The Regeneration Resource Center is here to support families though the process of dealing with a family member's disclosure that s/he has a transgender identity.  The Center is also here to begin to fill in the gap of absent or muted family voices on this subject, since family voices on the subject of relatives with a transgender identity have been quieter than others who have spoken on this topic.  Families can sometimes be left to support a member with a transgender identity after limited community resources have been accessed. In some areas, the resources to support families are few and far between.  And when a member proceeds with his/her transition, the family can be faced with a choice to reject or embrace the transgender family member.  

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What might some family members experience when a loved one transitions?

 

Family Stress Theory

Family Stress Theory helps explain how families deal with certain stressors that they may encounter, such as when a family member comes out as a transgender person (1*).  This theory suggests that the stress your family experiences could depend on the time of the transition (was it recent or did it happen years ago?), where you live (do you live in a rural or urban place? a conservative or liberal place?), the kind of church you attend (one with a conservative or liberal theological view of gender?), and the availability of community resources to address the needs of transgender people and their families (i.e., physical and mental health providers with the appropriate expertise).  Transgender-related behaviors have a long history that spans from biblical times until today, and familiarity this history may help family members to understand its effect on their ability to cope (for more details, see the brief history of transgender-related behaviors section in Why is this topic important?).  As a result these factors, not all families may have some of the experiences discussed below or may experience them to a lesser degree than other families might.

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When a family member transitions to another gender, it can lead to conflicts that other family members experience about their own identities in relationship to the transgender member.  For example, if a wife's husband transitions to become a woman and if the wife stays in the relationship, does that make her a lesbian?  Family members may also experience stigma, shame, and embarrassment about the changing dynamics in their families (2).  Children of transgender parents may experience victimization or peer harassment (3). While there are cases when it may not be safe for a child to be around a transitioning parent (4), there are also stories of family members maintaining or reinstating the relationship with the transgender parent (5).

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Ambiguous Loss

Ambiguous loss, or a death that lacks closure, is another common experience of families with a transgender member (6). This loss may be connected to some transgender people's experience that their life as their biological sex prior to transition is in a sense "dead" to them (7).  

 

Transgender advocates recognize that some family members may go through a period of mourning during the gender transition and encourage them to reframe the “loss” by resisting their understanding of the transgender family member's birth gender as normal and natural. Transgender advocates would instead like family members to consider the deep sense of shame that the transgender relative feels about the birth gender (for more about this perspective, see this article from The Lily, What Elliot Page's coming can teach us about supporting transgender people).  To the transgender person, casting off the birth gender can be liberating.

 

In addition to considering this viewpoint, let's examine what the change in gender identity might mean from the family members' perspective.  For family members, this transition can lead to personal and family issues since the situation is beyond their control, and the usual avenues to coping with the type of loss typically associated with death, such as expressing grief and having a funeral service, are not available to them.  Family members may perceive the transgender family member as physically absent but emotionally present or the reverse: physically present but emotionally absent. 

 

This kind of absence is similar to the experience of families of soldiers who become missing in action during a war or other conflict.  The family experiences grief but has no body to bury.  As a result of this unusual situation, family members can feel stuck in their grief because there is no closure.  The lack of certainty regarding the transgender family member’s presence or absence can cause them to feel unable to redefine their relationship to him/her.

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Grief can be a reaction to gender transition (8). However, not everyone recognizes grief over the changing relationship with the transgender relative as a legitimate reaction.  For example, some transgender people view grief on the part of their family members as a kind of trans-phobia (9).  Also, some community members may not recognize family members’ grief over the loss of the role of the transgender parent or child and may not express sympathy (10).  People may discourage family members from expressing their grief, instead encouraging them to accept the change without mourning the loss.  

 

Disenfranchised Grief

As a result, family members might experience disenfranchised grief (11).   In this kind of grief the family may sense that they have lost a member that they once knew, but their grief can’t be expressed or acknowledged in public as in the case of "relationships that are not recognized and losses that are unacknowledged" (12).  This family member may not participate in the same activities or acknowledge the family in the way s/he once did.  Other family members or friends may have a hard time accepting this change and it can lead to avoidance.  Thus, family members may not acknowledge their own loss or feel that they have permission to feel angry or depressed.  This circumstance may place the family members in a conflicted situation since they may experience feelings of depression, anger, and/or betrayal (13).  Disenfranchised grief is also connected to the identity conflict mentioned above since certain losses can affect family members' identities and challenge their sense of it, especially in the case of loss that is stigmatized.

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Family members may go through a process from denial to acceptance when one of them transitions (14).  The process may pass through stages of anger, depression, and bargaining in between.  The process isn't always linear, there can be multiple pathways, or partial completion of the steps, and not everyone in the family may make it through all of the stages.  In certain cases, acceptance may simply mean an acknowledgment of what happened, not necessarily the continuation of the relationship.  However, most families find it is possible to maintain a relationship with the transgender member following the transition (15).

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In addition to grief, family members may experience:

• Communication challenges (16).  Communication challenges may include the ability to provide support to the transgender person as well as reserving it for yourself during the transition, and to grieve someone who is not actually gone. 

• Stress (17)

• Estranged relationships (18)

• Adjustment difficulties may affect all family members of the transgender relative (19).  For example, adjustment difficulties on the part of children may be related to how well the transgender parent can pass as the new gender, and this ability is a factor in the adjustment of the child.

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*The citations on this page come from the research literature and other publications and are available upon request.

1. Hill, 1949; Boss, 2002 cited in Veldorale-Griffin, 2014

2. Veldorale-Griffin & Darling, 2016; White & Ettner, 2007; Whitley, 2013

3. Freedman et al., 2002; Norwood, 2013b

4. Sales 1995

5. Boenke, 2003; Canfield-Lenfest, 2008; Faludi, 2016; Howey, 2000

6. Boss, 1999; Boss, 2007; McGuire et al 2016; Norwood 2012, 2013a; Zamboni 2006; McGuire, Catalpa, Lacey, & Kuvalanka, 2016

7. Hauser, 2020; For a definition of "deadnaming," see Clements, 2019

8. Canfield-Lenfest, 2008; Norwood, 2012, 2013b

9. Talusan, 2019

10. Brin, 2004; Harris 2015; Mulvihill & Walsh 2014

11. Doka, 2002

12. Doka, 2002; p. 160

13. Freedman, Tasker, & di Ceglie, 2002; Leland, 2017; Zamboni, 2006

14. Kübler-Ross, 1969; Emerson & Rosenfeld, 1996

15. Grant et al 2011

16. Norwood, 2015

17. Veldorale-Griffin, 2014

18. Church, O’Shea, & Lucey, 2014

19. Dierckx, Motmans, Mortelmans, & T’sjoen, 2016; Emerson & Rosenfeld, 1996; Israel, 2005; Sales, 1995; White & Ettner, 2007