It is important to remain supportive of gay relationships. Kenneth Zucker and Susan Bradly, world experts on gender distress, made it their mission to help gay or straight-identifying children feel comfortable in their natal bodies and prevented the many children who later identified as homosexual in their clinical research from being harmed in transgender medical interventions. The children from these families often had other underlying issues beyond, for some, the normal emerging homosexual feelings and homophobic reactions by parents. Many detransitoners say that their parents did not want a gay son or daughter. This is a double-bind message. A double-bind message can cause a split in the child’s personality. A common double-bind espoused by trans identified females is that their mother was homophobic. A mother who sees her daughter as a lesbian and then wants her to live as a man, to cover it all up, is giving a double-bind message to her daughter. 

 

Abusive double-bind messages:[99] 

 

• “I love you.” / “Go away.” 

• “You can’t do anything right.” / “I need you.” 

• “Always tell the truth.” / “I don’t want to know.” 

• “I’ll be there for you.” / “I promise I will be there next time.” 

• “Everything is fine, don’t worry.” / “How can I deal with all of this?” 

• “Being drunk isn’t Okay.” / “Anything a drunk does is okay.” 

 

Viewing the problem from a family/group therapy perspective, by addressing addictions, intergenerational trauma, and introjections through psychotherapy is beneficial. Parental introjections, called injunctions, swallowed whole, are the source of the confusion and, once investigated, aid the therapeutic contracts for change. A wounded inner child can be a devastating force of contamination during one’s adolescence. Even a person with a healthy inner child will still have to “refight many battles of earlier years,” for adolescence is normally one of the stormiest times in the life cycle.[100]