Jen meets with veteran LGBTQ researcher Dr. Caitlin Ryan to talk about how family responses can directly impact the health and wellbeing of their LGBTQ family member. Dr. Ryan talks about her decades-long research on behaviors that occur within families when an LGBTQ person comes out and how those behaviors directly impact their self-worth, hopefulness, risk behaviors, health, and self-care. Dr. Ryan discusses the importance of connectedness and gives tips for families whose child has recently come out. Don’t miss this important conversation about family acceptance and the potential to impact the health and wellbeing of their LGBTQ loved one.
Guest: Caitlin Ryan
Caitlin Ryan is the director of the Family Acceptance Project® — a research, education, intervention and policy project – to help ethnically, racially and religiously diverse families to support their LGBTQ children. Dr. Ryan is a clinical social worker, researcher and educator who has worked on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) health and mental health for more than 40 years and whose work on LGBTQ health has shaped policy and practice for LGBTQ and gender diverse children and youth. She received her clinical training with children and adolescents at Smith College School for Social Work. Dr. Ryan started the Family Acceptance Project with Dr. Rafael Diaz in 2002 to help diverse families to decrease rejection and prevent related health risks for their LGBT children — including suicide, drug use, homelessness and HIV - and to promote family acceptance and positive outcomes including permanency. Dr. Ryan works with organizations, faith communities, families and providers to integrate FAP’s family-based support approach to build healthy futures for children, youth and young adults.
Links From the Show:
In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you.
Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at mamadragons.org.
If you have a short story, feedback, or any comments we would love to hear from you at 562-344-5010.
Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Donate to this podcast
Jen meets with veteran LGBTQ researcher Dr. Caitlin Ryan to talk about how family responses can directly impact the health and wellbeing of their LGBTQ family member. Dr. Ryan talks about her decades-long research on behaviors that occur within families when an LGBTQ person comes out and how those behaviors directly impact their self-worth, hopefulness, risk behaviors, health, and self-care. Dr. Ryan discusses the importance of connectedness and gives tips for families whose child has recently come out. Don’t miss this important conversation about family acceptance and the potential to impact the health and wellbeing of their LGBTQ loved one.
Guest: Caitlin Ryan
Caitlin Ryan is the director of the Family Acceptance Project® — a research, education, intervention and policy project – to help ethnically, racially and religiously diverse families to support their LGBTQ children. Dr. Ryan is a clinical social worker, researcher and educator who has worked on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) health and mental health for more than 40 years and whose work on LGBTQ health has shaped policy and practice for LGBTQ and gender diverse children and youth. She received her clinical training with children and adolescents at Smith College School for Social Work. Dr. Ryan started the Family Acceptance Project with Dr. Rafael Diaz in 2002 to help diverse families to decrease rejection and prevent related health risks for their LGBT children — including suicide, drug use, homelessness and HIV - and to promote family acceptance and positive outcomes including permanency. Dr. Ryan works with organizations, faith communities, families and providers to integrate FAP’s family-based support approach to build healthy futures for children, youth and young adults.
Links From the Show:
In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you.
Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at mamadragons.org.
If you have a short story, feedback, or any comments we would love to hear from you at 562-344-5010.
Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Donate to this podcast
JEN: Hello and welcome. You are listening to In the Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created out of our desire to walk and talk with you through this journey of raising healthy, happy, and productive LGBTQ humans.
Before each episode, we would like to share a personal story from inside our community to help us all get to know each other a little bit better and also help us find commonality in our shared experiences. This week I am overjoyed at the chance to pass the mic to Patrice.
PATRICE: My name is Patrice and I have a wonderful gay son, and we raised our kids in a very conservative religion. He had been on a mission for our church and honestly believed that if he served well and did that, that he would be free from these feelings, feelings that we now know he was definitely born with. When he came out, we had been through a family tragedy so we had already been through a lot together as a family, so we were very close. So when he came out, it wasn’t devastating to us, it was more of an “OK, we love you, you’re here on this earth, so let’s do this.” And he honestly was afraid that we would react like so many others he had heard and read about, so he literally went fetal and cried and cried and cried, and after several hours he knew that that wasn’t how we felt and we definitely weren’t going to reject him. Immediately that night, I went online and I tried to find help, I tried to find a safe space for him to be and still be part of our church and I found a lovely man who sent me a message that told me in no way was he on this earth without a purpose and that God sent him here this way and it is we that are the lucky ones, which is the truth. And I found two things that are most important to me is that I found the Mama Dragons; it was fairly new, still mostly Mormon Moms at that time, who were looking for help for our sweet kids who still wanted to keep their spiritual values and their spiritual hearts, and were looking for each other, and there were so many things that they helped me with. I was able to find a group of women who live here where I live in Oregon, and we got together within a couple of months and told our stories. And we cried, we laughed, and I walked out of there and I had never felt so uplifted and so calm and peaceful, and I had just never felt that feeling before, especially since my daughter’s death.
