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Objective: To explore family boundary ambiguity in the parent-child relationships of transgender youth.
Background: Transgender youth may perceive a lack of clarity about whether parents will accept their authentic gender expression, continue to support them physically and emotionally, and regard them as a member of the family. Uncertainty about being in or out of the family and whether family relationships endure is stressful and can lead to psychological distress, a sense of ambiguous loss, and frozen grief.
Method: Ethnographic content analysis was conducted based on interviews with 90 transgender youth recruited from community centers in 10 regions across 3 countries.
Results: Narratives revealed that transgender youth experienced family boundary ambiguity related to relational ambiguity, structural ambiguity, and identity ambiguity. Each experience of ambiguity obscured whether participants remained in the family and interpersonally connected to their parents.
Conclusion: Transgender youth actively navigated complex and ambiguous parent-child relationships whereby participants attempted to reconcile their need for authentic gender expression combined with their need for family connectedness and acceptance.
Implications: Family clinicians, educators, and policymakers are urged to consider family and transgender resilience through a lens of ambiguous loss and to promote a gender-affirmative life-span approach to clinical care for transgender individuals and their families.
Key Words: Adolescent development, boundary ambiguity, gender development, LGBT issues & relationships, parent-child relationships.
Within the social sciences, transgender experiences are often subsumed under an umbrella of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) scholarship, with little to no attention given to gender as a multidimensional construct or to trans youth's family experiences (Kuvalanka, Allen, Munroe, Goldberg, & Weiner, 2018; Reisner etal., 2015; Ryan, Russell, Huebner, Diaz, & Sanchez, 2010). A developing evidence base demonstrates the importance of family support and acceptance for mental health and well-being among transgender young adults (Grossman & D'Augelli, 2007; Simons, Schrager, Clark, Belzer, & Olson, 2013). For example, studies have shown that parental acceptance predicts reduced depression (Bariola et al., 2015; Bockting et al., 2013; Simons et al., 2013), whereas rejection and verbal and physical abuse predict suicidal ideation (Grossman & D'Augelli, 2007), anxiety, and depression (Budge, Adelson, & Howard, 2013). Although the scholarship on transpersons within the context of family is burgeoning, a need remains for studies that explore gender complexity and within-group gender identity variation...