"Oh, s#!t, my child just told me they're trans"

What you need to know when your teen or adult child got their gender wrong

Forward: This article is for the parents of teenage minors and adult children. If your younger child has told you that they’re trans, I’d suggest that you check out Our Trans Loved Ones, which focuses better on their specific needs in brief, and The Transgender Child, which is the most well-respective and comprehensive full-length book in publication about parenting a child who’s told you that they’re trans. While the needs of young trans children and trans teens and adult children are very similar in the end, because they’re at different developmental stages, the best ways for you to meet those needs are very different.

Alt text: A close-up of en eye, over which a thin strip of rainbow light plays.

Hi there, friend. I’m guessing you’re feeling a little bewildered right about now, huh?

Let’s talk about it.

First thing’s first: I want you to know that you’re really, really, really not alone, and it’s going to be all right.

The shock, the confusion, the fear for your kid? The sense that this all came out of nowhere? Worried for their safety? Feeling overwhelmed and pulled a million different ways at once?

All of it is incredibly normal, and there are lots of people who either have been or currently are where you are now. I’m guessing you’re feeling pulled in a million different directions at once right now. And I’m guessing that you’ve got a lot of questions and stuff you’re worried about. This is a guide to answer the most common questions that parents of trans teens and adult children ask, and give you some options about what you can do next.

And yeah, I’m gonna give you sources for everything. That’s kinda my jam.

Just so you know I’m not some random dummy on the internet, my name’s Zoe, and I’m a professor of technical writing. One of my areas is biomedical communication, which is just a fancy way of saying that I specialize in explaining complicated medical research in terms everyone can understand.

Stuff like this. So, let’s get to it.

Vocabulary

There’s a lot of terms that the trans community uses, so let’s get you comfortable with a couple of the most common ones, so that you can feel like you understand what the heck we’re talking about, okay?

• Transgender/Trans: Anyone whose gender doesn’t match what the doctor guessed when they were born.

  • This is something known as an umbrella term. That means that it’s sort of a bucket that exists to describe a whole lot of different experiences that generally fall into a single category.

  • Nonbinary people count as being transgender, but not all nonbinary people vibe with the label. That’s fine!

• Binary: Someone who’s just a guy or a gal.

• Nonbinary: Someone who’s not just a guy or a gal.

• Cisgender/Cis: Anyone whose gender matches what the doctor guessed when they were born.

• AGAB: An acronym for “the gender you were assigned at birth.” Sometimes you’ll see AMAB (assigned male at birth) or AFAB (assigned female at birth), but they’re getting less common.

• Transmasculine or Transfeminine: modern replacements for AMAB/AFAB. Generally, they mean “someone who is transitioning towards masculinity and/or away from femininity” and the inverse. They’re not perfect, but at least they don’t tie trans peoples’ identities to some doctor’s wrong guess a few decades ago.

• Dysphoria: Distress of some sort that your body or place in society doesn’t fit your gender.

• Euphoria: A feeling of joy and relief when your gender fits well.

• Presentation: How you dress and look. It’s the main way we tell other people what our gender is without saying anything.

• Transition: The process where a trans person changes their body or presentation to fit your gender, whatever it is. This does not need to include any surgery or hormones.

See? Not so bad. And, just to let you know in advance: I’m going to use gender-neutral language to refer to everyone involved, because I don’t know who, if anyone, is a man, woman, both, or neither. But knowing these terms will help us answer some questions you’ve probably got on your mind.

Now, let’s get to them.

What the heck do they mean, they’re trans?! That doesn’t make any sense!

This is an incredibly normal reaction. And what’s more? I’m gonna say something you probably wouldn’t expect a trans person to say to you right now:

You’re right. Given what you probably know, it really doesn’t make any sense.

Let’s talk about why.

If you’re the parent of a teenager, just mathematically speaking, you were born in the ‘80s or ‘90s at the least, if not earlier. And when you grew up, you learned the fundamentals of how the world worked, what it meant to be a guy or a gal or white or Black or any number of other things. You learned from your parents, your friends, your teachers, and from TV and movies and books and all that jazz.

That’s growing up. That’s how that all works, right?

