It’s common to hear teenagers complain, “My parents just don’t understand me.” When your child is LGBTQ, and your experience is that of a straight and/or cisgender person, that may actually be more true than we realize. We surveyed queer youth and gathered their feedback to learn what they most wish their parents understood. Jen sits down with queer and trans therapist Cole Brennan to discuss a handful of the things that LGBTQ teens submitted as potential understanding growth points for their parents.
Special Guest: Cole Brennan
Cole is a queer and transgender mental health therapist Ellie Mental Health in the Denver area, former bike mechanic and youth outdoor educator, and lover of nature, adventures, and above all, people. Cole works primarily with LGBTQ+ identified youth and adults, and has a passion for helping his clients find their innate love and joy for themselves, their many identities, and the world around them. Cole lives in Denver, Colorado with his partner, two young children, and two equally young pups.
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It’s common to hear teenagers complain, “My parents just don’t understand me.” When your child is LGBTQ, and your experience is that of a straight and/or cisgender person, that may actually be more true than we realize. We surveyed queer youth and gathered their feedback to learn what they most wish their parents understood. Jen sits down with queer and trans therapist Cole Brennan to discuss a handful of the things that LGBTQ teens submitted as potential understanding growth points for their parents.
Special Guest: Cole Brennan
Cole is a queer and transgender mental health therapist Ellie Mental Health in the Denver area, former bike mechanic and youth outdoor educator, and lover of nature, adventures, and above all, people. Cole works primarily with LGBTQ+ identified youth and adults, and has a passion for helping his clients find their innate love and joy for themselves, their many identities, and the world around them. Cole lives in Denver, Colorado with his partner, two young children, and two equally young pups.
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 www.mamadragons.org.
Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Donate to this podcast
JEN: Hello and welcome to In The Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through this journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.
It is pretty common for young people and teens to express the idea that their parents just don’t understand. And this seems to be almost inevitable on topics where parents really do have a different lived experience and haven’t gone through some of the things their kids are going through. I am convinced that any parent listening to this podcast intently wants to understand, but sometimes communication and big feelings can get in the way.
So we asked queer youth directly – and anonymously – what they wish their parents understood. And we had dozens of really thoughtful, and sometimes amusing, responses. A heartfelt Thank You to all of the youth that took time to reply to us. Today we’ve brought an interpreter to help us really understand what the kids are trying to tell us with the things that they are articulating here. Cole Brennan is here with us today as a bridge builder and interpreter.
COLE: So glad to be here.
Cole Brennan is a queer and transgender mental health therapist with Ellie Mental Health in the Denver area, former bike mechanic and youth outdoor educator, and lover of nature, adventures, and above all, people. Cole works primarily with LGBTQ+ identified youth and adults, and has a passion for helping his clients find their innate love and joy for themselves, their many identities, and the world around them. Cole lives in Denver, Colorado with his partner, two young children, and two equally young pups.
COLE: Good to be here. Thanks so much for having me back.
JEN: I want to note before we get started that several of the teens did indicate that their parents pretty much did understand and were doing a great job! Kudos to all those parents. It can be kind of hard sometimes to listen with curiosity and not get defensive. But that wasn’t the majority of responses we got. Some of the responses had a similar energy to each other, though. So, if you're listening and your child didn’t respond, we all might still learn some things from the voices of our kids’ peers. And I’m going to tweak some of the identifying information a bit just to protect any possible kids who did. I’ll never change the content, though. All right, Cole. Are you ready for me?
COLE: I’m ready.
JEN: I’m going to start with this one because I hear the parent side of this very often. This is from a trans fem, nonbinary 16-year-old. And they say, “I am not the kid they knew when I was, like, 6.” Interpret for us.
COLE: This is a great one to start with because I think that this taps into a lot of the journey that the parents of queer and trans kids go through. Which is that, as parents, we all have these kinds of dreams or ideas about who our kids are going to be, who they are, what their identities might be. Or maybe we don’t even ever think about what their identities might be. Because, if you don’t have an experience of questioning your identity, then a lot of identities are just assumed, like gender.
