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A recent study found that parents of transgender youth experienced worsening mental health and well-being following the 2025 United States presidential inauguration compared to parents of cisgender youth. The research highlights the immediate emotional toll that shifting political climates and federal policy changes can take on the family members of marginalized groups. The study was published in Psychological Science.
Following the 2025 presidential inauguration, the new federal administration issued several executive orders aimed at transgender youth. These orders sought to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors, penalize schools that support transgender students, and restrict transgender girls from competing on gender-aligned sports teams.
Prior research has established that such macrolevel policies can act as institutional signals. These signals communicate how broader society views specific groups, which can influence the well-being of those targeted and their families. Policies limiting self-expression and resources contribute to minority stress, a framework explaining how marginalized groups experience worse well-being due to societal hostility.
Researchers wanted to understand how this specific political shift affected both transgender adolescents and their supportive parents. The research team was led by psychologist Rachel A. Leshin of Princeton University, along with Aditi Kodipady, Grey F. Raber, Natalie M. Gallagher, and Kristina R. Olson. They designed a study to compare the mental health trajectories of transgender youth and their parents against a similarly situated group of cisgender youth and their parents.
The researchers tracked 160 youth between the ages of 12 and 17, as well as 167 parents. Within this group, 73 of the youth identified as transgender or nonbinary, and 87 identified as cisgender. The participants were drawn from larger, ongoing longitudinal studies of gender development across the United States.
The families involved in the research were predominantly white, highly educated, and high-income. Because both groups of parents skewed politically liberal, the study offered a controlled comparison. It allowed researchers to differentiate between general frustration with the new administration and distress specifically tied to raising a transgender child in a hostile political environment.
In their primary analysis, the researchers compared mental health data collected annually between 2022 and 2024 to weekly data collected in the seven weeks following the January 2025 inauguration. Youth and parents completed separate self-report surveys measuring depression, anxiety, and positive emotional states. Participants rated how frequently they experienced specific symptoms, such as being unable to stop feeling sad or worrying at bedtime, over the previous seven days.
The researchers observed widening gaps in mental health between the two groups of parents. 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 levels of depression and lower positive emotions than their counterparts.
Anxiety levels also diverged. While parents of transgender youth reported higher anxiety than parents of cisgender youth before the election, this gap more than doubled in size after the inauguration. To ensure these differences were not just reflecting voting behavior or a parent’s own gender identity, the researchers ran additional analyses. The patterns remained the same when excluding the small number of parents who voted for the current president or who identified as transgender or gender-diverse themselves.
The team also conducted a secondary analysis tracking participants continuously over an eight-week period surrounding the inauguration. They found that parents of transgender youth experienced steady linear increases in anxiety and depression throughout this window. In contrast, parents of cisgender youth showed no consistent changes in these measures.
To understand why parents experienced these outcomes, the researchers analyzed weekly measures of parental worry and perceived social support. Their exploratory analyses suggested that elevated worry for their children may help explain the differing mental health outcomes between the two parent groups, though the researchers noted the causal direction could not be definitively established. Perceived social support did not differ between the groups and did not explain the results. Both groups reported high levels of social support, indicating that community backing was not enough to offset the distress caused by the new political landscape.
The researchers also examined the mental health of the youth themselves. In the primary comparison between pre-election and post-inauguration periods, the differences in well-being between transgender and cisgender youth were subtle and not statistically significant in most models. Transgender youth showed a drop in positive emotions after the inauguration. However, the mental health trajectories of the two youth groups largely diverged only in anxiety. During the post-election period, cisgender youths’ anxiety lessened, while transgender youths’ anxiety remained stable.
To explore why the mental health declines were more prominent in parents than in the youth, the researchers analyzed open-ended survey responses. Two independent reviewers, blinded to the participants’ demographics, coded these responses. They found that parents of transgender youth were much more likely to explicitly mention transgender issues and express severe negative emotions than the transgender youth were. Some parents shared statements like, “I have cried almost every day this past week,” and “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 do. 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 might not have felt the immediate impact, whereas their parents were already processing the institutional signals and preparing for potential future consequences.
The study focused on a specific demographic of liberal-leaning, supportive parents. Parents who hold different political beliefs or who do not support their child’s transgender identity might not experience the same mental health changes. Research involving more politically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse families is necessary to see if these patterns hold across the broader population.
The number of participants involved also limits how broadly the conclusions can be applied. The group differences observed among the youth were small and less consistent than those among the parents. Further research with larger groups of adolescents is required to track how federal policies affect the long-term mental health of transgender youth. Future studies could also track whether the deteriorating mental health of supportive parents eventually impacts the well-being of their children over time.
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.