Well, what did you learn about trans people when you were growing up? You learned the best information people had at the time, because folks did their best, kinda like they always do. And then there was stuff like this:

Alt text: Buffalo Bill, from Silence of the Lambs, preens in front of a mirror.

That’s Buffalo Bill, from Silence of the Lambs. It was a pretty big hit in the ‘90’s, and it played on broadcast TV a lot. Still does, from time to time, on a few channels. But you remember the plot of the movie, right? Buffalo Bill would kidnap women, kill them, and skin them as “he” tried to make a suit from that skin. Hannibal Lecter had been “his” psychologist once, and said that “he” was not a "true transsexual,” but a lunatic and a murderer. The main character, Clarice, even said that “true transsexuals” are passive, quiet and reserved.

Where’d all that stuff come from?

Well, in the 1980’s, trans people were thought to be gay men who were so bad at being both gay and men that they’d transition to get a better dating pool. At the time, being trans was considered to be a type of psychotic delusion.

That’s what you were first taught it meant to be transgender. Is it any wonder that that’s the first thing your brain defaults to when you think about trans people?

The thing is? What you were taught turned out to be wrong.

What do you mean it was wrong? How? Why?

Well, it was wrong in a lot of different ways, but let’s talk about the big picture first.

All scientific knowledge has a half-life. In other words, our best scientific knowledge turns out, eventually, to be wrong after a certain length of time, and we learn things a lot more accurately. Let’s look at a visual example:

Alt text: The Pillars of Creation, courtesy of NASA. On the left, the Hubble version, and on the right, the James Webb version.

Those are the Pillars of Creation. On the left is a picture from the ‘90’s, from the Hubble Space Telescope. On the right is a picture from the James Webb Telescope, taken last year. Look at the differences. Look at all the stars we know are there now. Look at all the missing green and blue and yellow clouds from the Hubble—part of the nebula, but they got in the way, keeping us from seeing what was beyond them. Now we have the James Webb telescope, which uses infra red to see the stars and galaxies deep, deep in the universe, as if that gas and dust wasn't even there! These are two pictures of the same thing, but they’re completely different.

As we build better tools to measure stuff, we’re able to see things closer and closer and closer to the way they really are. And that’s good! That’s how science is supposed to work.

Psychology has been doing the same thing. About a decade and a half ago, they realized that a huge number of the things it thought it knew—experiments it had done and relied on for decades—weren’t true. It’s called the Replication Crisis, and it led to the field throwing out a whole lot of research and redoing it from scratch. When they did, with better experimental plans, they found very different results.

And a lot of what we thought we knew about trans people were a part of it. New research forced us to rewrite the book on what psychology thought it knew about trans people pretty much from the ground up.

So this whole trans thing isn’t a mental illness?

No. It’s just another part of the normal biodiversity human beings come in.

And that’s why it seems like it doesn’t make sense to you that your kid is trans: when you were growing up, psychology thought that being trans meant literal insanity. But they kept doing science after you learned that stuff, and now we know better.

What do you mean, biodiversity?

Well, being trans is mostly biological—it comes straight from our genes! And because gender is pretty complicated, genetically speaking, it’s not just a simple dominant or recessive sort of thing like you learned with Punnett squares in high school. It’s a lot of genes, all working together, so that no one of them makes the difference by itself. Then, on top of that, there’s this thing called epigenetics that can transform your DNA even while you’re alive because of the things that happen to you, and we’re pretty sure that that plays an important role too.

There’s a lot about all this that we don’t know yet. And that’s okay! We’re working on it. But we do know is that it absolutely, positively, isn’t a choice, social pressure, or anything like that.

But there weren’t any signs!

Maybe, maybe not. Turns out, the whole “childhood signs” thing? That’s one of the things that got thrown out.

Some trans kids did have those so-called signs when they were little—the classic stuff, like crossdressing and playing with other-gendered toys, and stuff like that. Some kids worked really hard to hide those things from their parents, because they were afraid, usually because other kids were bullying them and they didn’t want to risk the one safe place they had: their home. Some had all the signs, and didn’t turn out to be trans. And some, like me? There really weren’t any signs, and I didn’t know I was trans until I was 35.

People, whether we’re talking about psychology or biology, are just plain messy. Hard and fast rules aren’t very good at being accurate when it comes to people.