And so for the parents of trans youth, it can be really confusing to look at who their kid is saying that they are and comparing that to the kid that they have known since the child was born, right? So, for example, some parents of trans youth will say things like, “You know, my kid is saying that he is trans. But he never seemed to be bothered by wearing dresses or doing more girly activities when he was a kid. So, is it really true that he is trans? Can that be real?” and I think that it can be confusing because we have these ideas of what gender means. And when we think that gender is tied to the interests that we have or the clothing that we wear, then it can be really confusing when we think about how, if a person never said when they were 4 that they didn’t want to wear dresses or they did want to wear dresses or something like that, that that says anything about their gender identity.
But gender is so much more complex than that. It’s more complex than interests. It’s more complex than attire. It’s more complex than friendships. Gender identity is really a question of how we feel internally and who we feel we are in the context of the social environments that we live in. And that can look like so many different things. So, for example, you might have a trans kid who is saying, “Hey, parents, I am a boy and I know that you thought I was a girl. But I’m not. I’m a boy.” And they still might want to wear dresses. He still might want to just do art or just have long hair or things that are more traditionally feminine. But if he says, “I feel like a boy inside.” Then that’s right for him.
Because there are so many different ways to do gender and I think that that can be a really confusing thing when we don’t have the experience of living as a trans person. I guess it’s hard to explain quite how that’s different because, if you don’t have the lived experience of saying, “Well, I don’t feel like this gender that I was told that I am.” The best way that I can describe it, when I was coming out as trans is that it felt like I was wearing someone else’s outfit and trying to go out in the world pretending that I was someone else. And it felt so uncomfortable because people weren’t interacting with me in the way that felt like me. And it’s hard to describe because it doesn’t really make sense logically. It only makes sense as a lived experience. I don’t know if that makes sense to describe it that way.
But I think, when kids are saying, “I’m not the person you thought that I am.” What it goes back to, is they’re having a lived experience that might be hard to describe. It might be contrary to what you’ve experienced of them as a kid growing up, what your concepts are related to how a person’s gender is tied to their interests, their friendships, their style, any of those things. And ultimately, it goes back to this internal feeling that can only be described through experience.
JEN: I think back – I don’t know why, but this makes me think back to when I was younger – and I pretty much was 1,000 percent convinced that I wanted a minimum of eight children. I spent years, probably a decade, of my early years convinced that I wanted to be the mother of eight to ten. And everyone believed it. It came up for me forever after. When it came down to it, I did not want 10 children. It would not have been safe or healthy for any of us for me to have 10 children. But for a long time, people would say to me, “You’ve always wanted so many children.” And I’m like, “Hmm, when I was 12. We’ve moved past that.” So when I read this kid's question, I felt that frustration of, “I get to grow up. I get to evolve. I get to discover myself and find myself. And you don’t get to pigeon hole me back in my first grade.” Because I was probably very ecstatic about it at the time. Anyway, that’s what triggered in my head. But I’m going to move to the next one. Are you ready?
COLE: Okay.
JEN: This one is from a 16-year-old, trans masc teen, and he said, “I wish they understood that this is not a fad and it is not a phase.”
COLE: Yeah. I hear this one a lot. I think there’s a natural concern for parents to want to support their kids who are saying something that is potentially scary, definitely life changing, and it can feel scary to want to get behind their kid and support them. And, in reality, when we think about what the most important thing is, is that – well first of all, regardless of the studies that are kind of going all around the medias right now, there’s a lot of studies that are being cited right now that are spreading a lot of really, really harmful misinformation about kids identifying as trans and then later not identifying as trans.
Those studies are not accurate. Check your sources. If you’re reading those things, please, please, please check your sources because even reputable newspapers like the New York Times are publishing articles that are full of misinformation and it’s causing a lot of harm and it’s causing a lot of parents to question their kids and to say, “I read this thing about kids later changing their minds.” And in reality, very few do. If you’re hearing your kid say, “I identify as trans.” Then believe them.
The most important thing is that your kid knows that they have your support when it comes down to it. Even if they were to be one of the very, very few people who do later discover through their own journey of self-identity exploration that they don’t identify as trans any longer – which I think the rates of that are realistically between .5 to 3 percent of people who identify as trans later change their mind about it – if your kid happens to be one of those, that very small percentage, then they still need to know that you’ve got their back. They still need to know that you believe what they say and that you take their experience as real.