So I knew that this was my new mission, and it did not necessarily mean finding him a space for him in the church; it meant finding a space for him to be happy. And another thing that was amazingly helpful to me was the book “No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons Around our Gay Loved Ones” by Carol Lynn Pearson. We read this book together, my husband and I, on a long drive to Utah, and we literally cried, and my husband is an attorney and he really wanted to know if there were scientific studies, if there were things that had been done to save these kids or to prove that they were born this way. And this book is amazing, she tells about a lot of the research and a lot of the stories and a lot of the people who have done things, and then the second half of the book is all these amazing stories. And so that book, I’ve used it as a Bible, I mean I would go to it when I needed an answer and I really appreciate everything that she has done for all of us. And then I bought the book for every one of my siblings, and then just before he came out on Facebook, I sent that book to each one of them and I said, “If you want to speak with Cameron about who he is and what he is and the way he feels, I really want you to read this book first so you know in your heart, so that you know that it’s true, that he has been this way since the moment he was born and he deserves the love, he deserves to be loved, he deserves everything the rest of us deserve, in this life and the next, just who he is. Currently, he is married to his sweetheart and they are awaiting their first child via surrogacy, so we are happy. We are lucky that he is who he is and that we are as close as we are; I know that there are so many who are not. And these bubbly Moms have helped; and we have held hands and cried together and they are still the best friends that I have.
So, these are the things that have helped me, and I hope helps you. All my love to all of you.
JEN: I genuinely believe that most parents would like to do things correctly. Most of us want to provide our children with the healthiest possible future, but sometimes we just don’t know what that looks like in real life. Sometimes we parent out of love, but we’re doing things that actually hurt our children instead of help them.
Today we have a very special guest, someone who has actually done the research so that our ideas and our practice of support can be evidence-based. This research has shown that parents and caregivers have a compelling influence on their child’s risk and well-being. And, on a personal note, the research from this project was a life-line for our personal family a decade ago, when we really didn’t know how to do this new portion of our parenting journey at all. We were trying to do all the things that we thought would best protect our newly-out son, but frankly, we were doing it wrong. Thankfully, Dr Ryan’s research was available and helped point us in the right direction to help him have a healthy future.
So I’m thrilled to introduce Dr Caitlin Ryan to you all. Dr Caitlin Ryan is the Director of the Family Acceptance Project, a research, education, intervention and policy project to help ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse families support their LGBTQ children. Dr Ryan is a Clinical Social Worker, researcher and educator who has worked on LGBTQ health and mental health for more than 40 years. Her work on LGBTQ health has shaped policy and practice for LGBTQ and gender-diverse children and youth. She has provided education and training on this work for more than 120,000 families, providers, and religious leaders across the US and in other countries. Dr Ryan works with organizations, faith communities, families, and providers to integrate the Family Acceptance Project’s family-based support approach to help build healthy futures for LGBTQ children, youth and young adults across disciplines, services, and systems of care.
So you can see why I’m so excited that DCY has decided to help us out with our new podcast; we are literally thrilled to have your voice. Thank you so much for being willing to come and share with us.
DR CAITLIN RYAN: Jen, I am happy to be with you and I’ve had a long history and past that actually was connected to the emergence of Mama Dragons, so maybe we’ll get to talking about that in this podcast. Anyway, it’s great to be with you and thank you for inviting me.
JEN: I don’t know if you know, but we met at the very first LGBTQ conference that I ever went to, you were presenting and you were surrounded by a lot of people, so you probably don’t remember, but I definitely do.
Let me start by asking you a question about WHY. This is a monumental project that you began decades ago. What motivated you to start to take on this idea of the Family Acceptance Project?
DR CAITLIN RYAN: Well, I started working in LGBTQ health and mental health in the 1970s, and I worked to help develop the movement to develop the first national LGBTQ health organizations. I was involved with community organizing before I went to graduate school for my Clinical Social Work degree, and when I went to graduate school, I was sent to the south to do my clinical training. I was sent to Atlanta which was the center of research on AIDS and so many other communicable diseases. And that’s when the AIDS epidemic started, and so I was asked by members of the community to help develop the first AIDS organization in the south. There were no services; people were young, gay and bisexual men, who included a high proportion of young men of color, who were dying within a few days of diagnosis, within a week. It was an unmitigated tragedy, and such little information was known about it. And one of the hardest things, I mean, it was an honor but it was incredibly challenging: I would meet the parents, the family members of these young men, who would come from across the south, who lived in small cities and towns, and I would take them to the bedsides of their dying children. And those young men had left home to try to integrate their lives in the big city (Atlanta was the largest city in the south in terms of LGBTQ people), and to do so without shaming their families. And so when I met their parents, few of them knew that their son was gay or bisexual, and was dying of AIDS.
