On Susan’s birthday five years ago, her 10-year-old slid a note under her door. Today, she can recite it from memory: “Hey Mom, I wanted to ask, when you talk about me in the future, if you could use he/him or they/them pronouns because she/her pronouns make me really uncomfortable.” Then, “Happy Birthday.”
Susan, the mother of two kids in Connecticut, remembers letting out a deep breath. She had been deeply worried about Kai, her youngest, who had been severely depressed and struggling with school. She hurried to his room and hugged him, thinking: Maybe this is what has been wrong. Maybe this is why he’s been so sad. But in a way, it was a relief to have an answer, because, she realized, “this is something that we can tackle.”
Today, Kai is part of the minority of transgender youth who receive medical treatment for gender dysphoria, the medical term for the clinical levels of distress some trans people experience when their bodies don’t match their internal sense of gender. Kai takes puberty blockers and a low dose of testosterone, which he receives from the family’s trusted pediatrician, who now works at a clinic specializing in treating trans children. “It was an overnight transformation for him,” Susan says of Kai’s medical transition. “He’s in all kinds of clubs. He’s on the honor roll. He has friends over every day. Just a totally different kid, and that started the second I made that appointment.”
Neighbors, family friends, and schoolmates took his transition in stride. Kai “doesn’t have anybody in his life, really, who has ever batted an eye at his gender identity,” Susan says. Luck, of course, was a factor in his ease of adjustment, but she also credits the family’s decision to move away from South Carolina, where Kai was born. The state has since banned gender-affirming care for trans youth and prohibited trans kids from using school bathrooms or playing for school sports teams that align with their gender identity. She’s grateful that Kai could focus on being a kid. “He’s living in a rose-colored-glasses world that we’re trying to maintain for him.”
Those glasses shattered in December, when Susan took now-15-year-old Kai to Washington, DC, to attend a demonstration in support of trans rights at the Supreme Court. The justices that day were hearing oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a case challenging Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors. But to join the group waving transgender pride flags on the steps leading up the court, they first had to make their way through a crowd led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and other MAGA loyalists. “It was the first time that he had seen with his own eyes people saying, ‘Don’t trans our kids,’ and all of that,” Susan told me later. “I saw a feeling of fear across his face.”
Three months into President Donald Trump’s second administration, anti-trans hatred has become inescapable for families like Kai’s, even in more liberal states like Connecticut. Parents—many of whom have spent years learning, advocating, and finding ways for their trans or nonbinary child to thrive—say their lives have been upended by a series of executive orders and actions targeting their children’s health care and support at school.
The actions from just the first week of April, gives an idea of the flurry of attacks. On April 4th, the pro-wrestling-executive turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon launched a Special Investigations Team focused on keeping transgender girls out of girls’ school bathrooms and off of girls’ sports teams. After canceling $180 million in funding for research into transgender-related healthcare, the White House directed the National Institutes of Health to study the tiny minority of people who “regret” their gender transition. And in a proclamation recognizing April as National Child Abuse Prevention Month, Trump declared that “gender ideology”—an empty signifier for anything related to trans people—was “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today.” Parents who support their trans children are, in Trump’s framing, child abusers.
As the White House tries to turn the full weight of the federal government against transgender people, families say they are in survival mode, trying to find ways to protect their children from attacks on all sides. To understand how families are coping with this onslaught, Mother Jones spoke with seven families with trans children—from kindergartners through high schoolers—who come from both traditionally Democratic and Republican communities. Without exception, they spent last fall preparing identity documents and, for those receiving gender-affirming care, making backup plans to access puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Several have made preparations to move abroad.
For some parents and youth, Mother Jones is using their first names. Others, like Susan and Kai, have been given pseudonyms to protect them from backlash or targeting.
Raising a gender-diverse kid in a country where trans and nonbinary people make up less than 2 percent of the adult population has always been challenging. But as the transgender community has found its voice and grown more visible over the last ten years, religious-right advocacy groups, anti-LGBTQ activists, and Republican politicians have coordinated their efforts and politically weaponized fears about them. Since 2022, state legislators have introduced hundreds of bills in state legislatures restricting trans people’s participation in public life or their access to public facilities. To legitimize their efforts, they’ve flooded the media with claims that being trans is a matter of “indoctrination” and cast transgender women in particular as threats to cisgender women and children. Research by the LGBTQ suicide prevention group Trevor Project has found that the onslaught of political attacks has worsened trans kids’ mental health, which is already strained by gender dysphoria and existing prejudice and discrimination. Among over 18,000 LGBTQ youth the group surveyed in the fall of 2023, 90 percent said recent politics negatively affected their well-being, and nearly half of trans survey participants said they considered moving due to anti-LGBTQ laws in their state.
