I didn’t think that I would ever write the words “I feel sorry for Elon Musk”—but then again, much in life has not turned out the way I thought it would. Despite the tech mogul’s immense wealth and the fact that his politics and their impact on the world seem to grow more abhorrent with each passing day, I feel sorry for Elon Musk. 

I feel sorrier, to be sure, for the many people harmed by his actions: a group that has seemed to grow by the hour lately, given the recent changes Musk has overseen as a senior adviser to US President Donald Trump. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, launched in January to cut federal spending, has terminated federal diversity, equity and inclusion grants and contracts, and cancelled thousands of contracts for international aid. And under Musk’s ownership, the social media company X has dismantled content moderation policies and allowed anti-trans rhetoric to flourish. 

I feel a particular solidarity and kinship with Vivian Jenna Wilson, Musk’s estranged trans daughter. In an interview with conservative provocateur Jordan Peterson last summer, Musk alleged that he’d been tricked into signing documents that authorized gender-affirming care for Wilson. He described Wilson as “dead” and “killed by the woke mind virus,” the latter a concept that right-wingers have used to refer to the penchant for progressive social ideas. Yet as I heard him say those words in a video shared on X, I felt something in my heart soften toward him for the first time—not because I agree with or endorse his noxious opinions on trans people and gender-affirming care for youth, but because I have heard similar sentiments before. I have heard them from parents of queer and trans youth whom I have worked with throughout my career. I have heard them from my own parents, directed toward me, their transgender daughter. And I know that such hostility often contains real grief.

Between the ages of sixteen and thirty-one, I worked in the overlapping fields of grassroots queer community-building, social work and clinical child and family therapy. During that time, I worked with queer and trans youth and their families in a drop-in centre, a psychiatry department, a sexuality clinic and a community-based therapy program. I also coordinated and facilitated an educational program for parents of trans and gender non-conforming youth for a handful of years, meeting over a hundred parents in that role alone. A core theme I encountered across all those contexts was the grief that many parents of trans youth experience. These parents could not find a way to love their kids as they were, instead mourning who they had thought their children would be. This grief was often paired with anger toward the LGBTQ2S+ community, which some parents framed as having “stolen their kids.”

Like many millennial queer activists, I had been trained by my peers to react to such sentiments by dismissing them outright as wrongheaded and problematic. Contemporary psychological theory and research findings assert that parental expressions of grief and anger over children coming out and transitioning can be significantly harmful to queer and trans youth. A trailblazing 2010 study led by American clinical social worker Caitlin Ryan and published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing shows a clear link between familial support and positive mental and physical health outcomes for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth. Ryan and her team found that about 38 percent of LGBT youth who reported low levels of family acceptance experienced suicidal thoughts in the past six months, compared to only 18.5 percent of LGBT youth from highly accepting families. Youth who reported higher levels of family acceptance also scored better on self-esteem, social support and general health.

Yet in the role of a practitioner, sitting across from adults caught in a sea of rage, pain, fear and sadness, it was clear that it would be neither kind, nor effective in supporting the wellness of trans youth, to tell these parents to just get over themselves. As I listened to them talk and looked into their eyes, I knew that their fears came from somewhere deep within. Those fears would not be assuaged through academic debate—they needed to be met with compassion in order to be transformed. 

When I watched that video of Musk, I thought of the many parents who grieve their living transgender children. These parents’ speech and actions are frequently deeply damaging to the very relationships with their children they claim to hold so dear. With every hateful word they utter, they work against the closeness they long to share with their kids. But I have found that many of these parents also hold their own secret insecurities and painful histories around gender. Their anger and bitterness are often a disguise for a deep wellspring of fear and shame around the parental terror of having failed your child.

What the parents I met needed was a kind and curious presence: someone who wanted to understand on a deeper level what was happening, what they really feared and what they were really longing for. This tells us something about what we need to solve the “culture war” around trans youth and gender-affirming care. First, we won’t get very far without building spaces for true dialogue and deeper understanding. And second, it would be much easier for parents to let go of their fears about their trans children in a society where it is safe for anyone to be gender non-conforming. 

Youth gender transition, and in particular gender-affirming care, has become one of the most politically charged and polarizing topics in popular discourse. Several public figures, including Musk, Peterson and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, have made headlines by speaking out against youth transition, with some even decrying it as child abuse and medical malpractice. Journalists, academics, healthcare researchers, content creators and politicians have jumped into the fray—which almost always has the effect of raising their public profiles and expanding their audiences. The self-styled gender-critical movement has become big business, at least for a certain group of social and political influencers. 

