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Michigan father terrified by Trump’s plans for transgender youth

Sakege November 13, 2024

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

His daughter, a bright elementary school student who likes to ride her bike and play with friends and hugs him every night when he comes home from work, is transgender. And Trump, who decisively won last week’s election, has pledged to rescind protections for members of the LGBTQ+ communityespecially those of transgender minors, adding fuel to what many believe is already an environment of hate.

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

She added: “My daughter… is a normal girl… That she is trans is not the most interesting thing about her… It’s just who she is and if it weren’t for the fact that half the country seems to think she is a threat in some way, I don’t think we think about it much.”

What Trump says

Throughout his campaign, Trump was clear about his anti-transgender stance, even stating, falsely, that the schools are, without parental approval, providing students with sex reassignment surgery.

The president-elect has promised to ban gender-affirming care for minors and remove from the Medicaid and Medicare programs any hospital or health care provider that participates in those programs. child carewhich most often involves puberty blockers or hormone therapy. A study from the Harvard School of Public Health found that Gender affirmation surgery is rarely performed on minors.

Trump has also promised to establish a new “accreditation body for teachers” which “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 enact a law stating that the only genders the U.S. government recognizes are male and female and that those genders are assigned at birth.

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

“I think we’ve learned over the years with Trump that there’s no way to fully understand what motivates him day to day,” said Mark Erwin, executive director of the Ruth Ellis Center, which is based in Highland Park and helps LGBTQ+ teens and young adults with access to housing, health care and wellness services “But I can tell you that the political rhetoric your campaign has used has caused… harm, specifically, to trans youth across America.”

Said Erin Knott, executive director of Equality Michigan, which works to advocate for the LGBTQ+ community and reduce violence against them; “I have a 13-year-old trans teenager who is very close to me in my daily life… and she shared with 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, now they’re 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 peers, peers who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

In 2023, about 3% of high school students identified as transgender and about 2% said they were questioning their gender orientation, according to a study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study also found:

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

∎ About 40% of transgender students who asked questions said they had been bullied at school;

∎ Approximately 70% of transgender students who asked questions said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness;

∎ About 26% of transgender and questioning students attempted suicide last year, compared to 5% of cisgender men and 11% of cisgender female students.

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

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

Of the LGBTQ+ community, he added: “We have made significant progress in the last 10 years. There is still a lot of work to do, but we are a community of resilience and we are a community that supports each other and together we can Let’s take this step by step. passed”.

‘I see my baby’

The anonymous metro Detroit father of a trans elementary school boy has gone to great lengths to protect his daughter from hate. Father and daughter enjoy watching the Detroit Lions together, but to prevent his daughter from seeing the anti-train commercials that played during football games, he recorded the games and watched them on time-shift to fast-forward through the commercials. .

Outside of the immediate family, few know of her daughter’s transgender status. To keep that circle small, the family moved to a new school district that seems trans-friendly and where no one knew the girl. There, an administrator knows she is trans, 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 resolve those things,” the father said.

But after the election he is especially worried. “I want her to receive the right level of care,” he said of his daughter. “I trust their pediatrician and I trust adult trans people who have been saying how much hormones have changed their lives and teenagers who say the same thing. I once read something where, basically, if your child comes out as trans, you “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 you want, a happy, healthy child.

“She was a baby 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 she became this whole person. And just because she’s not exactly who we thought she was going to be doesn’t mean that she and that baby aren’t still the same person. While some people want you to see a threat, I just see my baby sleeping on me, my toddler throwing a birthday party for his stuffed animals, and my little one going to his first day of school. everyone could see that.”

Contact Georgea Kovanis: [email protected]

This story has been updated to add video.