If they say, “I’m trans.” Then they want to hear you say, “Cool. I’ve got your back. Let’s figure out how we’re going to help you get through whatever comes next.” Because ultimately, that’s going to strengthen your relationship with your kid as opposed to expressing the worries. Of course it’s natural, right? We worry about our kids. Of course. But if we let those worries come through in the way that we express or question our support for our kids, they feel that questioning of support. And it’s going to make them a lot less likely to come to you as a safe person to talk through this journey with. The reality is, it’s most likely not a fad if they’re saying that it’s real. Just take that at face value. It’s real for them, very much so.
JEN: This makes me think of any time that we discount each other’s feelings, right? Like if I said to you, “I am so sad.” And you were like, “You’re not sad. It was your birthday yesterday. You were at a great party.” And obviously, l would probably not tell you anything after that about how I felt if it feels so dismissed.
COLE: Right. Exactly.
JEN: But this is a big thing. By the time kids tell, they’ve known.
COLE: Yeah. Usually for a long time.
JEN: A demi boy who is 16-years-old said, “Just from the mental standpoint, my dad always calls me lazy because I have no motivation to go outside. But that is only because everyone is either calling me the wrong gender or just rude to me about my pronouns.” I can feel the dad being like, “Go outside!”
COLE: When I think back about parent intentions. We want our kids to grow up to be self-supporting and the ability to go on and have happy fulfilling lives in which they take care of themselves and their environment, the homes that they live in and all that. Doing their chores on their own. I think that’s often the intention. When we call our kids lazy, one, it’s just going to make them feel shut down. Laziness is – even if they’re not following through on the actions that we asked them to do – it’s typically more about underlying emotions that are going on that might be preventing them from doing whatever it is. And that could be anxiety. That could be stress.
So what I like to tell parents is, get curious. If your kid is not doing something that you’re asking them to do, get curious. And ask them, “What’s going on that’s making it hard for you to do this? Is there any barrier to you doing this?” Whether that is a chore or homework or whatever it is. Because, if your kid, if they’re not doing homework for a specific class, for example, it could very well be that they have a teacher who doesn’t support and respect their identity. And that’s going to make it really hard for them to be motivated to do their homework for that specific class because it’s probably going to bring up a whole lot of feelings for them every single time they open up their book to do homework for that specific class.
So there might be more going on that’s making it hard for them. And expressing care, expressing our support, expressing encouragement and problem solving with them. They probably have some really good ideas as to “What could help you overcome this barrier?” They probably have some great ideas. Or, at the very least, would be open to engaging with you in conversation about it. As parents, I think when we can check our assumptions about what’s going on for our kids, then it strengthens our connection. When we can get curious and talk to our kids about it, that’s when we have a better connection with our kids. And greater connection with our kids is going to lead to better motivation for them to follow through on the things that we hope that they will do.
JEN: So, I’m not a kid. But is there a correlation between the idea of laziness and – for a general rule for parents – if all the sudden your kid is lazy, can we make some assumptions about depression or is that kind of not presenting the same way for kids?
COLE: I think it really depends. For some kids, it might for sure. Depression is hard, right, because depression kind of comes along with a whole lot of other symptoms that aren’t just doing the things that they usually do or doing the things that they are asked to do by parents. I think it would be much too broad of a stroke to say that a kid is depressed if they’re acting “Lazy”. I think, again, I’m going to go back to connection because if we can get curious and try to just say, “Hey. What’s going on that’s making this hard for you to do this?” Then that puts us in the position of a safe person. I think oftentimes parents, especially parents of teens, can get into this pattern of being adversaries and when parents and teens become each other's adversaries, then that’s when the resistance to doing the things that parents ask them to do increases.
And so get on the same team. You and your kid, you’re on the same team. You kid ultimately, they want your support. They want your approval. They want your love and care. And they might not be expressing it in the best way possible. But they’re teens, it's to be expected, right, and that’s okay. Depression, I think it’s definitely good to have an eye out for depression. But that would go alongside some other indicators like if they’re acting really sad all the time or if they have withdrawn from friends or from the activities that they have loved doing before. There might be some other factors involved. And if you are worried about your teen feeling depressed, you can ask them if they’re feeling depressed. And you can also suggest, “Hey, you’re seeming low. Would you want to just go talk to a counselor just to see if that might be a helpful thing for you?”
