Creating Conditions for Desistance
A companion essay to Episode 216 of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist.
I’ve been busier than ever with my ROGD parent coaching work — so busy that I haven’t had time to schedule as many podcast guests as needed to keep up with the weekly schedule. So to fill in those gaps, I’m going to be doing a series of shorter solo episodes, each focused on a particular theme that comes up in my coaching work, which I do the rest of the week.
For each of these, I’ve scripted a draft that I’ll be reading from. I hope it sounds good when I read it aloud. Please bear with me, as this isn’t my usual style, but it is something I hope will be useful to a lot of people and manageable for me as I’m juggling maintaining a weekly podcast with a full schedule of coaching clients, plus running ROGD Repair and RepairBot.
I know many of you are interested in my parent coaching work, and I hope you’ll get a lot out of these episodes. So with that said, today I want to talk about something that comes up early in the work I do with many parents: a recalibration of what they think they’re trying to accomplish with their trans-identified child.
Recalibrating the Goal
Most of the parents who come to me, especially the new ones, come in thinking that the main goal should be to convince their son or daughter to stop believing in gender ideology. They’ve read the same books that you and I have. They’ve found heterodox voices like mine, and they’re hoping that I will give them the script to land the moment that will end the belief.
One of the first pieces of work I do with parents like this is to clarify that that’s not actually a goal I’m going to help them with — at least not as a first step, and not directly. The belief is downstream. The actual goals are two different things, and neither of them is “make her stop believing this.”
The First Goal: Preserving Bodily Integrity
The first goal, and the one parents should always put their primary attention on, is preventing medical harm — preserving bodily integrity, keeping your child intact and unaltered as much as you can for as long as you can, while the rest of the work has time to unfold.
The medical interventions are the part of the story that is most permanently damaging. The cross-sex hormones change her voice and face and fertility, as well as her risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s, in ways that are not reversible. Surgeries take pieces of a child’s body that they will never get back. So when I think about what we’re here to actually help parents accomplish, step one is preserving bodily integrity. A kid who’s not medicalized still has doors open to them. Some of those doors will permanently close with medicalization.
So that’s the first piece, and one of the earliest steps in my work is to assess how far along the medical pipeline a given parent’s child might be, or is at risk of being in the near future.
Now, this doesn’t mean that we will stop at nothing to fight for bodily integrity if there are other competing needs. For example, sometimes parents engage in shady tactics like bribery to try to slow a decision, and this ultimately only strengthens a child’s resolve to make that decision, as well as their resentment of the parent. So sometimes we have to weigh carefully what tactics a parent is considering using toward this goal of preventing bodily injury. That being said, we’re assessing severity, risk, and timeline — we’re triaging — and our first goal is always preserving bodily integrity, trying to do that without harming the relationship and without increasing the chance that you’re actually just kicking the can down the road and creating worse problems for a later date.
The Second Goal: Creating Conditions for Desistance
The second goal, alongside bodily preservation, is creating the conditions to support this particular child’s desistance. In other words: what can we do to help her want, on her own, to step away from the trans identity and reclaim what is left of her adolescence or young adulthood, and start building a real identity that is actually hers and will hold up over time?
That’s the long-game goal. No matter what, if your child is in this, they have lost a portion of crucial developmental years to building up a false sense of self that is only delaying their coming to terms with reality and strengthening the identity of who they really are.
So, for example, one way of thinking about this: let’s say you have a daughter named Samantha, and she’s calling herself Ryan. Ryan is the alter ego. I would think of the actions that she’s taking to reinforce her identity as Ryan, and I would call that starving Samantha and feeding Ryan. She does something well, and Ryan gets the credit. Everything’s going toward the alter ego. No matter how much or how little time your child’s been in this, all of that time and energy that’s going into building up the alter ego is something that’s lost that can’t be gotten back. So our second goal is to get as much of their adolescence or young adulthood back as possible, and start feeding Samantha — start nourishing and building up that person who she really is, which is an unknown entity.
