decisions and the main content you consume, it will not help you parent your autistic kid through their autistic issues, or your ADHD kid through their ADHD issues which are merely being refracted through the lens of gender. Reading every article about transition-related medical harms will probably just make you go insane, and your insanity will also probably make your kid go insane. And that is not good for anyone.

Your gender questioning kids need a parent who can stay sane and grounded as their beloved child navigates whatever middle school, high school, and college will throw at them. They need the targeted, unglamorous support of being helped to live with the developmental profiles associated with their autistic and ADHD traits. Parenting your smart kid with special needs, through their adolescent gender identity crisis, will probably be one of the hardest and most character-defining things you have ever done. If done well, both of you will learn so much about yourselves from it. And you too, are a human being deserving of experiences of joy throughout this process with your child. You should not attempt to navigate this all alone. I, for one, am here. But also, build a local support system.

Social and medical transition are not, in my opinion, the most ideal life outcomes. I think transition is a path which should be avoided at all costs, because it is so invasive in every facet of life, and because in most cases far less invasive paths to peace exist. That is my personal opinion. But I also don’t believe that transitioning is always the most catastrophic, life-ruining scenario; yes, even when it ends in regret or ambivalence. I also think there are more and less responsible ways to go about doing it, if that is the choice that an individual eventually makes.

I actually have extremely mixed feelings about my own time in so-called gender transition. Rather than sitting with the full emotional complexity of that, I intellectualize it for you all here. Welcome to my Substack.

My hot take, as someone who was the kid in your kid’s situation not so long ago, and for a very long time:

It is far more important that you and your kid can bond throughout this process, at any age, because you can be the one to teach them to recognize their own doubts, rather than them outsourcing that to an ideological script about “internalized transphobia,” which repackages doubt for young people who are autistic and genuinely struggling to understand their feelings for what they are. I think it is far more important for parents to bond with their kids by giving them the skills they specifically need to become the best versions of themselves. Someday your kid will be out in the world making their own choices. The goal is to prepare them to choose responsibly and thoughtfully, rather than as a way to “stick it” to their parents, because they are still psychologically adolescents with the rights of adults and are locked in a protracted power struggle with mom and dad over their desire for independence. Like I was.

Some of you are parenting autistic and ADHD kids, or kids you’d describe as extremely gifted but socially awkward, or underperforming relative to their gifts — or who traits of those conditions, perhaps without a formal diagnosis. Some of you are parenting kids with more severe mental health issues, sexual trauma, or family instability. These populations need different things, but are often intertwined. My series will focus primarily on the neurodivergent population, though since trauma can produce presentations of autistic and ADHD traits even without a strong genetic propensity, many parents may find it useful regardless of a formal diagnosis. Sometimes the parents I work with share the same autism or ADHD their kids have. Sometimes one parent has it in milder form. Usually that parent is not the one who reaches out to me. Sometimes these things skip a generation. My series will also, I hope, be comprehensive enough to be useful for clinicians wanting to deepen their understandings with research and lived experience, and for parents who share some of their kid’s neurodivergence, and for so-called “neurotypical” parents. Btw, “neurotypical” is a term I hate but I use it for explanatory ease, to mean that someone doesn’t have clinically significant traits of ADHD or autism— though as I’ll re-iterate; maybe the other biological parent or grandparent of your kid does.

The skills I’ll teach in this series are the ones I passionately believe your kids (if they are anything like I was at their age) will need. In some cases, these skills could be enough to help your kid grow out of their gender issues or find less invasive ways of coping with them than transition. This has been the outcome of some of my clients’ kids so far.

For others, the success of a neurodivergence-informed parenting strategy may look like your kid developing genuine self-awareness and then choosing social or medical transition with as full an understanding of what they’re signing themselves up for as they can before embarking on the process, and not as something they feel they literally cannot survive without, so they make rash choices because they are drowning and just trying to hold onto anything that vaguely resembles a life raft. That is also an outcome that some of my clients’ kids experience.

I see both of these life outcomes as far better than cycling through quick-fix ROGD parenting moves which are born out of panic and usually just destroy the parent-child relationship for no reason.

The advice I’ll be giving in this upcoming series will be more general than what I give families one-on-one, where I get enough information to notice micro-patterns within broader patterns within individual cases. But it will still be specifically focussed on the needs of this population. It is probably the most comprehensive body of work I will have ever created. I’m not yet finished with it despite having spent too many hours staring at this computer screen, so I’ll release it in phases: one series on sensory issues, one on social skills, one on emotional processing, and one on the academic and intellectual development your autistic and ADHD kids will need to make it through adolescence and into young adulthood with the capacity to make truly informed life choices, while preserving the most important family relationships even in the face of the most immense of conflicts.

To account for that time investment, I’ll be raising my paid subscription prices by a few dollars a month. This will not affect current paid subscribers.

Subscribe now to be locked in at the lower price and to access the full series as it is released.

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If you’d like my help with your kid’s specific situation before the full series is out, DM me to set up a parent coaching session.

And finally, I’d love your input as I build this neurodivergence-informed ROGD parenting series. Those of you who read my work regularly know that I don’t oversimplify what is genuinely complex, because I see that as a profound disservice to my readers and their kids. Naturally, that means everything I write is extremely long, including introductions to project announcements.

Let me know in the comments if there are specific questions you’d like me to address in the realm of parenting a kid through a gender crisis involving: sensory processing issues, social communication delays, a serious gap between a child’s potential and their observable accomplishment, and their ability to identify or understand their own bodily cues, including; emotions, tiredness, hunger, and so on. You can tell me about your kid’s specific presentations of autism and/or adhd, and if my content has helped you understand something about the relationship between that and their gender distress, tell me how. The more specific the question, the better advice I can give and the more precisely I can build it into this series.

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Update: this essay has two titles now. You guys picked the first one by popular demand, but I still like the second one better so I’m keeping it!!!

Okay; now, onto the essay

When Transmasc Becomes Another Mask for an Autistic Girl to Wear

Could girls be trying to mask their autism with gender transition?

On the overlap between autistic masking and gender exploration, for the parents and clinicians trying to understand

By Maia Poet

(Published Autism Awareness Day 2026)

Ever since I first entered detransition advocacy spaces, both online and in person, the most common first question I’ve ever been asked was: “Maia, are you autistic?”

Every interview I gave about my story of transition and detransition in the Middle East spawned comment sections full of people saying “this girl is so clearly autistic and yet it never came up.” Hell, even back in my trans days, I managed to have two girlfriends in Israel who somehow both worked as carers in hostels for autistic adults, unsolicited, one of them told me that she thought I was autistic. The other one, however, told me she was certain that I was. Mind you, the autistic adults these young women cared for, could not bathe themselves independently. Naturally, I was not amused by their armchair diagnosis. At some point, even my therapist brought up the fact that I have a number of autistic traits, albeit she did so with far more tact, and in a way more acceptable context, than did the others.

The fact that people who meet me, regularly conclude that I am autistic, is not entirely news to me. Nonetheless, for the first year or so into my detransition, I was frankly a bit offended every time someone brought it up.

Despite not being diagnosed with it, autism has been an important feature of my life for quite a while now. From the moment I became obsessed with autism as a pre-teen, and told any adult who would listen to my exciting theories about it, I was quickly made aware I had some autistic traits. Around that time coincidentally, my parents began to realize that I just was not picking up on any social cues, which they thought I would have started doing by now. So we studied them together. Occasionally, even on flash cards.

So whenever someone told me that I was autistic, I’d always respond with a prefabricated argument that went something along the lines of: “well, what you’re probably seeing is the ADHD that I’m diagnosed with, which is an honest mistake considering the symptom overlap” or: “trust me, when I was eleven to thirteen years old I was so obsessed with autism that it was the only topic I’d read about or think about, which by the way is also an ADHD trait… which I DO have a diagnosis of, and yes, I did meet Temple Grandin whom I’ve found to be highly relatable, and I even worked with autistic kids in a playgroup where (suspiciously) no volunteer duties had been bestowed upon me despite that being the entire premise of my participation in said group…. but it’s only because of their similarities with my ADHD that I find them to be the only group of people who actually make sense to me, and that does not mean that I am autistic.”

Needless to say, the more compellingly I tried to counter-argue, the more ammunition I seemed to hand my friends. Especially when they found out about the history of toe walking, my obsession with one rare brain tumor at the age of eight, and the fact that until I was almost 15, I had not learned to tie my shoes. But still, I was confused as to how all these laypeople with no knowledge of my history of developmental quirks could all come to the conclusion that I am on the autism spectrum, without having memorized the diagnostic criteria themselves— but how clinicians never thought to screen me for it.

So I did what I always do when something confuses me. I researched it. This time as an adult in the mid 2020s rather than as a middle schooler in the early 2010s, and this time, with the expressed purpose of proving my friends wrong. I tabled the neuroscience angle I had investigated as a child and decided to embark upon understanding that which has always eluded me: how to talk about emotions and social interactions.

There I stumbled upon the concept of how girls and women often “mask” their autistic traits. Admittedly, at first I thought the idea of this was stupid, because most of those talking about it had blue hair and an obnoxious victim mentality about the entirety of their objectively privileged, first world lives. But over time, as I began to investigate the nitty-gritty of my own life experiences in transition and in detransition, writing on this Substack and eventually consulting with ROGD families who describe their daughters engaging in the same types of atypical social-communication behaviors as I did at their age, I decided to delve more seriously into the literature on the female autism phenotype.

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What is ‘masking?’

Naturally, this pesky topic of “masking” or “autistic social camouflage” comes up a lot when researching how autism presents in women and girls. At some point, despite my opposition to the idea, the aggravating feeling of a leaf yet unturned in my autism research nagged at me.

It’s worth noting that autistic masking is not the same thing as code-switching, though they get confused constantly. Code-switching, or adjusting how you present yourself depending on who you're with, is something virtually everyone does. For most people it is not particularly costly from a cognitive standpoint, because it operates on top of their existing social intuition. Code-switching is when you still understand the room, but you are just choosing, more or less automatically, your register. Or so I’ve learned from people who describe this ordinary social phenomenon.

Autistic masking is the absence of that underlying intuition, compensated for by extraordinarily laborious conscious effort. It is not adjusting a natural social self for different contexts. It is manufacturing a social self entirely from observation, imitation, memorized rules, and real-time inference, and then sustaining that manufacture across every social interaction, including ones that a non-autistic person would experience as effortless. The difference in the cognitive cost is not a matter of degree. It is a fundamental difference in kind.

Code-switching is changing the settings on a device that already has a robust operating system with a toggle option. Masking is writing the operating system from scratch every time you turn it on, while the device is running, overheating from the overload of data, while pretending to everyone around you that it booted up instantly and without an issue.

Much to my surprise; the more I researched the topic of autistic masking, the more self-awareness I developed. The more self-aware I became, the more I began to realize that contrary to my friends’ opinions, that I must not be all that great at masking because I seem so autistic, I had come to the contrary realization; that all along, in addition to masking my social difficulties and sheer overwhelm in early childhood, I was also in fact masking my autism with the transgender identity I had held for twelve years of my life. Especially during the subset of that time I spent binding my breasts and later socially transitioning in the Middle East.

I will reiterate: I was not masking my autistic traits in spite of my trans identity. My trans identity was the mask I wore, as an elaborate way to conceal the confusion and overwhelm I felt as I navigated the world encumbered by my autistic social deficits.

This raises a question I think is worth sitting with before continuing: what might it be about autism that causes girls to want to opt out of being girls the moment they discover that such an option exists?

I think the answer to this question has everything to do with what it feels like to be an autistic girl attempting to navigate life while moving through a world that makes no sense to her, as she grows up.

To understand how a transmasc identity could become a mask which an autistic girl could wear, you first have to understand what ‘masking’ is, why autistic girls become so skilled at it, and why adolescence is precisely the moment that the whole house of cards predictably collapse, usually resulting in a crisis of mental health, identity and embodiment.

In this essay, I will use myself as a case study of sorts. I aim to focus on the early childhood to early adolescent period of my own development and compare it with the literature base of autistic masking strategies seen commonly in girls, to argue that a fully-baked transgender self-concept, which may appear seemingly out of nowhere to parents and clinicians around early adolescence, is rarely actually arriving out of nowhere. Particularly, in undiagnosed girls with elevated autistic traits, I believe it is the endpoint of a longer and largely invisible developmental sequence; one in which transmasculine identity functions not as a discovery of who someone really is, but as the most complete masking strategy the girl has yet found. If that is true, then what looks like a gender problem arriving at puberty is actually a neurodevelopmental problem that was never properly identified, and treating it as the former while ignoring the latter, causes multiple layers of harm.

I'll illustrate this with my own story. But I want to start earlier than most people would expect; not at puberty, not with the iPad I got for my 12th birthday, and not even at the moment I first encountered the word “trans.” I want to start at the very beginning, with a child who had only the haziest sense of what reality even was.

When I was a kid, I didn’t actually realize I was a girl in any permanent sense until I was probably a year into puberty. I thought I might grow into a man, a woman, or an airplane, and considered each equally plausible. Around the age of eight I still thought that some people were born kids and that other people were born adults. The concept of ‘growing up’ confounded me until I developed a fascination with the world’s tallest people and with the rare pituitary tumor that made them that way. That same year on the radio I’d heard about ‘hermaphrodites’ and wondered whether I might not be one of them. I also thought my 369 toy cats were almost as sentient as my two real ones until well into middle school. None of this seemed that strange to me.

I lived in an imaginary universe and had a relationship with reality which was tenuous at best for far longer than was typical. In the late 2000s, before small children had internet-connected devices of their own, life with a mind like mine was more or less survivable.

I was also, depending on the day, either fascinated or overwhelmed by everything around me. The seams on my socks. The buzzing of fluorescent lights. My own thoughts about whatever niche intellectual fixation I was currently investigating. My attention was so drawn to the overwhelming sensory input in my environment, that whatever my teacher had just said, I had already stopped tracking.

Between being lost in my own thoughts as a comfort from everything in my environment that overwhelmed me, I was picking up on very little of what was expected of me socially and academically. As a consequence, I felt constant frustration in school. I found it difficult to track more than single step instructions, and found myself flitting between my fascinating internal world and frantically looking to the worksheet of the kid on my left and then on my right, hoping I’d figure out what I was supposed to do next. I thought of myself as a perpetual, undercover idiot trying to disguise herself as a smart kid.