JEN: Awesome. All right. You’ll notice the next one’s 16 again. That was our most, I’m guessing a friend group got a hold of our survey because a chunk of 16 years olds. But this 16 year old boy shared, “My parents are very understanding of me. And I’m super grateful for that. But I wish they understood why I have such strong emotions and anger toward the people who don’t understand and the people who are rude about what I’m going through or who I am.”
COLE: Anger’s an interesting one because I think that different cultures have different approaches to anger. And when I say cultures, I mean microcultures like each family can have their own microculture, right? And anger can be something that we think of as a destructive emotion. In reality, there’s no such thing as a destructive emotion. Emotions are just feelings. They are neutral, more or less. Anger can actually be a really positive motivating force. Without anger, there would never be motivation to change the injustices in the world. Without anger, we wouldn’t see someone being wronged and feel motivated to step in and support them. And one thing that I think is really awesome about teens is their ability to tap into this type of anger. And the teenage years, kids are just discovering their own identities and where they fit in the world, and a broader social structure.
And there’s something that’s really magical about this specific time of life where people are just trying to figure out how they fit in and how the systems work and where those systems get it wrong. And so the anger, I actually think, is a really powerfully positive emotion that, when channeled right – and this is where anger is funny, right – because we can certainly cause harm through our anger. We can speak and act through our anger in ways that cause harm to relationships. But if we can help our kids to channel their anger in a positive direction, man, they can be unstoppable. It is just amazing to watch kids tap into that anger and motivate them to write letters to elected officials or speak up on social media or stand up for kids who are being wronged.
There’s so many amazing things that anger can do. But if we’re afraid of anger and if we tell our kids, “Don’t be angry.” And try to dismiss it like, “Well, they just don’t understand and it’s fine.” Well, be angry. If someone is doing something that’s causing harm, help your kid to see that that anger can go in a positive direction and lead to a positive change and that there’s a right way to do it that won’t cause greater harm. I think sometimes kids need guidance from the adults in their lives to help them see how they can tap into anger in a way that’s positive and speak through that anger in a way that leads to great social change for themselves and others around them.
JEN: Before we leave this one, could you – I’m wording that badly. Can you maybe provide maybe some insight about why these sorts of things are making kids mad because I think our generation, older people, we’re only allowed to get mad if someone was being mean on purpose. Right, it was all about intent for us. Like, “He didn’t mean to be rude. He’s so old. We have to give him a pass.” And you kind of touched on it, but why would this kid be mad about the stuff that’s happening when the parents are just able to, like, water off a duck's back.
COLE: I think a lot of it comes from the ways in which we haven’t always been aware of how harmful things are. For example, for a lot of people who are white, realizing the harm that color blindness does. And here is a correlation, right, because color blindness is something that, in my generation, I was taught people are just people and we shouldn’t pay attention to the color of their skin. And there’s something that, sure, that's a lovely idea. But in practice, people experience significant racism throughout their life. And so the color of their skin very much matters because that shapes their experience. And if you are white person who’s never experienced racial injustice, then you might not have that lived experience of how poisonous that mentality of color blindness can be because it erases the significance of the harm that that person has experienced throughout their life. We see the same thing in the LGBTQ community. If you’ve ever heard the term heterosexist. Hetersoexist is a concept that everything is just naturally heterosexual unless indicated otherwise. But that assumption completely erases the experience of people who don’t identify as heterosexual. When we make an assumption that – I’m blanking on a good example of heterosexism right now.
JEN: It kind of makes me think of when I say to myself, “How would that make me feel if I went to the grocery store and someone said ‘Excuse me, sir.’ It wouldn’t even hurt my feelings. So why are you trying to make such a big deal of it?” But it is because that consistent lived experience that you’re talking about is so different.