Some people don’t have signs. There’s no one way to be trans, in the same way that there’s no one way to be tall or be a sports fan.

It seems so strange to me, though!

Here’s another one you’ll probably be surprised to hear a trans person say:

I agree entirely, and I’ve been in transition for three and a half years. This stuff is weird! I mean, I’m going through puberty with a full-time job, a doctorate, and a mortgage payment. If that’s not weird, I don’t know what is!

Thing is, weird doesn’t mean bad. Transition has been, without a doubt, the very best thing I’ve ever done—it’s improved my marriage, my work, enriched my friendships, made me so much happier—really, it’s improved my life in virtually every single way. And, just as importantly, just because I don’t understand a thing doesn’t mean it’s not any good.

Think of it this way: I hate jogging for exercise. Just hate it. The way my body moves when I go jogging just irritates me on every single level, from how hard my feet strike the pavement to the way my shirt moves and flaps with each step. I absolutely, positively, do not understand why anyone would do that voluntarily, much less run a marathon or the equivalent. But I know that some people do love jogging. Doesn’t make sense to me, but it doesn’t have to. I trust other people to know their own lives best, in the same way that I know the truths of my own life better than anyone else alive.

None of your child’s transness needs to make any sense to you, and if you’re cisgender, it probably won’t! All you need to do is trust that you raised a good kid who’s got a good head on their shoulders, and who’s doing what they need to do to take care of themselves.

You’re a good parent. You want what’s best for them. That’s normal.

But I’ve heard all this stuff about suicide—I don’t want my kid to kill themselves!

I wouldn’t either! But let’s dig in on those numbers, because they don’t say what you probably think they say.

What often gets tossed around is a 41% suicide rate—it gets a lot of attention, and people who don’t like trans folks really, really love to call it out as evidence that we’re not stable, that we regret our transitions, and junk like that.

But that’s not what the science actually says.

Trans folks have a lifetime, cumulative 41% suicide attempt rate. Attempt, not completion. And the thing about suicide attempts is that people who make those attempts don’t actually want to die—they want help, and I speak from personal experience as a suicide survivor. Completion rates are actually very low, to the point that only about 7% of people who ever attempt suicide eventually complete it, usually requiring several attempts. As a result, only 2.87% of trans people commit suicide.

About 6% of people who have major depression eventually commit suicide, just for a sense of scale.

The truth is that science has shown consistently that transition massively improves trans peoples’ quality of life in pretty much every way. For instance, simply accepting your kid for who they are and supporting them in their transition—that one, single thing—reduces suicide risk by about 76%.

But they’re young! What if they’re wrong? They’ll regret it for the rest of their lives!

Regret and maturity are two other things that get thrown around a lot. So, let’s look at the science again, and see what we know.

The best research we have followed kids who told their parents they were trans for five years after they told their parents they were trans. It tracked who they were, all their demographics, and five years later, checked in to see if they still said that they were trans. How many turned out to be trans, in the end?

97.5%. Ninety-seven and a half percent.

I’m going to go ahead and quote from the conclusion of the study here:

A related potential concern with these analyses is that we classified a change from using, for example, binary transgender to nonbinary as a retransition. Not everyone would categorize this change as a retransition. Many nonbinary people consider themselves to be transgender.²⁴  If we had used a stricter criterion of retransition, more similar to the common use of terms like detransition or desistence, referring only to youth who are living as cisgender, then our retransition rate would have been lower (2.5%).

So, yeah, it turns out that when your kid tells you they’re trans, no matter what age they are when they tell you, they’re almost certainly right.

What about the regret part?

Ahh, I knew I forgot something! Regret has actually been studied much, much more than whether trans kids turn out to be cis or not, so I get to cite a really big study for you this time. How big, you’re wondering?

Oh, only 92,000 trans people. We’re looking at the 2022 United States Transgender Survey now, and it’s the largest study on trans people that’s ever been done. The data is still coming out, but you can read the early insights for yourself here. I want to drop two graphs from that here for you:

Alt text: A graph from the 2015 USTS. Less than 1% is less satisfied with life on HRT.

This first one is how satisfied people are with their hormone replacement therapy. Less than one percent are dissatisfied at any level. And as for surgery?

Alt text: a graph from the 2015 USTS. A little more than 1% is less satisfied with life after gender-affirming surgery.