And so I saw that, at perhaps the most vulnerable and devastating moment of their lives when all of the sudden they understood why their son only came home once a year, and why they didn’t know they had a partner, and they they didn’t know much about their lives at all, except what those young men had shared. And I saw something that very few people didn’t see: I saw that most of those parents would have done anything to change the future for those young men. But they couldn’t; it was really too late. And I also knew that, at that time in history, families were seen as the problem, all families were seen as rejecting. In fact, a term that was often used was “The Enemy,” and for those of us who work in service delivery to children and adolescents, it’s hard to imagine that systems of care would actively exclude parents and caregivers from the lives of their children, because they were seen as the enemy, and providers believed that, across the board.
And so I knew that we had to do something different. I knew that those families were open to doing something different but they had absolutely no idea what to do. I knew that if we could develop a way that could help diverse families learn to support what today we call LGBTQ young people, we could change the future, not only for those young people, but also for their families, and really for our communities as well: we could build affirming, supportive communities for everyone. And that was a very difficult time. I lost 100 young gay and bisexual men in one year, who died tragically, and I worked with many, many families over the years, and I knew that we could do something different, but it would also require substantial research and significant funding. And it wasn’t until 20 years later when I was recruited to come to San Francisco State University to help develop an Institute. And as part of that work, I met funders in the state and people became more familiar with my history and the work that I had done previously.
Our largest health funder came to me and asked me if I had a project that I could submit for review that would help them add LGBTQ heath to their portfolio, and that’s what I did. It was planned for doing the first research for developing the first evidence-based family support model for developing a culture-based framework because, having grown up in the period of time that I did, and based on my own experience living in different parts of the US and living in other countries, working with really diverse families with different kinds of backgrounds, I knew that the only way we could do this work was to work with families in the context of their cultural worlds, and that includes their culture, their faith traditions, their belief systems, their values. All of that became the basis of doing what seems kind of remarkable now, the first research that was ever done on LGBTQ young people and their families because previously they’d always been studied alone, because the perception was that there was nothing that could be done to help those families, and so when conflict erupted in families, typically LGBTQ youth were removed from the home and placed in foster care, and they couldn’t even go into foster homes because few foster homes would take them and so they went into residential and group homes, which really obliterated their futures.
So this work initiated a sea change, because the findings were so extraordinary in showing that parents and caregivers had a powerful impact on their LGBTQ children’s risk and well-being, and of course in developing our Family Support model, which we did over a period of years, we could see that we could change those futures, that we could work with families to help them understand . They didn’t have to accept an identity that they perceived as wrong, as maybe against their sense of morality, of what they thought was right or what they wanted for their child, but showing them that behaviors that attempted to change, reject, deny, minimize, their child’s identity were related to serious high levels of suicidality, substance abuse, depression, sexual health risks, isolation. Seeing and understanding that was a sea change, because they didn’t really understand that their behaviors in trying to change their child were harmful; they saw those behaviors as trying to help their child fit in, have a good life, be accepted by others.
And so this opened the door to a profoundly different way of thinking about and engaging and providing education and guidance for parents and caregivers, to support their LGBTQ children rather than trying to change them.
JEN: I love that you saw a problem and then totally went to head upstream and figure out what’s happening “up here” to address the problem instead of just trying to save people at the end when it’s too late and pull people out of the river.
We’re going to talk a lot about being affirming, being an affirming parent, being an affirming friend, just really briefly, the “dictionary” version, what does that mean, for somebody who’s brand new to this conversation, what do we mean when we use the word “affirming”?
DR CAITLIN RYAN: I think that people use it to mean different kinds of things. I would start with saying very clearly, which we say to families all the time, you don’t have to accept an identity that you think is wrong, or against your beliefs, to support your LGBTQ child, to reduce serious health risks and to increase well-being. I know we’re not showing any visuals in our session right now, but what we’ve shown in our research is that we’ve identified over 100 specific rejecting and specific accepting behaviors.
JEN: So, talk to us about what those are, what are some of those examples of the things that parents, like me, who are new and coming from kind of a different background, what are some of those things that we do that are not quite as awesome as we think they might be in advance?