Cameron, a 17-year-old from Connecticut, opting to use his first name, is among those preparing to leave the country. He isn’t touring colleges this spring break; instead, he and his boyfriend are figuring out where to move abroad, citing safety concerns under the Trump administration. “It is the best option I can think of right now,” Cameron tells me. He feels lucky that his boyfriend’s family is moving with them, but he is sad to leave: “Having to choose my safety over staying with my family at a young age is a really frustrating place to be in.” Cameron’s mother, who has been a steadfast advocate for trans rights for years, is “trying not to panic” and is focusing on supporting her son. “They don’t feel safe here,” she says. “They just want to be away from being the center of everything.”
For these families, when their children already have endured periods of suicidality or harassment from their peers or community, Trump’s anti-trans executive orders threaten their family’s well-being. “I have a daughter who is scared for her life every day,” says Charles, the father of a teenage girl in a Southern state that bans gender-affirming care for minors. She’s “terrified to be herself in public,” he adds.
Charles, whose name has been changed, drives his daughter 10 hours each way to a hospital clinic in Virginia for her treatments. In early February, he learned from the news that the hospital had canceled appointments for trans youth, including his daughter, in response to one of Trump’s orders. His daughter has been living with intense fear, he says. He’s scared about her mental health spiraling. “We do our best to convince her we will protect her,” he says, “but the vitriol of those in power at the state and federal level has been destabilizing.” He describes how his daughter prays, “Please, God, no,” as her mother holds her. “They both weep. It’s unbearable,” he says.
“Being trans isn’t the most important thing in my life,” says a 17-year-old girl I’ll call Brooke. “I have so many other things going for me and so many other things I’m gonna do.” Brooke transitioned the summer before fifth grade and has been living fully as a girl for almost half her life. Now a willowy high school junior on the varsity diving team, she likes to go shopping at Target with her friends and watch rom-coms with her mom in the living room, where family pictures line the TV cabinet. There’s tiny Brooke wearing a bucket hat in the snow, teen Brooke beaming with her two siblings, and a portrait of a great aunt—a Catholic nun—who’d been especially supportive when she came out. A print on the wall reads, “Every day I love you.”
A few weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Brooke settled on the living room couch and logged on to a Zoom call with a Washington, DC, surgeon. The family’s plan, according to her mother, Renee, has been for Brooke to graduate high school, get transfeminine bottom surgery—which Brooke describes as “the final step that I need to fully be who I am”—and recover before going off to college. The family has always known she would likely have to wait until she turned 18, because the procedure is almost never performed on minors. They’ve gathered the required letters from Brooke’s therapist and endocrinologist and researched hospitals that would take their family’s health insurance.
Then, two days after being sworn in, Trump issued an executive order threatening to cut off federal funding to hospitals that provided gender-affirming care for trans youth—defined as anyone under the age of 19. Even though the order wasn’t immediately enforceable and a federal judge quickly put it on hold, hospitals were terrified. On the Zoom call, the surgeon informed Brooke that he couldn’t help her for another year.
Would gender-affirming care even be available for anyone in a year? At a previous appointment, Brooke’s endocrinologist told her and Renee that she wasn’t sure it would be. When they ended the call with the surgeon, the family sat in the living room together, crying. Then Brooke burst out, “I just want to be normal!”
Renee says that for Brooke, surgery is “everything. She knows that her body does not match who she is.” Brooke showers two or three times a day, her mom says. In the earlier years of her transition, she always wore a bathing suit.
“People are like, ‘What’s another year?’” Renee says. “This is life or death.”
When Brooke turned 7, she told her mom that her secret birthday wish of waking up as a girl hadn’t come true. Reassuring her child, Renee said there were many ways to be a boy. Two years later, she learned from another parent that Brooke had texted friends in a group chat that she felt like a “freak” and was planning to kill herself. “I just felt very lost, and I felt very lonely,” Brooke says now. “I didn’t know what being transgender was. I was like, ‘I’m a girl, I don’t know what to do. Help me.’”