Other kids seemed to understand what was going on around them in ways I found genuinely mysterious. By third grade I had developed a workaround: memorize what the teacher said in ten-to-fifteen-second increments and play it back when called on. Supplement by gifting random things to my classmates, and with copious flattery. Instead of melting down in front of other kids, thinking it would subject them to as much distress as I felt when they did that, I began to pull out my eyelashes instead. Then I’d feel shame about the missing eyelashes and worried about disappointing both my parents and the therapist who could not figure out why I was pulling out my eyelashes. Rinse, and repeat.

As a side note, trichotillomania or compulsive hair pulling is increasingly being studied as another possible body focussed repetitive behavior with links to elevated autistic traits (namely sensory processing issues and difficulties with identifying and verbally articulating distress) in both kids and in adults. Of course, back when I was a little kid and presented with these issues, this was not well-known enough for my psychologist to have suggested screening me for autism. Instead, it was seen as a potential indication for OCD and my psychologist tried to convince me that there was a ‘trickster’ monster in my head convincing me to pull out my eyelashes. Needless to say, after our time together, my eyelash pulling had not improved. It wasn’t until I was 14 and put on ADHD meds that I was able to redirect my compulsive eyelash pulling to compulsive hair twirling; which does make one look weird, but it is at least not disfiguring.

My main social strategy from toddlerhood on was to be highly altruistic and people pleasing. I’d put candies into small plastic bags and hand them out to the other toddlers on the playground.

Giving people things is a good way to get them to like you. And every parent wants a kid who does not need to be told to share their things with others, so the behavior is reinforced, especially in girls. And clearly, my strategy was good enough that my teachers described me as a pleasure to have in class, good enough that the adults around me mostly had no idea how little I understood of what was happening around me, good enough that I made it to middle school without a diagnosis of autism despite having been in constant intervention to correct my list of developmental delays. As I got older, this strategy made me very prone to manipulation by others and being taken advantage of.

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But at eight, you are allowed to be weird. Nobody minds very much if you don't track everything, don't quite follow the social choreography, live substantially inside your own head. I would not learn to tie my shoes until the end of my freshman year of high school. I believed in Santa Claus well into middle school without any awareness that this was unusual. The gap between what I could do and what my peers were doing was increasingly evident with time, but it was easy to overlook when the stakes were still low and the rules were still simple.

Elementary school had actually suited me, in its rigidity. The rules were posted on the wall. The teacher stated them clearly and repeated them until they were memorized. "Be nice." "Take turns." "Raise your hand." These were instructions I could follow. I was good at following instructions. What I was not good at, what I had never been good at, was something that would start mattering enormously— reading a room.

As it turns out, the ability to survive in one’s true, authentic quirkiness is an age-dependent phenomenon which favors the young. And adolescence was coming.

On adolescence as a developmental inflection point which necessitates new masking strategies

The research literature on autistic girls documents this pattern. In childhood, girls often mask their autistic traits through imitation of the behaviors of others (including copying their tone, hand gestures and exact words), through rigid compliance with stated rules, and compensatory behaviors, such as weaving in and out of group activities to mask their social deficits, and with “good girl” (people pleasing) behaviors. These masking strategies work reasonably well when the social environment is structured and the demands are explicit (Dean et al., 2017; Hull et al., 2018; Lai et al., 2015)¹. But they extract a cost that isn’t visible until later.

The more a girl learns to manage her behavior to meet the stated expectations of others, the less she practices noticing what is going on inside of her own body. Over time, she loses a sense of what she needs, what overwhelms her, and what is just too much right now. What appears to be a successful, well-adjusted and quirky little girl who doesn’t cause problems for other people will soon begin her evolution into a teenaged girl who doesn’t know who she is, at all.² The unpaid bill of a decade of missed social learning eclipsed by a surface-level performance of pseudo-compency, tends to come due in adolescence. And when it does, it usually comes due all at once.

By nine and a half, puberty arrived and with it the full weight of what being a girl was apparently going to begin requiring of me.

In the early stages of puberty, I was still in denial that I would grow up to be a woman. I was having fun occasionally running around shirtless in the summer and being a socially oblivious oddball until breast buds began to grow, and suddenly, along with them came a cascade of expectations: that I would become more focussed on my appearance, that I would grow out my ‘beautiful’ (and difficult to manage) curly hair and have to feel it touching my ears and neck with every gust of wind, that I would have to begin uncomfortably removing all of my increasingly dark body hair.

And then there were the bras, which in theory did not horrify me, though in practice they absolutely did. The had straps that twisted as I moved. In a small, contained strip of fabric there were multiple different textures. I had to feel a new extra garment covering only my chest rather than merely the predictable sensation of a shirt. It made me want to scream. I now found it difficult to focus on anything else.

By the end of fifth grade, by the time I got my first period, I had arrived at the realization, with considerable mixed feelings, that I was in fact a girl, and that this was not going to change. Most kids reach this understanding, called sex constancy, sometime around first grade. It is considered a standard developmental milestone. But I was not most kids.

My developmental trajectory was, to put it charitably, its own thing entirely. I had genuine delays in some areas requiring my parents to work what amounted to two separate full-time jobs; one paid, one consisting of shuttling me between appointments and then doing the work themselves when the clinicians turned out to be largely useless, while simultaneously presenting as obviously gifted enough in other areas that the adults around me never quite put it all together. I could memorize entire children’s books as a toddler after a single read-aloud. However, I consistently struggled to understand what my teachers were asking me to do. The gap between those two facts should perhaps have told someone something. It did not.

What I know now, is that autistic kids are significantly more likely to struggle with sex constancy than their peers. Notably, this holds even when you control for IQ. Autistic children with and without intellectual impairments lag behind non-autistic IQ matched peers on these skills. Which is to say: it is not about being smart or not smart. There is something specifically autistic about the way appearance and reality get processed, or, in my case, not processed, until the evidence becomes literally impossible to ignore. For me, that evidence arrived in the form of a menstrual period. It’s hard to argue with that.

As the sensory hell of puberty raged, the social communication rituals of my female peers became increasingly non-literal. They began to rely on sarcasm, the backhanded compliment; they built social hierarchies defined by trendy clothing as a status symbol. In unison, they began to wear cosmetics on their faces, which they somehow managed to tolerate the feeling of all day. Their social skills were rapidly advancing, and mine were not. I was confused by them and quite happy to continue spending my afternoons researching rare medical conditions for fun.

The masking strategy that had carried me through elementary school; smile, nod, memorize the explicit rules printed on a classroom poster and follow them enough to draw no attention to myself so I could drift off into my imagination where the lights were not fluorescent, where my socks did not have bothersome seams and where I did not hear a classroom full of pencils and erasers scratching on paper, had suddenly stopped working so seamlessly. You cannot smile and nod your way through a conversation that is happening almost entirely in subtext and have the charade that you understand what your peers are communicating actually be believable. You will eventually smile, nod, or laugh at the wrong time, and everyone will understand that you are not human like they are, but that you are actually an alien who has landed on Earth and is only pretending to understand them in an effort to bide enough time to learn their girl human ways.

The girls in my grade had undergone some kind of coordinated social software update I had not received. It wasn’t just that they showed up to the first day of seventh grade in what seemed like a collectively planned outfit, wearing makeup, having apparently agreed on all of this over a summer. Even the words they used no longer meant what they used to. “Basic” was no longer just referring to the bare minimum. “Extra” no longer meant more than the bare minimum. “Throwing shade” was a nonsensical statement on its face. “Spill the tea” had nothing to do with spilling any tea. All of these words and phrases carried layers of social meaning that seemed obvious to everyone else and completely opaque to me. And slang was only the surface of it. Underneath the slang was tone, timing, gesture, implication, hierarchy — a constantly updating codebook that everyone else seemed to have been born holding, and which I had never been issued. I was unaware of all of these nuances. At one point, I even wondered whether kids my age were perhaps brain injured and incapable of using words correctly.

When I did what any reasonable person would do and asked what a word meant, one of two things happened: either someone explained it to me, which still marked me as strange, or more often, as the girls had begun building social hierarchies and learned that status could be gained by tearing others down, I was made to feel stupid for even asking.

It should come as no surprise that I found the boys in my grade significantly less socially treacherous to navigate. They were way less socially developed, not playing these games yet, and asking them a clarifying question was a much safer bet. There was also another reason I was gravitating toward boys by this point, though I had no framework for it yet: I was experiencing romantic feelings for girls and had absolutely no understanding that this was what I was feeling. My hypothesis involved some kind of complex illness or a brain injury, which when my parents took me to the doctor for, showed that I was healthy. What I did know for sure, was that being around boys was not awkward in the way being around girls had just become.

I also felt confident in my ability to understand just enough of the boys’ social universe to make it out of middle school alive, whereas the girls had formed what felt like an estrogen-fueled impenetrable force of rapidly advancing social development. I could spend hours with a pen, a notebook, and a textbook trying to understand the peculiarities of their behavior by effortfully decoding it with whichever diagnostic or developmental cipher I managed to find either within one of my parents’ parenting books, Meyers-Briggs Personality Type tests, all of which felt flimsy and non-actionable to me until I began to delve into the sturdy predictability of various diagnostic criteria I took great pleasure in memorizing. Despite my tremendous efforts, I felt perpetually unable to ever master even an iota of it.

I became acutely aware of just how much I was living on a different planet from everyone else and grew increasingly insecure about what I thought was a flaw in my intelligence, and out of self-preservation retreated into a mixture of even more books about parenting, child development and about various learning disabilities and neurodevelopmental disorders I had become obsessed with learning everything there was to know about.

It is worth being precise about why. It was not just that the social demands had increased. They had changed in kind. Non-autistic adolescent girls tend to navigate social environments through implicit cognition: rapidly reading emotional nuance, relational subtext, unspoken dynamics. Autistic girls, by contrast, tend to rely on explicit, systematizing rule-based processing: conscious inference, pattern memorization, careful observation of surface behaviors.³

Autistic cognition is, at its core, systematizing cognition. It is very good at finding the rules, memorizing them, and applying them consistently. The problem is that adolescent female social life stops being governed by consistent rules. The rules become implicit, unspoken, and constantly renegotiated by a group of people who never consciously agreed on them in the first place. You cannot systematize a system that its own participants couldn't articulate if you asked them to. It is the difference between learning a language from a textbook and being dropped into a country where everyone speaks it natively; except that in this version, the language changes every few months, nobody wrote it down, and asking someone to explain it to you marks you as an outsider immediately.

Autistic social camouflaging, or “masking” intensifies during early adolescence and is associated with increased psychological distress.⁴ Studies indicate that earlier in life masking strategies relying on imitation and behavioral compensation become less effective as social systems become more implicit and less governed by explicit rules.⁵ I believe that the biopsychosocial changes emerging at adolescence create a developmental inflection point at which it becomes harder for girls to continue masking their autistic traits with the same old strategies. New social demands require new software updates to keep up the pretense that you know what the hell is going on around you. So, absent an intellectual impairment, autistic girls do what they do best: figure out ways to adapt to the new, unpredictable social landscape associated with growing up as an embodied female, by attempting to gain some kind of control over the situation, and namely, over how they are perceived by their peers.

On adolescence as a developmental inflection point which necessitates new masking strategies

At this point, I theorize that there seem to be at least three broad directions an autistic girl might move in, when her previous masking strategies cannot effectively meet the new demands of adolescence.

The first two are noted in the literature, and the third is my novel contribution to the discourse.

1. To intensify her previous masking strategies, attempting to ‘double down’ on feminine appearance and social role performance.

2. To develop a restrictive eating disorder like anorexia nervosa

3. To develop intense cross-sex ideations which crystallize into a trans(masc) or ‘male’ identity and often escalate into intense transition desire.

Some will move sequentially through them, or move between them non-sequentially, attempting to get some semblance of control whereas others will more ardently stick to one.

The first possible response to the developmental inflection point of adolescence, is to intensify ordinary masking: by intentionally and effortfully (rather than naturally or intuitively) becoming more agreeable, more outwardly feminine, more perfectionistic, more imitative of her female peers, more self-monitoring; effectively to “girl” better socially. Having met many autistic girls and women over my life, it seems to me that most of them (at least historically) will stay here for a very long time. This comes with its own, well-documented, mounting mental health costs which are then also usually masked until they simply cannot be anymore. For some, this crisis hits sooner than for others. I suspect it could be the result of temperamental differences in distress tolerance or the explicitly stated value of social role conformity and pressure put on a girl in her environment, though I am not sure.

The second possible response to the developmental inflection point of adolescence is to increasingly problematize the changing body as the primary source of distress via an eating disorder. Change of any kind is particularly stressful for autistic people: the more unpredictable, the more existentially dreadful. The body in puberty is nothing if not unpredictable. This problematization can take different forms, the most common of which is an eating disorder. In my opinion, restrictive eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, functions for some autistic adolescent girls, as an attempt to stunt pubertal development and regain control over a body that has begun changing suddenly and without her permission. The overlap between autism and eating disorders is substantial: in one adolescent anorexia sample, ten percent met full diagnostic criteria for autism and another forty percent showed elevated autistic traits.⁶ Rather than trying to socially perform the shifting expectations of the teen girl category, or exiting the category of girl, this strategy attempts to arrest it; to freeze the body at a point before the social demands became unbearable.

A third possible response to the developmental inflection point of adolescence, I theorize, is for an autistic girl to mask her autism with a trans identity. This path shares features with the eating disorder strategy by problematizing the changing body as the source of distress, while also rejecting the impulse to intensify the classic masking strategies described in the literature which mostly amount to “being better at being a girl”. These autistic girls, instead of attempting or continuing to try to perform the category of “girl” better, could do what I did, and choose to step outside of it altogether. Then, the pursuit of biopsychosocially attempting to embody either ‘boy’ or “transmasc” becomes the masking strategy of the autistic adolescent girl. It should go without saying that the adolescents who do this are very unlikely to have any insight into their behavior, so using this as a ‘gotcha’ is not something I would advise for either parents or for clinicians. Nonetheless, it may be an important framing to keep in mind when trying to understand and better meet the needs of this population.

Why some girls respond to this developmental inflection point by doubling down on a social performance of femininity, whereas others stop eating, and others still decide they need to become boys, I can only conjecture about. There are huge variations in temperament, distress tolerance, environmental acceptance of non-conformity at various life stages, traumas, family dynamics, cultural values and the type of social media messaging which contribute to the overall picture. I suspect however, that one vector worth looking into is Pathological Demand Avoidance.