About one percent were dissatisfied with their life after surgery. One. Percent. And that’s with everything after surgery, not necessarily regret with their surgeries themselves. Other research finds surgery-specific regret somewhere between a half a percent and 0.3%, depending on the study.

For comparison, the average regret rate for surgeries of all kinds is 14.4%. That’s as much as 48 times higher than regret for gender-affirming surgery.

So yeah, I wouldn’t worry about regrets. Statistically speaking? They’re as rare as hen’s teeth.

Isn’t that stuff dangerous? I’ve heard some things…

No, it really isn’t.

The HRT we use today is bioidentical, which is a complicated way of saying “chemically identical to the hormones the human body makes on its own.” Does that mean it’s completely safe? Of course not! No drug is—not even Tylenol! There are risks no matter what you do. Heck, there are risks from drinking a glass of water from your faucet.

Mostly, with HRT, it makes your risk profile—that means, the health problems you’re most likely to have—look like the sex normally associated with the hormone you’re taking. So for instance, folks on estrogen will have a higher breast cancer risk, which makes sense because having breasts means you’ve got more breast tissue that can develop cancer.

As for gender-affirming surgeries? Things like vaginoplasty and phalloplasty—the most common bottom surgeries—have been around since the early 1900’s, and are really, really well-understood. Honestly, they’re safer than just about any other major surgery, and aren’t just safer—they’re much safer. Other gender-affirming surgeries, like facial feminization surgery and masculinizing top surgery, are even safer than that.

But set that aside for a minute.

A lot of trans people never take HRT and never get any surgeries. Only about 12% of trans women, for instance, get a vagina, and only about 5% of trans men get a penis. Partly, that’s because they’re expensive and big, scary surgeries, but it also means that nothing’s set in stone for your kid.

They’ll figure out what they need, and no matter what that looks like for them, they’re gonna be all right.

Shouldn’t they just talk to a therapist about all this?

Absolutely!

Wait, did you not expect me to say that?

Thing is, being trans in the world we’re in is really hard and stressful, and a good gender therapist can help your kid figure out what their gender might mean, in practical terms, for their life and manage that stress. Seeing a therapist is a great idea.

And you should too. Being the parent of a trans kid is stressful, and this is a whole new world you need to learn. You deserve support.

But if you were wondering whether a therapist might help your kid grow out of being trans? Well, check back at that study of how many kids turned out to be trans after five years. All of those kids had therapists.

You can’t talk someone into being trans, and you can’t talk someone out of it either.

I feel like I’m losing them! Like they’re dying!

Believe it or not, that’s really, really common.

First thing’s first: you’re not losing your child. They’re still them, in an unbroken line from who they were, to who they are right now, to who they’re going to become.

But it’s incredibly normal to need to grieve. It’s not about grieving their death or loss, even though that’s probably what it feels like right now. You’re grieving the version of the future you thought they were going to have—the dream of a perfect tomorrow that we all have of life with the people we love.

And it makes sense! When they were a newborn, you dreamed about their graduation, their wedding, maybe the children they might have someday. When they were little, you dreamed about the partner they’d have someday, and the colleges they’d get into. Being a parent is about dreaming a better world into existence for your kids.

That dream was never going to happen… but usually, you give up on that dream a tiny bit at a time, like grains of sand slipping between your fingers. This? You’re tipping the hand over and pouring it all out at once. Of course it feels sudden and overwhelming.

My advice, though, is probably not going to be what you expect: I think you should engage with the grieving process, and work to move through it. We need to grieve for all sorts of different things, but grieving is a healing process. Find an LGBT+ affirming therapist and do the work. You’ll come out the other side feeling a lot better.

But their life is going to be so much harder if they’re trans…

You’re not wrong, and I’d be willing to bet a lot that this is the part that’s really behind all of the other stuff you were asking and worried about earlier. You’re a good parent. You want your kid to be happy and healthy, to live a vibrant and wonderful life. That’s kind of what it means to be a good parent.

And you look at the world and you see all this… well, scary, angry stuff. People shouting about trans people being bad, folks making laws and claiming we do horrible things. We don’t, but you already knew that deep down; when angry people shout about this group or that group doing horrible things, it always turns out to be made up fearmongering in the end, doesn’t it? I mean, remember the panic about people with middle eastern descent after September 11th, and about people with Chinese descent after the COVID lockdowns started?

