For Eric’s father, it was simply not an option.
His 14-year-old child (whom I’m calling Eric to preserve his anonymity) had been identifying as a transgender boy for years. With his mother’s support, Eric started seeking hormone therapy to treat his gender dysphoria: the distress he felt at the incongruence between the gender with which he identified and the sex he was assigned at birth.
But that didn’t sit well with Eric’s father. So he took action.
He wrote to the British Columbia gender clinic that was treating Eric to make his opposition to hormone therapy known. It didn’t stop there. He also sought a series of injunctions to prevent his son from receiving the puberty blockers and testosterone injections Eric and his doctors agreed he needed—this even though Eric’s dysphoria was so intense that he had attempted suicide the year before.
This 2019 case is unusual (though not unique, as I’ve reported before) in that it involved the legal system in a parent-child dispute over a child’s decision to proceed with gender-affirming care. This case, however, is representative of a broader problem: parents going to extreme lengths to try to prevent their children from being trans.
Such efforts are at home in the current cultural moment. Anti-trans movements are on the rise, here in Canada and abroad. And they’ve got trans children in their sights.
Trans-exclusionary feminists and their conservative allies are working to exclude trans children from sports and restrooms. In the United States, numerous states have seen legislation introduced to ban gender-affirming care for trans children; Texas is going so far as trying to investigate trans-affirming parents for child abuse. And transphobic thought leaders like Abigail Shrier are peddling the myth that trans children are victims of a new and insidious social “craze.”
None of this is okay.
Indeed, the goal seems to be to make it impossible for children to be trans in public—and to normalize parental efforts to keep children from being trans at home.
It’s time we called such efforts what they are: Abusive. Plain and simple.
A feminist issue
Specifically, they constitute a type of psychological abuse known as coercive control.
Coercive control is best known as a form of intimate-partner violence, and for good reason. One expert estimates that it appears in some form in 95-97% of all domestic violence cases.
It looks like a range of things—everything from isolating a victim from their friends and family, to monitoring their activities, to cutting them off from medical and other support services, to dictating what a victim can wear and where a victim can go.
And it’s a feminist issue.
That’s because, like all forms of intimate-partner violence, the victims of coercive control are overwhelmingly women. Women are twice as likely as men to self-report being the victims of domestic violence, and five times as likely to report being the victims of coercive control.
In the United Kingdom, feminists successfully pushed for the criminalization of coercive control. And there have been similar calls from some women’s rights organizations here at home.
To be sure, criminal-justice “solutions” have their skeptics, myself included. But in a country where a woman is killed by her intimate partner every 6 days, and coercive control is present as a warning sign in 15% of all domestic homicides, it’s clear something must be done.
On that, all feminists should be in agreement.
Trouble is, coercive control also characterizes many parent-child relationships where the child identifies as transgender or non-binary. It’s just as abusive as when the coercive control occurs in an intimate-partner context, and just as destructive to the victim. Only trans-exclusionary feminists and their conservative allies are trying to normalize it.
Not affirming your trans child is coercive control
The internet is full of dire warnings about the dangers of allowing your child to socially or medically transition. But what’s a transphobic parent to do if their child comes out as transgender?
Quite simply: stop them.
Sites like Mumsnet, Transgender Trend, and other hotbeds of trans-exclusionary feminism are awash with horror stories about the dangers of allowing your child to change their name, pronouns, and dress; to access life-saving puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy; or to obtain gender-affirming equipment like chest binders. (I won’t link to specific examples in this column because I don’t want to promote transphobic hate.)
The point of such narratives is obvious: Make parents so fearful of affirming their transgender child, who like Eric may be legally capable of making informed decisions about things like gender-affirming medical care, that they will do everything in their power to prevent their child from living as their felt gender.
Now, put this into perspective. Imagine if the narratives were instead about the dangers of husbands “allowing” their wives to live the lives they wanted. The dangers of husbands allowing their wives to choose how they wish to be addressed, what name to go by, what medical treatments to consent to, and what clothes to wear.
The level of dictatorial control such narratives promote would be clearly unacceptable in an intimate-partner context. And it’s just as wrong, just as coercive, and just as abusive in the parent-child one: because it places children in a perpetual state of fear.
The plight of trans orphans
That state of fear is the basis of every case of coercive control. As sociologists Carmen Gill and Mary Aspinall described this form of psychological abuse in a research paper submitted to the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime: “The nature of harm does not involve physical contact but can translate into a ‘[…] state of fear’….the victim is neutralized and can only make decisions in a structure controlled by the perpetrator. The victim is literally on an invisible leash. It makes it hard to escape the abuse.”
In other words, what makes coercive control possible, be the victim a wife or a child, is the implicit threat of escalated violence that underlies it: either go along with your abuser’s controlling behaviour or face much worse.
In the case of trans children, the implicit threat is that of being cut off from family supports and, in effect, orphaned. And for too many trans children, that threat is realized—with devastating results.
Data on these trans orphans paints a picture of homelessness, addiction, and poverty.
Compared to the Canadian population as a whole, transgender and gender non-conforming people are “7 times more likely to abuse drugs or other substances” and “2 times as likely to experience severe poverty and homelessness.”
Why?
Because many transgender youth face rejection from their families and are forced onto the streets after coming out. Indeed, more than half of all 2SLGBTQ+ youth cited an “inability to get along with their parents” as the reason they became homeless; and more than a third pointed to “violence or abuse” as the reason they left home.
A ticket out?
Eric won the day against his father. Most trans children aren’t so lucky.
Rooting out the transphobic narratives that lead parents to control and, failing that, reject their trans children is a long-term project. But trans youth need support now—from their families, ideally, and if not, then from society.
This country already has limited financial supports in place for orphans and those leaving abusive family situations.
My home province of Alberta, for example, provides an Escaping Abuse Benefit to adults leaving family violence. While the Canada Pension Plan provides a flat monthly benefit to the children of deceased contributors.
Trans children escaping the coercive control of non-affirming parents are as deserving of these and other financial supports as any other victim of psychological abuse. While those trans youth whose families reject them outright are as much orphans as those youth whose parents have died.
What I am proposing, in short, is that we extend existing benefits programs to cover trans children who lack family supports: provide them with a limited basic income, if you like, so that leaving their abusive parents is financially feasible.
This proposal is hardly a panacea for the hardships that abused and orphaned trans children face. But it’s a start. One that takes seriously the need to provide direct aid to those who face some of the worst discrimination our world has to offer.
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