On Transmasculine Identification as Pathological Demand Avoidance

I want to introduce a concept here that I think is genuinely useful for understanding a particular subset of autistic girls, even though it’s imperfect and a bit controversial: pathological demand avoidance, or PDA.⁷

PDA is a behavioral profile, not a formal diagnosis. Some clinicians and researchers find PDA to be an extremely clinically useful in understanding a specific subtype of autists, whereas others are skeptical of it, partly because similar behavior patterns can show up in people with complex trauma, ADHD, or anxiety, and partly because some people feel it pathologizes what is essentially just a strong drive for autonomy. I’m not going to adjudicate that debate here. What I am going to do is describe what it looks like, because I think the description is illuminating.

At its core, PDA is what happens when an autistic nervous system treats demands not as difficult or unpleasant, but as genuinely intolerable and reorganizes the person’s entire social existence around avoiding them. The demands in question can be anything: a direct instruction, an implied expectation, an internal bodily need such as cues that one needs to use the restroom or to feed themselves. The specific avoidance strategies used by this population are creative and wide-ranging: distraction, excessive flattery, elaborate excuse-giving, withdrawal into fantasy, outright refusal, and when everything else fails, aggression.

One thing that tends to be consistently noted in descriptions of PDA is a particular comfort with role play and pretend and with inhabiting fictional or alternative selves, that goes well beyond what you’d typically expect. Reality, with all its demands, is simply easier to manage from inside a different version of yourself.

Now sit with that for a moment in the context of what I’ve been describing.

If an autistic girl experiences femininity not as a set of difficult social skills she hasn’t yet mastered, but as a category of never-ending demands to sacrifice her autonomy which her nervous system finds fundamentally impossible to comply with: pursuing gender transition becomes nearly indistinguishable from her previous demand-avoidant strategies.

Though the language she is given in online communities sounds like “I am figuring out who I really am,” the utility she is experiencing may actually be closer to “I cannot keep doing this, and I have found a structure that gives me permission to make others stop requiring this of me.” The social strategies involved in this demand avoidance, including; the elaborate reframing, the construction of an alternative identity, the insistence that the original demands of femininity should never have been considered applicable to her— follow the same basic architecture as PDA-style demand avoidance. Additionally, the noted comfort with inhabiting an alternative self, with role play, with pretend, that too fits, uncomfortably well, with what we know about the role of narrative construction and ideation in adolescent gender identity development. I’ve written a bit about that in my gender identity ideation series here:

I want to be careful here. I am not saying that every autistic girl who declares a trans identity has similar, pre-existing PDA behavioral patterns. I am also not saying that transgender identification is always a form of pathological demand avoidance in this population.

What I am saying is that for a specific subset of these girls, those whose perceptions of what it means to enter emerging womanhood entail meeting standards of femininity which she perceives to be an intolerable set of never-ending demands — the framework of PDA has some explanatory validity.

It is clinically important to distinguish between a girl who is at the time she is presenting with discomfort around her sex/gender— really struggling to intuit and therefore to effortlessly meet the implicit social demands of the category of womanhood into which she is emerging, and a girl whose nervous system has categorized the whole thing of ‘being a girl’ as something she will never be able to do because it is sensorily intolerable. There are various well-known workarounds to decrease demand avoidance in the latter population, which should be utilized so the adolescent can think more calmly about herself, rather than being encouraged to making decisions on the basis of a fight or flight response.

To recap a bit:

In the years leading up to my transgender identification, there were many indications that something about the way I functioned in the world, was very different. In summary:

I was already struggling academically under the weight of severe, undiagnosed and unmedicated ADHD. My attention was captured only by the few obsessions I happened to have at any given time. I had no ability to track fictional plotlines, which depended on an age-appropriate grasp of social nuance I found exhausting in real life, and I saw no reason to voluntarily subject myself to more social scenarios I couldn’t decode as a form of leisure. I had a zero-tolerance policy for fictional movies. I had always chosen nonfiction over fiction, but the older I got and the more my peers communicated through cultural references and layered social meaning, the further behind I fell.

At some point, I realized that trying to find the right prefabricated set of logics to understand the erratic behavior of my female classmates was an exercise in futility.

Though around middle school, I became increasingly aware that the other girls made absolutely no sense to me, and both their social behaviors and their verbal communication endlessly confounded me, I was (have always been, and will always be) an extreme extrovert. My extroversion manifested as floating around different social groups, finding a group of boys whose humor I could parse and all of us collectively pulling pranks on the teacher. All of them got caught, and somehow, I never did. Beyond that, I didn’t really have meaningful friendships with other kids my own age. I didn’t significantly desire to have friends over, or know how to form the types of friendships that others did. I’ve never experienced “stage fright” and because I’m definitionally obtuse to understanding how others perceive me unless they tell me explicitly and in a non-coded way, I at least wasn’t also distressed by that aspect of social interaction. If kids called me mean names, I certainly didn’t pick up on it. Despite all of my oddities and lack of close friends, I somehow managed to become extremely popular with my peers for reasons that I to this day, do not entirely understand.

By this point in middle school, in seventh grade I was also still, in some respects, catching up to developmental milestones most of my peers had passed years earlier. I knew something was deeply different about me. I was gullible in ways I couldn’t protect myself from. I couldn’t detect sarcasm. It took an eighth-grade English class on rhetorical devices to give me even a rudimentary framework for the idea that words could mean something other than what they said — and that was the literary version, which at least came with a textbook.

In my desperation to understand what was wrong with me, I had already graduated from Myers-Briggs personality types to parenting books to the DSM-4. Memorizing diagnostic criteria gave me a feeling of mastery over a world I couldn’t understand intuitively. I was good at memorizing information, but could never recall it quickly enough to actually integrate it or to act on it in the midst of the sensory onslaught presented by an average social interaction in a crowded school.

About a year into this line of exploration, I began to spend a lot more time online trying to do the exact same thing that I had previously been doing in stacks of books. It did not take me long to stumble across the concept of a female-to-male sex change.

The utility of transgender identification as an autistic adolescent social survival strategy:

For me, my trans obsession started the same way every other obsession of mine had started: as a medical curiosity. I was already fascinated with the pituitary gland, and I began wondering whether the pituitary glands of trans patients could be altered so they wouldn’t need exogenous hormones for life. The question pulled me deeper. And somewhere in that process, what had begun as intellectual investigation morphed into something else: a self-concept.

The trans identity framework had a utility for 12 year old me that I think is worth enumerating carefully. Each thing it offered was precisely something an undiagnosed autistic girl in an adolescent crisis would find its own utility in.

First, it gave me a socially legible reason to opt out of female social performance. I couldn’t stand the constant expectations; to uncomfortably remove my body hair, the bras with the aggravating straps, the elaborate codes of feminine conduct. I was already so far behind on female social learning that actually mastering it felt impossible. Trans identity gave me a principled basis for refusing to continue trying, only to keep being lost, miserable and ultimately to fail. No longer did I have to say “I can’t keep up this female social performance because it is impossibly difficult to retain my sanity at the same time. I know you expect me to just keep trying harder, but I just can’t do it anymore. I am a failure.” Instead, I could express something along the lines of “I don’t have to do this ‘pretending to be a girl’ thing, because I was never meant to be a girl. No wonder I failed at it. My female body is the mistaken vessel for my ‘male’ (read: systematizing) brain. If I am just allowed to be a boy, you will no longer have to deal with the fact that I am a failure of a girl.”

Second, it gave me language for experiences I had no words for. The trans vocabulary: gender dysphoria, gender identity, born in the wrong body, all functioned, in a way, like the echolalia I had used to communicate requests to my parents as a toddler. Except this time, I was an adolescent. So the language was more emotionally complex. I could repeat frameworks I’d absorbed and use them to describe myself without having to construct the description from scratch. This gave me a feeling of self-mastery I had never had before. I’ve actually written an essay for about this subtopic, titled “How Gender Ideology Became the New Script for Autistic Girls.”

Third, it offered me a structured path forward. Rather than continuing down the path of visibly failing to become a girl, I now had a clear set of steps: come out, bind, socially transition, eventually figure out how to access high doses of testosterone and surgeries when continuing the charade required such things. My previously ambiguous future now could be scaffolded by me into a predictable set of steps. This alone eased many of my anxieties about what was to come.

Fourth, and this is the part I think gets missed most often: there are extensive online guides for trans men on how to pass. How men versus women stand, sit, dress, gesture, take up space. These guides are functionally, a social rulebook. They are explicit, enumerable, and require no intuition to master. This type of social learning was infinitely easier to memorize and follow than the unwritten, constantly shifting, subtext-dependent rules of female adolescent social life that I had been failing to master for years.

Fifth, and perhaps most painfully: I thought pursuing a trans identity might finally give me something akin to an answer that I could bring to my parents. Something that would explain me to them, and maybe, in doing so, explain me to myself; as something other than a lifelong failure at being normal and uncomplicated. Though my parents were with me every day and highly involved in my care, even they did not know just how much I was struggling. In the early years, even I did not know how much I was struggling. I thought being confused by almost everything, all the time was normal.

Trans identity was the first framework I found that seemed to answer every question about what I knew to be wrong with me, what it would take to fix me and a clear plan to rigidly follow with a promise of feeling better.

For a brain that craved conceptual frameworks above all else, trans wasn’t really my identity per-se. It did, however, become my operating system.

The emotional pull of finally ‘figuring yourself out’ after a lifetime of intense confusion about everything… is difficult to contend with

This is also why the transmasculine framework can feel so immediately, viscerally adaptive to a stressed out autistic girl who has long been good at hiding her distress to appease others; it does some real heavy lifting in the short term. It says: you do not actually have to become better at being a girl. You can stop trying. You can stop wearing the intolerable things, tolerating the textures, deciphering the hierarchies, and failing the never-ending social-emotional performance review. You can name your difference in a way that sounds coherent and all-encompassing. And because this relief is immediate while the costs emerge slowly, it does not feel like yet another form of masking. It feels to that adolescent, more akin to an “aha” moment.

That distinction matters enormously. Adolescents who adopt transgender identities (whatever that means to them) are probably not asking themselves, “What function is this identity change serving?” They are asking, “Is trans really how I feel?” and once they can find enough bits of evidence to lend to that explanation, it becomes “How do I get my parents to go along with me on this, so my life can be more bearable?” The transgender framework for self-understanding provides answers to those existential teenage questions in a deceptively simple way. Having a perceived element of certainty within escapism is perhaps the most alluring thing there is for a teenager who is simultaneously trying to navigate the inherent category/role instability of adolescence, while also attempting to do so by intellectualizing their way into self-understanding rather than by developing it through embodied life experience.

It seems to me now that what I was doing, arriving at a trans identity at twelve, was not so different from what I had been doing since I was old enough to notice that the world confused me. Trans identity was simply the framework that finally stuck. Not because it was the most true in a metaphysical sense, but because it was the first one that explained enough of my chronic problems to feel like a complete answer.

The maladaptive side of this, which I could not see at the time, is that the original social and cognitive mismatch remained entirely untouched. My increasingly severe sensory processing issues only got worse. The breast binder calmed me down from a compression standpoint, which only caused me to give more credence to the trans framework’s explanation of how I ought to live my life. Because the breast binder calmed down so much, I also became totally unaware of how much it was actively damaging my body.

The masking literature repeatedly shows that autistic masking or compensatory strategies can conceal difficulties without resolving them, and that the costs tend to show up later as exhaustion, anxiety, burnout, or identity confusion.⁸

A transmasculine identity used in this way reconfigures masking rather than eliminating it. The girl is no longer trying to perform ‘neurotypical’ femininity, but she may still be relying on scripts, monitoring, role performance, and externally supplied language to hold herself together. She has not stopped masking. She has found a new mask, and this one comes with medical consequences.

I am not writing this essay only about myself. Over the course of my conversations with trans people, detransitioners, and clinicians, and having spent an unreasonable amount of time researching autism instead of socializing with people my own age, I have been developing a framework that I think explains far more of the trans phenomenon than most people are willing to acknowledge.

The argument is this: for a significant subset of the girls now identifying as transmasc, the transgender identity is not the underlying condition. It is a mask for one. Specifically, it is a mask for undiagnosed or unaddressed autism in the form of a totalizing identity framework that organizes every potential source of autistic distress under a single, socially legible label, while leaving the actual underlying neurology entirely unaddressed.

Autism in girls is still sorely underdiagnosed. Girls on the spectrum are known to mask their autistic traits well enough to evade diagnosis. The literature on this is now substantial, even if it has been exceedingly slow to reach clinical practice.⁹ Higher levels of autistic camouflaging are associated with more anxiety, more depression, more exhaustion, lower self-esteem, and greater risk of burnout and suicidality.¹⁰ Masking does not protect the person doing it. It protects the people around her from having to recognize that something is wrong. What has not been adequately examined is what happens when that masking instinct meets, at the precise moment of adolescent crisis, an ideology that offers a new and complete identity to step into.

What happens, I believe, is this: the autistic girl who has spent her childhood failing to master the demands of her neurotype, and who has arrived at adolescence without a diagnosis and/or with a diagnosis but without adequate support, finds in transmasc identity a mask that fits better than any she has tried before. Not because it is literally true, but because it is the first explanation she has encountered that accounts for everything; the sensory distress, the social alienation, the bodily discomfort, the failure to become what everyone expected her to be.

In gender affirming clinical culture, this unconventional form of autistic masking is being unquestioningly, socially and medically enshrined by clinicians who cannot see that not only are they subjecting young people to needless medical harms, but that they are disrupting any chance at social development by ignoring the underlying causes.

In other words, gender clinicians are perhaps unwittingly trying to treat autism with gender transition. And that is unconscionable.

Call to Action: for parents, therapists and clinicians broadly.

Even so-called “mild autism” can be debilitating to the individual experiencing it because the mildness, such as it is, is largely a description of how inconvenient the autism is to the people around the autistic person, not of how much it costs the autistic person themselves. An autistic girl who has learned to mask well enough not to disrupt anyone else’s life is still, on the inside, running a program that consumes enormous resources just to keep the lights on. The absence of visible disruption to others is not the absence of distress. It is the successful concealment of it. The concealment of it, as I have been arguing throughout this essay, is precisely the problem.

This matters enormously in the context of gender-affirming clinical culture, because what that gender-affirming clinical culture has effectively done (whatever its intentions) is to take one of the most elaborate and costly masking strategies an undiagnosed autistic girl could ever construct, and to enshrine it; medically, socially, institutionally and psychologically.

Clinicians who should be asking “what is underneath this?” are instead asking “how do we help this new identity along?” Gender clinicians are not seeing the masking for what it is, because they have been trained to treat the autistic girl’s mask as if it were her face. In doing so, they are not only exposing young people to unnecessary and often irreversible medical harms. They are also actively foreclosing the possibility of the kind of development that might actually help her to thrive; the slow, unglamorous work of building skills for genuine social understanding, understanding of her sensory issues (and building tolerance where necessary), and self-knowledge that no amount of hormones or surgeries or affirmation can substitute for.