COLE: Right. And so using that example. That’s a good example, because for you, that might be kind of confusing as to why someone might say that or what they’re seeing that’s leading them to say “Sir.” It would be easy to dismiss it as a mistake. But for someone who identifies as trans, especially right now, we live in a time when being trans is a very, very politically charged issue. And so there’s a lot of people who are intentionally saying harmful things, intentionally using the wrong pronouns, intentionally using the wrong names, intentionally misgendering people in all sorts of identifying ways. And it brings up a lot of fear for people who identify as trans or even as queer. I mean, even I think the big backlash about trans folks is raising concern that our gay marriage rights next, or is it actually safe for me to be out as a queer person because it’s not feeling safe right now. And when we don’t feel safe, we’re going to get angry when people do or say things even unintentionally that bring up that fear. And so I think we have to think about how the intention – yes, intentions matter. Of course they matter And impact really matters. And I think we can kind of dismiss how like using the wrong pronouns for example, is our intentions might be “Yes. I want to support my kid.” But if we dismiss the impact that using the wrong pronouns or pronouns that are different than the ones that another person requests that we use for them, then we dismiss the harm that they’re feeling every single time they hear the wrong pronouns used for them, which is probably a lot for most trans folks. And the impact matters despite our best intentions.
JEN: All right. We have a 14-year-old who is gender fluid and bisexual. When asked what they wish their parents understood, they said, “How hard it is being a queer teen in this generation.” Emphasis mine.
COLE: Yeah. This is a good one. I think this kind of speaks to what I was talking about, is that over the last few years, queerness and especially transness has become such a politically charged issue that it can almost feel like as LGBTQIA folks, we are wearing targets on our back which is really different than my experience growing up. Coming out as queer and trans in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was very different. We, most of myself and my peers, we felt a lot of aloneness in it. Or not even necessarily aloneness – some of us, yeah – but more just like, we were so fringe that nobody was thinking about us at all. So, like, trying to find, for example, books in the library about being queer or trans was near impossible. There just weren’t that many options because there hasn’t been that much written about our experiences. It’s different now. What’s different now is not so much that people don’t realize that we exist so much as people do realize that we exist and they have really strong opinions about it one way or another. Either they’re strongly in support or they are strongly opposed to the concept of us. And I think that’s part of what is really hard right now. So I talk to a lot of my teen queer and trans clients about this is like, it can feel like every day, especially given different people’s environments, it can feel like stepping out of the house or even stepping out of their bedroom is hostile. And you're entering a hostile environment whenever you leave your safe place. Or maybe there isn’t even a safe place because people have ideas about who you are and they have strong opinions about what that means. And when you have a large portion of the country saying you don’t even exist, “What do you mean I don’t exist. I’m right here in front of you and you don’t know what’s going on inside of my mind and inside of my heart.” And so it can be, I think, as trans people right now and trans teens trying to understand – not only trying to understand their own experience but trying to understand the societal structures that we live in, the cultural systems that are at play, and how they fit into it. All of that can feel really overwhelming. And it can feel really scary because it’s hard to find yourself and feel comfortable and confident in who you are when you’re hearing from all around you these really hostile perspectives about who you are, who you should be, what you should and should not be allowed to do, what you should and should not be allowed to do not only just in terms of sports or bathrooms, but even with your own bodies. Not even being allowed, being told that you shouldn’t do things to your own body that you feel like would really help you to feel a lot better. And people all around saying “Well, that’s wrong and that’s mutilation.” This is a hard time to be, and I don’t think there’s any way around it. This is a really hard time to be, especially trans, but queer too.
JEN: I can hear in my mind a generation of people saying, “There’s books all over the place and you guys have clubs in your schools. And I don’t know why you’re so upset. It’s actually cool to be gay.” Right. You hear that all the time, it’s cool to be gay, now. It’s popular and dismissing the intensity of what these kids see and hear that’s just ugly or dishonest about them all the time. When you’re growing up and you’re hearing politicians in charge of your state refer to you as a pedophile or a groomer or disgusting. I don’t think, when I was a kid, nobody talked about it. It was just kind of invisible. Which had to have been hard for the queer kids. But it wasn’t as hostile as it seems, like you said.
So we have an 18-year-old lesbian tells her parents, “You can never fully understand what it’s like. No matter how many questions and discussions, we will always have unique struggles that you can’t get. And that’s ok. We want your love and support. We don’t need you to fix us or solve all of our problems.”
COLE: I don’t know how to translate that or interpret that. It was so beautifully said. It was really beautiful.
JEN: She did a good job, didn’t she.