People are just… people. And right now, trans people are the most recent rotating villain-of-the-week, because some people, being people, like to get angry and scared about stuff.

This is the hard part I need to tell you, though, so I’m going to be really direct:

Your kid’s life is already harder because they’re trans. It has been their whole life. That ship sailed long, long ago. It’ll be incredibly hard if they try to stay closeted and live as their gender assigned at birth. And yes, it’ll be hard in a different way if they transition and live as their whole, vibrant selves.

So, what are you going to do about it?

I don’t mean to be confrontational here, and I know it sounds kinda like I am, so let me explain. Imagine your kid got diagnosed with a rare illness. What would you do? You’d fight like hell to get them the care they need to live their best possible life. What if they’d been born with a birth defect? You’d take them to the best surgeons you could find to help them heal and grow. If they were being bullied at school? You’d turn over heaven and earth to make sure the teachers and administrators there would protect them, wouldn’t you? And you’d do these things because we know, from research, that they’re what let those kids live the happiest, healthiest lives they can.

Shouldn’t you do the same sorts of things to protect your trans kid, and build a world that welcomes them instead of being hard for them?

If you don’t want people to treat your kid the way you see trans people get treated, fight to make the world change the way it treats trans people.

Everyone feels that way, though!

Well… they don’t, actually.

Bear with me for a minute, okay? This can be… really surprising to some folks.

I want you to scroll up and reread that part I mentioned earlier about transness being genetic. Well… those genes come from somewhere. Maybe you. I’m sure you’ve heard before—probably many, many times—that trans people always knew they were trans, and that that was actually a requirement for being trans.

Thing is? It’s not true. Let’s look at a graph from that article I just linked.

A graph, showing how many years ago, by age category, when trans people first noticed gender dysphoria.

This is all broken down by age categories. Let’s skip the young folks for now and see right in the middle: the 30-50 age groups. We’re looking at 22-29 years on average between the person’s first memory of gender dysphoria and when they started their transition. That means that a 49-year-old person who was completely average on this graph typically didn’t even feel their first twinge of gender dysphoria until they were 20, or that a 39-year-old wouldn’t have noticed until they were 21.

And then they’d have to figure out what that feeling even was, and not just, like, depression or anxiety. Believe me, as someone who’s been there? It can take a lot of work and a lot of time.

But things get even trickier. While not all trans people knew we were trans when we were little, a bunch of us did. To make an average, then, that means that for every 45-year-old who figured out that they were trans when they were 8, you have to have someone who didn’t have the first whiff of their dysphoria until they were thirty-seven.

I didn’t realize I was trans until I was 35. Literally, no earthly idea, and then 11 days of panic, and then I knew I was trans. I know several people who didn’t realize they were trans until they were in their sixties.

It’s the same basic idea we talked about with the “there were no signs” thing earlier. There’s no one version that trans people come in, and no defining or universal experience in our lives. We’re people. We’re messy.

And yeah, that means that it’s possible that you, your partner, or even both of you might be trans and not know it yet. Probably not, because that’s how odds work—even identical twins are both trans when one is trans only about 30% of the time. But it happens often enough that I have to at least mention it.

How often? Well, at least 5% of the population is transgender. That means there’s a one in twenty chance that anyone is trans, and your odds are higher because you’re directly related to a trans person.

And anyone includes you or your partner.

There’s a fantastic memoir called Love Lives Here, by Rowan Knox, that’s that exact story. Rowan’s middle kid came out to him as trans, and then a couple of years later, his wife did too. And then, a few years after the memoir came out? Rowan came out as trans too. Mom, dad, and son turned out to be dad, mom, and kid.

Their other three kids, by the way? All cis. Genetics and biology: weird, messy, and unpredictable.

So, I’m just supposed to let my kid make irreversible changes to their body?

That’s not how it works.

First of all, remember the numbers we talked about earlier, with your surgery worries. If even adults mostly don’t get surgeries, what do you think that means for minors?

Yeah. So let me walk you through how things do work.