DR CAITLIN RYAN: First I would say that we found this in our research, we didn’t make up these behaviors, we did in-depth interviews that were four or more hours long with individual LGBTQ young people and their families, transcribed, translated, in English and Spanish, over 8,000 pages of transcripts, from accepting, ambivalent and rejecting families. And we found that there were a series of rejecting behaviors, more than 50 of them, there were accepting behaviors, more than 50 of them, that were common across these cultural boundaries.
Behaviors that many parents thought were helping their child fit in, having a good life, keeping their family together, were:
Not talking about their identity, so silence and secrecy.
Not letting them have an LGBTQ friend.
Telling your child that it’s just a phase, you’ll grow out of it, it’s not real.
Not letting them participate in LGBTQ support groups or services.
Letting other people speak badly about LGBTQ people or gender-diverse people in front of your child.
Trying to shape how their LGBTQ children act, how they dress, how they look, how they wear their hair, which is difficult with adolescents anyway, but for young people who are gender-diverse, this really is a marker for how they see who they are, and to try to dress them in clothes and hairstyles and makeup, for example, that feel so diametrically opposed to who they are, it doesn’t only feel wrong for them, it feels humiliating, it feels like it cuts them to the quick.
And so parents don’t understand that, because there’s been one right way to raise children, and we learn this, we learn intergenerationally from our own parents and grandparents, how to become a parent. We don’t get a manual, we don’t get a handbook. And this is the case when you have a child that is different in any kind of way, any kind of special needs.
One of the big challenges I think with LGBTQ young people is, unlike other children who have special needs (and that includes emotional, social, physical, issues related to mental health); needs related to their LGBTQ identity are seen as immoral. So it then becomes a question of morality, and virtually wrong, so parents then are hard-wired to want to help their child fit in, have a good life, keep themselves together now or in the afterlife, if it’s a family of faith.
So we found these behaviors were repeated across cultures, in- and outside the US. I’ve worked in many other countries outside the US. And we’ve found that these rejecting behaviors, the more of these behaviors the parents engaged in, the higher the level of risk for their LGBTQ child. For example, with a lot of these rejecting behaviors during adolescence, by the time they were a young adult, they were more than eight times as likely typically to attempt suicide, or about six times as likely to report high levels of clinical depression, high enough for medical intervention, or more than three times as likely to use illegal drugs, to have low self-esteem, to have family conflict.
And when parents and caregivers reduced those rejecting behaviors and increased supportive behaviors, and those included behaviors like requiring that other family members would treat your child with respect because they’re a member of the family, or if you’re religious, because they are a child of God, because they are a part of the family, just like they treat everyone else in the family. Showing affection to your child when you learn about their identity, and even when you’re struggling with it, and what we found was that when families were struggling with their child’s LGBTQ identity, they would, consciously or unconsciously, stop embracing that child, stop showing affection.
JEN: We definitely heard that from people, like my son when he came out, I definitely was told that I coddled him too much, that our relationship was too tight, that I needed to step back from his life and give more time to Dad, he needed more time with Dad, it was probably my fault. It would have devastated him at the time.
DR CAITLIN RYAN: Absolutely, and you can see how that would increase depression, isolation, hopelessness for the future.
Other supportive behaviors like, actually, even when you initially learn about your child’s identity, and any time thereafter, just simply listening to them, sitting down with them, talking with them, asking them what it’s like for them, asking them to explain and help you understand, without interrupting, punishing, ridiculing. Just really talking with your child and listening, being able to talk about their identity in a neutral, supportive way with other family members.
Welcoming your child’s LGBTQ friends to family events and activities as you would your child’s other friends, who are not LGBTQ. The isolation that LGBTQ children experience is pretty profound because, unlike young people in general, where their family might be their primary source of support, with LGBTQ young people, it’s often not their family, it’s their peers. And so that isolation from peers is extremely risk-generating. We found, for example, not letting a child have an LGBTQ friend or not letting them learn about their LGBTQ identity or participate in LGBTQ support activities, even though parents and caregivers thought they were helping their child, our research showed it was related to a more than nine times greater likelihood of attempted suicide, So that isolation had a huge, powerful impact on hopelessness, helplessness and withdrawal, and also obviously a sense that the parent or caregiver could never be able to support them, and of course that increases risk.
So, one of the exciting things for me, having now worked across cultures, I’ve worked for about 15 years with Spanish-speaking countries, about 600,000 copies of our Family Education booklets have been disseminated in different languages in 70 countries. Those are best-practice resources for suicide prevention. I’ve found that these behaviors are common across cultures, that the behaviors related to rejection are all shame-based, that these identities are seen as shameful, or they need to be changed or need to be hidden or need to be modified in order for that child to have a successful life. So already with parents, they’re struggling to try to reconcile underlying religious and cultural beliefs with an identity that they have learned across generations is wrong.
