aka “No. You are not born in the wrong body.”
Erin Friday is an American lawyer and “life-long” Democrat, who used to have a trans-identifying child. That child (now an adult) has desisted, partly due to Erin’s refusal to affirm her. I met Erin in Washington DC at the Genspect Detransitioners conference earlier this month. She is President of the US arm of Our Duty, a group of parents who had or have trans-identifying children.
Erin is part way through compiling a series of podcast interviews, during which she speaks to a number of parents who helped their children through their gender confusion. The Desistance Series is published on the Genspect website and can be found on the Genspect youtube channel.
Erin wanted to know about the “patterns” which cause children to announce they are trans and find out more about the parental tactics to deal with the situation. Based on Erin’s talk I thought it might be useful to put together a list of her findings. But first,
Common traits of youth transgenderism
Being enrolled in an affirming school – the moment a child “indicated any sign of discomfort with their natural body” they would be affirmed by “teachers, counsellors, and administrators”. This could and did often happen without informing the child’s parents.
At least one diagnosed or observable co-morbidity: mental health issues, ADHD, OCD, autistic traits, internalised homophobia.
Standard adolescent self-loathing: “We know that it’s the vulnerable. It’s the insecure, who look in the mirror, and hate everything that is reflected in those mirrors. Transgenderism doesn’t come after the confident kid. It hits the most vulnerable.”
Being a bit different: “Of the males who were featured in the podcast, almost all of them were sensitive, young adolescents, and they were late bloomers. So puberty hit them later, and they looked around, and they saw the other boys in their classroom, and wondered what was different about them, and why they weren’t growing facial hair, or getting taller or getting more masculine.”
Spending a lot of time on the internet: “Most every kid took on a transgender identity during puberty. Most came to learn about transgenderism in the first place, through the internet… many of these kids adopted [their new] identity over COVID lockdowns, when isolation forced them to become friends with complete strangers, and exposed them to the dark delights of the internet, where children can be preyed upon by adults and easily influenced as they hide out in their room for hours at a time.”
Having a trans friend – all of the children of the parents Erin interviewed did not announce they were trans before someone in their peer group had already done so.
Walking it Back
This is not a magic formula. None of the parents Erin spoke to can point to one particular thing that really worked. It was more “a thousand things” over a long period of time. But all the parents interviewed by Erin deployed one or more of tactics listed below. For some children it took five years. By this stage many had become adults and were medicalised on hormones, or worse. Remember these are Erin’s findings. They may be of interest. It’s not a manual:
1. Just Say No – This, according to Erin, is the first thing a parent must do. “Say ‘No… you are not transgender. No, you are not born in the wrong body, and no, I’m not going to approve any type of medical transition on you’.”
2. Reject the new pronouns – Do not entertain them. Do not introduce your child as another sex to friends, relatives, strangers, or anyone. Refuse to be a participant. You can allow the child to do it, but don’t assist. Without affirmation, some children will find it hard to declare/introduce themselves as the opposite sex, especially to people who have known them all their lives.
3. Limit access to the internet – Removing your child’s phone is tough. Erin likens it to taking heroin from a heroin addict, “Brutal… but you must.” The same goes for laptops or home computers (unless it is for school work during monitored periods). These can give children easy access to Reddit, Discord and various other sources of gender ideology and porn-drenched poison. To make it easier for your child, you may want to declare certain locations or times internet-free zones , so the whole family is cut off. This can “temper the pain”, but be assured your child will tell you they hate you, and your other children aren’t exactly going to be thrilled either.
4. Enlist the help of non-affirming family members – let your child see and even stay with Grandma and Grandpa, who don’t really understand this gender nonsense and wouldn’t have any truck with it if they did. This sometimes helps a younger child “go back to their earlier life before trans with Grandma for a little while”. Cut out the affirming aunties and uncles. Don’t go to their family events or weddings. Make being non-affirming a condition of access. Block those who won’t help.
5. Consider a therapist – there are good and bad therapists. An affirming therapist is going to make detransitioning or desisting harder. A therapist who understand the situation and does not affirm might help, but Erin warns: “if parents think that the therapist one hour a week is going to pull their child out of this, they’re delusional. The job is on the parents, and the parents alone, unfortunately.”
6. Sit down with your child and watch movies and documentaries about cults – “I did that”, says Erin “It can jog in the child’s mind that they’re actually part of a cult, because after you see a few of these [documentaries], you realise that transgenderism is a cult.”
7. Read lots of books – Erin says the book she heard mentioned most was Hold on to your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, which has nothing to do with transgenderism, but is about parenting and attachment. Erin noted the parents she interviewed “had lost that attachment, not because they were bad parents, but because the internet stole it from them. We were the first generation to raise children against this thing. And we failed because we didn’t understand the power of the internet.”
Erin said building or rebuilding attachment with your child does not need to be a big deal. “I realised that every time I walked into my daughter’s room I made a comment about the messiness, or the food that she had left in there, instead of just coming in and saying, ‘Good morning’, and spending a little time sitting on her bed, and maybe stroking her and saying, ‘It’s time to get up’, really sweetly. It sounds so simple, but it really matters. It recreates that connection you have with your child.”