Let’s keep this in mind. A lot of people talk about a child’s self-esteem issues or body image issues, insecurity or social anxiety, as if it means there’s something wrong. They worry as if it’s abnormal for an adolescent to lack confidence. And I reassure parents: that’s a normal part of adolescence. Of course she’s insecure — she hasn’t had time to develop the things that make for real confidence. So I don’t even recommend reacting to a child’s complaints of low self-esteem as if that’s a signal that there’s anything wrong. It takes time to build character, confidence, and competence. We want to help build that up for Samantha, or whoever the real child, the real person, is. We want to help put those building blocks into place so that they’re not losing valuable portions of their adolescence and young adulthood feeding a false sense of self that will just have to be dismantled later, leaving them disoriented.
What Desistance Actually Looks Like
Let’s spend a moment talking about what desistance actually looks like in practice. I think parents often imagine it as a single dramatic moment, and that imagination tends to do parents a disservice.
Desistance rarely looks like a kid sitting down with her parents and saying, “I was wrong. You were right. I’m a girl. I am not trans. Please go ahead and call me by my real name.” All those things you long to hear — you’re not going to hear them. If you’re lucky, in five or ten years you’ll be able to laugh about this together, maybe cry about it, and maybe she will thank you for what you did to ensure her long-term success. But that fantasy moment is something that you might have to lay to rest, or just hold out for, while you play the long game.
More often, desistance is a gradual off-ramp. The kid does not flip from belief to disbelief in gender ideology in a single moment. She eases sideways and preserves as much as possible of her existing identity and worldview. She wants to save face. She wants to have a cohesive sense of self and worldview and cohesive relationships at a time that’s already unstable enough. And who can blame her?
So for some of these kids, that sideways move is into what I call the ally identity. Instead of focusing on being trans herself, she becomes someone who supports trans people, who knows trans people, who is adjacent to that world without claiming it as her own. This preserves her social standing in the in-group and her designation as a good person according to the beliefs of her peer tribe. She doesn’t have to confess that she was wrong. She just gradually repositions herself. And before you roll your eyes at this, I want you to think about how big a move that is from her perspective.
For other kids, instead of leaning into the ally identity and claiming the label “trans” less for themselves, they might step down the same way they came in — through the non-binary label, or pansexual, or one of these other labels — but choosing not to pursue medicalization, and oftentimes having rationalizations rather than admitting that they were wrong. The rationalization can sound like, “Well, you don’t have to medicalize to be trans.” This lets them retain some of the benefits that come with that social identity in their current social environment while stepping off of the medical pathway. Deep down, they might feel afraid of the permanence of medicalization and might feel some relief about the guardrails you put in place, while not being able to admit that.
There are other intermediate steps along the way as well. Some kids drift away from the identity as their friend group changes, or a particular relationship ends, or their social context otherwise shifts, or they’re spending less time online — perhaps thanks to your interventions getting them off of screens and into the real world, into their bodies, into the place where they can build social capital, confidence, and character.
The point I’m trying to make here is that desistance is rarely a one-step move. It’s a series of smaller moves, typically aimed at preserving social cohesion, narrative worldview, a consistent sense of self, and saving face — preventing embarrassment and disorientation. As a parent, it’s your job to make those smaller moves available to her, to keep those off-ramps open and appealing without requiring her to fully recant in front of everybody she’s told.
Another way this shift can look, depending on the kid’s emerging sexuality, is leaning more into their sexuality labels and less into gender labels, particularly if the kid is genuinely same-sex attracted. For instance, I once worked with a family where the kid claimed to be both gay and trans. Now, if you’ve been in the gender-critical movement for a while like I have, you know those things cannot be simultaneously true. In fact, you know that a person cannot simultaneously believe in things like trans, or non-binary, or gender as a spectrum, and believe that there is such a thing as sexual orientation — because the whole idea of trans destroys sexual boundaries. That’s part of why it’s so dangerous. It seeks to erode consent and self-knowledge of one’s own body and heart. That being said, these kids have a lot of cognitive dissonance and conflicting beliefs, and it’s your job as a parent to help surface them gently, using the techniques that I teach in ROGD Repair.