This is iatrogenic harm in a specific and underappreciated sense. We typically think of iatrogenic harm as the damage caused by a treatment such as: the side effects, the surgical complications, and the medication’s interactions with pre-existing health issues. But there is another kind of iatrogenic harm that is harder to see and arguably more devastating: the harm caused by treating the wrong condition. When a clinician affirms a transgender identity in an autistic girl without ever investigating the underlying neurodevelopmental picture, they are not acting neutrally. They are making a diagnosis by omission. They are saying, implicitly, that the presenting distress is best understood as a gender problem. In doing so, they are ensuring that the actual problem remains unaddressed, unnamed, and untreated, possibly for years, while the window for early intervention closes.

The autistic girl who transitions does not stop being an autistic girl. She becomes ‘transmasc.’ Her autistic masking strategies become the mask she will be assumed to wear for life as it is permanently enshrined into her social relationships and eventually into her body. This is especially catastrophic when she is unaware of why.

But here is something equally important, and something I say from personal experience: the pure opposite of gender affirmation is not a solution either. My parents did not affirm my transgender identity for 12 whole years. And yet my underlying issues went entirely unaddressed for just as long, because non-affirmation, on its own, is not a clinical strategy. It is an ideological position.

Saying no to a confused kid’s transgender identity without having a coherent account of what is actually going on; without being able to name the masking, trace its developmental history, and without knowing how to tactfully offer something more accurate and more useful in its place: leaves the autistic girl exactly where she was before. Except now she also feels unseen and unheard by the people she needs the most.

My parents’ refusal to affirm me as trans and their parenting strategy, effectively prevented me from addicting myself to a lifelong regimen of testosterone injections and surgeries. What it did not do, was prevent me from being harmed with easy to access breast binders. It did not keep me from spending twelve years inside an identity that was doing the work that an accurate diagnosis and an autism/ADHD- informed parenting strategy should have been doing. The goal of parenting a kid through a gender crisis should not be affirmation and it equally should not be relying on non-affirmation to do the heavy lifting. In order to parent a kid through a gender crisis in a way that promotes their well-being and skill development, parents deserve to have at least a baseline of accuracy, which requires an understanding of what they are actually looking at.

What this means practically is that the adults best positioned to intervene are not the gender clinicians at all. They are the parents, the occupational therapists, the speech and language therapists, the family therapists with enough history to notice patterns across years rather than a presenting complaint in a single intake session. An occupational therapist working with a girl on sensory processing is in a position to notice that the child’s bodily distress has a sensory profile, not just a gender one. A speech and language therapist working on communication and social skills is in a position to notice that the child’s difficulty navigating female peer relationships looks a great deal like the social-cognitive profile of autism. A parent who has watched their child struggle since kindergarten with things other children find effortless is in a position to ask whether the sudden crystallization of a transgender identity in adolescence is a discovery of a true, authentic self or whether it is a desperate child’s attempt at finding a solution. And where it is the latter, whether the solution is worth interrogating before it is medically acted upon. I argue that it absolutely is.

This is precisely the work I do in my parent coaching sessions with families. The parents I work with are not parents who simply want to be told how to say no. They are parents who are trying to understand what they are actually seeing. They want to contextualize the emergence of gender issues on a developmental trajectory that, when you look at it carefully and through a neurodivergence-informed lens, often tells a coherent story that has little to do with gender and everything to do with a child who has been trying, in increasingly elaborate ways, to solve a problem that was never correctly identified. Together, we look at the whole picture: the early sensory sensitivities, the social difficulties, the masking strategies that developed long before the transgender identity arrived, the parent-child dynamics, the next stages of life, the ethos of the educational environment. And together we develop strategies; practical, neurodivergent-informed parenting strategies, that aim to address what is actually there, without getting distracted by the transgender identity framework that has been obfuscating the entire thing.

The transgender identity framework is very good at being distracting wherever it enters a family dynamic. It arrives with moral urgency, institutional backing, and a vocabulary specifically designed to discourage questioning. Parents who have not been given a more accurate framework for what they are seeing are enormously vulnerable to that pressure because they love their children and they are being told, repeatedly that gender affirmation is the only alternative to harm. It is not. But the only way to resist that narrative is to have a better one. And building that better narrative; one that is grounded in the child’s actual developmental history, attentive to the specific ways neurodivergent kids process distress and construct identity, and honest about what gender transition can and cannot solve — is what I am here to help with.

If any of this resonates with what you are seeing in your child, I would encourage you to reach out. The real work is not found in endlessly debating ideology. It is about seeing your child clearly. This is, in the end, the most protective thing a parent can do.

I hope this essay has given you some new insights. It took me weeks to write and to research. Next week. I’ll make a video of tips for how to translate everything I’ve just written into actionable steps that are aimed at parents and clinicians who care for young people like those I described. It will be available for paid subscribers, and linked in this post:

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Announcements:

Is your kid navigating gender questioning and neurodivergence, and you’d like my two cents?

If so, I offer parent coaching sessions to help you figure out how to best navigate your specific child’s situation, in a compassionate and practical way. If this is of interest, please DM me on Susbstack or send me an email at officialpeacepoet@gmail.com

Have you enjoyed this article?

If so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work so I can continue to bring my insights to you.

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Please share, comment and repost this article to give it traction in the algorithm. I Can’t wait to hear your thoughts on this essay.

Endnotes

¹ Dean, M., Harwood, R., & Kasari, C. (2017). The art of camouflage: Gender differences in the social behaviors of girls and boys with autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 21(6), 678–689. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27899709/

² Hull, L., Levy, L., Lai, M. C., Petrides, K. V., Baron-Cohen, S., Allison, C., & Mandy, W. (2021). Is social camouflaging associated with anxiety and depression in autistic adults? Molecular Autism, 12(1), 1–13.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33593423/

The long-term costs of masking — including exhaustion, threats to self-perception, and identity confusion — are also documented qualitatively in: Bargiela, S., Steward, R., & Mandy, W. (2016). The experiences of late-diagnosed women with autism spectrum conditions: An investigation of the female autism phenotype. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(10), 3281–3294.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27457364/

³ Lai, M. C., Lombardo, M. V., Pasco, G., Ruigrok, A. N., Wheelwright, S. J., Sadek, S. A., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2015). A behavioral comparison of male and female adults with high functioning autism spectrum conditions. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21695147/

PLOS ONE; Hull, L., Mandy, W., Lai, M. C., Baron-Cohen, S., Allison, C., Smith, P., & Petrides, K. V. (2020). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40489-020-00197-9

Development and validation of the camouflaging autistic traits questionnaire (CAT-Q). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50(3), 819–833; Wood-Downie, H., Wong, B., Kovshoff, H., Mandy, W., Hull, L., & Hadwin, J. A. (2021). Sex and gender differences in camouflaging in children and adolescents with autism. Autism, 25(6), 1701–1715.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32691191/

⁴ McKinney, W., et al. (2024). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39734921/

⁵ Dean et al. (2017), as above; Wood-Downie et al. (2021), as above.

⁶ Westwood, H., & Tchanturia, K. (2017). Autism spectrum disorder in anorexia nervosa: An updated literature review. Current Psychiatry Reports, 19(7), 41. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28540593/

For broader review findings on the overrepresentation of autistic traits in eating-disorder populations, see also: Huke, V., Turk, J., Saeidi, S., Kent, A., & Morgan, J. F. (2013). Autism spectrum disorders in eating disorder populations: A systematic review. European Eating Disorders Review, 21(5), 345–351. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23900859/

⁷ O’Nions, E., Christie, P., Gould, J., Viding, E., & Happé, F. (2014). Development of the ‘Extreme Demand Avoidance Questionnaire’ (EDA-Q): Preliminary observations on a trait measure for pathological demand avoidance. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 55(7), 758–768; Stuart, L., et al.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24117718/

⁸ Hull et al. (2021), as above; Cassidy, S., Bradley, L., Shaw, R., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2020). Risk markers for suicidality in autistic adults. Molecular Autism, 9(1), 42; Evans, S. C., et al. (2024). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6069847/

⁹ For overview of underdiagnosis in autistic females, see: Lai, M. C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2015). Identifying the lost generation of adults with autism spectrum conditions. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2(11), 1013–1027; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26544750/ Rutherford, M., McKenzie, K., Johnson, T., Catchpole, C., O’Hare, A., McClure, I., & Murray, A. (2016). Gender ratio in a clinical population sample, age of diagnosis and duration of assessment in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 20(5), 628–634. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26825959/

¹⁰ Hull et al. (2021), as above; Cassidy et al. (2020), as above; Evans et al. (2024), as above.

In this livestream, and I set out to answer some of the questions you all asked us in previous comments.

The formal questions we ended up answering were the following:

From :

• What is your relationship like with your parents and family now?

• What questions would you ask an 18 year old man who is taking cross sex hormones (for the purpose of listening to understand his world)?

From

• What percentage of people who identify as trans or non-binary would NOT be likely to have an ASD diagnosis, in your opinion? In my clinical experience the vast majority do meet the criteria

Though we did try to answer more questions, Airiel and I have a tendency of egging each other on into tons of autistic rabbit holes.

We ended up covering almost every trans topic and subtopic under the sun including:

• The impact of transition on family relationships

• The role of autism in gender dysphoria for both males and females

• Theories for why adolescent/young adult males develop gender dysphoria: is it autogynephilia (AGP), or is it ROGD? and the relationships between them.

• Where present, does AGP drive the development of gender dysphoria in males, or is it a post-hoc cope?

• The differences between parenting a young person through gender questioning in those under 18 vs. 18 +

• How to have better conversations with your kids about their feelings, when recognizing their feelings is not their strong suit

• The role of the internet in adolescent psychosocial development

• The connection between online gaming, anime, hentai, autism and gender dysphoria in adolescent males

• How both the trans activist and gender critical sides of the culture war frequently get things wrong in the gender debate

• Much, much more.

Here are some timestamps which roughly cover the times throughout which we discuss these many subtopics. We hope these timestamps are accurate. Let me know if they are not.

00:00 — Going live + setup (intro, tech, cats invading the livestream)

03:05 — Q&A begins: family relationships now post-detransition

04:15— Ariel’s family background, estrangement, and where things stand now

08:00 — Why parent–child conflict usually isn’t “just about being trans”

09:30— The risks of “exceptionalizing” trans identity

10:30 — What should you ask an 18-year-old on cross-sex hormones?

12:30— Why advice has to match the specific family dynamic

16:30 — Understanding someone’s inner narrative + worldview

18:00— Rapport first: how to approach hard topics without triggering defensiveness

21:00— How to ask questions that open conversation (not shut it down)

25:30— Listening vs debating: why “counter-arguing” kills disclosure

26:30 — How trans identification often develops gradually (vs sudden “aha”)

30:00— The longer internal “appraisal” process before a kid even iterates “I’m trans”

33:30— Retconning: how both kids and parents rewrite the backstory

36:00 — Emotional language + self-understanding (esp. in neurodivergent kids)

38:30— Confusing emotions with “symptoms” and why that matters

42:00 — Mental models: how frameworks shape what you can even see

45:30— Poetry / perception / meaning-making as a “world-building” skill

47:00 — Imagination, boredom, and how childhood has changed

49:00— Gaming avatars and identity experimentation in boys

52:00— Attention span: deep focus → consumption

01:00:28 — Dwight Panozzo’s question (answer + discussion)

01:22:00 — Social contagion: dysphoria vs identity trends / non-dysphoric medicalization

01:42:23 — AGP (autogynephilia): self-aware AGP discourse + innate vs developed

01:44:31—AGP continued: paraphilia “treatment,” persistence, atrophy

02:09:03 — AGP, anime/hentai, porn, and Gen Z psycho-sexual development

02:11:30—AGP fantasies: escalation, autism, abstraction, identity formation

03:11:00 — Zooming out: gender issues in the broader human story

03:12:00— Closing + stream ends

Announcements + How to join me next time on Substack Live

Do you have a kid navigating gender confusion and trans identification?

If so, I offer parent coaching sessions to help you figure out how to best navigate your specific child’s situation, in a compassionate and practical way. If this is of interest, please DM me.

To participate in my next live:

Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Maia Poet in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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Due to the highly personal and sensitive nature of the topics we are discussing, this livestream will be accessible only to paid subscribers only.

We hope you enjoy our recording. As always, feel free to interact with our arguments and content via the comments.

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Please share this post. Let’s make Ellie’s story go VIRAL.

The moment a parent says “no” to their child’s gender transition, they don’t expect that the next knock on the door could be from Child Protective Services.

A few years ago, if someone had told me that in the United States, a parent could lose custody of their child for refusing to affirm a new gender identity, I would have assumed they were exaggerating.

I was under no illusion that the system was perfect. But, like most Westerners, I had a certain minimal degree of trust there were still basic guardrails within social services which ensured that kids were protected from genuinely abusive situations rather than flagrantly kidnapped from their families due to ideological disagreements.

In a sane society, one would presume that the disagreement over a child’s stated gender identity would be treated as a family matter, a therapeutic matter, maybe even a painful conflict… but not as something that could end with the state taking your child away.

Then I started meeting people whose stories suggested otherwise.

Today’s video is one of those stories.

If you have found my work beneficial and would like to support my advocacy, become a paid subscriber to support my work, so I can continue bringing my insights to you. My content take a lot of time and effort to produce and to bring to you. As a 26 year old independent writer, your $8 a month is very much appreciated.

Subscribe now

I’m Maia Poet. I’m 26. I’m a detransitioner.

Most of what I do now- writing, public speaking, and coaching families through complex situations like these- has grown out of one simple realization; that the path into transition is rarely as straightforward as it looks from the outside, and the institutions surrounding it are often far more powerful than the families caught inside them.

In this conversation, I’m joined by my friend Jonni, a 23-year-old detransitioner I met at a conference last fall. Jonni was medically transitioned at 13 after just a single therapy appointment and a single endocrinology visit. His mother was warned that refusing gender treatments could mean her son’s suicide… or even the possibility of authorities stepping in to find a more “supportive home.” That sentence stayed with him.

For that reason, after a nearly six hour Spaces conversation on X, I decided to invite Jonni as a cohost, and Ellie as a guest for this conversation.

