While Trans People Build Families, Transphobes Try to Destroy Them
👨👩👧👦 We need to admit it at last: we support family values. Trans people create families, raise children and plan a future together.
🥴 Meanwhile, there are so-called “defenders of family values” who dream of destroying trans families. Yet the fact remains: trans families exist and have children who are just as happy as those in “ordinary traditional families” with cis heterosexual people. The phrase “traditional family values” sounds rather suspicious when it is used to propose annulling someone else’s marriage.
👉 Read more about the research below.
Contents
Trans people build families
Trans people build families just as cis people do. This is an undeniable fact.
As early as 2014, researchers at the Williams Institute brought together 51 studies and reports on trans parenting. In many of the surveys reviewed, between a quarter and half of trans respondents had children. Numerous other studies also confirm that trans people plan to become parents.
The widespread myth that trans people do not want or have children does not stand up to scrutiny. Trans people can have biological children, use donated reproductive cells, adopt, or raise children together with a partner.
Research on families with trans fathers
A French study in 2020 involved seventeen families with trans fathers and their 32 children. The men had transitioned before their children were conceived, and the families had used donor insemination. In other words, these people planned and built their families after transition.
These 32 children were compared with two other groups: 28 children of cis parents conceived with a donor and 28 children conceived naturally, without donor assistance. No differences were found in intelligence tests or overall measures of psychological difficulties.
In the same study, twenty assessors were shown children’s family drawings without being told which families had a transgender father. No group of assessors was able to identify this any better than chance.
The myth that a parent’s transition supposedly puts a child’s psychological health at risk therefore remains a myth.
Relationships between parents and children
Another study examined 35 families with trans parents. Twenty-five children aged eight to eighteen participated directly, and researchers also collected assessments from parents and teachers.
Overall, the children had high levels of psychological well-being and positive relationships with their parents. The age at which a child learned that a parent was transgender was not associated with psychological difficulties.
So who is the enemy of family values?
In Ukraine today, it is the authors of the new draft Civil Code.
Under Articles 1488, 1495 and 1500 of the draft Civil Code of Ukraine, transition is treated as an immoral act, and the state would declare trans people’s marriages invalid following a legal change of sex.
This threatens the marriages of real people who share a life, property and sometimes children. A handful of parliamentary votes could destroy these families. As of September 2026, the draft is being prepared for its second reading: this provision has not yet become law, and whether we allow Ukrainian families to be destroyed depends on us.
Sources
- Emancipation NGO’s original Instagram carousel.
- Canadian Psychological Association: family building for gender-diverse individuals.
- Williams Institute: Transgender Parenting.
- Tasker and Gato (2020): Gender Identity and Future Thinking About Parenthood.
- Condat et al. (2020): Transgender fathering.
- Imrie et al. (2020): Children with Trans Parents.
With support from
Published with support from TGEU — Trans Europe and Central Asia.