A US study has found that parents of transgender youth experienced worsening mental health and well‑being in the weeks after the 2025 presidential inauguration, compared with parents of cisgender youth. The research, led by psychologist Rachel A. Leshin of Princeton University, and published in Psychological Science, tracked families across 2022 to 2024 and again in the seven weeks following the inauguration.
Following the inauguration, the new federal administration issued executive orders aimed at transgender youth. These orders sought to ban gender‑affirming medical care for minors, penalise schools that support transgender students, and restrict transgender girls from competing on gender‑aligned sports teams.
Researchers note that macrolevel policies can act as institutional signals, communicating how broader society views marginalised groups and influencing the well‑being of those targeted. Policies limiting self‑expression and resources contribute to minority stress, a framework explaining how marginalised groups experience worse well‑being due to societal hostility.
The research team, led by Leshin and including Aditi Kodipady, Grey F. Raber, Natalie M. Gallagher, and Kristina R. Olson, designed a study to compare the mental health trajectories of transgender youth and their parents with a similarly situated group of cisgender youth and their parents.
The study tracked 160 youth aged 12 to 17 and 167 parents. Within this group, 73 youths identified as transgender or nonbinary, and 87 identified as cisgender. Participants were drawn from larger, ongoing longitudinal studies of gender development in the United States.
Families involved were predominantly white, highly educated and high‑income, and both groups of parents skewed politically liberal, allowing a controlled comparison that aimed to separate general political frustration from distress specifically tied to raising a transgender child in a hostile political climate.
In the primary analysis, researchers compared annual mental health data collected from 2022 to 2024 with weekly data collected in the seven weeks after the January 2025 inauguration. Youth and parents completed separate self‑report surveys measuring depression, anxiety and positive emotions, rating how often they experienced specific symptoms over the previous seven days.
Results showed widening gaps in parental mental health between the two groups. Before the election, parents of transgender youth and parents of cisgender youth reported similar levels of depression and positive emotions. After the inauguration, parents of transgender youth reported higher depression and lower positive emotions than their cisgender counterparts.
Anxiety levels also diverged; while parents of transgender youth reported higher anxiety than those of cisgender youth before the election, this gap more than doubled after the inauguration. The researchers conducted additional analyses excluding a small number of parents who voted for the current president or who identified as transgender or gender‑diverse, and the patterns remained the same.
A secondary analysis followed participants continuously over an eight‑week period around the inauguration. It found that parents of transgender youth experienced steady, linear increases in anxiety and depression, whereas parents of cisgender youth showed no consistent changes.
The team also examined weekly measures of parental worry and perceived social support. Exploratory analyses suggested that elevated worry for their children may help explain the differing mental health outcomes, though the direction of causality could not be definitively established. Perceived social support did not differ between groups and did not account for the results; both groups reported high levels of support.
Regarding the youths themselves, the primary comparison showed only subtle differences in well‑being between transgender and cisgender youths in most models. Transgender youths displayed a drop in positive emotions after the inauguration, while anxiety trajectories diverged: cisgender youths’ anxiety declined post‑election, while transgender youths’ anxiety remained stable.
Open‑ended responses were analysed by two independent reviewers blinded to demographics. They found that parents of transgender youth were far more likely to explicitly mention transgender issues and to express severe negative emotions than the transgender youths themselves. One parent wrote, “I have cried almost every day this past week,” while another said, “Every week is a new wave of fear, frustration, and utter disbelief.”
The authors suggest that parents often anticipate long‑term threats more acutely than adolescents. At the time of the surveys, the executive orders targeting transgender youth had largely been blocked by federal judges and had not yet altered daily life for most participants. The youth, therefore, might not have felt the immediate impact as acutely as their parents, who were already processing the institutional signals and potential future consequences.
The study’s sample is described as a specific demographic—liberal‑leaning, supportive parents—raising questions about generalisability to more politically diverse or socioeconomically varied families. The authors call for research involving broader demographics to determine whether the observed patterns hold more widely.
The number of participants also limits broad conclusions. Differences among youth were smaller and less consistent than those observed among parents. Further research with larger adolescent cohorts is needed to track how federal policies affect the long‑term mental health of transgender youth and whether parental distress might later impact their children.
The study, “Reduced Mental Health and Well‑Being in Parents of Transgender Youth Following the 2025 U.S. Presidential Inauguration,” was authored by Rachel A. Leshin, Aditi Kodipady, Grey F. Raber, Natalie M. Gallagher, and Kristina R. Olson.