Ellie is a Ukrainian immigrant who came to the United States in 2007 believing she was building a safer, freer future for her family in California. Instead, she found herself in what she describes as a 20-month nightmare: after refusing to consent to testosterone for her teenage daughter, Child Protective Services (CPS) intervened. They ultimately removed her child from the home. She is now hiding in Florida with her younger child, whom CPS is also trying to remove from her custody.

Ukrainian Mother's Fight for Her Daughter

It always starts in school. It did in our horror story. p. 1 Massachusetts

2007 we, anticipating the ‘brighter future’ in the ‘country where laws work and dreams come true…

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7 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Ukrainian Mom

Ellie’s story is a human story. It is a messy, painful and emotional story that so many of you have either heard some version of before, or are currently experiencing some version of, in your own families.

It includes:

• A bright, sensitive daughter who struggled with bullying, trauma, and mental-health challenges

• Online communities that became her primary social world during COVID lockdowns

• A psychiatrist who began discussing gender identity privately with the child

• Requests for hormones that the parents asked to delay

• And finally, a knock on the door, followed by the removal of their daughter

But Ellie’s story is also a dystopian tale of a sort of totalitarian control of families which most Westerners presume could never afflict their own countries.

Over the course of this conversation, I was struck by the pattern emerging between my story and the stories of Ellie and Jonni. It became clear to me that our stories and differences in life outcomes were largely due to a timeline of escalation:

• In 2012, when I first articulated a trans identity at 12, my parents couldn’t even find a therapist who knew what to do with me. The system didn’t have answers, and they didn’t pretend to. So I was left alone with my thoughts, and given no support in dealing with intense confusion which just festered for the next 12 years.

• By 2016, when Jonni was transitioned, pediatric gender clinics were not only fully operational, but parents were already being warned that their refusal to affirm and medicalize their kids could endanger their child’s life.

• By the 2020s, Ellie’s case suggests something even more concerning: that institutions don’t just encourage affirmation, but that particularly corrupt jurisdictions may treat parental hesitation itself as a risk factor. And remove the child from their parents. In Ellie’s case, it’s not as if there was a divorce where one parent was advocating to retain custody of the child upon the basis that the other refused to give her testosterone. There was no apparent need for these social services to even be involved here.

  ---

The kids and teens who say they’re transgender are not the villains. They’re doing what kids do: searching for identity, trying to resolve distress, to understand themselves. They’re doing so by reaching for explanations that make sense of everything. The trans explanation is the one our culture has given them. They are not wrong for being products of their environment.

What’s harder to understand is the role of the adults.

Because when a teenager experiments with identity, that’s just development.
When professionals insist there is only one acceptable response which involves permanently, experimentally enshrining an adolescent’s distress and confusion into their bodies— and when they invoke institutional power to enforce it — that’s something else entirely.

Ellie says something in this conversation that stayed with me:

“Love is not always saying yes.”

I presume this sentiment is one which every parent understands instinctively. If a child reaches toward a hot stove, love means pulling them back. They may scream and throw a tantrum because they don’t understand why they’re being prevented from doing something which they really desire. However, the role of the parent is to protect the child from their own destructive impulses, regardless of how the child feels about the parents’ attempts to protect them.

The question this conversation raises for our society is equal parts unsettling and important:

What happens when saying “no” to your child isn’t treated as a parenting choice, but as grounds for governmental intervention?

In this interview, we don’t claim to have all the answers. We also don’t try to reduce a complex situation into slogans or talking points.

We are simply three people, from different points along this timeline of trans ideological capture, trying to understand how families end up caught between their children, medical institutions, and the state.

Because what I’ve learned, both from my own experience and from working with families, is that most of these situations don’t start with ideology. They start with developmental distress, confusion and unmet needs which become subsumed by an idea which falsely promises to make all the pain go away.

These stories start with:

A kid who feels different.
A kid who is chronically overwhelmed.
A kid who’s struggling socially, sensorily, emotionally, or developmentally — and who latches onto the one explanation our society gives them, that seems to make sense of everything. The explanation (trans) is flawed and it promises a (transition) panacea which routinely fails to deliver on its promises of making people’s lives easier or more bearable to live.

And when that happens, parents often feel like they’re standing at the edge of a cliff with no map.

Parents in these situations are given really bad advice. They’re usually told there are only two choices: affirm immediately, or risk losing their child — emotionally, psychologically, or even legally.

But in reality, there’s a much bigger middle ground.

A lot of the coaching work I do now involves helping parents slow the situation down, understand what their child is actually communicating beneath the confusing, ideological scripts, and figure out how to identify and address the real sources of distress or discontent within the family, within the child’s environment, and within the child’s own developmental needs.

I help families work through their complex situations with strategies which do not involve:

• Endlessly fighting with their kids about gender.

• Outsourcing everything to “experts” who neither know nor care about the life outcomes of these kids.

Instead, I focus on finding ways to help families keep vulnerable kids out of unnecessary interaction with corrupt, captured social institutions wherever possible—
by strengthening the parent-child relationship and helping parents find unique ways to build the skills that allow their family to navigate this together.

I’ve seen families make real headway when they approach this not as a culture war, but as a complex human experience that deserves patience, clarity, and grounded support.

If you’re a parent dealing with something similar, or feeling overwhelmed and unsure what to do next, I do offer parent coaching sessions where we make a plan for how work through these situations step by step. You don’t have to figure this out alone.

To book a parent coaching session with me, send me a DM or comment on this post:

And if Ellie’s story resonates with you, please share it. She needs coverage of her story so she can find people who can help her.

Share

Support today’s guests by sharing the hell out of this post and by finding them at the links below:

Ellie:

Find her as on Substack and on X

Jonni:

Find him as on Substack and on X. You can also donate to support his advocacy here

As always, please like, share and comment on this post. Let’s make Ellie’s story go viral.

Share

How you can support me:

1. If you have found my work beneficial and would like to support my advocacy, please become a paid subscriber to support my work, so I can continue bringing my insights to you. My essays take a lot of time and effort to produce and to bring to you. As a 26 year old independent writer, your $8 a month is very much appreciated.

Subscribe now

2. If paid subscriptions aren’t your thing (or even if they are) and you’d like to support my work, please quote, repost and comment on this piece.

The algorithm will bring it to more parents, clinicians, concerned citizens and researchers (like yourselves) who are interested in learning how best to safeguard the young people in their lives.

Now, onto the essay….

Here’s why I brought my old breast binder to a gubernatorial campaign rally.

I am 26. By now, the word “transgender” has occupied a significant amount of my brain space over the past 14 years of my life. For 12 of them, when I was between the ages of 12 and 24, ‘transgender,’ was both my self-concept, and increasingly as I got older, the zeitgeist of my generation. For these last two of the 14 years, since having quit my gender transition, I have developed a different relationship to the word “transgender.” Rather than seeing it as an aspect of how I understand myself, I find myself equal parts disillusioned with the notion and simultaneously quite curious about how I managed to change my mind about something I was convinced was true about myself for half of my life. My intellectual musings about my own journey and the advice I have for parents of kids who are grappling with the same kinds of questions about their own gender, are the subject of this blog.

But, when I’m not on this Substack, providing you with an incredibly time-consuming autistic analysis of the transgender phenomenon which has taken my generation by storm, I find myself itching for a bit of social interaction with the ‘normies’ who don’t spend their days and nights fixating on the gender topic. But, just like many of you who read my incredibly autistic analysis on Substack (either for fun or for information), I sometimes cannot resist an opportunity to bring this one topic up. It has, after all, profoundly impacted my life in ways that will live with me forever— both in mind and in body. And crucially, the “born in the wrong body” lie that I was sold as a 12 year old in 2011/2012, has over the course of the last decade and a half, been sold to an entire generation of autistic kids and young people.

After the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, someone whose life mission I have been personally inspired by, I decided to attend one of the thousands of vigils across the country commemorating his life and legacy.

There, an opportunity for those in attendance to speak about the impact of Charlie Kirk’s life upon ours, came up. And not knowing anything about one another, a tall dude with a spiffy fade who I would later learn was named David Medina, gave me the microphone. So, I told my life story. I discussed my gender transition, detransition and the role played by Charlie Kirk’s work in allowing me to question my own understandings. I quite enjoyed David’s energy and enthusiasm. He planned an incredibly moving event.

Then, several months passed.

Out of the blue, less than a week ago, I got a DM on X from David Medina, the citizen journalist turned gubernatorial candidate, inviting me to speak at his upcoming rally. He told me to just show up for a casual chat on a stage about my story, and told me that I didn’t need to prepare anything specific. Within 48 hours of that phone call, I found myself in a church, with my old breast binder and no real time limit for how long I could speak, or much of a plan for what I was going to say. About half an hour before the event, I asked David if there was anything specific he’d like me to discuss.

His response was “just speak from the heart.”

I hope you all enjoy the little impromptu speech I came up with. And I hope it teaches you something you may not have learned before. I am so grateful to David Medina for giving my concerns a voice. Hopefully, protecting youth from dangerous medical practices and destructive ideological orthodoxies will become bigger issues not just on the national level, but in local politics too.

For more on the harms of breast binding, you can read these essays I’ve written on the topic:

More Announcements:

Do you have a gender questioning kid and find yourself wondering “what in the world am I supposed to do?”

If so, I offer parent coaching sessions to help you figure out how to best navigate your specific child’s situation, in a compassionate and practical way. If this is of interest, please DM me.

Do you have any questions to me, or topics you’d like me to do essays or videos about?

If so, let me know in the comments

Leave a comment

Do you know a parent or clinician who would benefit from reading my essays?

If so, please share this one

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To support my work:

Become a paid subscriber to support my work, so I can continue bringing my insights to you. My essays take a lot of time and effort to produce and to bring to you. As a 26 year old independent writer, your $8 a month is very much appreciated.

Subscribe now

Share my work, comment on it, repost it and let me know your thoughts!

Have a fantastic week,

Maia.

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A bit of background on me:

Hello, Substack! My name is Maia Poet. I’m 26 years old and I’m a detransitioner. For the last couple of years, I’ve been looking back at the twelve years (ages 12–24) when I identified as transgender, with the intention of actually trying to understand what was happening inside my mind before I had reached this conclusion about myself, during that time, and after I had disembarked from it.

A big part of that reflection for me has been examining the overlap between my own gender distress and neurodivergence: ADHD traits, autistic traits, sensory processing issues, social communication deficits, a propensity for memorizing scripts in order to communicate with others, and many more things. On this Substack, I touch the topics that don’t fit neatly into either side of the trans culture war, which flattens a complex phenomenon into political slogans of “woke transgender indoctrination” and “trans people are born this way.” Neither of these framings help parents who are living inside the day-to-day reality of a kid who is overwhelmed, distressed and desperately trying to feel better using the only explanation their society has given them. And, unfortunately, the transgender explanation which provides this pretense of clarity comes with a lot of potential costs that the youth is developmentally incapable of weighing against the ‘benefits’ no one can guarantee they will experience.

That’s where I come in.

Over the last year, I’ve also been working one-on-one as an ROGD parent coach, with over 60 families at this point. Almost all of these parents have gender questioning kids/teens/young adults with autistic and ADHD traits or diagnoses. Many of these parents tell me the same thing, in different words:

• “Now that gender is in the picture, we don’t recognize our kid anymore.”

• “Every conversation about the topic turns into a caustic argument”

• “We’re scared of saying the wrong thing.”

• “We’re walking on eggshells or being accused of causing harm constantly.”

And I want to say this clearly, because a lot of parents need permission to stop moralizing their own confusion:

Hard conversations about gender are often difficult for families to have, regardless of their background, because of the many high stakes involved. In a coaching or consulting capacity, I’ve developed some tools with families which have helped them to begin the process of having good conversations with their kids about these important topics.

My goal in coaching is not to hand you counter-arguments so you can “win” a debate with your kid. It’s to help you create the conditions where your kid can think, reflect, develop, and stay connected to you. This outlook I see as being the most beneficial in the long-term, so that an adolescent’s identity questioning doesn’t devolve into an avoidable estrangement story, spurred on by caustic arguments that achieve nothing.

If you’re a parent who has been living in a loop of failed conversations about hard topics, where you try to be careful, you try to be loving, you try to be rational, you try to be correct, and it still turns into a disaster— I want you to know something:

The communication breakdown usually isn’t happening because you’re missing the magic sentence. It’s often happening because the conditions for having a good conversation aren’t there. Especially when neurodivergence is in the picture.

In this video, I’ll be sharing with you the beginnings of my framework for how to have hard conversations about gender with your adolescent or young adult kid. Most of these tips are focussed on the autistic/ADHD population, though there’s something in here for all families struggling to have good conversations.

On parent coaching with me:

If you want help applying these tips to your actual kid, or on troubleshooting any number of areas, I do one-on-one parent coaching (and I can do two-on-one with both parents). We will slow everything down, get specific about areas where conversations like these go off the rails, and build a strategy that fits your specific situation.

If you’re interested in booking a session with me, DM me or leave a comment on this post (or any post) and we’ll set something up.

Everything below is for paid subscribers, and it includes a summary of the nine pro tips discussed in the video (so you can keep it as a reference), plus the logic behind them. Let me know what you guys think!

Maia’s 9 pro tips for having hard conversations about gender with your autistic or ADHD kid:

Read more

(This written essay will also be accompanied by an audio recording of me reading it. Those listening should scroll through to see any relevant images or links. At the end of this essay there are some announcements.)

It has been over two years since I stopped binding my breasts in order to ‘pass’ as a man.

Initially, I hoped my body would naturally return to a state of health and wholeness, as was implied to me by those who claimed that breast binding is “safe and reversible.” However, I still experience daily pain while breathing, lying on my side, and while moving. Odd tingling sensations shoot from my shoulders down my arms. My breasts are visibly deformed, as is the skin on my chest which has become so weak in some places that simply trying on bras causes it to bleed. My ribs are deformed. I have posture issues, including an inability to sit up straight, and pain in my neck. I have no positive sensation in my chest— just a mixture of semi-numbness, irritation and pain.

In the past two-ish years since I have stopped binding, none of this damage has reversed itself. I am slowly grappling with the emotional reality that my decade of breast binding has done far more damage to me than anyone had prepared me for, and that what awaits me (should I wish to experience less pain in my body and regain some function) is a long road of unknown medical intervention from so many different specialists that the thought of it makes my head spin.

It turns out that my situation, though it feels uncharted, is not that unique. The complications from breast binding are among the most common transition-related harms that young women face. Yet despite its near ubiquity as a first-line transition intervention, shockingly almost no one even brings it up when discussing the physical and medical harms of gender transition.

That changed on December 18, 2025.