COLE: Yes. I think this is so exactly right. And I don’t even know that this is just like a parent/kid dynamic. This is just a human/human dynamic. We want to be able to understand other people. And when it comes down to it, we’re never going to be able to fully understand another’s perspective because we’ve never lived their entire life and been them, right? And that is OK. Exactly as she said, that’s OK. The power of empathy, empathy doesn’t mean that we have to understand what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes. Empathy just means that we have to understand what some of their emotions might be. So we can all tap into feeling scared. We can all tap into the emotion of feeling rejected. We can all tap into the emotion of feeling othered in some way. Maybe that’s not in terms of sexuality or gender, but maybe that’s in terms of like, you walk into the room and you’re the only person of your gender. So, if you’re a woman, you walk into a room just of men. That can be an intimidating experience. Or a man walking into a room just of women. Or, I mean, really any experience of feeling like you are outside the norm and feeling alone in that. We can all kind of tap into what that might feel like. That’s the important thing that we understand. That we can understand the emotional experience [inaudible] of a person, not that we have to understand all of the details of it.
JEN: I wish I knew how to get back in contact with these kids. ‘Cause I would be like, “Hey. That was good.”
We have another 18-year-old who offers this insight to parents, “I wish my past self, and my previous labels I’ve gone through, weren’t considered taboo to talk about. Like, if you want to talk about memories from before I started transitioning, or different labels I’ve cycled through, you don’t have to walk on eggshells around me. If you make a mistake or get confused or don’t know how to talk about something, I’m not going to bite you, it’s ok!” I think some kids might feel the opposite of this.
COLE: This is a good one. I think you’re exactly right. I think it’s so person-to-person and a lot of that, I think, has to do with how validated they have been in their experiences. If someone has been told over and over again that they’re delusional or wrong or it’s just a phase or something. If their experience has been invalidated, they might be less open to hearing about experiences from before they identified a certain way. But maybe not. It depends on the person. But I think one of the things that we can do is we can check in with the individual, right? You know your kids. And so, or if you feel like you don’t know your kids as well as you want to, then it’s never too late. Like, literally, it is never too late to try to build a stronger relationship with your kids. And if you feel like you really want to understand why they feel a certain way about something, like if you want to be able to talk about experiences from their childhood and don’t know what they’re going to feel comfortable with, talk to them about it. They’ll probably have some really great insights about what feels good, what doesn’t feel good. And believe them when they say it. I think that’s a big thing that as parents we can sometimes forget is that we can believe our kids when they talk about their experiences because whether or not it’s a logical and rational experience, it’s an experience that feels very real to them and go with it. That’s just for anyone. If we hear someone talk about something, you know, inside, the emotions are real.
JEN: I think these kids are so smart. I’m just astonished at every comment. But this is a 17- year-old transgender male who says, “I wish they understood how hard it is to live with the world where everyone knows and is constantly thinking about your gender.“
COLE: This is an interesting one because I think as trans people we are very aware of our gender and we are very aware that it is outside the norm. And I think for most people who are cisgender, they don’t think – you know I’m not cisgender, so I can’t speak to the experience of being cis – but most of the cis people that I know and have talked to don’t really think a whole lot about their gender until they learn about or talk to someone who is trans. And then they start to reflect on their own gender identity a little bit, in a different way. But even then, it’s not something that’s constantly present on their minds. Whereas, when you walk through the world as a trans person, you are very aware of your gender, basically, at all times. And this is interesting because gender permeates basically every aspect of human interactions. It permeates how we talk to other people, the kinds of relationships we build, the ways in which people feel comfortable talking to us. It connects to how people perceive us as someone that they may or may not be attracted to because of sexuality. And how that’s kind of how we judge our sexuality based on the perception that we have about another person’s gender. It just touches everything. And so, when you have the experience of being someone who doesn’t fit into the cisgender binary world, if you step outside of that, you’re very aware of how you fit within all of those structures and especially if you’re someone who doesn’t pass 100 percent of the time which most teens don’t. Then you’re also probably very aware that people are going to be looking at you and also thinking about your gender and how you fit into all those different societal boxes, because we do, whether we think about it or not. I remember learning about this years back that, when we first are walking up to another person, in our brains before we register their age, before we register their race, before we register their class, we always have assumptions about another person. But before we register any of those things, our first perception is gender. I don’t think that we realize that until we look – unless we are trans, basically.