Let’s pretend you have a young trans kid, not the older teen or adult this article is really for. And let’s say they’re a binary trans person and want the whole shebang for hormones, surgery, whatever. Really give things the benefit of the doubt, you know?

According to the worldwide Standards of Care (SoC) for trans people, if your kid is prepubescent? No medical intervention is ever permitted. Period. The most they can do is change clothes, names, pronouns—social stuff.

Once puberty kicks off at, say, 11 or 12, that kid can go on puberty blockers. That pushes pause on puberty, and gives everyone a chance to figure things out. the SoC say that that should last for about a year before anything else happens. After that, the kid can start HRT if you or your partner agree to it. Once HRT starts, the kid is supposed to stay on it for at least two years before anything more can be done.

Only at that point are they eligible for surgery. About 95% of gender-affirming surgeries on minors are a single operation: mastectomies for trans guys, and they’re done because, in the incredibly unlikely case that the kid changes his mind? He can get breast reconstruction to have his breasts back later. In the very rare cases where a minor needs bottom surgery before they’re 18—and we’re talking about around 20 cases per year in the entire United States—they also need to have a year or two of hair removal done, get approval from their parents, a surgeon who’s willing to do it, two separate therapists, at least one social worker, and a whole medical ethics review board first.

That’s why virtually all minors who get gender-affirming surgeries are 16 or 17. With all the safety guardrails, it’s just plain hard for it to be even possible before the age of majority.

Why not just wait until they’re an adult then?

Well… let me try to explain it through a story or two.

If you’re a guy, imagine this:

Imagine, for a moment, that you're twelve, and all of a sudden you start growing boobs. Like, at first, seems like a novelty, right? Hey, look at this! Your friends make some jokes about them. Everyone laughs.

Now you're thirteen. They're still making jokes, and you're getting tired of the jokes. You try to laugh, but it's the same joke they've been making for a year now, and it's tiring. And your tits are still growing. Now they're big enough that you have to wear a bra any time you're out of bed. You can't work out shirtless, like you like. The sweat trickles down underneath and makes your skin stick to itself. They jiggle when you run. It hurts.

Now you're fourteen. Your tits are still growing. Why won't they stop fucking growing? You had to throw your bras away last month and get a bunch of new ones, and your parents told you that they were so expensive that you're going to have to go without new clothes for school this year, or only get thrift ones. Your friends are still making those stupid fucking jokes. You're starting to distance yourself from them. It's lonely after school.

Now you're fifteen. The doctors say your tits are unusually large for your stage of puberty and they're still growing. They say you'll get used to them, and if you don't like them, you can have them removed when you're eighteen. In three years. But there's a six- to eight-month wait for the surgery once you're on the onramp, so it's closer to four years anyway. You had to get new bras again, and your parents made you get a job if you want new clothes for school. The customers at Burger King laugh at your tits. It's the same joke your friends started making when you were twelve. Why does everyone think it's so fucking funny? You haven't talked to any of them in a couple of months anyway, especially after John asked if he could squeeze one. Fucking gross. You had to quit the track team because they bounce so much, and the only sports bras that'd keep them properly immobilized so you can still run cost $100 per bra. The girls at school won't be your friend either, because you're a man, and they think a man with tits is gross.

If you’re a woman, try this on for size instead:

Imagine, for a moment, that you're twelve, and all of a sudden you start growing. Like, a lot. Suddenly you’re noticeably taller than all your friends. At first, seems like a novelty, right? Your friends make some jokes about you being tall. Go play basketball! Everyone laughs.

Now you're thirteen. They're still making basketball jokes, and you're getting tired of the jokes. You try to laugh, but it's the same joke they've been making for a year now, and it's tiring. And you’re still getting taller. They are too, but you’re getting taller faster, and you’re already a full head taller than the next tallest of your friends. Your mom is complaining about buying you shoes and clothes, and you can barely wear anything in the Junior’s section anymore.

Now you're fourteen. You’re still getting taller. Six feet has stopped becoming a weird, distant number, and has become something you’re only a few inches away from. It feels like an inevitability now, and you tower over all of the friends you’ve loved since elementary school. You had to throw your shoes away last month and get a new pair for the second time this year, and your parents told you that they could only afford to get you thrift clothes because you’re going through them so fast. Your friends are still making those stupid fucking basketball jokes. You're starting to distance yourself from them. It's lonely after school.