Where do they turn for accurate information, where do they turn for guidance, where do they turn for support? So one of the reasons why having parent support from other parents from your cultural world is a core part of the Family Acceptance Project’s Family Support Model. So we work with families across cultural groups, across the US and outside the US, helping them integrate their child’s identity into their culture, not separate it, not try to isolate and reject that child, but really learning to support that child. So affirmation could be part of that definition or it could be support, I think the semantics are different depending on who the family members are, but I think by helping parents and caregivers understand that behaviors matter, that you can support an LGBTQ child even if you’re struggling, even if it’s against your values and beliefs, even if you don’t understand what this means for the future, that these supportive behaviors can help your child feel connected and help them have a sense that, “You know maybe my parents are there for me now but they’re not going to abandon me.” Because so many young people have thought that they have to collude with being rejected and isolated and excluded, just to stay connected to their parents and their caregivers and their cultural world or their faith tradition if it’s a family of faith. And that’s tragic to think that you have to pay a price just to be loved.
JEN: So give me, like for the people who are brand new, give me three or four solid ideas of what we could do that is going to say to our child “I accept you as a person”. Is there a short, quick list of the things, you’ve mentioned many things, just a short, quick, beginner’s list?
DR CAITLIN RYAN: Well, I think the most important thing that parents and caregivers can do is get accurate information. They may not even be ready to say the word “accept”, that may not even be part of their vocabulary to start, but just being able to get accurate information, and we’re in a time now of profound misinformation and disinformation. This is my 46th year of working with LGBTQ health and mental health and I’ve never seen the flood of misinformation and disinformation and even active rejection of LGBTQ young people, and their families. I’ve never seen the extent of that, that I’m seeing now, it’s really, really troubling. So going to organizations such as Mama Dragons and we actually have a whole website that we’ve created for parents, caregivers, and LGBTQ young people, where they can go together and find accurate information from their cultural background and their faith tradition, sources of support in their communities and online. Because they need accurate information and guidance from parents who have been there before, and parents who speak their language, who understand their cultural world, their traditions, what does that really mean for them.
Because so often, even if a parent is struggling to support their child, they, the parents, can be rejected by their own family or their congregations, or by their cultural world, their community leaders who may say to them “How can you let them do that? You’re being a bad parent, that’s not what we believe.” And so we know in very conservative communities that, for generations, parents who tried to support their LGBTQ young people, and they have, over all these years, were rejected. Some couldn’t even attend family events anymore, they couldn't attend and worship in their congregations. Some of them had to move to another community or another state to start a new life without their families of origin.
So the level of rejection is enormous, and so the first thing is to get accurate information, and the second thing is to find support, to find support from families from your cultural background, that can help you understand “What does this really mean for us? How did you reconcile your underlying beliefs with having a child like this? What did you do? How did you deal with your family? How did you deal with your religious leaders?” And that’s why the expansion now of organizations for culturally, racially, religiously diverse families with LGBTQ young people, that’s really exploded in the last five years. Before that, it was really hard to find resources, but of course we created this new website that provides a space to go and find resources, whether it’s in your community, whether it’s nationally, or even whether it’s outside the US; we have some international resources.
But to talk about these issues in the context of your cultural world, your language, your belief systems, this is incredible because parents can’t really deal with these issues in isolation, and so many of them have had to do that. So the second thing is: get support.