JEN: I noticed that even online, somebody will post a picture. I’ve been friends with them for five years and had fantastic conversations with them. And they’ll post a picture and I’ll be like, I didn’t realize you were a girl? Or I didn’t realize you were a guy? And it absolutely doesn’t matter. And I don’t care. But there is, even in this invisible space, somehow, subconsciously, I’ve created this identity or picture of them that includes gender and how much more real that must be in real life. And I wonder if that feeling of everyone’s thinking about gender is just going to get more intense as the laws – like the bathroom bills, how do you even enter a bathroom if you’re constantly worried people are “looking out for you.” And before it seems like you could not really even notice that trans people existed and now you’re hunting for them, legally. These poor kids.
All right. So this is an asexual 15-year-old who had this to say, “I deal with so much judgment at school all day and it's hard. Sometimes I just need space to be by myself and breathe when I get home.”
COLE: This is a good one because I think that it can be hard for us to, when we’re adults, to think back to the experience of being a teenager in high school. And the intensity of it. It is so intense. High school is such an intense environment, especially if you fit outside of the norm. And for, I think especially for people who identify as ace or asexual or aromantic or a label that is even less common than trans or queer or something like that. The less common the identity, the more alone they are likely to feel. And not just in their lived experience day-to-day, but also probably based on how other kids are treating them because there is nothing quite like being different when you’re in high school. Kids will target that and they will say stuff. I don’t know about all day long, kind of depends on the high school. Some high schools, probably all day long. Some high schools, it’s probably just occasionally. But in any case, it’s very likely that your teen needs space to decompress because the pressure of just trying to survive day-to-day as a teen in high school, even if you don’t identify as something outside of the norm, is intense. But, if you do, then it can be really hard to feel like you can just be yourself. And I think, for a lot of kids, if they have a supportive home, to be able to come home and just feel like they’re finally free of the pressure of needing to conform or having to defend their right to exist as someone who identifies as something different. It is huge to be able to just come home and feel safe because it can sometimes, as an LGBTQIA+ kid, feel like it is you against the rest of the school and to be able to come home to your safe bedroom or wherever that is, your safe space at home, and just to have the comfort of that safety is – I think the significance of that cannot be downplayed.
JEN: My kid could’ve written that one, except that my kid’s not 15 and asexual. But for the moms out there who miss your kids all day long and are super excited to talk to them, this can be hard. This can be hard to respect that. But not all of our kids are extroverts. I read that one and I was like, “Is that my kid? No.” OK. That was not.
All right, we have a 17-year-old, non-binary, lesbian who says, “It's easier to come out or explain different parts of your identity on your own time, even if your parents find out and are supportive it can be scary and uncomfortable to bring it up before the kid is ready.”
COLE: That’s a good one. It’s so true. I think kids want to feel in control of – not kids, anyone – I don't know anyone who doesn’t want to feel in control of being able to share who they are with the people in their lives on their own terms. And I think the thing that can be really hard is that even when parents are really supportive and really just want to tell their kids how much they love them and want to show up for them, it can be really easy to maybe overlook the experience of how scary it can be to come out. Coming out can be really terrifying because there’s always the what-ifs. I can’t tell you how many teens I’ve talked to who are like, “I’m pretty sure my parents would be supportive, but what if they’re not?” Or, “I don’t think that my parents are going to accept me when I tell them, but what if they don’t just not accept me, but what if they kick me out? What if I’m facing homelessness if I come out to them?” And the terror that kids have to sit in with that, especially if your kids are under 18, and/or are still living with you or still dependent on you then the fear of the loss of your support brings up the fear of the loss of their safety and security to stay alive. It’s sadly not uncommon for kids to come out and be kicked out of their homes. Rates of homelessness for LGBTQ teens is exponentially higher than it is for straight kids. And just rates of people coming out and risking the loss of social support from their parents or parents saying we love you, but we can’t accept this part of you. That alone is terrifying because who wants to hear that love is conditional, that the parent’s love for them is conditional. No one wants to hear that, right? You’d be fine, we’d love you more if you just weren’t gay or if you weren’t trans. But that’s not an uncommon thing within the LGBTQ community. And so, even if you fully support and can’t wait to tell your kids how much you love them and want to show up for them, letting them kind of do that on their own terms, it can be really important. And, for parents who are kind of like, “Well, then what do I do? How can I tell my kid that I . . .”