Putting the Goals in Order
Once you put these two goals in the right order, the question of how to work this whole situation comes into focus. Again: our first goal is bodily integrity. Our second goal is for your child to find their own pathway toward desistance — typically one that allows for as much cohesion as possible during an unstable time.
Ideological desistance — the wholesale rejection of gender ideology — typically comes much later, if at all, and I would encourage you as a parent to be okay with that: to let them have a worldview that makes sense in their social order, and to get your priorities straight. Once your relationship is in a good place — much more robust and resilient — then there can be more room for debate over your ideological differences.
The Load-Bearing Delusion
There’s a frame I’ve written about in an essay that many of you have read, called “The Load-Bearing Delusion,” that explains why the strategy parents typically arrive with — to argue their child out of believing in gender ideology — tends not only to fail, but to make both of the actual goals harder to reach. I’ll give you the short version here, because it matters for what comes next.
The gender identity isn’t floating freely in your kid’s head as a belief that you could argue her out of. It is propping something up. It is doing emotional work for her, holding something fragile in place. This could include, but is not limited to: discomfort with her body, avoidance of adulthood, refuge from social pain that she doesn’t have other ways to manage, belonging with a peer group that requires this identity as the price of entry, internalized misogyny, and lots more.
The belief — the claim about her identity — is the visible part. Underneath, there are emotional drivers, and those drivers are what the belief is in service of. When parents come in trying to argue the belief away, they are pulling on the visible part of something with roots they can’t see. The kid understandably holds on tighter, because the belief is doing work for her, and because this just so happens to coincide with the adolescent power struggle for independence. So she can’t drop it, and you pulling on it is likely to spark resistance. The thing underneath it all would have nowhere to go if you were in fact to break this down. Or she might feel like she’s going back inside the womb by surrendering to what you want for her, rather than going forward through the birthing process into adulthood and individuating — but not needing the trans identity to serve as her source of individuality.
The work I do with parents is to address the emotional drivers underneath the belief.
Where Your Leverage Actually Lies
Once you frame the goal correctly, the question of what’s in your sphere of influence becomes important. This is for the parent who’s been pulling on the belief for a while and is exhausted, and it’s also for the parent who is brand new to this and still in the phase of thinking that the right argument is going to fix things and turn your child into a gender-critical TERF warrior like me. I want to give both of you a more accurate map of where your leverage actually lies.
I’ll start by listing a few things that parents in this situation often try to control — most people don’t realize they’re doing it until we talk about it. Many of you have been trying to control your child’s beliefs, in the ways I just described. You might try to control what she does with her body, whether that’s through things that are more warranted — like preventing her from using a binder that can physically harm her — or through things that are more of a gray area, like affecting her ability to wear her hair or clothes a certain way. You might also try to control her social environment: friends, partner, or online behavior. Those are not bad things to want, but the way you go about trying to influence or control those areas of her life can be problematic for the relationship, or for her ultimate willingness to receive the guidance and influence you’re trying to offer.
Of course, much of this depends on age, stage, temperament, and so on. It’s good to set boundaries that encourage kids to spend more time on real hobbies and less time on screens, but your ability to control that at 15 is different from your ability when she’s 20. And the way you communicate those changes makes a big difference in how they’re received.
So if these things aren’t necessarily where your real leverage is, where is it? Let’s go over a few things that you can truly control.
The Climate in Your Home
The first thing is the climate in your home. Think of yourself as the thermostat in the room that she comes home to. You set the temperature. You decide what the emotional climate of your household feels like when she walks through the door. Is it warm and steady and predictable, with levity and humor? Or is it tense and conditional, fragile, ready for an argument? The emotional drivers underneath your kid’s belief — her bodily discomfort, social discomfort, loneliness, insecurity — all of these are influenced by her climate at home.
If you’re like many parents I’ve worked with, at this point you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, I don’t control the climate — she does.” And that thought right there is a red flag that should be sounding an alarm, because it means the dynamic in the household has been flipped. If you feel that your child is emotionally in control of what happens in your household, then you are already in an 11th-hour, desperate situation, and this is what I call a toddler at the steering wheel moment.