And the third thing that is really important, is open communication with your child. Start to sit with them, spend time with them, ask them to help you understand, not that you are putting them on the spot or that you are forcing them to explain who they are, but just really getting to know them, getting to know what it feels like for them, because one of the things that parents will often say is, “I thought I knew my child, and now I feel like they’re a stranger, I don't really understand who this person is who is living in our home,” and one of the things that I will say, and I think it’s really important for all of your listeners to know, is this: I’ve now worked in this field for almost half a century, and I’ve seen extraordinary changes during that time, I’ve experienced them in my own life. When I started doing this work, there were very few population-based studies of lesbian, gay, bisexual adults and adolescents. At that time, there were a few state studies that showed that maybe about 1% of the students in these population-based studies that measure the population as a whole, so they are quite reliable and accurate overall, that about 1% of youth identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Today, in our population-based studies, it is over 14%, and if we look at the studies of adults, among young adults, the proportion of 18-24 year olds that identify as LGBTQ is over 20%. And the main reason for that is that we live in a wired world, the Information Age, the Internet. When I grew up, there was no information anywhere, there were only horrible, tragic European novels where anybody who was gay died of suicide, and there wasn’t even language for transgender people, although they’ve always been with us. And as time went on and the internet emerged and people got personal computers in the early 1980s, gay people were early adopters of technology and that was a way to stay connected and to learn, and as more and more of them began to learn about their identities in a wholesome way, in a positive way, in an affirming way, they could be out and open and have a job that they really wanted, that they could have a partner, that they could have a family, that they could become parents. And it’s even their birthright to parent. Because when I grew up, if it was known that you were gay, your child would be taken away from you by the courts, by your partner. There were so many sanctions against living a supportive, healthy life, and those changed radically in the past 40 years. And so what’s ended up happening is that we now have images, in Walt Disney, the Muppets have a non-binary puppet, in various kinds of popular culture and media, sports stars and celebrities and film folks, are coming out, and the kinds of celebrities that we’ve always grown up with , now we realize that you can have the life and be open and be out, and you can be supported and validated, and that even your faith community and your cultural world can affirm you. So, as more and more people have come out, and we’ve realized the full dimensions of sexual orientation and gender identity, and realized that it’s about connectedness, there’s always been a perception, and it’s unfortunate that the term “sexual orientation” uses the word S-E-X, sex, because everybody thinks that sexual orientation is about S-E-X but it’s about connectedness. We actually know from important research that in adolescents and adults, that young people who feel connected at school and home, to their family, to their peers, to their social world, are about 66% less likely to have high risk behaviors in adulthood, and that includes substance abuse, violence, mental health, all of those kinds of health and mental health problems, and that holds true for LGBTQ people as well.
Since the late 1970s, we’ve had the emergence of LGBTQ support groups, and beginning in the early 90s, the emergence of support groups in schools, Gender/Sexuality Alliances, for example, but because the language was tied to sexuality, everybody thought that these identities were tied to sex, but really these identities are all about connectedness, about being connected to others, being connected to your peers, being connected to your families, to something larger than yourselves, to your faith communities, for example. This is what these identities are all about, and so the challenge is that they’ve not really been seen as normative child development. But now because the information barriers that prevented LGBTQ people from knowing who they were at early ages have been really ripped away by access to the internet, and access to information, that means that young people are coming out at much younger ages, they’re coming out in childhood. So, for 15 years, I’ve been working with young people that, at under age 10, are identifying as gay regardless of whatever language they use, and the parents don’t understand it because they think that you have to be sexually active to know you’re gay and it’s only about sex and what does this really mean, and so, going back to what I was talking about in terms of getting accurate information, in terms of parents and caregivers, this is really one of the most important things that they can start with, starting of course, with telling your child “I care about you, I’m going to be there for you, I may not have all the answers, but we’re going to figure this out together,” and making sure that child knows that you’re going to be there for them even if you’re struggling and don’t really know how to respond to this. I have worked with parents who threw their children out of the home when they found out their identities, never to see them again. I have worked with parents who have disowned their LGBTQ children who then took their own lives, and I can tell you the impact that has on the rest of their lives, which is profound and tragic and for them maybe even unspeakable. That doesn’t really have to happen; there are so many things available today, things like Mama Dragons and other supportive, culturally-affirming and faith-affirming parent support groups that are on our parent support website, and we created a site where LGBTQ young people and families could go together to find affirming faith communities where they could even worship together online, or find affirming family support activities or find support groups for LGBTQ young people or families, or gender-affirming programs across the US. That space now is available and we also have a website for the Family Acceptance Project that provides guidance and information on the tools and resources that we have been developing that include Family Education booklets in three languages that are best practice resources for suicide prevention for LGBTQ young people. We’ve started a faith-based series of that booklet, although I’ve had to fund that work myself, and so I need funding to develop more versions and more faith-based versions which are a lifeline for parents who are trying to reconcile what seems like conflicting social worlds.