JEN: Because I don’t want my kid to sit in that fear any longer, right?
COLE: Right. So maybe something that could be done is instead of directly going to your kids and being like, “Hey, I heard that you’re X, Y, or Z?”
JEN: I was reading on your phone…
COLE: Or I was reading on your phone, right? Yeah. Instead of calling out their identity, planting little like, “Hey, I just heard about this trans teen who was doing this cool thing. Isn’t that cool?” I don't know. Something like that, that indicates a level of support for LGBTQ people in general will significantly decrease that fear. And so if you suspect that your kid might be somewhere in the LGBTQ community, but they haven’t come out to you yet, maybe just try planting some little messages of support about the community in general or your beliefs around LGBTQ folks. And just see if they bring it up.
JEN: Is some of that fear, like, “If my mom figured it out, maybe she’s OK and we had an OK talk. But maybe everybody’s figured it out and not everybody’s safe, like maybe I’m not as sneaky.” Is the fear bigger than just addressing it with your own specific kid?
COLE: Do you mean like would that kid be thinking, does everyone know that I’m queer?
JEN: Yeah.
COLE: Yeah. Perhaps. I mean, it could be. I mean, if they haven’t come out to anyone, then they might be thinking – or if they’re just in the process of starting to come out to themselves, right, because sometimes there’s the period of time which they’re starting to question their own identity and figure out what that means for themselves before they’ve even told anyone. And so there could be much bigger fears. I think you’re right. There can be much bigger fears around, well even if my parents love and support me, what if coming out means that I’m going to get bullied at school every day when I go? Or what if it means that my grandparents won’t love me anymore. There could be bigger fears just outside of the parent/child relationship that are making it kind of feel unsafe for them. I think still going back to that idea of planting seeds that indicate your support for the community goes a long way.
JEN: This is an 18-year-old, non-binary person and they said, “It’s scary to live anywhere in a Republican-led state. I know you think it’s fine because our area is ‘super gay.’ But the legislature can impact my life even inside my little safe town.”
COLE: Absolutely, yes. This is a huge one right now. And I would even go so far as to say even in blue states, there is still a big fear because of the way that politics have been going and how rapidly laws are changing, especially against trans people. There’s a real fear that the 2024 election, all that it would take would be one non-supportive candidate getting elected to make sweeping laws that impact every single trans, nonbinary, or even queer person in the entire country regardless of which state they live in, regardless of how supportive the town is that they live in. And there’s something really nice about living in an area where there are a lot of LGBTQ folks. It feels nice to be able to kind of like go about your day-to-day life without fear of dirty looks or physical violence out in the streets as much, right, as you might be facing if you lived in a more conservative area. But that doesn’t mean that the fear of the laws is not there. Where we have, there’s different levels of fear. There’s fear of loss of relationships, fear of physical safety, fear of being able to do the things that you want to do with your life, whether that is marry the person that you want or change your body to fit the way that you identify, or use the bathrooms that feel right to you. If you live anywhere in this country right now, it’s an unstable feeling even if you live in a really progressive state because right now, nothing feels certain.
JEN: I can hear in my mind parents thinking that they’re comforting a child who feels afraid by being like, “It’s okay. Don’t worry. Relax.” Right, trying to help them. “We live in this super cushy area, very queer.” But leaving that kid to hold that on their own.
COLE: I think you’re exactly right. I think what people are needing when they express those fears, they don’t need reassurance. They need empathy. They need someone to say, “You’re right. It is a scary time. and I wish that it weren’t this way. I wish we weren’t all facing these fears. But we’re going to face it together.”
JEN: I liked that you acknowledged so rapidly how real that fear is. I appreciate that. Probably they’re not going to listen to this. But I want to thank all of the teens who contributed. I appreciate their vulnerability and wisdom. I’m sure there’s some level of anxiety even answering these anonymous questions for us. So I want to thank them for being bold and brave and trying to help us out a little bit. And of course, thank you Cole for helping us a little bit better understand these crazy kids we’re trying to raise.
COLE: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
JEN: Thanks for joining us here In the Den. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends, and take a minute to leave a positive rating and review wherever you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at mamadragons.org.