The Narrative Around Affirming Parents Doesn't Tell the Full Story

A Detransitioner’s Defense of “Affirming” Parents by Claire Abernathy

One poignant image (not the author) from the genre of affirming mothers with their children.

We have all seen the photo: a mother stands proudly beside her child, grinning with one arm around her daughter, who bears the fresh scars of a mastectomy. This is not a singular image; it is a genre. Sometimes, there are other scars too. Sometimes, one or both hold a transgender pride flag. It is easy to assume the worst. People might say, “That woman is mentally unstable” or “She is using her child for attention.” Some may even reach for clinical terms like “factitious disorder imposed on another,” also known as Munchausen by proxy. And in some cases, those assumptions aren’t entirely off base.

But they aren’t the whole story.

What you might not see in that photo is the panic behind the mother’s eyes during countless sleepless nights. You won’t hear the therapists and doctors warning her that if she didn’t act quickly, she would lose her child to suicide. You won’t see the hours she spent researching, or feel the fear in her chest when her child cried in despair, or understand her desperate hope that “affirming” might be the thing that finally makes her child want to stay alive.

I know, because I was that child, and I had that mother.

My relationship with my mom has always been complicated, but one thing I’ve never questioned is that she loves me. If you ask her what she was thinking during the time when I was trans identified, she might tell you that her only goal was to make her child’s life better. If you asked me, I might say that she was too quick to trust people in white coats—people who seem confident, credentialed, and certain. Those two tendencies—her drive to protect and her trust in authority—collided during my adolescence, when I was most vulnerable. The result left permanent changes on my body and permanent regret in both of our hearts.

I was a sensitive, anxious kid, creative and curious, often overwhelmed by the world. I didn’t fit the mold of what a little girl was “supposed” to be. I hated dresses, preferred short hair, and played rough. That wasn’t really a problem when I was six, but by the time puberty began, things shifted. Suddenly, my body was changing in ways that felt alien and wrong. I didn’t just feel uncomfortable; I felt disgusted by my reflection. At the same time, I was carrying the weight of sexual trauma and early exposure to pornography, which warped how I saw myself and what I thought it meant to be female.

My mother saw me spiraling and wanted to help. She didn’t ignore me. She didn’t dismiss my pain. She did what a parent is supposed to do—she looked for answers. And the people who had those answers, or claimed to, were very clear: “Your child is transgender. The earlier you affirm, the better their outcomes. The risk of suicide is high. Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”

Imagine hearing that from a licensed therapist, someone you’ve trusted to keep your child alive. Imagine hearing it over and over again.

It is easy to say that my mother should have asked harder questions now, that she should have looked deeper, that she should have paused. And I do wish she had. But I also understand why she did not. She believed she was choosing the path that gave me the best chance at survival. She was not thinking about scars, lifelong medication, or future regret. She was thinking about tomorrow—and how to get me there in one piece.

What I needed most was someone to slow everything down, to say, “Let’s explore this more deeply,” to treat the underlying trauma before introducing irreversible solutions. But that’s not what the system offered us. Instead, it rushed us forward, and my mother followed the only experts she had access to.

The truth is, my mother was not an activist—at least, not at first. She did not wave pride flags at parades or post hashtags online because she believed in some broader political cause. She was a scared parent trying to keep her child alive in a situation she did not fully understand. The narrative we are often fed—that parents of trans-identified kids are attention-seeking, politically motivated, or deranged—is not just untrue; it is cruelly reductive. It erases the humanity and heartbreak behind those decisions.

As time passed, and the pressure from doctors, therapists, and advocacy groups mounted, my mother eventually stepped into that activist role. Not because it was who she truly was, but because she was told it was what a good, loving, supportive mother did. The subtle and not-so-subtle messaging was clear: if you hesitate, if you ask too many questions, if you do not show public pride in your child’s identity, you are willfully risking their life—and you are a bad parent.

And so, little by little, she adapted. She joined online support groups, where hesitation was met with warnings about suicide rates. She attended events, posted affirming messages on social media, and stood by my side in photographs, smiling bravely as I displayed my post-surgery chest. The same woman who, months earlier, had worried about what testosterone would do to my developing body now told family members that this was saving my life.

My mother eventually became one of the loudest affirming voices in our community—not because it came naturally to her, but because she was made to believe she had no other choice. The therapists told her this would keep me alive. The doctors told her she was brave and progressive. The advocacy groups held her up as a role model. And so, she did what she thought a good mother should do.