We have developed Healthy Futures posters that take 20+ of these accepting behaviors and put it on a poster and tell on one page what acceptance looks like and what kind of impact it has, and taking 20 or so of these rejecting behaviors and putting them on a poster that shows what the impact of rejection is and how it impacts risk and well-being. And we even have what I call a Conservative Acceptance poster that is for parents and caregivers from conservative social worlds, who see having a same-sex or same-gender partner as really being against their values or beliefs, so it doesn’t really talk about dating but it has a range of other kinds of accepting and affirming and supportive behaviors that they can gauge it and shows how to support that LGBTQ child. These should be in all places where children, youth and families are served, they should be in community centers, public libraries, schools, pediatricians' offices. And they really aren’t because we have been the source of all of this information and there still is a lot of prejudice against families that are seen as rejecting, and there still is even prejudice towards parents that are struggling with having an LGBTQ child, and the perception is that we just have to work with the LGBTQ person and that’s going to fix everything. But of course, we know that most young people grow up within the context of a family system, whatever that is, and so by helping the parent and caregiver learn to support that child and care for them, and just see their identity as a special need, as it is for so many other child development issues. This is really such an important place to start, and it really begins to change how we think about these identities, not as something that the child is doing to rebel, or that is inappropriate or that is wrong, but is part of who they are, and the reason we didn’t have this information before is that we really didn’t know. We’ve now had 80 years of research on sexual orientation and on gender identity, and we learn more and more each year, just as we now know so much more about left-handedness, or health issues, or the autism spectrum. Autism was formerly seen as something that was so completely and profoundly different that there was nothing that could be done, we didn’t even understand what it meant. And so we live in a time of enormous information, we have to use that information, and we have to assume that parents and caregivers want the best for their children, which is what, where we come from, they want to help their children, they want them to be happy and healthy. And the way, really, to do that, is to go on that journey together, and learn what support means and learn how to care for your child. And learn how to affirm them, even when you’re struggling to understand how to integrate this.
JEN: In my opinion, one of the most brilliant things about your work is that it doesn’t attempt to separate families from their roots. And I love the idea that the concept of intersectionality started being talked about in the early 1990s but you were already involved in that idea, that culture and language has to work together, we can’t separate people into little divisive categories and expect it to make sense. I love everything about this; for ten years now, I’ve been sending links to your website because it probably saved our family, very literally. We appreciate so much your support and all of the work that you’ve done to save our lives: is there something that our listeners could do to continue to support this project, to help? I love your goal of a poster in every place where children are at; we can’t even hang rainbows in our school district, so I’m sure we can’t get it here. But what can we do, what can listeners do to support this project?
DR CAITLIN RYAN: Well, the tragedy of the work that I’m doing is not that it makes a profound difference, which it does, the tragedy is that I’ve had to fund all of this work myself, I’ve had to raise all the funds do this research, to pay my salary, to develop the multi-lingual, multi-cultural Family Education materials. We’ve started an incredible family video series that shows how diverse families learn to support their LGBTQ children, but I don’t even have the funds to make those available in educational versions because I have to raise all the operating expenses, and I do that by selling myself out as a trainer and as a consultant.
So anybody who’s listening to this can go to our website, which is familyproject.sfsu.edu. They can help fund us; we don’t have many donors, in fact I’ve been told by many people out in the community that because we work with families that are rejecting, they wouldn’t fund us because so many LGBTQ people have been wounded, some in devastating ways, by their own parents and caregivers, and families that are seen as rejecting are seen as doing it intentionally, and we know from our research that’s not the case. We learn how to parent intergenerationally; parents and caregivers are doing what they think is correct, how they think is going to help their child fit in, have a good life, keep their family together, and we’re showing them that the motives to love their child really need to be linked to behaviors that are going to reduce their risks, and not increase their risks, and that they can support their child even if they believe that being gay or transgender is wrong, because these behaviors are really powerful and really predict the futures of these LGBTQ young people. I know very often when I’ve met someone who is LGBTQ themselves, I can tell whether their family has been supportive or not because of how they interact with others, their level of self-awareness, of self-esteem, even their level of humanity. We invest in our children in different ways, and by teaching your child that who you are is to be reviled, who you are is a sin, who you are is wrong, that not only do your parents not love you but that maybe God doesn’t love you: we’re setting them up for a world of hurt, but also for a very short, devastating future, and these are the reasons for these high levels of health and mental health risks, early loss by suicide, self-harm, high levels of tragedy. And of course, what I think many parents don’t understand is when they are rejecting these children, that marks their family forever, because the family then becomes fractured as a result of that loss and never really gets healed unless they make an effort to do that. When the parent is rejecting their child, in essence, they are teaching that child to hate themselves. It’s no surprise that in our research that we’ve found that LGBTQ young people in families that rejected them were much more likely to be in relationships with someone who hurt them, where violence was part of it, to be victims of violence, because that’s what they expected, to have extreme levels of self-doubt, to actually have much lower educational levels and income levels because it even affects their ability for self-care. And these are things that parents and caregivers never think about, not only because we were the first to do this research and we still need help and support to get this information out, there are still so few places where diverse parents and caregivers can get access to accurate information in systems of care, about how to support your LGBTQ child. In an early paper that I wrote, I called on all pediatricians to teach parents and caregivers about sexual orientation and gender identity as part of well baby care, as part of normative child development. It’s not just going upstream and providing education upfront, but we can provide information whenever conflict erupts, whenever young people end up out of home and parents have thrown them out of the home, we can help reconnect families. We can make a difference at any level, but if we can do this before serious health and other problems have emerged, we can save a world of hurt. And I don't think our systems yet understand that this information is not routinely available to parents and caregivers, that they have to dig to find it, that they maybe have to find a group like Mama Dragons, or someone else, and that may be a threshold that’s really hard to cross for parents that are struggling and feel that no one understands, and maybe no one will respect their belief system. And so it’s a hard challenge to find someone that they can learn from, that they feel is going to respect their values and beliefs. That’s part of the challenge right now.
