When the effects of policies aimed at transgender people are discussed, the focus is almost always on young people. They are at the centre of the debate and of the statistics. But around every transgender teenager there is a family that reads the news, attends appointments and, in many cases, holds the household together. A team from the University of Washington and the gender research centre at Princeton University set out to measure what happened to those parents at the moment the new U.S. administration began signing executive orders aimed specifically at transgender youth. The result, published in Psychological Science, is that the strain does not stay with the teenagers: it spreads to the people caring for them.
This is not an opinion poll or a single snapshot of a group of families. The authors followed a group of adolescents aged 12 to 17 and their parents for three years, between 2022 and 2024, and kept measuring just before and just after the presidential inauguration of January 2025, in the middle of a wave of orders restricting access to gender-affirming care for minors. In total, 160 young people and 167 parents. The design was preregistered, meaning the hypotheses and analyses were fixed in writing before the data were seen, which limits the room to find afterwards exactly what one hoped to find.
The key comparison was not simply before versus after, but two parallel trajectories: that of families with a transgender child and that of families with a cisgender child, meaning one who identifies with the sex assigned at birth. If the distress had been a general effect of the political climate, both groups would have fallen equally. If it had been chance, it would not have appeared systematically.
What appeared was a clear gap. Parents of transgender youth showed significant declines in mental health and well-being compared with parents of cisgender youth. Among the adolescents themselves, by contrast, differences over time were less pronounced. The authors read this as a sign of where this kind of political message lands first: on the adults who understand what is at stake, who know which resources exist and who know that, if those doors close, they will be the ones who have to look for alternatives.
One design detail deserves attention because it changes the usual reading of findings like this. The sample was, as a whole, not favourable to the new administration. These are not families who felt politically defeated by an election result. They are people who already disagreed with those policies and who, even so, experienced a measurable deterioration in their well-being as they saw those policies become rules. The harm does not depend only on sharing an ideology: it depends on having a son or daughter whose daily life changes with every executive order.
To grasp the weight of this result, it helps to recall what raising a transgender teenager in a hostile environment involves. The family is usually the first filter between the child and the world: the one who books appointments, talks to the school, manages the fear that a classmate or a teacher will expose them. When the pressure rises, that invisible work multiplies. And caregiver burnout is not a private problem: an exhausted family has fewer resources to support, to spot warning signs and to sustain adherence to treatments already under way.
The work fits a line of research that in recent years has stopped looking only at the individual and begun measuring the environment. We know that structural stigma is associated with poorer mental health in transgender people; what this article adds is that the effect does not stop at the adolescent who is targeted, but reaches the person caring for them. It is a different argument from the usual one and, in a way, harder to dismiss: no one has to settle any question about identity to recognise that a mother or father can become ill with worry.
The limits are clear too. The sample is American, of moderate size and does not represent every family in the country; the authors work with a single time window around the inauguration, so follow-up does not extend far enough to see whether the decline persists or recovers. Nor can the effect of the executive orders be fully separated from the effect of the public conversation surrounding them, because both arrived together. These are limitations of an observational study, and they do not invalidate the comparison with cisgender families, which is its greatest strength.
The practical conclusion is not psychological but public health. If legislative changes harm caregivers, services for transgender youth should include families in follow-up, not only the patient. And those drafting such policies should know that the cost they claim to be protecting — the well-being of minors — is also paid by the people who support them. An adolescent does not live alone; their mental health rests on that of the people around them.
Source: Reduced Mental Health and Well-Being in Parents of Transgender Youth Following the 2025 U.S. Presidential Inauguration. Leshin RA, Kodipady A, Raber GF, Gallagher NM, Olson KR. Psychological Science 2026;37(8):586-599. DOI: 10.1177/09567976261461126.
Article published on dosier.es. Image generated with artificial intelligence (marta ai → marta.syf.es).