This time, her parents understood. With their support, Brooke transitioned that summer. They went to Claire’s to get her ears pierced, changed her name, and contacted their city’s LGBTQ center for referrals to health care providers. “My first year when my insides and my outsides matched,” she says, “it was so great to make friends and build relationships and not have this weight weighing on me.”
In middle school, when classmates outed her, she decided to make a video about being trans. “I’d rather people hear my story and things about me from me,” she says. It took a few more years to learn to stop believing the cruel comments some classmates traded in group chats. “Me being happy doesn’t hurt anyone,” she declares in our interview. “And if it hurts you, you need to get over yourself.”
Renee says Brooke is coming home from school angrier these days. They still haven’t heard from the school district about whether or how it will implement Trump’s other anti-trans executive orders, which threaten to pull federal funding from schools unless they stop using trans kids’ updated names and pronouns and kick trans girls off girls’ sports teams. The week of Trump’s inauguration, a boy on the diving team called Brooke by the name she hadn’t used for seven years. Lately, she goes to practice but stays on the bench, Renee says. She’s been sitting out meets since November.
“I am physically ill,” Renee tells me. She’s been writing letters and calling her representatives. “I just want to protect my children. I want them to have wonderful, happy, healthy lives. And the federal government is trying to take my kids’ rights away…I’m just so terrified because I don’t know what the future holds for them.”
As Jenny, the mother of Blake, a 14-year-old transgender boy in Connecticut, watched hospitals close their doors to trans youth, she eyed the clinic that treated her son warily. It’s in a sanctuary state, with laws in place to protect the trans community, but other hospitals in states like New York and Colorado had begun to cancel gender-affirming care appointments. (Both Jenny and Blake have opted to use pseudonyms).
Let’s be proactive here, she told herself, and emailed the executive board of the hospital that housed the clinic. The gender program had changed Blake’s life, she wrote, asking administrators to commit to keeping it open.
To her surprise, Jenny ended up in a Zoom meeting with the president of the hospital. The federal government hadn’t pulled funding yet, and the hospital wasn’t going to “overcomply” with the executive order, she remembers him assuring her. But he didn’t sugarcoat the situation: The hospital would go bankrupt without federal funding. If forced to choose between funding and continuing care for transgender youth, federal funding had to win out. “We’re going to keep working until we can’t,” she remembers he told her.
Jenny had been hesitant when Blake first said he wanted to start testosterone last year. “What finally changed my mind [was Blake] telling me that he was showering and getting dressed with the lights off because he couldn’t stand to look at himself,” Jenny says. “As a mother, that hits you.”
It had been easy for Jenny to dismiss it when Blake was 3 and telling her he wanted to be a boy. Yet by the time he was 13, his dysphoria was so intense that immediately after school, he would just go to sleep. Classmates and teachers constantly misgendered him, he says. When I spoke with Blake, he was wearing a black oversized hoodie—the unofficial uniform of trans men before top surgery. He was also being bullied, he continues. Once, two classmates called and threatened to beat him up. “They called me every slur, including one for Black people and one for Jewish people,” Blake says, shaking his head. “I’m not either, so good try.”
Still, he recorded the 10-minute harangue and shared it with his principal, who wanted to file a Title IX complaint. Instead, Blake wanted a mediated conversation with the bullies. In the end, both bullies apologized, saying they had “mad respect” for him.
By the time he turned 14, Blake tells me, “I couldn’t wait any longer.”
Once Jenny agreed to let Blake pursue gender-affirming care, it took several months of waiting—and therapy sessions—before he saw an endocrinologist. Due to Blake’s physical development and bloodwork, the clinic recommended that he forego puberty blockers and start with a low dose of testosterone.
After having struggled with ambivalence, Jenny now finds herself fighting to make sure Blake can keep getting his medication. She’s meeting with his pediatrician—whose practice doesn’t rely on federal funding but also doesn’t treat trans kids—to set up a contingency plan. The pediatrician never planned to handle Blake’s gender-affirming care. But now, with Jenny’s advocacy and other training, the pediatrician has agreed to take over the prescription.
Despite everything going on, Blake is happy. He dismisses bigots as wanting what he has, saying: “It’s probably just because they’re jealous that I’m comfortable in myself and that I have the freedom to live [like] I want to.”