I sometimes wonder what it felt like for her to put on that mask, if she believed it, or if she was simply trying to convince herself. Because underneath the slogans and photo ops, she was still the same woman who cried herself to sleep, terrified she might lose me.

At fourteen, after less than a year of hormones, I underwent a double mastectomy. I remember the cold hospital room, the antiseptic smell, the nurse’s strained smile. I remember my mother holding my hand as they wheeled me back, whispering, “I love you so much.” She was doing what she believed she had to do, clinging to the promise that this would bring me peace.

But it did not.

The dysphoria remained. The anxiety persisted. The sense of alienation in my own skin worsened. No one told us that “gender-affirming care” often does not resolve the underlying pain—it just gives it new contours. The truth no one wanted to say out loud was that a traumatized, self-loathing child cannot be made whole by surgery. And while my mother celebrated alongside me, deep down, I think she knew something was still wrong.

It would be easy for me to blame her. And for a long time, I did. There were nights I lay awake, replaying conversations, remembering the appointments, the prescriptions, the hospital room where I woke up with my chest wrapped in bandages. I wanted to scream, “Why didn’t you protect me?”

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize that my mother, too, was a victim of this system—a system that preys on parental love and fear, a system that frames unquestioning medicalization as the only compassionate response, a system that leaves no room for nuance, uncertainty, or alternatives.

We need to have honest conversations about that system—and about the parents trapped inside it.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth: loving, well-intentioned parents are being manipulated into consenting to irreversible interventions for their children—not because they are selfish, abusive, or craving validation, but because they have been told that the only alternative is death. The medical establishment, activist organizations, and even mainstream media have created a moral panic that weaponizes suicide statistics and reduces complex human struggles to a simplistic, binary choice.

And yet, when these children grow up and express regret—as more and more of us are doing—we often direct our fury at the parents. We shame them. We call them monsters. We demand to know how they could let this happen. But rarely do we stop to ask who else was in the room, who handed them the consent forms, who framed affirmation as a life-or-death necessity, who profited from it.

In recent years, we have finally begun to see cracks in the gender medicine establishment. Major health systems in the UK, Sweden, Finland, and elsewhere have paused or restricted medical transition for minors, citing a lack of long-term data and growing evidence of harm. Whistleblowers have come forward. Detransitioners like me have spoken out. The conversation is shifting—slowly, painfully—but shifting nonetheless.

And as it does, we need to hold space for the parents—not to absolve them of accountability, but to acknowledge the impossible position they were put in, to recognize that they were manipulated by a system far bigger than any one family.

I believe parents should be held to a high standard. They should be curious, skeptical, and fiercely protective of their children’s long-term well-being. They should seek out multiple opinions, question conventional wisdom, and resist pressure to rush life-altering decisions. But they also deserve compassion when they fall short—especially when falling short means following the advice of those they believed they could trust.

I have had long, difficult conversations with my mother since I detransitioned. We have cried together. We have apologized. We have tried to make sense of what happened and what it cost both of us. It has not been easy. Some wounds cannot be fully healed. But I have seen her heart, and I know it was never malicious. It was frightened, exhausted, and misled.

If you take anything from my story, I hope it is this: behind every photo of an “affirming” parent stands a person with a story—a person who may be terrified, a person who may feel isolated, a person who likely believes, in that moment, that they are saving their child’s life.

Some of those parents will, in time, come to regret their decisions. Some will not. But all of them deserve a deeper, more humane conversation than the one we are currently having.

We cannot address the harms of this system without acknowledging how it operates—not just through medical protocols and legal frameworks, but through the fears and hopes of ordinary parents. If we want to protect children, we must also support those parents in making informed, unpressured, thoughtful decisions. That means demanding honesty from medical professionals, making space for dissent in public discourse, and refusing to reduce families to simplistic villains or heroes.

There is a tendency, in our outrage, to seek easy targets, to cast blame where it is most visible. But if we truly care about the well-being of children, we have to be braver than that. We have to be willing to look at the whole picture, to ask harder questions, to extend empathy even when it is uncomfortable.

I will always carry the consequences of what happened to me. The scars on my chest are a reminder of how quickly and carelessly a child’s identity crisis can be medicalized. But I refuse to let those scars make me cruel. I refuse to hate the woman who loved me as best she could in a system designed to fail us both.

My mother was not perfect. She made devastating mistakes. But she was also a mother trying to save her child.

And that matters.

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