Other books recommended by the parents were Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (I would recommend that, too) and Detox, Desist, Detrans: Getting Your Child out of the Gender Cult by Maria Keffler.
8. Let them wear what they want – except breast binders. Clothes don’t make a person’s sex – they are a matter of self-expression. Let boys wear skirts and girls cut their hair short and wear whatever it is they think boys wear.
Do not help your girls buy “male” clothing. In other words, don’t take them shopping into the men’s section in clothes stores, but also don’t comment if your daughter chooses to wear typically masculine clothes. Same for the boys. Don’t buy the lads make-up, but don’t stop them from painting their nails or putting make-up on.
9. Block the trans/queer/super-affirming friends – as mentioned above, every single one of the kids of the parents Erin interviewed had a trans friend or peer. Find ways to not drop your child over at that friend’s place. Come up with reasons as to why they can’t come round. Erin said “I actually made the trans-identified kids so uncomfortable when they came to my house that they stopped wanting to come over. But that’s what you do. You have to, actually. The parents have to build these really strong, strong boundaries and be the bad guys.”
10. Move house – this will be seen as the nuclear option, but “almost every” parent Erin spoke to changed house or schools or both. She says one of the most important things a family can do is provide “an off-ramp” for a transitioned child. Erin explains: “there’s enormous amount of peer pressure when these children take on a transgender identity. They have now told all their friends, all their teachers… and they have been lauded in this identity, and they can’t backtrack if they’re at that same school.”
Moving school means your child can quietly climb down from the pedestal they put themselves on. “Because remember, these kids are forcing pronouns and different names on their peers. And then they have to walk it back. They’re going to be embarrassed.” One parent even split up her family and moved with her daughter to a less liberal state whilst the father stayed with the son. “That’s how important it was to get that breakup from that friend group, from that influence group, from that state that’s extremely liberal, to start a new life with this young girl. And it worked.” One family even moved country. That worked too.
11. Explain the realities of taking hormones and transgender sex – when one child announced that in her persona as a gay boy she was going to date another gay boy (the sex of whom was unclear, but presumed to be male), her mother told her that she had better go get “some lube”. On explaining to her virgin daughter some of the realities of male gay sex “the girl’s eyes just popped open… I think the mom frightened her enough to say, ‘okay, maybe, maybe I’m not a boy’.” Another mother told her child about the side-effects of testosterone, reading from some (affirming) Planned Parenthood documentation. She told her daughter “you’re going to be bald, by probably age of 22, because it runs in the female [side of the] family”. That was enough to put doubt about the sense of what she was proposing to do in her mind.
12. Give them a reality check – some parents took their kids to developing world countries and exposed them (safely) to real life situations outside their school, family and internet bubble. This was so they could see their “belief system is a luxury belief.” They also “put their children to work. They had chores. They had to get jobs.” One parent threatened to cut their child off financially.
13. Hold steady – as Erin says, all the parents she interviewed were “persistent and consistent in saying no… It’s really okay for your kids – when they’re going through this – not to like you. In fact, you’re probably not doing it right if they don’t not like you during this period. And it’s really hard for parents, because we grew up in a generation where we were told we were supposed to [be] child-led. We were supposed to be friends with our children. And that’s a lie. We’re not. We’re supposed to parent them. And then we get to be friends with them later in life. But over this period of time, sometimes saying: ‘Because I told you so, because I’m the mom’, is an okay answer, especially to these kids who are gender confused… sometimes you have to do some tough love.”
There wasn’t time for questions after Erin’s session, so I sought her out to ask the obvious one. Non-affirming parents are often cut off by their children. Many parents would rather be in some contact with, and therefore potentially have some influence over, their trans-identifying child. This usually involves compromise. What would Erin say to them?
Erin acknowledged the fear of estrangement is real “but without setting up boundaries there is no chance for the individual to return to biological reality. Parents are truly the only ones who can help their children, whether s/he is a minor or an adult. I really know of no parents who did not take a risk of estrangement from their child in order to get their child to return to comfort in their natural body and to drop their transgender identity, regardless of the child’s age.”
Erin took the view that she was going to lose her child “regardless of whether I set boundaries or not, as the transgender hooks were solidly in her. So I took the risk, and it paid off. I was not going to be a participant in her demise, nor did I want to have to explain to her after she medicalised and regretted it that I was too afraid of losing her that I capitulated. I wanted her to know that I fought for her future, even if it destroyed me in the meantime.”
In Erin’s case, when the matter came to a head “I told my daughter that I was tired of swimming after her. I would now sit on the beach holding on to the lifeline, ready to tow her in when she was ready to come back to shore. Luckily, she grabbed hold of the rope before she harmed herself.”
The Life Beyond Transition conference took place in Washington DC on 12 March 2026 and was organised by Genspect. You can read all my live tweets from the event here.
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