Reclaiming Parental Authority

Erin Friday's talk at the 2026 Detrans Awareness Day conference on patterns in parenting styles

Parents are too often invisible in the transgender debate. In societies in which transgender identities have gained legal recognition and are affirmed by medical, psychotherapeutic, educational, community, and even faith-based institutions, parents are supposed to celebrate when their child comes out as trans. A parent’s doubts, or the stomach-churning fear that a child will be beguiled into socially validated self-harm, are stigmatised as evidence of bad parenting. In the topsy-turvy world of gender ideology, once again, natural impulses – the overwhelming urge to protect your child - are demonized as transphobic. The result can be intense isolation, estrangement from family and friends, and the label “bad parent”.

But what constitutes good parenting? Erin Friday, a licensed California attorney who specializes in parental rights and educational advocacy, has created a podcast and interview collection, “The Desistance Series“, that documents strategies parents have used to support their children through gender-related distress. She spoke at Genspect’s 2026 Detrans Awareness conference about how parents of desisters and detransitioners have responded to their children’s trans identification, and examined patterns in parenting styles within the wider culture of child-parent relationships today.

Erin began her talk by reporting on what parents believed had brought their children to reject their bodies in the first place. The patterns they observed are unsurprising. Most children, both males and females, took on a transgender identity during puberty and first learned about transgenderism through the “dark delights of the Internet”. Many of them adopted a new identity during the isolation of COVID lockdowns. All of them were enrolled in schools where transgender indoctrination ruled supreme, with teachers, counselors, and administrators who immediately pounced upon any sign of discomfort children had with their natural bodies to support the child’s transgender identity, without informing their parents. Almost all the male children were sensitive young adolescents and late bloomers. All had comorbid mental health issues: ADHD, OCD, autistic traits, internalized homophobia.

None of this is new. We know that transgenderism doesn’t come after confident children. It gets hold of the vulnerable and insecure who look in the mirror and hate everything they see there. What continues to surprise, as Erin Friday points out, is the lack of curiosity doctors, medical providers, mental health providers, and therapists appear to have in these well-established patterns.

What Parents Do When Kids Say They’re Trans

The parents of desisting children interviewed by Erin Friday did the hard thing: they said no. They refused to use preferred pronouns or chosen names; they refused to introduce their children as the other sex; they banned binders; they refused to participate in their children’s fictional identities. But they picked their battles. Clothes don’t make a person, and neither does a hairstyle. That was all irrelevant. They blocked their affirmative relatives and friends and set boundaries. They were willing to be the bad guys: “It’s really okay for your kids, when they’re going through this, not to like you. In fact, you’re probably not doing it right if they do like you during this period,” says Erin in this talk.

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These parents put their children in real-life situations that challenged their luxury beliefs: gave them chores, got them jobs, took them on trips to third-world countries to see what real people should be worried about. And where possible, they helped their children to desist by providing an offramp – changed schools, moved house, removed their children from peer pressure and the embarrassment of backtracking, even started a new life in a new country away from the trans identity so that, to steal the words of the ideology, the child could “come out as their true selves”. They did a thousand things to get the child back to being comfortable in their natal sex. Sometimes it only worked after the child had done some severe things to their bodies. But the parents were persistent and consistent in the “tough love” of saying no to their child. And in many cases, it worked.

A Culture That Conspires Against Parents

But it doesn’t always work. Erin recognizes the overweening power of the culture parents are struggling against. First there’s the Internet. “We didn’t understand the power of the Internet,” she says. Parents have given their children smartphones and devices without understanding social media, the pornification of so much content, the power of peers’ likes, or how children can be preyed upon and easily influenced by malevolent adults.

Institutions and the culture conspire against parents. It is hard to take children’s devices away from them, and you’re likely to be hated for it, even if the rest of the family follows suit and sets up a no-Internet zone to temper by sharing the pain. But in some jurisdictions and countries, removing a child’s access to the online world can be construed as a form of abuse, prompting social services to get involved. In Germany, for example, it is not possible either to remove a child from a trans-affirming school, and the very meaning of child welfare is contested.

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Today’s parents are contending with a child-led culture that valorises friendship rather than authority and anaesthetises growing pains with therapeutics. It’s a culture in which parental authority has become suspect. Authoritative parenting, on the other hand (and in contrast to authoritarian or permissive parenting, as elucidated by developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind), combines warmth with demandingness. As parenting researcher Professor Ellie Lee puts it, “You can’t bring children into a social role without some form of authority structure.” Authority and discipline have been negativized. And yet, in order to grow up, children need to experience discipline. Learning to “hold yourself” and experience the discomfort that goes with developing the capacity for other-directedness (not just doing what you feel like the whole time, with no capacity for cooperation with other people) is necessary and an antidote to the false belief that discomfort is harmful.

“You Wouldn’t Give a Two-Year-Old Whisky!”

Parents’ confidence in their own parenting instincts has been undermined by too many “parenting experts”. The parents Erin Friday interviewed read many critical books. Gabor Maté’s “Hold On To Your Kids”, in particular, explains how parents can reestablish a relationship with their children and recreate connection. Erin cites some simple examples in her speech of how this can be done. In the face of a cultural assault against them, there is a need “to validate parents’ instincts”. Controlling behavior is detrimental. Authoritative parenting, on the other hand, is nurturing, boundary-setting and protective. “You wouldn’t give a two-year-old whisky!”, says Maté. What is more, giving the child or teenager too much power “risks communicating to kids that they can’t tolerate distress”.

Parents who manage to reclaim authority, as Erin Friday describes, can make all the difference. But even with the best of wills, it is not always possible in the current dispensation. The parents of trans identified children and adolescents are as varied and different as any other group of people: they may be “left, right, attentive, distant, single, divorced, married, big families, only children, homeschooled, didn’t homeschool”. Often, perhaps most of the time, the culture is just overwhelmingly stronger than any parent, whatever their parenting style. Which is why the parents who are all too often invisible in the transgender debate need the support of all of us. We all share responsibility for the societies more and more parents are struggling to raise their children in.

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