Parental Support for Transgender Youth

By Jaycee Alban

Social support and gender affirmation have been proposed as sources of resilience that can buffer

against the deleterious effects of gender minority stress on the mental health of transgender

individuals. Transgender adolescents and young adults appear to be at higher risk for mental

health complications. Critically, however, familial support buffers the effects of gender minority

stress on this subset of the population. Despite this key finding, extant research fails to quantify

what factors predict the likelihood of parents supporting and affirming their transgender youth.

This study examined the relationships between current experiences of general parent social

support and gender-specific parent support as well as several potential variables, namely time

since disclosure, family religiosity, parental adherence to gender norms, parents' education about

gender diversity, child gender, and blending. Eighty transgender young adults were recruited for

survey research using Amazon's Mechanical Turk and CloudResearch's MTurk Toolkit. All

multiple regression models were found to be significant, but only parents' education about

gender diversity significantly predicted support in all models, suggesting that the active process

of research into transgender community and experiences as parents shape perceptions of support

among transgender young adult children. Blending was a marginally significant predictor of

gender-specific parent support. General parent support and gender-specific parent support were

found to be related. Qualitative analysis elucidated themes of change in parental support over

time. Implications for researchers and applications for educators, advocates, and clinicians are

discussed.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F8FS7YXW
• ISBN13: 9798349340932
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Infotech
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.2" x 6.0"