JEN: I find it fascinating too that your research points in a causal direction, we know because of your research that these rejecting behaviors lead to an increase in suicidality or self-harming behaviors or low income, those kinds of things. And it’s really easy for people who haven’t been let in on the information from the beginning to say things like “My son’s been using drugs for ten years, this is just his next crazy thing,” instead of being aware, and your research is really very clear, that being gay or being trans isn’t another decision at the end of a dysfunctional life, it’s actually that the behaviors and the things surrounding those connections lead to those behaviors maybe before they even tell anyone that they’re queer.
DR CAITLIN RYAN: Part of it I think that people don’t understand is that LGBTQ people don’t have higher levels of risk because of who they are, it’s because of how others treat them. Parents get inclinations about who their children are, whether they deny it or not, you know, little children who are gender-diverse, we see that at 18 months, 2 years, 3 years. From the research, we know that by age 3, children have a real sense of their gender identity. We never had language to talk about this, we didn’t have models for how to teach people about it, we didn't have the internet where we could disseminate not only diverse information but where children could see themselves reflected in someone who dressed like they actually feel inside. But not to be able to act that way, or be that way, or to talk about this or have language for it, is part of what puts them at risk because when parents don’t understand this, they are parenting the way they were parented.
But we’ve known throughout history that parents often end up with children who are very different than they are, some who have special needs, and some who have needs that they could never anticipate, and in this case the needs are seen as immoral or even un-Godly, and that has devastating consequences, not only for the child but also for the family.
And I think as we learn, we grow; and I think one of the things that is so incredibly important is to share the humanity of who these children are, but also who their families are. And so I think as families more and more are seen as being able to support these children, the level of prejudice against diverse families will drop, because the perception is that if you are racially or religiously conservative, culturally conservative, you will not be able to support this LGBTQ child, you will reject them, and that has set up a really serious barrier to engaging and involving and providing support for these families, and also for encouraging dialogue and communication between parents and children. Parents don’t talk about these things because they don’t know how to talk about them. If a young person hears, “Well, you’re from that background, forget about it, your parents will never be there for you,” they may never come out to them, may never tell them. They may never let them know how at risk they really are because of what they feel because they are afraid of rejection. And so what ends up maybe happening is tragedy before the parent even knows who their children are, which is really devastating.
JEN: I’m so sad that we’re out of time. With almost 50 years of research, I could listen to you talk about it probably for 50 years; I find it all so fascinating. I’m sure that on some level, you’re partially aware of the impact that your work has had on families, and I hope that you hear about it often. I hope you get that feedback. The type of work that you do maybe often feels invisible or behind the scenes, and relentless and exhausting, but you are absolutely saving lives, literally saving lives and families, including my own. I want you to know, like on a personal level, how grateful I am that not only did you help my family, and continue to help my family, before we ever even met, but I am so grateful that you are willing to come and share this important information to save lives and to save families that are out there just newly experiencing this, and we will include all of the links and all of the resources that we’ve talked about. And the conversations I’m sure will continue inside of our groups as well.
Thank you so much!
DR CAITLIN RYAN: Jen, Thank you for having me. And I guess the one request that I would have is: Help donate to support this work! I’m not really going to be able to carry it on much longer unless I get support from the community and even though we’ve made really substantial contributions over the years, we have really very few people from the community who actually financially support this work, maybe because they assume that I’ve done a good job of being able to fund it, but I’ve funded it on my own. And there's so much more that needs to be done and right now I’m mentoring young people to be able to carry it on but I need funding to continue.
JEN: Everybody, join me! Donate to the Family Acceptance Project! We can all do it with technology in just minutes of listening to this podcast, and show our appreciation for this absolutely essential work that’s been done. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
DR CAITLIN RYAN: Thank you.
JEN: For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, visit our website at mamadragons.org, or follow us on Instagram or Facebook. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, donate at mamadragons.org or click the link in the show notes. We’re glad you’re here.