When “Nonbinary” Is the Door Out

Not every off-ramp announces itself

The word supplies no information about direction of travel.

One girl announced a “nonbinary” identity at fifteen; by eighteen she had been on testosterone for half a year, and her parents learned about her surgical consultation only because a hospital scheduler dialed the wrong number in the family directory. Another young woman has used the same word for four years without taking any medical steps, and talks about training as a doula and about wanting children of her own someday. The label sits still in both cases while everything underneath it moves, in one instance toward an operating room and in the other toward something that looks a great deal like an ordinary young woman’s life.

On the way in, the label tends to arrive as part of a sequence. Kids will say they are “bi,” then “pan,” then “nonbinary,” then “trans”; after watching this long enough, you stop treating any single announcement as a fixed data point. Each step costs a little more than the last and buys a little more social standing than the last.

One family described their sixteen-year-old coming home from an after-school arts program with her girlfriend, the two of them having decided the same afternoon that they were “nonbinary” and changed their names on the same day. Where the sequence is running in that direction, the announcement is worth taking seriously as an early move rather than a settled destination, because the next step tends to follow the same logic that produced this one.

On the way out, the sequence runs backward, and it runs through the same vague middle.

Most of the desistance I have watched involves a gradual reduction in emphasis on personal identity, sometimes accompanied by a corresponding increase in emphasis on the “ally” position. A young person who has invested years in a community and a vocabulary needs somewhere to land. Leaning into the “ally” role permits her to remain among the “good” people while putting far less weight on any claim about herself; she can express support for the community without asserting any particular label applies to herself.

The categories that hold the least fixed meaning become useful for the same reason. “Nonbinary,” “queer,” “pansexual,” and their neighbors are elastic enough to be occupied while a person changes considerably underneath them, which is precisely what makes them serviceable as an exit.

There is a small grammatical tell worth watching for. One son, who had cycled between “gay” and “trans” for two years, had started referring to trans people as “they” rather than as “we,” at roughly the same time that his “gay” identity stabilized. Nobody announced anything. The pronoun simply relocated him to the outside of a group he had spent years inside, and it happened in an unremarkable conversation about somebody else.

His “they” instead of “we” is the kind of evidence that matters more than any statement about identity, because it was not produced for an audience and it was not the point of the sentence. A few months later, the same boy said softly that he wasn’t interested in “that stuff” anymore, meaning trans. Wisely, his mother did not call attention to the moment.

The label is close to useless as a measure of where a child stands, while the things worth measuring instead are less dramatic. Whether your daughter can mention her period without flinching. How often, and in what circumstances, she still binds her breasts. How the relationship with the same-sex parent is faring. Whether she is doing anything at all to advance the identity beyond continuing to hold it.

One daughter whose parents I work with had been trans-identified for more than a third of her life and had never gotten weird about menstruation, still talked to her mother about her body, and had taken no steps toward hormones. By the measures that carry prognostic weight, she was already most of the way home, whatever she was calling herself.

Two reasons the label outlasts the belief

The first has to do with autonomy and with the arithmetic of conceding an argument.

Adolescence runs in one direction developmentally. Asking a fifteen-year-old to, in essence, accept that her parents were right about the central question of her identity feels like asking her to abandon the very push for autonomy that is organizing her growth. She is not going back into the womb; she is following an impetus to move forward into adulthood. We are not asking for a retreat into childlike dependency that feels like giving up, but rather hoping for a version of autonomy that does not require denying her sex — one that will last throughout her life. There is a birthing process underway, and it needs to complete itself.

Nothing about that process permits a clean retraction. What you tend to get instead is a young person reaffirming her sense of herself as independent and clear-thinking while simultaneously letting the substantive claims go slack. She may tell you that you are making too big a deal of the medical question and that she has no interest in it anyway, in the same breath, never giving you the satisfaction of acknowledging you had every reason to be worried sick about the thing she just nonchalantly took off the table.

