Unconditional

A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child (LGBT Book, Child is Transgender or LGBTQ+)

Telaina Eriksen

• Publisher: TMA Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781633535169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Guidance on Providing Loving Support to Your LGBTQ Child

Winner of the Sixth Annual Bisexual Book Award for Non-fiction, 2017
#1 Bestseller in Lesbian Studies

Unconditional: A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child provides parents of a LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning) child with a framework for helping their LGBTQ child navigate a world that isn't always welcoming.

Tips from a mother with experience. Author Telaina Eriksen, a professor at Michigan State University and the mother of a gay daughter, explains what she and her husband have learned through experience, including how to deal with gay children coming out, tips on confronting bullying of gay children, guidance on becoming an advocate for gay children, and advice on building a support system in a gay family.

Gender dysphoria and other concerns. Eriksen also covers the science on gender and how to help a transgender child through the various stages of development. Throughout the book parents and kids who have been there, share their stories. She also directs gay family parents to various resources online for help.

Inside learn:

• How to help your child navigate locker rooms, sleepovers, proms, etc.
• When to involve the police or school administration when it comes to bullying
• How to advocate for local, state and national policies that protect your child
• Ways to educate well-meaning, but misguided extended family members
• How to help start a Gay-Straight Alliance at your child's school
• Strategies for keeping your child talking after he or she comes out
• Signs of unhealthy relationships
• When to consider therapy for your child and/or your family
• How to find an LGBTQ-friendly community (including inclusive churches)

If you liked books such as the ABC's of LGBT+, This Is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids, A Guide to Gender, or This Book Is Gay, you will want to read Unconditional: A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child.

Chapter 1

Coming Out

Chances are if you’re reading this book, your child has told you that they are not heterosexual, or they might be questioning their gender or their identity in some way. Or perhaps you suspect your child might be queer, and may not know how or whether you should talk to them about their gender and/or sexual orientation. The good news is, you are living in a better time to parent your LGBTQ child than at any previous time in history. People can legally marry their same-sex partners. LGBTQ people can openly serve in our country’s military. In many municipalities throughout the United States, LGBTQ people can no longer be fired from their jobs just because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. LGBTQ people are in the media (Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow) and there are positive role models of LGBTQ people in movies, television (Ellen Degeneres, LaVerne Cox, Neil Patrick Harris, Alan Cumming, and a host of others), sports (John Amaechi, Orlando Cruz, Brittney Griner), politics (Jared Polis, Mike Takano, Kate Brown), business (Tim Cook, Megan Smith), and literature (Alice Walker, David Sedaris, Rita Mae Brown, Gore Vidal). And I’m writing this book in 2016, an Olympic year, and the number of out USA Olympic athletes with inspirational stories is truly amazing.1

Many teens are coming out earlier and earlier, feeling safe at their middle or high schools and with their families and their friend group. Older kids (and their parents!) have access to the Internet, with its wealth of information, support, resources, and community. (Almost three-quarters of LGBTQ teens say they are more honest about themselves online than they are in the real world.)

But. But. According to research and youth surveys,2 40 percent of LGBTQ youth say they live in communities that are not accepting of LGBTQ people. LGBTQ youth are still twice as likely to be physically assaulted at school (kicked, shoved, or hit). Twenty-six percent of LGBTQ youth say their biggest problems are not being accepted by their family, being bullied at school, and fear of coming out. Ninety-two percent of LGBTQ teens say that they hear negative messages about LGBTQ people at school, on the Internet, and among their friends. In the United States, 1.6 million youth experience homelessness each year. Of that number, 40 percent of those youth identify as LGBTQ.3

According to A Healthy Chicago for LGBT Youth,4 LGBTQ youth were more likely to report depression and depressive symptoms, suicide attempts, and self-injury. They were more likely to be underweight and vomit to lose weight. They were more likely to report risky sex behaviors, to not have had proper HIV education, and were more likely to become pregnant (I know this seems strange, but LGBTQ youth are less likely to use a birth control method if they engage in heterosexual sex). LGBTQ youth were also more likely than their heterosexual cisgender (those who identity with the gender in which they were born) counterparts to use tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana. They were also more likely to experience sexual violence and victimization. The paper’s abstract concludes, “Due to the presence of these disparities at such a young age, they are likely to influence the health and well-being of LGBTQ Chicagoans throughout their lifespans.” I’m not a social science researcher, but I think one could easily imagine that the data in Chicago probably is a fair reflection of the rest of the United States.

That’s a lot to take in. Parenting, an enterprise already fraught with worry (breast-feeding, formula feeding, co-sleeping, sleep-training, oh my God is it normal for them to have a fever this high with an ear infection?, disposable diapers, cloth diapers, money concerns, education choices, extracurricular choices, friend drama, and always, no matter what the age, AM I SCREWING UP MY KID?) becomes doubly if not triply more fraught as your child’s risk of mental, emotional, and physical peril increase, simply because they were born “different.”

The good news is, parents can do a lot. They can’t do everything. We still live in a very homophobic and intolerant world, but we can do a lot. I hope this book is a resource in helping you and your child make it through this challenging time.

The Many Different Reactions to Coming Out

Sometimes in novels, TV shows or movies, an LGBTQ child comes out to a distant parent. The distant parent stands in shock. Depending on the narrative, the distant parent hugs their child and says they love them anyway (ouch) or hits them (oh God). These are the two stories that play out the most frequently in popular culture. And like most over-used tropes, they are damaging in their simplicity, reducing real life to two not-so-good extremes. I’m not saying neither one of these things ever happen, but in addition to these two stereotypes, there are a lot of other parental reactions. Those reactions, and the consequences of those reactions, need to be discussed in a realistic (non-romanticized / non-Hollywood) way.

In many cases, your child has been thinking about coming out to you for a lot longer than you have been expecting them to come out. One of the clichés that surrounds being the parent of a gay child is that before your child comes out to you, “you must have known on some level.” When my daughter Casandra came out to my husband and me shortly before her 13th birthday, I did not even suspect that she was attracted to girls. My sister is a lesbian and many of my close friends are gay. Because of my relationships with them, very early in my life I realized that sexual orientation is just one small aspect of any human being. My cluelessness about my daughter’s sexual orientation wasn’t denial. Like many parents of adolescents, I just didn’t know what was going on in her head. Whatever stereotypes there are about gayness, my daughter doesn’t fit them (some kids do and some kids don’t). Casandra played with dolls. She loved Blues Clues. Her favorite Disney movie was Mulan. Casandra liked her long hair braided. She didn’t care if she wore a dress or sweatpants (now jeans and a t-shirt are her favorites). She was (and is!) my beloved little girl—not my beloved-little-girl-who-might-be-gay.

The trouble with finding support (or sharing with other parents) when your child comes out is that you might inadvertently out your child to others before they are ready. Your LGBTQ child may also have already heard horrible messages about gay people from our culture and society—even from friends, the media, or perhaps from their religious community. To add further complexity to this delicate situation, your child has probably planned this talk with you for days, weeks, maybe even months or years. They’ve been looking for the r...

Table of contents

• Note
• Foreword
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Acknowledgments
• Author Bio
• Endnotes