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The HHS Breakthrough: December 18, 2025

On December 18, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services did something truly unprecedented in the effort to protect vulnerable youth from the harms of pseudoscientific gender medicine. While the press conference announced restrictions on federal funding for hospitals treating gender-dysphoric adolescents with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, the most groundbreaking development has been largely overlooked: HHS officially classified breast binders as Class I medical devices that have been illegally marketed to children as a treatment for gender dysphoria.

This matters because breast binding is perhaps the most commonly used and most widespread of these damaging ‘gender affirming’ interventions, yet it has been routinely overlooked by clinicians in both North America and Europe. Until now.

What makes the American approach unique is the decision to investigate “gender-affirming care” through the lens of consumer fraud via the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FDA issued twelve warning letters to U.S.-based companies that illegally promoted breast binders as a treatment for gender dysphoria without engaging in the regulatory due diligence required for medical devices. This signals a recognition that these practices may constitute deceptive marketing of a purported medical intervention to vulnerable populations without warning them or their parents about the potential consequences.

But wait—medical devices? Most people think of breast binders as clothing, maybe compression sportswear at most. To understand why HHS’s classification matters so much, we need to look at what breast binders actually are and what they were designed to do.

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What Breast Binders Actually Are

HHS clarified that breast binders are Class I medical devices with legitimate, approved medical uses. They have established clinical uses in post-surgical recovery, including after mastectomy, breast reduction surgery, breast augmentation, and reconstruction. They’re also used after radiation therapy and in recovery from bariatric, cardiac, and abdominal procedures.

In these legitimate medical contexts, compression garments serve specific purposes: reducing swelling and bruising, preventing fluid accumulation, supporting the surgical site, protecting healing incisions, and minimizing scar formation. The critical difference: these interventions are time-limited—typically worn for approximately one month post-surgery under medical supervision with follow-up monitoring.

Breast binding was also historically used for postpartum lactation suppression. However, a 2003 study found that breast binding caused greater breast tenderness, more breast leakage, and increased use of pain relief compared to simply wearing a supportive bra, with no difference in reducing engorgement. In response to this evidence, breast binding for lactation suppression has been discontinued as a recommended medical practice. The same cannot be said for “gender affirming” breast binding.

So if breast binders are medical devices designed for temporary post-surgical use, and if they’ve been abandoned even for short-term lactation suppression due to evidence of harm; how did they become normalized as a years-long intervention for healthy adolescent girls? The answer lies in a deliberate misclassification.

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Why This Is a Medical Intervention, Not “Social Transition”

Breast binders are medical devices with impacts on the function of the body and are advertised to be treating the condition of gender dysphoria. It is critical to recognize breast binding as a medical transition intervention because it has long been misclassified as a form of “social transition,” akin to a change of clothes. In reality, it frequently functions as the first medical intervention in the gender-affirming pathway for adolescent girls—one that causes direct physical harm while escaping the same scrutiny applied to cross-hormones and surgery.

The irony is stark: a device designed for temporary (approximately one month) post-surgical recovery is being used by adolescent girls for years to compress healthy, developing tissue—with no medical supervision, no monitoring, and no treatment of actual physical pathology in the tissues being compressed. To put it more bluntly: a gender dysphoric young woman could have bound her breasts for a decade starting in early adolescence, thinking she’s got a legitimate medical or mental health reason to do it. But in reality, the only time that her lifelong breast binding practices will actually be medically indicated is for the month she binds her chest after her breasts have been amputated.

Breast binding as an intervention for treating gender dysphoria occupies a uniquely dangerous regulatory gray zone. It is a medical device used off-label without required medical oversight, marketed as a mental-health treatment, and shielded from scrutiny by being mislabeled as “social transition.” Unlike hormones or surgery, breast binding never requires a prescription when used explicitly as a treatment for gender dysphoria. Doctors need not formally prescribe it, yet they recommend it despite the known health risks and gender clinics in children’s hospitals even publish safety guidelines, despite the absence of a single study demonstrating its safety for use in this patient population.

I know this regulatory gray zone intimately, because I lived in it for over a decade.

I’ve written about that experience in my essay titled Breast Binding, Genital Tucking & the Lie of ‘Safe Gender Affirmation.’

My Binding History

I initially started trying to use an ace bandage to bind my breasts at age 12. It was so painful and uncomfortable that I didn’t last more than a few hours. I began flattening my breasts on a regular basis shortly thereafter with multiple tight sports bras worn in different directions at 12, and a back brace that my chiropractor gave me at 13 in a smaller size upon my request, which I wore to sleep and only took off once a week while showering.

Though regularly flattening my breasts as a young teenager certainly did me some harm, the bulk of the problems came from the moment I turned 18 and was able to get a commercial breast binder from Gc2b. The relative comfort of the so-called “safe” breast binder compared to the other methods I had used, in addition to the sensory soothing aspect of compression, totally caused me to not realize just how much damage I was doing to myself. I wore it consistently until the age of 24.

The promise that I could bind “safely” turned out to be a complete lie. One that I wish I had seen through before a decade of damage was done. But how was I supposed to know? The research backing up these safety claims simply doesn’t exist.

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The Research on Harm: What We Know and What We Don’t

There is no evidence to suggest that there is a healthy way to bind breasts (especially developing breasts) for months or years at a time, even when used “as directed,” limited to 8–12 hours a day (and this recommendation changes based entirely on who you ask). Yet commercial ‘gender affirming’ breast binders are marketed to healthy girls and women as a mental health treatment for gender dysphoria.

The limited information available shows that over 97% of patients in a 2016 cross-sectional study of 1,800 transmasculine adults experienced at least one of 28 measured adverse effects from regular breast binding. The frequency of binding was the strongest predictor of harm—22 out of 28 negative outcomes were consistently associated with how many days per week someone bound. Over half the participants (51.5%) bound daily.

Most damning: commercial breast binders were associated with 20 out of 28 negative outcomes—more than elastic bandages (14/28) or even duct tape and plastic wrap (13/28). The “safe” commercial binders cause more harm than the supposedly “dangerous” DIY methods.

Despite the fact that these harms have been published in multiple journal articles since at least 2016, companies that sell breast binders do not include this information. For that reason, the FDA has issued warnings to 12 of these companies.

To this day, there is not one peer-reviewed study which supports the assertion that breast binding can be done safely, either in children or in adults. At the time the 2016 study was published, it noted that “there are no peer-reviewed studies that directly assess the health impacts of chest binding,” meaning companies and clinics had already knowingly been making safety claims with zero evidence to back them up.

What’s even more telling is just how much we still don’t know. The 2016 study documented THAT harm occurs—the 97%+ complication rate, the specific symptoms. But there are still no peer-reviewed studies investigating HOW the harm occurs mechanistically. We don’t have research examining what chronic chest compression does to developing rib cages, to intercostal nerves, to respiratory function over years of daily use starting in adolescence.

This absence of research on mechanisms is not incidental. It is, in fact, central to how breast binding has been able to operate in a regulatory gray zone. Gender medicine promoted binding as “safe” with no studies on whether it causes harm, no studies on how it causes harm, no monitoring protocols for patients who bind, and no treatment protocols for the damage it causes.

I can tell you from lived experience that binding damages nerves, deforms ribs, impairs breathing, and causes chronic pain that persists years after stopping. The 2016 study confirms these outcomes are nearly universal. But medicine has never bothered to investigate the mechanisms, establish safe limits, or develop treatments for the injuries— because to do so would require acknowledging that this practice causes serious, lasting physical harm to healthy tissue.

Anyone who makes the claim that breast binding can be done safely, or that it is reversible, is either lying to you out of malice or out of ignorance.

But “reversible” in gender medicine doesn’t mean what most people think it means.

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How Gender Medicine Defines “Reversible”

Within gender medicine, reversibility is defined in an unusually narrow way. Even when an intervention causes lasting harm—to the form and function of the breast tissue itself and the skin on the chest, chronic pain, musculoskeletal injury, respiratory restriction, or loss of bodily function—it is still deemed reversible so long as it does not permanently masculinize or feminize the body. In practice, this means that nearly any degree of physical harm is treated as acceptable, provided the intervention preserves the possibility of achieving a desired sexed appearance in the future. The entire field of gender medicine is thus premised upon sacrificing bodily integrity and function in service of an aesthetic endpoint, while dismissing injuries that fall outside that framework as either irrelevant or as the patient’s responsibility.

This twisted definition of “reversible” sets up a perverse pathway where binding, sold as a safe alternative to surgery, actually accelerates girls toward the operating table.

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The Path from Binding to Mastectomy

Speaking from a bit of lived experience here— breast binding is so physically uncomfortable and damaging that many girls cannot tolerate it long-term. Instead of alleviating distress, binding often worsens it by damaging breast tissue and causing significant, function-impairing harm to surrounding muscles, ribs, skin, nerves, posture, and skeletal structures. That damage is then interpreted as further evidence that the breasts themselves are intolerable or ‘wrong’ on the body. As a result, many girls become even more desperate to remove them entirely.

In my case, and in the cases of many others, the practice of breast binding makes it nearly impossible to get used to the fact that you have breasts. Many of the families I have consulted with tried to strike a compromise with their kids’ doctors who wanted to start them on the pathway of cross-sex hormones and surgeries. This compromise included buying the girl a breast binder, socially transitioning her, and hoping that by the age of 18 she would somehow reverse course. These parents genuinely believed that breast binders are the lesser of two evils—that they are a compromise for mastectomy, that binders are just like tight sports bras. The content they had consumed from gender critical sources, which caused them to proceed with caution about testosterone, clearly failed to warn them about the potentially devastating and permanent injury their daughter would experience from breast binding. Because the fallacious, unsubstantiated claims of trans activists remained uncontested, and because the harms of breast binding are so commonly dismissed and overlooked, they were evidently persuaded by the pediatrician who brought up the breast binder as a “safe and reversible compromise” that would allow their daughter some temporary reprieve without permanently altering her body. Or so they thought.

As their kids near 18, these parents contact me in full panic that their “compromise” of a breast binder has only made their 17¾-year-old daughter more hell-bent on a mastectomy than ever before.

Doctors then promote the lie that breast binding is a safe mental-health treatment for girls who hate their breasts—until the patient’s pain worsens or her psychological condition fails to improve. At that point, “gender-affirming” top surgery is presented as the solution. Even girls who detransition before mastectomy, like me, often suffer lasting pain and damage from years of binding. Those who proceed to surgery carry forward injuries already incurred to their rib cage, back, skin, nerves, and muscles—injuries that do not disappear when breast tissue is removed and are compounded by additional, unnecessary surgical trauma.

Given the clear evidence of harm, you’d think the response from both sides of the gender debate would be unequivocal condemnation. You’d be wrong.

How Both Sides of the Trans Debate Get This Wrong

Both trans activists and many gender critics often dismiss or downplay the damage caused by breast binding, though in different ways.

Trans activists treat breast binding as safe, reversible “social transition”—something akin to a haircut or wearing different clothes. When confronted with testimony about lasting harm, they blame the individual for “misusing” the binder rather than acknowledging the practice itself is damaging. They dismiss the 97% complication rate and ignore the complete absence of peer-reviewed evidence supporting safe binding practices.

In response to Secretary Kennedy’s declaration, The Advocate published a piece claiming breast binders have “no use beyond aesthetics” and that “the effect disappears as soon as the binder is removed.” This framing reveals everything wrong with how trans activists think about reversibility. When they say “the effect disappears,” they’re only talking about immediate aesthetic reversibility—whether the chest looks flat. They’re not talking about the rib deformities, nerve damage, chronic pain, or damaged breast tissue that don’t disappear.

But many gender critics misunderstand the practice of ‘gender affirming’ breast binding, just in a different way. They tend to view breast binding as problematic primarily because it leads to mastectomies, not merely because it is permanently damaging in and of itself. Breast binding is often downplayed even in circles which are critical of gender medicine, treated as a minor or lesser harm within the trans debate, a gateway to the “real” harms of hormones and surgery.

I have been told by prominent gender critics that I have no right to refer to myself as a detransitioner because the ‘gender-affirming’ medical device that permanently harmed my body was not prescribed to me by my doctor. Though it is important to note that when my doctor did become aware of my breast binding, she recommended I continue doing it (albeit with extra breathing breaks) so I didn’t have to miss a day of affirming my gender even while I was deliriously sick with the flu and sitting in her office. I have also been told that I should refrain from referring to my experience as detransition because the transition harms which occurred to my body did not specifically masculinize me.

When I express frustration that the incredibly common and significantly impairing transition-related harms I have experienced are being dismissed, these prominent gender critical individuals have suggested that I should step aside as an advocate, or that I should use my platform to highlight the voices of young women who have “actually been harmed.” That I’m lucky because I’ve lost “only” my sanity and 12 years of my young life to this ideology, rather than any body parts. That I should be grateful for still having my now damaged breasts attached to my damaged rib cage. That I should perhaps… jump for joy that things did not turn out ‘worse’ as I contend with the totally preventable chronic pain and mobility issues I now have at the ripe old age of 26 because of a bad idea I encountered on the internet as a 12 year old.

Here’s what everyone is missing: Breast binding causes severe, lasting physical harm even when breasts remain intact, and even when used as directed. The damage to ribs, muscles, nerves, posture, respiratory function, and skeletal structure is permanent and function-impairing. This harm matters regardless of whether it leads to further surgical harm—and it deserves recognition as serious medical injury, not as a lesser evil or merely as a stepping stone to something ‘worse.’

Which brings me to why I’m writing this essay in the first place: we need policy change, and we need it now.

Call to Action for Policymakers

While much of the public attention both in the United States and across Europe has focused on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and chest/genital surgeries, we cannot gloss over the significance of HHS’s ruling on breast binding companies.

No current legislation aimed at protecting vulnerable youth from gender-affirming or sex-rejecting body modifications will meaningfully protect girls from permanent bodily harm unless breast binding itself is recognized as a medical intervention.

It is long past time we take seriously the dangers of all gender-affirming medical interventions. These practices do not merely affect impressionable minds; they also alter (and often permanently damage) the objective health and integrity of female bodies. HHS has now clarified what breast binders already were: medical devices with legitimate uses in defined clinical contexts. What remains is to confront how those same devices have been misused as a first-line intervention for distressed adolescent girls. Until that happens, efforts to protect youth from the harms of gender medicine will remain fundamentally incomplete.

But policy change alone isn’t enough. Medical professionals, particularly those tasked with caring for detransitioners, need to fundamentally rethink how they define and study medical transition.