The second driver applies particularly to kids who are innocent, literal-minded, and often autistic, and it is less a psychological maneuver than a gap in language.

These children frequently lack both the vocabulary to describe their own sensory and emotional experience to others, and the theory of mind to recognize why communicating these to others, particularly parents, is essential for meeting their needs. An autistic child does not know that most people do not register the tag at the back of the collar, or give much thought to the textures of foods. Parents sometimes discover the sensory profile years after the behavior it was driving. A girl who tells you she is “nonbinary” may be telling you that fitted clothing is intolerable on her skin, that she resents the twenty minutes a day that hair and makeup would cost her, and that she has no available word for what she wants other than the one her peer group handed her.

One mother realized that her daughter’s preference for plain shirts and cotton joggers had a purely logistical origin, worked out before any identity question arose: if she slept in comfortable clothes, she woke up already dressed. Another family, describing a daughter at a school where nobody dressed in a conventionally feminine style, arrived at the observation that a realistic direction for her preferred style would be “unisex,” a word she had never once used about herself.

What these girls often mean is that they prefer an androgynous appearance, both for its ease and sensory comfort, and for the protection from judgment they imagine comes with opting out of hyperfemininity. If only it were so simple; if only they could ask for that and nothing more.

Braided into the sensory piece is a resistance to being evaluated by the standards applied to her sex. Look at what is actually sold to teenage girls in the way of summer clothing and it becomes difficult to blame a fourteen-year-old for refusing all of it. Plenty of Millennial and older women occupy a middle ground where we never played the status games, nor enjoyed the company of the girls who did, yet arrived at adulthood as women without this particular “gender” narrative for our personal difficulties, simply because we grew up in a different cultural context. (We may have developed eating disorders along the way, but no one “affirmed” our bulimia.)

A girl who does not register this humble middle ground as a safe place to land may reach for the word “nonbinary” to describe a position that has been available to women for generations under other names: androgyny, unisex, “tomboy.” But when offered such an alternative by her Gen X mother, she may scoff and double down on the part of her that still believes in a special thing called “nonbinary” that parents just don’t get. Ceding the territory of gender grandiosity for a humbler label costs her something. In her ears the unglamorous version says “plain, frumpy girl too lazy to learn to style her hair,” where the other one says “special person who’s discovered something magical about themselves no one can touch.” Your fragile daughter may not be ready for that trade.

The difference that matters, and why saying so loudly can cost you

Here lies the dilemma. Androgyny is a wardrobe and a haircut. It’s comfy, it’s low budget, and it costs your daughter’s future nothing. The “nonbinary” claim is a proposition about what a person fundamentally is, and it arrives attached to an ideology and to the possibility of iatrogenically harmful interventions.

A twenty-three-year-old woman declined testosterone because she did not want to lose her voice, while still pursuing a mastectomy on the grounds that she was neither male nor female. Her definition of the word was purely negative, an absence rather than the presence of anything, and the absence turned out to be sufficient justification for surgery.

The label protected nothing. It only narrowed which interventions she was willing to consider, and the one she settled on was irreversible. But by the same nonsensical logic, her peers “microdose” testosterone with the fantastical belief that they can somehow control the outcome: a beard without balding; broader shoulders without the belly fat.

Naming this distinction to a child who is already moving in the right direction requires care, because the confrontation can cost more than it buys. An oppositional teenager working hard on autonomy is least likely to arrive at a conclusion that has been handed to her, and telling her exactly what you think can be the surest way to keep her from thinking it herself.

Where positive movement is already underway, an argument about ideology gives her something to defend, and defending it requires rehearsing it, and every rehearsal deepens the pathways that hold the script in place. The mother who says nothing when her daughter recites something absurd about pronouns is not necessarily being passive; she may simply be wisely declining to give the script another repetition.