In trying to protect their children from the barrage of GOP attacks, some parents have taken what may appear to be drastic measures. As Nancy, the mother of Ari, a trans teen in Florida, asks, “What choice do we have?”
Nancy watched with horror as Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a slate of anti-trans legislation in 2022. The laws included the notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill and a ban on trans people using the correct restrooms in government-owned buildings. The state Medicaid agency issued a report slamming gender-affirming care for youth that was co-authored by anti-LGBTQ extremists. Soon, the state medical board, stocked with DeSantis appointees and Republican donors, banned doctors from treating gender dysphoria in minors with puberty blockers or hormones.
Nancy and her husband felt strongly that they needed to get Ari out of the state. But they relied on her husband’s job in Florida, and their other children were still in high school. The solution? Selling their house so Nancy and Ari could move 1,200 miles north, to a more trans-friendly community in New England. Meanwhile, the rest of the family remained in Florida and moved in with relatives.
“I’m managing our household by myself and doing everything on my own,” Nancy says; her husband flies up to visit when he can. Their friends and family in Florida continually react with disbelief at their arrangement.
The emotional cost for Ari has been high. Now 14, her anxiety has dictated many of her day-to-day decisions, ever since she was outed at her Florida school. The constant news about trans issues only makes things worse, so Nancy tries to shield her from it.
“I used to put my name and my face out there,” Nancy says, “but now I don’t even feel safe.” Her husband has started applying for jobs so they can leave the country.
Most trans youth are just doing their best to focus on being kids. Six-year-old Charlie’s life is typical of someone in the single digits: gymnastics, Legos, kindergarten. “A really smart, wildly creative kid,” as her mother, Lisa, says, Charlie has even taken to going to an American Ninja Warrior-themed climbing gym. A week after she turned 5, she told her parents, “I’m not a boy, I’m a girl.” Lisa doesn’t consider this as Charlie “coming out—she just told us who she is.” And so for the last year, Charlie’s been using she/her pronouns. (Both Charlie and Lisa are using pseudonyms.)
Lisa says they are raising her as their daughter, which is clearly how Charlie understands herself. Because she is so young, medical interventions are years and conversations away. For now, Charlie wears dresses, has long hair, and describes herself as a girl.
But even a 6-year-old can pick up when something is not right. “She is a smart kid,” Lisa notes. “She can read the room.” When Trump was elected, Charlie was upset, though she couldn’t quite articulate why. “I told her that there are people fighting back,” Lisa recalls, “and she said, ‘Fighting with words, or fighting fighting?’”
We spoke to these families in early 2025, as they coped with the uncertainty of executive orders and court injunctions. Kai is trying to keep a level head about changing policies. Susan is watching her son emotionally brace himself for what may lie ahead. As he told his mother: “Whether we have meds, whether we can have surgery, I’m still a boy and I’m still the same person, and I’m going to continue to be the same person.”
Susan reports her son is continuing to thrive among his supportive community, but finds herself asking: “What would it mean if the doctors could no longer provide his treatments and he was forced to physically detransition in front of his peers?” Her whole family is distracting themselves by focusing on the musical Kai is in. Her home has become noisy with theater kids—many queer and trans. “We’re trying to cling to that normalcy as much as we can, for as long as we can,” she says.
Renee, Brooke’s mother, is researching places in other countries where Brooke could receive surgery before entering college. “We will get this done for her,” she says. “If we have to go to Thailand, if we have to go to Canada, if we have to go to Spain, it doesn’t matter.”
Charles, the Southern dad, texted me to share that after a month, the Virginia hospital resumed care for his daughter and trans youth. Again, he only found out through the news; the hospital did not contact the family about any of the changes. “FYI: on way home from Virginia,” he wrote in celebration. “Got her estrogen Rx and filled while up there.”
Many of these parents lean on each other through informal support groups. An elder in his church for over 20 years, Charles appreciates the importance of strong communities. But when it comes to the bonds he has formed with other trans families, many of whom he met only recently, “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” he says. “The solidarity and being understood, the compassion. It’s a community that knows the pain and the fear that we’re all experiencing and wants to support one another.”
But now, Charles is leaving his church and his hometown to take his daughter to a safer state. “Transgender people and their families are in hiding,” he says. “We are in desperate need of allies. Even if people don’t buy the threat of violence is real, as parents, we can’t take that risk. Please help us.”
If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.