Now you’re fifteen. The doctors say you’re unusually tall, but assured your parents—not you, your parents—that all this is perfectly normal. To you he asked if you’d ever tried out for the basketball team. You don’t even like sports. On your way home from the doctor’s office, your parents stop at the shoe store again. You’ve been telling them not to, but they can see your wince in pain when you put on the size 12 sneakers (that’s 44 EU) you’ve been wearing for the last six months, and that you’ve been wearing flip-flops for the last month or so to avoid them. School is coming, and flip-flops aren’t allowed, and so you trail them into the shoe store, past the women’s shoes and to the men’s. Nobody carries size 13 women’s shoes, and almost nobody makes them. You stare at the ugly gray and orange sneakers the boys think look cool. You’ll never wear a pair of cute pumps now, even if you could bear to be even taller than you are now. You don’t even ask about clothes for school. Basically nobody makes anything for girls as tall as you are, and plus-size clothes just mean wider, not taller. It’s custom tailoring, which your family can’t afford, or boys’ clothes for you. Even if you could squeeze into a cute dress, you’re so tall that you make midi-length dresses almost indecently-short minis.

And there’s nothing anyone can ever do to make you a more normal height.

Are you starting to get the picture? Doing nothing is not a harmless option. Forcing your trans son to grow breasts, or your trans daughter to grow tall, is a permanent, irreversible thing for them—and those are each just one thing, of dozens of effects that puberty will have on them. Neither you nor they get an option of “just wait.” It’s either “accept something you both know is hurting them” or “try something to make it better.”

You’re a good parent. Your kid is in pain. What do you do when your kid is in pain?

You do whatever it takes to make it better.

God, that sounds like a nightmare.

Yeah, it kind of is, in some ways, especially during puberty.

I’ve got size 13 shoes. There are a total of five significant shoe manufacturers in the US that make shoes in my size, and by far the largest is the same brand that makes shoes for exotic dancers. And like, no shame to them! But it’d feel really weird to wear them while I’m teaching, just on principle, so I have to spend almost twice as much to get a different brand. I’m just about six feet tall, so I can still wear most midi-or-longer dresses, but a lot of them wear as minis on me.

I’ve made my peace with it, because I don’t have any choice. I have to live the rest of my life this way, like it or not. But if I could magically be shorter and smaller? I’d lunge at the chance.

So… what do you think I should do?

There’s actually a lot you can do to make your kid’s life better, and it takes less effort than you might imagine.

1. Find them a therapist if you haven’t already. Get someone with experience with gender therapy... and think about getting yourself one too. This is a lot. You both need, and deserve, Big Time Support right now.

2. Practice their name and pronouns. A lot. As much as you can, especially when they’re not around. Work to think of them as the gender they describe, and use their name and pronouns even when you’re talking about who they were before they came out. Putting in the effort so that their name and pronouns come to you automatically can make a huge difference in your kid knowing you support them.

3. If they’re still a minor, when your kid is ready to be out at school, meet with their teachers and the administrators at their school to make certain that they’re going to respect your kid’s identity. Don’t accept no for an answer. Your kid has a right, under Title IX if you’re in the US, for their chosen name and pronouns to be used at all times.

4. Get some support from other parents of trans kids! Places like /r/cisparenttranskid and organizations like TransFamily Support Services can take a lot of the burden and fear off, because you’re absolutely not alone in this.

5. Listen to your kid and trust them. All of our best science says that trans kids know their truth. It may take them time to discover or understand parts of their identity. That’s okay. And yeah, that might include hormones to transition.

6. Love them like the dickens. The world can be harsh to us right now. Knowing you’re in our corner and will fight to protect, support, love, and see us for who we are inside makes all the difference.

You'll find, in many ways, that having a trans kid isn't that different from having a cis one. Weirder, in a few ways, sure. A bit of a shock, probably, because you're going to see pretty close up that the world isn't as fair, just, or equal as I bet you thought it was.

But you're also going to find that there's a lot of beauty in places you never even imagined to look. Your trans daughter’s first dress, or your trans son’s first masculine haircut, are going to make them shine in ways you never imagined they ever would. The little things, like that, are going to make it all worthwhile and then some.