Call to Action for Medical Professionals (with a focus on NHS England)

In its recent call for evidence on detransition care, NHS England defines detransition narrowly as “the process of discontinuing or reversing a gender transition” and specifies that “this definition generally includes individuals who have medically transitioned through medical intervention (hormone therapy or surgery) and who subsequently self-identify with a process of detransition.” This limited framing excludes commonly used gender transition interventions including puberty blockers like Lupron, alternative hormonal suppression interventions such as Depo-Provera, and breast binding altogether.

(I will be bolding a lot in this section because I will be making truly original arguments which I am shocked are not common-sensical enough to make it into the popular disocourse— so here goes.)

This incredibly limited framing will fundamentally impair the NHS’s ability to understand detransition-related harm. Each transition intervention carries its own risks, some well documented and others still poorly understood; those risks intensify with duration and compound when multiple interventions are used sequentially or simultaneously. A patient who bound her chest for years and later underwent mastectomy does not present the same clinical picture as a patient who only had surgery. A patient who bound for two years will have distinct patterns of harm, functional impairment and damage from a patient who bound her breasts for ten.

Yet by excluding binding (and early hormonal suppression) from the category of medical transition, clinicians will lack crucial context for why rib deformities, chronic breathing restriction, spinal changes, nerve injury, and postural collapse appear so frequently in their post-mastectomy patients. The damage caused by prolonged chest compression will be misattributed entirely to surgical technique, to cross-sex hormones, or to undiagnosed pre-existing musculoskeletal or genetic abnormalities—obscuring the reality that many patients entered surgery with an already compromised chest wall.

Without recognizing breast binding as a medical intervention, clinicians cannot integrate existing research on nerve and tissue compression, cannot develop a mechanistic understanding of how years of binding interact with surgical trauma, and cannot design appropriate treatment protocols for the injuries they are seeing. 1

The consequences extend beyond clinical care: excluding puberty blockers, substitute hormonal suppressants, and breast binding from the medical record also distorts public’s understanding of the truth, allowing early, cumulative harms—often incurred long before hormones or surgery—to remain invisible. This narrow definition does not merely exclude certain detransitioners from recognition; it ensures that even those the system does recognize will receive fragmented explanations, incomplete care, and yet another potentially traumatic experience of a medical industry that refuses to learn from its own mistakes.

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Read this essay until the end for some announcements.

Both year round, but especially with the holidays coming up, parents of ROGD kids flood my DMs with some version of this question:

“Is there something I can say—some study, some detransition story, some argument—that will make my child stop and reconsider their transition?”

I understand why parents ask this. I really do.

I was trans-identified from ages 12 to 24. I spent over a decade inside trans communities. And over the past two years, since reconsidering my own gender transition and ultimately disembarking from it, I’ve been telling my story on podcasts and reflecting about my experiences on this platform. Since going public with my story, hundreds of parents have reached out to me wanting to pick my brain about how to help their kids and families navigate these difficult and uncharted times.

I’ve noticed that as the culture war on trans issues has heated up over the last half decade, parents are overwhelmed by panic-inducing content that doesn’t actually help them guide their kids through what is often a confusing, painful and misunderstood journey.

As someone who experienced first hand what it’s like to navigate a prolonged gender questioning period within my own family dynamic, and who has reflected extensively on what my parents did right (and what I wish they’d done better) and most importantly— why all of us acted (and reacted) the way we did, I’ve been writing about my thoughts here.

I’ve also spent the last year working directly with families navigating this exact situation with their kids. By now, I’ve now consulted with dozens of parents who are scared, overwhelmed, and desperate to protect their children; especially when holidays, school breaks, or a child coming home from college feel like a rare, narrow window to “fix” things that have been festering in darkness and panic for a long time. Some parents see this opportunity presented by their kids being home for the holidays, not as a time for glee and connection with their kids, but as a rare window to continually bombard their kid with every scary story imaginable in the hopes that what persuaded them, will also persuade their adolescent. Or at least, that’s what mine did.

Though my parents’ intentions were good, the actions they took in trying to debate me out of my trans identity without attempting to empathize with the reasons I adopted it in the first place, or to understand its utility in my life, did not help me gain an ounce of clarity. Their well-intentioned strategy did succeed in eroding our relationship and raising the emotional stakes to such an extent that our relationship would have been irreparably ruined if not for the fact that I was abroad and had space to just breathe, to make my own mistakes and to learn from them. And simultaneously, this strategy of trying to plant seeds of doubt caused me to be entirely unable to take anything they said seriously. Even when their advice was prudent, and even when it had nothing to do with gender. As a result of these escalating tensions, I changed the entire course of my life to pursue getting citizenship in a foreign country just so I could transition far away from my parents.

That is the reason I wanted to make this video for you all today. I hope that instead of repeating the same mistakes and being endlessly demoralized, your family has the option to build something better.

So, here’s the truth as I see it, both from my lived experience and from working with families now:

There is no sentence, study, or testimony that can be dropped into a teenager’s mind that will magically induce doubt or shatter their entire worldview and transgender self-concept.

And more importantly: attempts to do so often backfire.

So, that’s why I decided to make this video essay for you all. Here’s what I’ll cover.

Why “planting seeds of doubt” doesn’t really work

One of the central ideas I introduce in the free portion of the video is this:

Doubt cannot be externally forced in a meaningful way onto an adolescent by the parents from whom they are developmentally wired to individuate, especially when no attempts have been made to heal the erosion of the relationship, or to address underlying issues.

When parents try to “plant seeds,” teenagers almost always experience it as:

• Manipulation

• Invalidation

• A threat to their autonomy

• Or proof that their parents aren’t actually listening to them

Even when parents have the best of intentions, these strategies tend to escalate conflict and negative emotions without a release of tension.

Despite what everyone says, none of this is unique to transgender identification. It’s a feature of adolescence itself.

Teenagers are developmentally wired to:

• Push against parental authority

• Experiment with identity

• Attach strongly to beliefs that help them make sense of distress, confusion, hopes, dreams, desires and to do this in peer groups

• React defensively when those beliefs are attacked

• To become their own people, separate from their parents

When a parent’s first response to a teenager’s vulnerable emotional disclosure such as “I’m trans” is panic, data-dumping, or parent-driven attempts to persuade, the child often doubles down in response. And they’re not doing this because they’re ‘indoctrinated’ or pathologically narcissistic, but because they’re an adolescent.

How both sides of the trans culture war get this wrong

Another core theme I introduce early in the video is that both trans-activist and gender-critical narratives tend to exceptionalize transgender identities as a way to compel viewership and ideological buy-in. However, in my opinion, it is precisely this type of trans exceptionalism that actually harms families who are trying to help their kids.

On one side, parents are told:

• “If you don’t affirm, your child will kill themselves.”

On the other, parents are told:

• “Your child has been indoctrinated into a cult and must be deprogrammed… oh, and it’s also probably your fault somehow”

Both of these frameworks encourage panic and all-or-nothing thinking.
Both of these frameworks flatten the complexity of the youth’s inner world.
And both of these frameworks mislead parents from what their adolescents actually need from them.

In my view, and in my experience, trans identification in adolescence is not outside the realm of normal human identity development, even if the socially advertised, institutionally reinforced medicalization of it is in many ways, totally unprecedented. Treating this type of identity crisis as uniquely mystical or uniquely pathological prevents parents from using the same relational wisdom and strategies they already probably have used with teenagers who are dealing with other struggles. And it prevents clinicians from using their judgement about what is going on with a young person, when all of the ideological language is stripped away.

What I prioritize instead

Throughout the free portion of this video, I lay out the philosophy that guides my work with families and the advice I give on this platform:

• I do not work directly with kids or teens, but with their parents

• I do not (and will not) try to convince anyone to detransition

• I do not prioritize outcomes like desistance over meaningful family relationships because I do not believe anything in life is as simple as that with humans being social creatures (and all that jazz)

• I do not think that specific outcomes can be forced, because human beings aren’t machines that change the way they operate after simply being fed new data. Though I do believe strategies can be implemented, particularly in the early stages to mitigate some of the harms of both the impulsive youthful gender transition quest and the erosion of parent/child relationships in its wake.

Instead, I help parents:

• De-escalate their panic

• Gain clarity about their values

• Rebuild trust and connection

• Anticipate their adolescent’s underlying needs

• Decode confusing, ‘scripted’ statements their kids are using to express something legitimate

• Strengthen life skills their child will need regardless of what turns they take with their identity (with a focus on ADHD and ASD specific areas of struggles which I see as being potential predisposing or contributing factors to gender distress)

• Address areas of underlying distress rather than arguing about conclusions

• Strategize about their specific kid, family dynamic and the steps they can take to pick the right battles instead of throwing darts at a wall and arguing about everything

• Understand the factors which in my opinion actually lead to or indicate desistance, so parents can best support their kids through that experience as it occurs

Because here’s something many parents don’t want to hear, but need to:

A prolonged fracture in the parent-child relationship is a worse outcome than simply a child identifying as transgender. Or yes, even transitioning socially or medically in adulthood. The parent-child relationship is of utmost importance.

Especially once your kid turns 18, and especially if that fracture pushes the youth toward secrecy, defiance for its own sake, or making major, permanent decisions about their health because they want to win the power struggle by proving their parents wrong.

When parents no longer have direct control over the choices their legally adult kids make, the parent-child relationship alongside specific strategies are the only mediating factors which have the chance of slowing down the reckless behavior of an impulsive, distressed young person, considering no real systemic protections exist to account for these realities today. Or at least, that’s how I see it.

And with this framing, I’ve helped parents guide their kids through this chapter of life. And yes, many of their kids do become less singularly focussed on gender transition as a result. Sometimes, that looks like desistance. Other times, it looks like slowing down and taking the time to actually consider the full range of options available to them in a grounded, mature way— while also focussing on the plurality of life demands that young adulthood entails.

What happens after the paywall

The remainder of the video, over an hour of content, is behind a paywall because I want to keep it for adults (parents and clinicians) only.

In the paid section, I go into depth on:

• Why attempts to induce doubt reliably trigger anger, broken down developmentally and culturally

• The specific reasons that many trans-identified teens struggle to recognize their own doubts

• How trans communities reinterpret doubt in ways that closes off exit ramps

• Why lived experience, not abstract debate, is what actually creates real reconsideration

• The three real pathways I’ve seen out of transgender identification/gender transition within a subset of my age cohort (and younger)

• What parents can focus on instead of arguing about gender—especially during the holidays

This is not content meant to be forwarded to your child. It is content meant to help you think more clearly, calmly, and strategically.

If you are tired of debates that go nowhere.
If you want to preserve your relationship even during times of tension.
If you want to stop feeling like every conversation is a ticking time bomb where you might say the “wrong” thing

If you want to enjoy the holidays with your family and make the most of this precious time together—

Then the rest of this video is aimed at someone like you.

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👉 The full 1 hour and 20 minute video is available to paid subscribers.

Your support allows me to continue this work, and keeps this space focused on parents and clinicians who are ready to engage thoughtfully.

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Full 1.5 hour video available for paid subscribers.

I was probably one of the first Gen Z-ers to adopt a transgender identity around early adolescence, as a 12 year old in 2011/2012. And at that age, I genuinely believed I would someday in the distant future become the only trans adult I would ever know.

Little did I know that in just a few years, TIME Magazine would declare the “Transgender Tipping Point,” Bruce Jenner would become Caitlyn (btw, I didn’t even know who this individual was until the news of Jenner’s gender transition was everywhere), and within five years it felt like tons of girls my age had come to the same conclusion about themselves—being “born in the wrong bodies”—that I had reached so long ago.

As a 12-year-old in 2012, I presumed I would be “trans” for the rest of my life. My parents presumed I’d be over this “phase” by the end of the year and move on from it the way I moved on from my fourth-grade obsession with a rare pituitary tumor, which morphed into a fifth-grade obsession with the human genome. Instead, I spent twelve years of my life in a trans identity. Many of those I spent pretending to be a man in the Middle East. I have lived an insane life that neither my parents, nor I could have ever envisioned all those years ago. So both me and my parents were dead wrong about the twists and turns my “gender journey” would take.

Take this article (and video) as proof that neither 12-year-olds nor their parents can perfectly predict the future in this brave new world.

Now, as a 26-year-old detransitioner/ ex-transgender/ zoomer gender heretic who discusses her experiences, thought processes (both former and current), and dissects the uniquely Gen Z flavor of today’s transgender phenomenon in the hopes of helping families freak out a little less when their kids do what I did back in the prehistoric year of 2012, I naturally get my inbox filled with hundreds of parents whose kids (today’s 13-year-olds) are doing the same exact thing I did the year they were born. They usually ask me the same questions, because although they each feel alone, they unfortunately are not.

So instead of either ghosting them out of sheer overwhelm or spending my whole life individually answering every DM, I decided to start this blog. Putting my experiences into words forced me to reflect on the intricacies of my mindset during each year I spent living in a fallacious transgender self-concept, and much to my delight, the semi-coherent babbling of my inner voice actually seemed to help parents understand what their kids might be going through. I’m glad that some of you find the insights I’ve gained from one of the most insanely traumatic, eye-opening and lesson-generating experiences of my life, to be helpful to you.

In addition, I’ve spent the last year consulting with over 50 families whose teenagers were swept up into the same thing I was more than a decade ago. Sometimes parents find me before their teenagers turn 18; sometimes they find me years after; deep into an identity crisis that confounds them, threatens their kids’ health, and often destabilizes their family dynamic.

As I reflect on all the years I spent in trans communities, online and in real life, in the United States and in Israel—and now, as something of an apostate—I’ve noticed many parallel patterns that almost no one is putting words to. I also see enormous problems with the way the culture war discusses the “trans issue” as it relates to Gen Z. These narratives leave parents even more stressed and confused than they were before.

Here’s one pattern I’ve been reflecting on recently, which I unpack in depth, in this hour-and-a-half video (available to my paid subscribers):

Parents spend months, sometimes years, trying to decode their child’s behavior once a trans identity unexpectedly enters the picture. Conversations become tense because the parents are scared of saying or doing the “wrong” thing, and the kids are on edge about whether their less-than-100% gender-affirming parents will reject them. Both sides start sending each other articles proving why their opinion is the correct one. Everyone talks past each other. And because of the mutual worry, parents often feel totally shut out from their teenager’s internal world, even years into the identity crisis.

And because of this, both the parents and their kids rely on virtue signals or external signs that the other is “coming around” to accepting either the transgender identity or an identity based in biological reality. So often, parents ask me alongside anyone on the internet who will listen;

My daughter wore a dress for the first time in years after coming out as a trans boy, does that mean she’s coming back to reality?