A toddler might want very much to grab hold of the steering wheel of your car, but to cede control of the vehicle to her is a whole other matter. It puts everyone in grave danger. And while a toddler who has grabbed the wheel might in fact be intent on maintaining that power, deep down she’s terrified, because she knows she’s not ready for it, she doesn’t know what to do with it, and she’s at risk of crashing the car and harming everyone. This is how your child feels if he or she is emotionally in control of the atmosphere at home.
Your Tone
On that note, the next thing you can control is your tone — the sound of your voice and your body language when you interact with your child, the look on your face when he or she walks into the room. This is partly under your control. It’s not completely, because you are human; you are likely emotionally exhausted. That being said, your kid is reading you constantly, and your tone is giving away valuable information about where she stands with you.
Please bear in mind that if she’s emotionally immature — like most of these kids are — she’s often not aware of her impact on you, and may see the way you’re interacting with her not as a reflection of the conditions she’s created, but as a reflection of how you feel about her. Remember too that these kids have a spotlight-effect bias, meaning they overestimate the degree to which people are thinking about them and the degree to which other people’s actions are based on them. So they will also take personally things you’re giving off that might have nothing to do with them.
This is why it can be quite helpful, if there’s something affecting you and the way you’re showing up — something from work, or from your other kids, or from your health — to actually name it. It might sound like, “Sorry if I seem distracted today. We had a really hard meeting at work.” It could be that simple. It’s just a way of letting your kid know that whatever they’re picking up on doesn’t necessarily have to do with them. There also might be times when it does have to do with them, and where you need to find a way to assert that gently. In ROGD Repair, I teach a lot of tools for doing this, such as parts language.
The Structure
More things you can control include the structure: household rules, sleep schedule, phone and technology policies, expectations and requirements about chores, mealtimes, and how people talk to each other in your home — and whether you’re paying for college, and under what conditions.
I’m going to spend a moment on that last one. If you’re raising a 15-, 16-, or 17-year-old, I really want you to think about this, because I have talked to so many parents whose kids are going off to college, or are in college, and who have raised them with the expectation that the parents will be paying for college — sort of a “no matter what” kind of thing. What I will say to these parents is: when you raised them with this expectation, it was because you’d created a really stable upbringing for them. They were a good kid, a good student. You didn’t have any reason to think you had to put qualifiers on it.
It would have been another thing if you were dealing with the problems that parents of teenagers dealt with 30 years ago, or that you might have thought you’d end up dealing with when you had kids 20 years ago. If they were involved in illicit drugs, gangs, prostitution — any of these extremely high-risk behaviors that no parent wants for their 20-year-old — then you would definitely reassess the financial support you’re giving to enable that lifestyle. But where do you draw the line when that translates into a kid medicalizing? How is that not harmful drug use? How does it not put their whole future at risk, and therefore call into question how they’re spending their time now, what the intention and purpose of college attendance is, and whether that is something you still support?
I’m not saying you should be cavalier in how you change those policies. It’s something to be handled with great care, and it’s something I often spend many hours talking with parents about — to really figure out where the boundaries need to lie in their particular family, and how to express those new boundaries.
Back to the list of things you can control: whether the car is hers or yours, and under what conditions she can borrow it; whether her room gets to have a lock on it; whether you let his partner stay over, and on what terms; whether you allow drug use in your home, and what the consequences are for bringing drugs into your home; whether you allow a binder in your home, and what the consequences are for bringing a binder into your home. These are things that are in your control.
The structure does not depend on your child’s agreement, or even their understanding of the policy. This is important to clarify. Whenever a parent is setting a boundary or a rule, I tell them: in this conversation, you have one job. It’s to deliver the news — the news that we are not allowing this or that. It’s not to get her to agree. It’s not to get him to understand your reasoning and say, “Okay, Dad, I accept that.” That is an unrealistic goal, and if you’re looking for it to happen as a signal that you’ve succeeded, then you will walk away feeling that you’ve failed, and your boundary will be meaningless, because you were waiting for the kid to show that they agree.