The upshot is that youth gender-affirming care has been legally restricted or banned in jurisdictions across the world, including in many states in the US and the entire United Kingdom. In December, Alberta passed a bill to ban transition-related surgeries for minors and to prohibit prescriptions of gender-affirming hormone therapy for minors under sixteen. Such legislation has been introduced despite the protests of not only the trans community, but also prominent medical organizations and bodies of experts that have spoken to the potentially severe psychological impact—including suicidal ideation—of denying trans youth gender-affirming care.

The gender-critical movement typically frames youth transition as a problem of psychological illness, or of social contagion, a theory that suggests young people are “suddenly” coming out as trans because of social influences. Transness is seen as a problem within the child that can be solved by therapizing away their gender non-conformity, or by insulating them from the corruptive influence of trans representation in culture and society. 

But both these approaches very clearly do not work. Therapeutic practices meant to “cure” young people of being trans, also called conversion therapy, have been strongly disavowed by mainstream medical organizations and banned in Canada since 2022. Meanwhile, research suggests that the social contagion theory is nothing more than a myth. A 2022 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that in a national sample of American youth, the total percentage of young trans and gender-diverse people in fact decreased from 2.4 percent in 2017 to 1.6 percent in 2019. The experts also found that trans and gender-diverse youth are significantly more likely to report experiences of being bullied than cis youth, which contradicts the hypothesis that youth are coming out as trans because it offers them a social advantage among their peers. 

Both conversion therapy and the social contagion theory are undergirded by the assumption that young people identifying as trans is an inherently negative phenomenon. Significant to our understanding of the issue is the reframing of the basic premise of the debate: namely, that much of the actual problem is not rooted in the inner lives of trans youth, but rather in how adults feel about and react to them. Anti-trans activists who are parents of trans youth often express intense emotional turmoil over their children’s transitions, narrativizing it as the central problem. Yet many of these youth are living relatively happy lives as trans people, albeit without the support of one or more of their parents.

Take, for example, Beth Bourne, a prolific Californian anti-trans activist who has vociferously campaigned against so-called “gender indoctrination.” According to a 2024 article in local newspaper the Sacramento Bee, Bourne has continued to pursue a relationship with her estranged trans child, Lily, even while speaking out against trans rights at school board meetings and protests. In her X posts, Bourne repeatedly misgenders Lily and suggests that she is working to protect her child who has been “caught in the trans cult.” Meanwhile, the Bee reports, Lily has been leading an active life as a college student and trying to step out of her mother’s shadow. 

Another prominent case is that of anti-trans activist Jeff Younger, a Texan father whose custody battle over his trans daughter Luna has made national headlines in the past few years. Younger argues that Luna’s mother, Anne Georgulas, has been pushing Luna to transition. Last November, Younger suggested in a X post that he had ultimately lost custody of Luna, describing his story as a “cautionary one” and claiming that Georgulas had been given the authority to “castrate” Luna, seemingly referring to Luna’s ability to access gender-affirming care. While Luna and Georgulas have not publicly commented on the case in recent years, Karen Hirsch—a family friend and then-media contact for Georgulas—told Vox in 2019: “[Luna] just wants to be a girl. She doesn’t want all of [this] conflict.”

When anti-trans activist parents like Bourne and Younger use sensationalized language, extreme emotion and a narrative of tragedy to discuss their trans kids’ coming out, they centre their needs and fears over those of their children. Their rhetoric causes real harm for their kids. But in the fight over youth gender-affirming care, just as important as redirecting focus to the experiences of young trans people is unpacking where these parental feelings come from, and addressing them at their roots.

In my experience, the reactions of cis adults to trans youth, especially their own children, are deeply influenced by their feelings about parenting in general. A core concept in family therapy theory is the observation that an adult’s emotional experience of parenting, as well as their overall parenting approach, is likely to be heavily influenced by their own experience of being a child. As psychologist Diane Ehrensaft points out in her book The Gender Creative Child, parents bring their gendered selves and histories to the table when reacting to their children’s transitions—for better and for worse. Their experiences of gender socialization influence their responses to their children’s growth and development as gendered beings. 

As therapists and educators, a common question my former colleagues and I would ask parents of trans children was what their experiences of being taught about gender in early life had been like. We were curious what they had learned about being men and women, and about trans people, while growing up. The stories that emerged were frequently emotionally charged and, perhaps unsurprisingly, filled with recollections of limiting and shame-based stereotypes. The parents I worked with had most often learned that being a man meant being strong, not showing weakness and not having feelings. Being a woman meant being a fragile and emotional caregiver who is often sexually objectified. These parents had also often learned very little about trans people, aside from television and movie tropes that portrayed us as sexual predators, monsters, street-based sex workers and the butts of sexual jokes. In some cases, parents were familiar with the idea of trans people being poor and living sad, lonely lives full of danger and despair.

