Answer

What Should I Do If My Child Is Questioning Their Gender?

If your child has told you they are questioning their gender, you are probably somewhere between wanting to say the right thing and being afraid of saying the wrong one. Both feelings are reasonable, and neither is the most important thing in the room.

Stay close first. Whatever you say in the next few weeks matters far less than whether your child concludes they can talk to you. If they conclude they cannot, every conversation you actually want to have later becomes impossible. You can hold everything you believe and still make closeness the outcome, and most parents who navigate this well describe deciding that in the first hour.

You are not the first parent here, and the Church has written for you specifically. Its counsel is that those who identify as transgender, and their families and friends, face complex challenges and should be treated with sensitivity, kindness, compassion, and an abundance of Christlike love. Beyond that there are two short guides: one written for family members, working through what to say, how to show love without pretending to agree about everything, and what to do if your child is depressed or thinking about suicide — and a companion written for your child rather than about them.

Eternal Truths

Your child is a beloved child of Heavenly Parents, and that came first. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that each of us is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents with a divine nature and destiny. That was true before this conversation and it is true during it.

Gender is part of who someone is, not a container the real person was placed into. The Proclamation teaches that gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose. Our spirits have form, and that form is gendered. You need this settled in yourself. You do not need to deliver it as a lecture.

Identity is taught the Savior’s way, which is slowly and relationally. A child who is certain of your affection can hear things a child who is not cannot. That ordering is not a tactic. It is the whole method.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The influences here are real and they are largely social, which changes what actually helps. The phone and the friendship group are usually a more relevant lever than another conversation about doctrine. It is also easy to let this become the only subject in the house. Siblings are watching, and what they are learning is what your household does when someone is struggling.

Questions to Think About

• Is my child more certain of my love this month than they were last month?
• Am I reaching for doctrine because it is right, or because it is the part I can control?
• What in our home has quietly become about this one thing?

What You Can Do

Read Supporting Others this week, before the next conversation rather than after it. It is short, it is the Church’s own, and it is written for the position you are actually in. Give your child Understanding Yourself when the moment is right, and read Gospel Topics: Transgender yourself first.

Get help, and get the right kind. A bishop. A therapist who will neither simply affirm whatever is presented nor simply dismiss the distress — Elder Jeffrey R. Holland counselled those carrying this kind of weight to seek the advice of reputable people with certified training, professional skills and good values (“Like a Broken Vessel”). Both exist and both are worth finding.

Then pick one ordinary thing you and your child do together that has nothing to do with any of this, and keep doing it. The essay behind this answer goes further into the doctrine and the research.

Jesus Christ knows your child by name and is not finished with either of you.