What you need to do going into a conversation like this is lower your expectations. You have a mission. Did you fulfill it? Did you deliver the information — “Here’s the boundary, and here’s the consequence for crossing it”? You need to go into these conversations prepared for what the backlash might be, depending on your particular child. It’s important to keep in mind that if you’ve ever behaved in the past in a way that leads your child to rightfully believe they can get you to cave, whatever they did to get you to cave before will be tried again. This can get very dysfunctional. Obviously, if it’s dysfunctional to the point of threatening self-harm, alleging abuse, or anything of the sort, that’s a situation that warrants professional counsel. But keep in mind that whatever you’ve done in the past to show your child precisely how to erode your boundaries will be something they try again until it stops working — and this will have to go through a phase of extinction, where it gets worse before it gets better.
So the structure does not depend on your child’s agreement. You set it, and he lives within it. This structure introduces delays, which are your friends, because the medical clock keeps ticking, and any time you can buy is time that can be spent on other things — the natural cognitive maturation process, evolutions in friend groups, a relationship ending, and so on.
Money
Next, you can control money. Again: college tuition, the phone bill, the car, the therapist, medical insurance, clothing budget, travel, rent subsidy. If she is under your roof or your financial umbrella, the money is yours, and what you do with it is yours to decide. Of course, how you assert what you will and won’t be doing with your money — how you communicate that — may require expert guidance. That’s what ROGD Repair is for. If you need those communication tools and you’re not already enrolled, enroll today at rogdrepair.com.
Here is where the money lever connects most directly to bodily preservation. The money is sometimes what stands between your son and a step he would otherwise take through a different therapist, a different clinic, a different insurance policy. I’m not telling you to weaponize money. I’m also not telling you to keep the money flowing on autopilot, regardless of what it’s funding or subsidizing. I’m telling you that the money is a lever you actually have, and the question of how to use it — and when, and with what conditions — is a decision you get to make as a parent.
Often in coaching, I see parents operating as if this lever does not exist, because pulling on it feels coercive or cruel, or because it feels like it violates an expectation the parents set forever ago — that it would always be there, without any stipulations. But it’s not necessarily coercive or cruel to set limits on what you’re willing to spend on, when it’s done with consequences in mind rather than punishment. That difference is worth thinking about. Again, the specifics of how to communicate these boundaries and brace for impact are things we can go over in one-on-one coaching and in ROGD Repair.
Your Own State
Next, of course, you can control your own state. This might not feel doable, because a lot of parents feel very out of control by the time they get to see me. They’re not sleeping; they’re not eating well. But these are all things you can regulate, and it’s important to regulate your nervous system. You can control whether you’re following good sleep-hygiene practices, whether you’re eating properly, exercising, creating social support networks; whether you have a faith you can lean on, a therapist you can trust; whether you take a pause before responding to provocation from your child.
A dysregulated parent cannot do any of the other things we’re talking about here. The relationship work, the boundaries, the emotional tone of the household — everything depends on you being someone who can regulate yourself.
Your Vision of Who Your Child Can Become
The last thing I want to mention that you do have control over is your vision of who your child can become in the future. The relationship you’re going to have with your son when he’s 30 and you’re 65 is something you’re building right now. Every time you don’t take the bait, every time you don’t crumble into despair but keep your eyes on the prize — holding that vision of who your child is capable of becoming — that’s a win.
This is one of the vital signs I look for in a family. Some of the other vital signs include humor, which I consider a keystone species: if there’s humor, playfulness, and spontaneity, the family has a good chance of making it — unless humor is relied on excessively as a conflict-avoidance mechanism. But if there’s playfulness and spontaneity combined with humor in a household, their vital signs are looking good. They have a good chance of making it when they implement the techniques I teach.
Another vital sign I look for is the parents’ faith in who the child is becoming. Earlier I mentioned the idea of going back into the womb. That’s what it can feel like to a child — what you want for them — when the trans identity serves an important role in their process of individuation. That child might now realize that individuation is a natural process everyone goes through on the path from child to adult, and that so much of what they’re going through with the trans identity is an attempt at individuation. For many, it’s very wrapped up in that.
