The Desistance Series
How one mother’s firm boundaries and steadfast love helped her teenage daughter step back from a transgender identity
When I consider the millions of words written about the trans phenomenon, it is startling how few have been devoted to desistance. Thankfully the PITT parents sought to change this with Parents of Desisters, and now Erin Friday’s new series, interviewing 16 parents of desisted children, will add to this small but growing library on how parents helped their child to desist.
The first video of the 16, released today, is an interview with California mother “Lydia,” who describes how she set firm boundaries when her teenage daughter began identifying as transgender.
Lydia had homeschooled her daughter, Jane, for nine years and then, in 2021, when she was 13, she decided to attend high school. Three weeks later, Lydia was horrified when she found disturbing pictures of Jane that made it clear she was self-harming and identifying as transgender. Lydia took no prisoners when combating the school, which socially transitioned Jane without her consent.
Jane was cheered along by older girls who also attended the Gay Straight Alliance in school. Schoolmates advised Jane to go to her biology teacher, who then helped change her name and socially transition her in 9th grade.
Lydia went into panic mode and read everything she could about trans issues. The more she read, the more this liberal mom soon became a “TERF.” Through reading 4thWaveNow and the work of Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano, Lydia came to better understand her child. During these years, Jane directed intense anger toward her, yet Lydia responded with consistent expressions of love alongside clear and unwavering limits. She was also helped by Parents of ROGD Kids as well as FAIR. In the interview she explains how firm boundaries, combined with steady expressions of love, helped her daughter slowly desist and come to accept her female body and her burgeoning womanhood.
The Merriam-Webster definition of the word “desist” is “to cease to proceed or act.” Desistance, accordingly, is “the act of desisting: cessation of action.” Most of us Gen X parents first encountered the word in legal language, in those stern letters instructing someone to “cease and desist” when one individual had libelled another. Yet for parents of trans-identified children the word has become the holy grail. It means the pathway to healing, the avoidance of irreversible medical harm.
Detransition is when a person identifies as transgender (or non-binary or whatever you’re having yourself), medically transitions and then seeks to reverse the process. Desistance is when a person identifies as transgender, seeks to medically transition, but relinquishes their transgender identity before any medical intervention begins.
Typically when a person loses themselves in mental illness it is death by a thousand cuts. There is seldom a clear-cut Rubicon that is crossed. The behaviour of a young person who becomes addicted to alcohol or another substance slowly becomes more unacceptable. The anorexic individual becomes increasingly difficult to reach. The person with OCD may initially seem a little neurotic but, over time, their behaviour becomes evidently disturbed and out of control.
The same patterns often unfold for a person who identifies as transgender. Some people drink too much but pull back before addiction takes hold. Some become intensely preoccupied with dieting yet never tip into full-blown anorexia nervosa. In the same way, a young person may identify as transgender for a period of time but ultimately decide not to medicalise their body in order to present as a different identity.
For parents, however, there is a particular moment that changes everything. Medicalisation becomes the Rubicon.
This Rubicon does not quite exist in many other struggles (although for addicts the move from smoking or snorting to using a needle can feel like a similar crossing).
For this reason, many parents of trans-identified children live with constant terror. Will they or won’t they? It is indescribably pressurising. I remember a parent in one of our Beyond Trans meetings likening the year preceding her daughter’s eighteenth birthday to “the feeling that soldiers are coming to take my child away.” The arrival of adulthood often gives a distressed and vulnerable teenager the legal freedom to harm themselves with hormones and surgery.
Thankfully, as parents become more empowered and better equipped to help their children, a growing number of these young people are desisting. After a couple of years living with a male identity, Lydia’s daughter Jane stepped back from her trans persona and reached adulthood no longer identifying as transgender.
This conversation with Lydia is the first in The Desistance Series, a collection of sixteen interviews with parents whose children stepped back from a transgender identity. Over the coming weeks we will release one interview at a time, each telling a different story of fear, distress, perseverance, and ultimately recovery. These parents rarely receive public attention, yet their experiences offer something many families are desperately searching for - evidence that desistance is possible.
Watch Erin Friday and Lydia here: