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Abstract
Objective
The present study explores how coming out to parents – in terms of both status (being out vs. not) and, if out, experience (continuum from rejection to acceptance) – affects trans people’s mental health.
Method
Participants were 509 young adult trans individuals from Germany (community-based sample; 50% gender binary, 50% nonbinary; 16-35 years). The cross-sectional online study used standardized measures of coming out response, social support, and mental health.
Results
More participants were out to their mother than their father, but mothers did not respond with more acceptance. At the bivariate level, coming out experience, but not coming out status, was positively related to mental health. At the multivariate level, parental support mediated the association between both coming out variables and mental health. That is, trans people who were out to their parents and, if out, had a positive coming out experience received more parental support, which, in turn, was conducive to their mental health. There were no substantial differences between maternal and paternal effects, and effect sizes were equal for coming out status and experience.
Conclusion
This study confirmed the crucial role that parents play when it comes to their child’s coming out as trans – by accepting their child’s gender identity early on and providing them with support.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the students of an empirical research methods course taught at the University of Trier in winter semester 2022/2023 for their valuable support in data collection. Geoff Rose deserves special thanks for discussing and proofreading the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The reviewers of this article wondered why we only referred to mothers and fathers as addressees of trans people’s coming out and thus excluded same-sex and nonbinary parents. We acknowledge that the latter parent types were not the focus of our study. Such focus would require extensive purposive sampling to obtain adequate statistical power. Given that in Germany, where adoption by same-sex couples has only been possible since 2017, currently less than 0.001% of children grow up with same-sex parents (German Federal Statistical Office, Citation2018) and that a maximum of 0.5% identify as trans (Williams Institute, Citation2022), the probability to survey a trans person growing up with same-sex or nonbinary parents was very small (1 in 400 to 1 in 20,000). Indeed, none of our participants who grew up in nontraditional families had same-sex or nonbinary parents. Most nontraditional families were single-parent families; very few participants grew up with their grandparents, fostering parents, in a group home – or a mixture of this (see also Limitations).