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Suicide, substance abuse, mental illness, and harassment affect LGBTQ kids at highly disproportional rates—but there is a single mediating factor that can lower those risks dramatically: family acceptance. LGBTQ teens who experience rejection at home are 8.4 times more likely to have attempted suicide by their early twenties. As the visibility of trans people increases, raising and supporting trans kids is emerging as critical. How can we help them beat the dismal stats? Elijah Nealy shares a few best practices for parents and friends, from understanding gender fluidity and questioning gender norms to respecting pronouns and recognizing that being trans isn't necessarily about body parts—it's about what's going on in someone's mind. These tips may help save a life, and better yet, it can help a trans kid become a confident, healthy, and loved young adult. Elijah Nealy is the author of Transgender Children and Youth: Cultivating Pride and Joy with Families in Transition.

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ELIJAH NEALY

Elijah Nealy, Ph.Ds, M.Div., LCSW, is Assistant Professor in the Department of SociaI Work and Latino Community Practice at University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, CT. As an out transgender man, he has spent the past 25 years working extensively within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities.

For 12 years, he worked at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Community Center in New York City. Initially serving as the program director for alcohol and drug counseling, then the overall director of mental health services for adolescents and adults, and finally as the Deputy Executive Director of the Center.

His book, Transgender Children and Youth: Cultivating Pride and Joy with Families in Transition, is one of the first comprehensive guides to the medical, emotional, and social issues of trans kids. To learn more about Dr. Nealy, visit elijahnealy.com.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Elijah Nealy: It is true that transgender youth, gender diverse youth, youth who don’t necessarily transition but whose gender expression is diverse or considered nonconforming or fluid are at higher risk of verbal harassment and even physical bullying within a school context. That’s been consistently demonstrated in surveys over the last 10 to 15 years.

So what I’d say to trans youth who are experiencing bullying is that it’s absolutely important that you talk to an adult in your life about what’s happening. That you don’t need to navigate harassment or bullying by yourself. In fact it’s critical to reach out and let someone safe in your life, another adult, know what’s happening, and that you can identify who that safe person is whether it’s a teacher, a school counselor, a school social worker, a parent, an extended family member. But it’s important to let someone know what’s happening because you have a right to be able to go to school and be safe and be free from the experience of bullying.

What the research is telling us in the last ten years is that family acceptance, a young person’s, a teenager’s experience of being accepted by their families is the critical mediating variable in queer young adult risk factors. So teenagers, queer teenagers, lesbian, gay, bi, trans teenagers growing up in families they experience as rejecting are eight-and-a-half times more likely to have attempted suicide by the time they’re 21 to 24. And they’re three-and-a-half times more likely to be at risk of HIV, to be using drugs and alcohol in an addictive way or problematic way, much higher rates of anxiety and depression, and that by contrast those risks are much lower for adolescents growing up in families that they experience as accepting.

The important piece about that for parents is the degree to which we can have an impact in lowering the risk factors that trans youth already face in a world that sometimes is still hostile or discriminatory, and that even in the face of external discrimination or harassment by peers or other adults or discriminatory laws family acceptance shows up as the critical mediating variable for young adult risks among trans youth.

So one best practice is to recognize that everyone of us as a human being has a right to define who we are, and that gender identity is not necessarily about our body parts but it’s about our own understanding of who we are as male or female, both or neither. It’s what’s in ...

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