My son/daughter switched from “trans” to “nonbinary,” is this a step toward desistance? Or is my child doubling down?

and even,

I found an 18+ toy in my college-aged kid’s stuff when she returned for winter break. Do I talk to her about it? (please don’t, for the love of all that is holy and good in the world) Does that mean she’s comfortable enough in her body that she’ll finally accept she’s a woman? Yeahhhhhhh. I’ve heard that one a few more times than I would have anticipated.

Anyways, after working with over 50 families this year, and having lived in a trans identity for 12 years myself, in online and in-real-life communities with other Gen Z-ers who were trans-identified (some of whom retain these identities, and others who have since detransitioned quietly) I can say this clearly:

Most of the “signs” parents cling to as hope of desistance don’t always mean exactly what parents think they mean. And the only reliable indicator almost no Gen X parent knows to look for in their Gen Z kid is, at least in my opinion, something entirely different.

In this video, I explain why the common external signs parents interpret as proof that a young person is in the final stretch of their transgender identity can actually be deceptive, and why Gen Z’s (admittedly confusing) gender landscape makes traditional parental intuition an unreliable metric.

In this video, I’ll discuss what I consider to be the many roads into, through and out of a long-term transgender identity adopted in early adolescence and disembarked from in early adulthood— since this is an experience I can speak to. I will also discuss the many ways the road to desistance can look, based on the people I’ve known throughout my life. I’ll also reflect on what I consider to be some of the early success stories of a few of the families I’ve worked with and analyze the factors which have contributed to their success.

• the one psychological shift I’ve seen in every young person who truly desists, and whose desistance ‘sticks’ rather than existing in a perpetual state of backsliding.

• how I define ‘success’ in terms of parenting a teenager through a gender crisis, or any adolescent identity crisis for that matter.

• the three exit trajectories that appear across every detransitioner I’ve met.

• patterns from some of the families I’ve worked with who are beginning to see real progress using techniques we’ve developed together to fit their specific circumstances.

• a few of the types of changes that can be made to improve a young person’s ability to eventually self-accept.

• skills that neurodivergent youth will need for their futures which are important to develop regardless of what happens with the trans identity.

• The importance of preserving parent/child relationships regardless of personal disagreements.

Due to the sensitive content of the video which is in absolutely no way suitable for young listeners, it’ll be available in full for paid subscribers. This is not the podcast you should be blasting within earshot of your kids. Trust me.

If you’re parenting a gender-distressed teen and you want a bit more of a roadmap than a game of suspense guesswork, I hope you’ll find this video informative.

Announcements:

If you like the way I think about this stuff and would like to book a session with me so we can strategize together about how to navigate these difficult times while preserving the dignity of all involved, and family relationships, feel free to reach out via DMs

If you have comments, questions or little tidbits that surprised you, drop them down below.

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This fascinating conversation with is accompanied by a short essay reflecting on the conversation, and with some announcements for my readers below.

Most of the conversations I have with transitioners and detransitioners online, are with people around my own age or within a decade of me; a mixture of Gen Z twenty-somethings or younger millennials in their early thirties who were caught up in the adolescence-to-Tumblr/YouTube and now, TikTok era of gender identity ideation. But every once in a while, I meet someone whose life experience spans the entire arc of modern transgender medicine. And when that person is willing to sit down and talk; candidly, vulnerably, analytically—I know the conversation will unearth incredibly cogent and important insights.

But first,

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That’s what happened with Ethan, who goes by on Substack.

Some time ago, the two of us met on X spaces. Ethan casually discussed beginning the gender transition process in the mid-2000’s and conveyed some fascinating insights about the process. Instantly, we hit it off. From the moment I decided to start interviewing people on here, I knew I needed to interview Ethan. Apparently, until stumbling on my content online, (who is evidently not as chronically online as many of us are) had no clue just how much the transgender landscape had changed over the last two decades.

Practical Transman

Am I The Only Transguy Without A Gender Identity?

I don’t have a gender identity. I know, that sounds weird considering I took testosterone for 11 years and transitioned to live as male 25 years ago. But hear me out…

Read more

10 months ago · 3 likes · Practical Transman

Ethan and I have talked for hours. About our childhoods, the early Internet, the old Harry Benjamin era, LiveJournal, MySpace, testosterone clinics in San Francisco that would dose you the same day, what “gatekeeping” actually looked like in the mid-2000s, and why the current narrative about how careful and rigorous the old system supposedly was… doesn’t fully line up with reality. Even so, there are differences in the populations who would have been allowed to undergo such radical body modifications two decades ago versus today.

Ethan and I discussed those differences between the “old school” transsexual cohort and today’s transgender phenomenon amongst youth. We touch upon the reality of being extremely non-conforming members of the female sex and the types of social alienation and resistance which cause so many of us to want to live as men in society, for practical reasons rather than ‘gender identity’ ones. And then we discuss how even a path that once seemed like the perfect, practical choice for social cohesion reasons, comes with health consequences that young people even in their mid twenties struggle to predict— and these health consequences and the constant need for medical intervention actually makes transition a less practical path than once expected.

In this conversation, I learned a lot more about the specifics of Ethan’s story than I knew before. Ethan began taking testosterone in 2005, and from the outset decided against getting ‘top surgery’ because it seemed radical and insane. This calculus alone makes Ethan very different from today’s young transitioners who are overwhelmingly desensitized to just how radical it is to remove body parts simply because you don’t like them now. Ethan’s 11 years on testosterone allowed for the masculinization necessary to attain the ‘male social package.’ After so long on such powerful drugs, Ethan became disillusioned with the amount of medical intervention needed to maintain taking testosterone, and upon quitting the drug, Ethan experienced a significant adrenal crash. Ethan has been off of testosterone for 10 years and has had much time to think and reflect about the entire process.

In this conversation, we discuss the motivations behind Ethan’s transition in a sober, analytical and non-ideological way. Ethan shares my concerns about the ethics of gender medicine, and about the predominant ideological narratives but doesn’t per se regret having transitioned (in Ethan’s case; masculinizing on testosterone for a decade, not undergoing any surgeries, and then ceasing the testosterone use and experiencing new changes). I’m sure some people who stumble across this video will be upset by that fact alone, but I encourage you all to watch with an open mind.

Considering the lack of data on the life outcomes of long-term transitioners, I find stories like Ethan’s illuminating. And I’m sure you will too.

In my opinion, this was one of the richest, most enjoyable and revealing conversations I’ve ever published, so please send and I your questions in the comments, and we can answer them in a second interview.

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If you are the concerned parent of a gender questioning, transition-ideating kid and would like my lived experience/former insider’s perspective on ways to navigate this stage of life and social landscape within your specific family dynamic, in a compassionate and practical way — feel free to reach out via DMs to book a parent coaching session with me.

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(This long interview will be introduced by a short essay. Please read this until the end to find the links referenced in the video)

On the rare occasion I manage to speak with an autistic Gen Z-er who nearly became trans but didn’t—I feel like I’m looking into a parallel universe.

Recently, I spoke with a young man named whose story, for this reason, has been echoing in my mind ever since.

We are both on the autism spectrum. Sven was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. I was given a separate diagnosis for every autistic trait, but not with autism itself. He was a boy. I was a girl.

Sven spent his Kindergarten in a Christian school that “wasn’t abusing [him] on purpose. They just didn’t know what they were doing.” I spent my Kindergarten year in leg braces to correct my toe walking while squandering the small fortune my parents spent on my Montessori school, just for me to do the same two tasks on repeat while adamantly refusing to switch activities. Off to a great start! (this is sarcasm).

Sven spent his childhood in SPED classes that continually underestimated his intelligence and thoroughly demoralized him. His parents had very few choices over which state schools they could enroll him in. When educational environments continually neglected him and failed to meet his needs, his parents even pulled him out for a couple years.

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I spent my childhood being shuffled between occupational therapists, speech therapists, psychotherapists, special tutors and functional neurologists— none of whom could find a word to describe my mix of intellectual precociousness and motor- developmental delays + social communication difficulties. My teachers never agreed on whether I was a gifted, or whether they needed hold me back to repeat the grade. In addition to my schoolwork load, my parents would stay up late to tutor me themselves.

Sven and I both switched schools multiple times as we grew up, because not a single school could manage to meet our needs.

We were both odd, intense, precocious children. We were both twice-exceptional kids with autistic sensibilities (albeit somewhat different expressions of these). We both struggled socially, felt alien in our own skins, and entered puberty early, and with confusion that quickly calcified into panic. For both of us, our adverse experiences in our school environments contributed to our vulnerabilities around adolescence. And we both stumbled, in our own ways, into gender ideology.

His parents would have affirmed him, had he expressed a transgender identity. My parents never did.

But, for 12 years of my life, I nurtured my transgender identity. And, Sven somehow didn’t get pulled into it.

The question I aim to answer in this conversation is: why?
Why did gender ideology nearly claim both of us, but succeed at capturing only one?

Watch my interview with Sven to find out.

We covered so many topics and subtopics about all things autism (in boys and in girls, diagnosed and undiagnosed experiences), transgender ideology, SPED horror stories, the biggest online threats to autistic youth and much, much more.

Your comments, likes and shares are another great way to support my work and a great way for me to hear your thoughts!

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Do you have a kid navigating gender confusion or transgender identification?

If so, I offer parent coaching sessions to help you figure out how to best navigate your specific child’s situation, in a compassionate and practical way. If this is of interest, please DM me.

Follow Sven, Support his Advocacy:

Don’t forget to follow , founder of the Autistic Freedom Network, on X, on Instagram and on YouTube.

The first three minutes will be available to everyone, but to watch the full episode and to access this essay in full, please become a paid subscriber to support my work.

It is aimed at people who resonated with the topics I discussed in this post:

With that out of the way, let’s continue:

If there’s anything I’ve learned from my time as a high school debater who also coached kids from elementary school, middle school and high school in public speaking, debate, and rhetoric— it’s that critical thinking skills are a necessity for a functioning, democratic society.

But, unfortunately, our education systems across the West do not prioritize teaching necessary critical thinking skills to kids. And equally unfortunate is that the ability to recognize logical fallacies and to perspective-take are not really inborn capacities that most people have (the latter of which is an even bigger challenge for people who are on the autism spectrum). Our very human, evolutionarily advantageous tribal tendencies flourish in the absence of an education targeted at teaching young people how to ‘hack’ our primitive instincts of filtering new information through the lens of whether it’s being told to us by the good guy (a member of the in-group) or by a bad guy (an ideological opponent).

In other words, the skills which comprise critical thinking, must be taught. Since schools don’t routinely teach them, this responsibility falls on either extracurricular debate clubs or on parents, who most likely also did not receive this type of education as youngsters.

As a detransitioner/ ex-transgender person who now consults with parents of gender questioning kids like the one I used to be, one of the most common requests I get from families is for some ways to teach their kids to think critically about the internal logical inconsistencies within the gender ideological frameworks they have adopted.

While I have discussed previously that the issue of critical thinking is by far not the biggest factor in why most people embark upon or disembark from a so-called “gender journey” in adolescence or young adulthood, it is still important for families to teach these skills to their kids so they can become well-rounded adults. Especially because beyond learning how to think critically in terms of identifying logical fallacies, it is important particularly for morally rigid, intelligent, justice-oriented kids and teens to learn frameworks for how to perspective-take, given that it is usually not their strong suit. And many of the thought exercises I participated in as a competitive high school debater gave me the later ability to do just that.

In my experience, and in the experiences of many of the families I’ve consulted with, one of the biggest reasons why families erode over the topic of a teenager’s or young adult’s desire to transition into some approximation of the opposite sex is due to the inability of one or both parties to take the perspective of the other. This is particularly difficult for families whose kids are on the autism spectrum, and even more difficult when one or both parents are as well. But, thankfully, perspective-taking can be taught in ways which unite the family rather than further dividing it.

The tool I will share with you in this video is one of the many I have used with the families I coach, who have reported that they really enjoyed doing it with their kids!

As always, if you’d like to book a parent coaching consultation or session with me to problem-solve about your specific child’s and family’s situation, please reach out through my DMs

When I think back to some of the most important critical thinking exercises I learned from high school debate, which force rigid, justice oriented young people like the one I was, to perspective-take, I cannot help but to think of the Trolley Problem.

In this video, available in full for paid subscribers, I will run through not only what the Trolley Problem is, but how parents can introduce it to their kids. This exercise could be a great way to involve the whole family and to impart some basic skills without unnecessarily aggravating the gender conversation, or (yet) probing too deeply into other touchy, conversation-terminating subjects.

The best part about activities like these is that they take a doom and gloom situation and inject a bit of intellectual family fun back in!

I hope you enjoy the rest of this essay and doing this activity with your kids!

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In this riveting conversation, I chat with . Not only is she a brilliant writer and commentator whom you should all follow and support, but she was also an early critic of gender ideology in 2013. I came across her story a year ago while watching the podcast where she was interviewed by and and I found her brain to be incredibly impressive. So I reached out to her on here, and thankfully, she responded!

We talk about a number of fascinating subjects; from critical race theory in schools, to how our experiences abroad impacted our understandings of ‘gender’, what it’s like for people to look at you and assume you’ll agree with them ideologically, to the term “Latinx” and most crucially— whether transgender ideology is racist.

Nevline has a habit of being a well-spoken heretic, which naturally does not earn her any brownie points with the authoritarian Left. Not even being a Black lesbian saved Nevline from the far-left’s wrath when she proclaimed the simple fact that trans women are not female, online, 12 years ago. Today, she writes on Substack and has some fascinating projects coming up, which we discuss here.

Please read to the end of this post to find the essays discussed in our conversation.

If you enjoy my work and find it beneficial, please become a paid subscriber to support my work.

My essays/videos take a lot of time and effort to produce and to bring to you (and mostly in front of a paywall). As a 26 year old independent writer, your $8 a month is very much appreciated.

(you can upgrade your subscription to my Substack by clicking the subscription buttons in this post)

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If you’ve enjoyed this conversation and would like to read ‘s impressive work, here are a few of her essays:

Transphobia Is Not Real

How The Trans Movement Is Erasing Black Women From History

Transwomen Are Not Female (12 Years Later):

Nevline’s Feature in the Wall Street Journal:

If you’re a Black woman who has been impacted by gender ideology and would like to submit an essay to ’s anthology, or know someone who would— you can find that here:

She Holds The Line Print Anthology:

Do you have a kid navigating gender confusion or transgender identification?

If so, I offer parent coaching sessions to help you figure out how to best navigate your specific child’s situation, in a compassionate and practical way. If this is of interest, please DM me.

As always, please leave your comments below, and share this piece with those who would benefit from it.

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