A child might feel like they are at a crossroads, a push-pull between childhood and adulthood, where autonomy is linked with a trans identity, and the idea of giving up the trans identity is linked with giving in to you and becoming that child again. Of course they don’t want to go back there, because the associations they have with the child they once were might include shame, fear, insecurity, awkwardness — the things they were made fun of for, the ways they felt powerless and naive. All of those things might be linked with their sense of their child-self, while whatever positive vision or hope for the future they have is linked with the trans identity.
This is a major obstacle, and something you’re going to have to look at, because if you want them to become who they were before — that’s not going to happen. They’re not becoming a child again. They’re not going back in the womb. I use that hyperbolic language intentionally, because of course they’re not literally going back in the womb. But I want you to think about it figuratively: that is what your push for them to desist can feel like to them.
So the vision you have of the person they’re becoming will, of course, be incomplete and not fully accurate to the person they will actually become. But it’s going to contain elements of the person you’ve always known — elements from their childhood, from adolescence, even from now. What are those core common threads that seem like they’ve always been there? What will those things blossom into? What is just beginning to emerge within them?
One of the reasons I teach alter-casting in my course and coaching work is that I want parents to look for the seeds of potential — the little things a kid says or does that indicate who they want to become, who they want to see themselves as. Not every aspect of that is directly linked to the trans identity. They might think it is. It might sound that way coming out of their mouth. But if you listen carefully, there are qualities, virtues, and characteristics the child indicates are important to them that you can actually appeal to, that you can actually support and feed.
So your vision of who they’re becoming is where your faith is put to the test — and I say that whether you’re a religious person or not, because it’s about your faith in them. Is there a way forward for them? Can you hold that vision in mind? Can you have faith in who they might become? If you can, that doesn’t mean your obligation in the present moment is to concede, or even to flatter them. It’s to know a little something of what they’re capable of and what they really want, and to know that they’re unfinished in the process of becoming that person. Sometimes it’s only in the light of a strong, positive vision of who they could become that you have any credibility, any ground to stand on, when you gently indicate that this isn’t their best right now.
The kid you are sitting across from today at 20 does not look like the woman or man she or he will be at 35. And that is the person you’re actually trying to stay in relationship with, to help come about. What you are doing now is not all about today. It’s about laying the foundation for the relationship you will have in 15 years — when he might be calling you for help with his own kid, when she might be calling you for help with her own marriage, or when they might want your perspective on something confusing they did back when they were this age. That future relationship is actually in your sphere of influence, because it comes down to you, and your faith, and your vision and purpose — not because you can guarantee it or control the outcome, but because what you do today, and how you perceive the problems of today, is one of the inputs to that future outcome. And that future relationship matters here too, because it is one of the conditions that makes the off-ramp possible.
Holding the Two Goals Clearly
Let me come back to the two goals we stated at the beginning, because I want to leave you with them held clearly. Body preservation first. Conditions for desistance second. Only third — and not on a rushed timeline — is ideological desistance. Only once she has let go of the identity do we care about influencing her worldview, and maybe one day helping her get to the place you and I are.
Recalibrating makes these goals possible. You came in trying to change her belief. The work that actually moves things forward is underneath the belief, on the emotional drivers the belief is resting on. So your job essentially boils down to two things: protect her body however you can — especially through the windows where she might otherwise take a permanent step — and shape the conditions, over time, that affect the drivers of the identity.
This episode + companion article doubles as a bonus lesson in ROGD Repair. Where it’s found in the course, it comes with reflection questions to help you personalize the material.
If you like this kind of content and you’re a parent navigating this, please get help sooner rather than later. Visit rogdrepair.com and use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take half off your first month. The number one piece of feedback I hear is, “I wish I’d started working with you sooner.” Don’t leave it till the 11th hour.
Your trans-identified kid won’t listen to reason, because reason isn’t what they need right now. They need a parent who knows how to communicate in an empathic yet strategic manner. ROGD Repair gives you over 120 lessons in the psychology and communication tools that actually work when normal parenting doesn’t — plus RepairBot, your 24/7 AI coach trained on my entire body of work, ready to help you navigate tough moments in real time. Visit rogdrepair.com and use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take half off your first month.