Sorting the harmful from the harmless is a substantial portion of parents’ inner discernment work. Figuring out how, whether and when to convey what you have sorted is another. Some portion of a parent’s objection to any given request is symbolic, and it helps to know which portion.

A girl already well along the path toward desistance asked to dye her hair blue. Her parents found a version of this they could agree to, because the request was about temporary self-expression and had no bearing on her body. Most parents feel this way: if my daughter wants to dress androgynously, fine, so long as she does not damage herself medically or build her identity on a lie.

Symbolism is what complicates the sorting. Blue hair on a girl who is settled in herself is just hair; the same request from a girl who has just announced she is “trans” arrives freighted with everything else she has been telling you, and what might lie ahead. What you are weighing is never only the haircut or the joggers or the dye, but the direction they seem to point.

Named plainly, the bind sounds something like this. If I control my child’s expression too much, I am a tyrant whose cautions are meaningless and whose overreach invites rebellion; that doesn’t earn my kid’s trust and respect, and it’s not even who I want to be. Yet I find myself unable to allow seemingly innocuous and temporary forms of teenage experimentation and self-expression, not because of anything inherent to the individual acts themselves, but because of the ideology those acts represent and the direction they reveal my child intends to go. So I have to become a more rigid and controlling parent than I see myself as, destroying my credibility, in order to protect my child from dangers they are not equipped to see.

Much of my work with parents involves loosening knots of this kind with parts language, or with the “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” construction that lets both truths stay on the table without either one winning. This particular knot sometimes gives way from a different direction. Instead of working the bind between control and permissiveness, you can step around it by separating your child from the position she is holding.

The framing that tends to survive contact is exactly that. You can express confusion that someone this independent-minded would take her metaphysics from a website, that this behavior sits oddly on her, that it does not resemble her.

That approach hands her a version of herself she wants to keep and puts the ideology outside it, where it can be dropped without any loss of face. Compare that to the alternative, in which you tell her the belief is false and she now has to choose between the belief and her standing as a person who thinks for herself.

A word on the small feminine moments, which will start appearing before anything is said out loud. She wears lip gloss to school three days running. She borrows her mother’s jewelry for graduation. She turns up to a family event in a dress.

The instinct to remark on it should be resisted, because attention triggers self-consciousness and self-consciousness produces the vulnerability hangover that pulls the concession back. Take the win and say nothing about it. One mother, after a call in which her daughter had softened considerably, wanted to revisit the moment and name what had happened; the better move was to leave it entirely alone and let the softening stand as a new normal, rather than as a subject of discussion.

The concrete work, meanwhile, is finding a presentation that suits her and that she can tolerate. There is a difference between a modest, neutral look and an awkward one deliberately designed to conceal her sex, an aspiration typically achieved poorly if at all. Swim clothes illustrate it well: rash guards and modest swim shorts cut for a female frame read as unremarkable, while enormous men’s board shorts read as hiding.

A girl who tries to pull off a masculine look while carrying a female shape usually ends up in an unsatisfying middle that pleases nobody, herself least of all, and no amount of binding improves it. What improves it is clothing cut to fit her. The distinction a parent has to make here is whether the baggy preference is about comfort, in which case there are good answers, or whether it is covering a femininity she has not yet given herself permission to want to grow into, in which case the question worth holding is what look would actually delight her. As she grows through the awkwardness inherent in adolescence, what way of carrying and presenting herself would truly allow who she is to flourish, allowing her body to move with grace and dignity?

Imagine her crossing paths, on some ordinary afternoon, with a girl who resembles her a little. Similar features, similar build, well put together without being especially girly, going about a good life, and not that far off from her at all.

This is an ROGD Repair bonus lesson. Where it’s found in the course, it comes with reflection questions to help you personalize the material — and over 120 other lessons designed to help parents navigate the difficulty of responding to teens’ and twenty-somethings’ “trans” declarations. Use code SUBSTACK for half off your first month, or get one month free with a paid subscription.