Michigan father terrified of Trump's plans for transgender youth

You can hear the fear and anxiety in his voice when he talks about his daughter. He fears her because he believes that doing his job as a father – keeping his girl happy, healthy and safe – will become extremely difficult under the administration of newly elected President Donald Trump.

His daughter – a smart primary school student who enjoys cycling and playing with friends and hugs him every evening when he comes home from work – is transgender. And Trump, who decisively won last week’s election, has pledged to repeal protections for members of the LGBTQ+ communityespecially that of transgender minors, adding fuel to what many believe is an already hateful environment.

“My job is to protect (my daughter) and now everything is so much more dangerous that we don’t know what will happen next,” said the father, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears for his child’s safety. “It’s scary. It’s terrifying.”

He added: “My daughter… she is an ordinary child. … The fact that she is transgender is not the most interesting thing about her. … It’s just who she is, and even if it’s not for the fact that half the country seems to think she’s a threat in some way, I don’t think we would think about it that much.”

What Trump says

Throughout his campaign, Trump was clear about his anti-transgender attitude, even claim, wrongly, that schools are, without parental consent, offering gender reassignment operations to students.

The president-elect has pledged to ban gender-affirming care for minors and to cut all hospitals and health care providers that participate from the Medicaid and Medicare programs. care for minorsusually involving puberty blockers or hormone therapy. This is evident from a study by the Harvard School of Public Health Gender confirmation surgeries are rarely performed on minors.

Trump has also promised to create a new country “credentialing body for teachers” that will “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrate rather than erase the things that make men and women different and unique.”

And he has promised to ask Congress to pass a law stating that the only genders the U.S. government recognizes are male and female, and that these genders are assigned at birth.

Members of the LGBTQ+ community say the campaign, which included heavy use of anti-trans commercials with the slogan “Kamala is for them/them; Trump is for you,” has eroded public acceptance of transgender people.

“I think what we’ve learned over the years with Trump is that there’s no way to fully understand what motivates him on a day-to-day basis,” said Mark Erwin, executive director of the Ruth Ellis Center, which is based in Highland Park and helps LGBTQ+ teens and young people. young adults with access to housing, healthcare and welfare services. “But I can tell you that the political rhetoric his campaign has employed has especially harmed trans youth in the United States.”

Said Erin Knott, executive director of Equality Michigan, which advocates for the LGBTQ+ community and reducing violence against it; “I have a 13-year-old trans teen who is very close to me in my daily life… and they told me that ‘this is a matter of my life and death.’ It’s hard enough being 13… you’re supposed to be a kid. But on top of that, they’re now worried about what’s going to happen to them.”

Making an already vulnerable group even more vulnerable

The fear and uncertainty come at a time when transgender youth, due to lack of acceptance and stigma, are already more likely to struggle with depression and suicidal behavior, more likely to experience violence and homelessness than their cisgender counterparts, peers who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

About 3% of high school students identified as transgender by 2023, and about 2% said they were unsure about their gender orientation, according to a survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study also found:

∎ About 25% of transgender and questioning students said they skipped school because they felt unsafe, compared to 8.5% of cisgender male students;

∎ About 40% of transgender and questioning students said they were bullied at school;

∎ About 70% of transgender and questioning students said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness;

∎ About 26% of transgender and questioning students have attempted suicide in the past year, compared to 5% of cisgender male and 11% of cisgender female students.

Research shows that gender-affirming therapies help minimize the risk of depression and suicidal behavior. According to one study published in 2022 by the Journal of the American Medical Association, Youth who received gender-affirming therapies were 60% less likely to have depression and 73% less likely to have suicidal thoughts or behavior than youth who did not receive gender-affirming care.

“What I hope,” Erwin said, is that “his administration will take a moment to reflect on what they have done, what they have caused and how their words have affected our community, and that he will take a moment to reevaluate their priorities so that they serve all Americans, not just those who are part of the MAGA movement.”

On the LGBTQ+ community, he added: “We have made significant progress over the past decade. There is still a lot of work to be done, but we are a community of resilience and we are a community that leans on each other and together we are going to take this one step at a time.”

‘I see my baby’

The unnamed father of a transgender Detroit elementary school child has done what he could to protect his daughter from hate. Father and daughter enjoy watching the Detroit Lions together, but to keep his daughter from seeing the anti-train commercials that played during football games, he recorded the games and delayed watching to fast-forward through the commercials.

Few outside the immediate family know about his daughter’s transgender status. To keep that circle small, the family moved to a new school district that seemed trans-friendly and where no one knew the girl. There, an administrator knows she is transgender, but her teacher does not.

“I’m never going to tell her not to be who she is, but at the same time we have to make a lot of decisions for her about what’s safe and what’s not, because she’s a child and we’re the adults that we have. to find out,” the father said.

But after the elections he is especially concerned. “I want her to get the right care,” he said of his daughter. “I trust her pediatrician, and I trust the transgender adults who say how much hormones have changed their lives, and the teenagers who say the same. I once read something that says if your child comes to you as transgender, you can have a trans child who feels supported and loved, or you can have a trans child who feels rejected and alone.”

That’s really all he wants: a happy and healthy child.

“She was a baby just like anyone else,” the man said. “And we brought her home and we took care of her and she learned to walk and talk and became a whole person. And just because she isn’t exactly who we thought she would be, doesn’t mean she and Baby aren’t still the same person. Where some people want you to see a threat, I just see my baby sleeping on me, my toddler throwing a birthday party for her stuffed animals, and my little child heading into her first day of pregnancy. school. I wish everyone could see that.”

Contact Georgea Kovanis: [email protected]

This story has been updated to add a video.