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that for some parents, their child coming out as trans is a moment of terror and confusion. Countless times, I watched parents weep as they told me that they believed that if their child was trans, the child would never graduate from school, get a good job, find a romantic partner, have kids or live a happy life. Countless times, I heard parents say that they felt like they were losing their trans child to a strange world they didn’t understand. This sentiment was particularly common among migrant parents who were already feeling the impacts of their child’s acculturation to a different country’s social customs. Countless times, I heard parents tell me through tears that they felt a deep and relentless shame, the haunting sense that they had done something terribly wrong, and that no matter what, they would never be able to make it right. 

Listening for so many hours over the years to the pain and desperation—often called “grief”—of so many parents was a complex and transformative experience. Their suffering was, of course, deeply sad, but there was also an inherently hopeful, even joyful, aspect to the situation, because I knew a few things that the parents usually didn’t. 

First, I knew that most of their fears, while focused on their child’s gender, were often in some way universal to parenting. What parent isn’t terrified that they are losing their child to contemporary culture, or that they’ve done something horribly wrong that will scar their child for life? These fears reveal just how challenging it is to be a parent in an atomized society suffused with prejudice and lacking in wide networks of support. 

Second, I knew that transphobia is a very real and serious problem for trans people, but that in spite of it we are indeed capable of succeeding academically and professionally, finding love and building families. Not only was my own life proof of that, but I was surrounded by trans friends who could say the same.

Finally, I knew that though the world can be a terrifying place—and not just for trans people—our deepest wounds around being trans often come not from the hatred of strangers, but from the rejection of our families. Trans people who have loving, supportive and non-anxious (as much as possible, anyway) parents benefit enormously in a multitude of ways. A 2012 report from Trans PULSE, a research project that explored the health of trans people across Ontario, found that trans youth whose parents strongly supported their gender identity and expression reported “higher life satisfaction, higher self-esteem, better mental health including less depression and fewer suicide attempts, and adequate housing compared to those without strong parental support.” When trans youth are affirmed by their families, they can flourish in many arenas of life. 

The grief of the parents of trans children, unlike most kinds of grief, is often about a future that has not yet come to pass: a hypothetical nightmare where their child is socially exiled and suicidal, and where the parent-child relationship has been shattered beyond repair. Yet this nightmare is largely avoidable, even in the face of a transphobic society. What many young trans people need to survive and thrive in a hostile world is the support and acceptance of their families. The nightmarish future can most often be prevented, or at least improved, by that most simple and commonsensical of ingredients: love. 

When I heard Musk declare that his living trans daughter was dead, I heard the echo of the parents I’d sat with and listened to for so many years. I heard the shame of being a man whose so-called son had turned out to be a woman. I heard the terror of a father whose daughter had made a choice so powerful and self-possessed, it threatened his entire world and sense of self. I heard the longing of a parent who yearns to connect with their child, but has not understood that deep connection cannot be achieved through domination and control, only through curiosity and openness to wonder. 

I feel sorry for Musk because his actions toward the trans community continue to create the opposite of a world in which there is any possibility that his daughter might be able to love and respect him as he so clearly desires. I also feel afraid, because I know there are scores of parents who, rather than admit the fear and shame that they feel, project those emotions outward in the form of anger and hatred toward trans people and trans culture, which has created a more frightening world for us all. 

Yet I remain hopeful, precisely because I’ve met so many parents who have made braver choices. I’ve watched so many families that once struggled to accept a young person’s transition eventually experience transformation and change. I know I’m not alone in seeing this, because more and more prominent parents are defying social norms and publicly validating their trans children’s gender identities. Retired NBA player Dwyane Wade and actress Gabrielle Union have proudly supported their trans daughter Zaya for years. Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon has championed the rights of trans youth, naming her trans son among the “beautiful, brave trans people” in her life—at a recent protest against a New York City hospital’s alleged cancellation of gender-affirming care appointments for children, no less. And of course, Cher has long supported her son Chaz Bono, who came out as trans sixteen years ago. 

We’ve all seen proof that another world is possible, a world where no child has to go through what I and so many of my trans siblings went through. We’ve seen that parents can form deep and powerful bonds with their trans children when they’re willing to face their own fears and act as advocates. We’ve glimpsed what might be possible in a society where all parents have the support they need to in turn be strong supports for their kids. We’ve seen proof that love can still win. ⁂

Kai Cheng Thom is an award-winning writer, performer and creative arts facilitator based in Tkaronto/Toronto whose work delves deeply into the themes of revolutionary love, transformative justice and healing from collective trauma. Thom’s work has received multiple literary awards, including a Stonewall Honor Books award, a Publishing Triangle award and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers.