Attachment Patterns and Complex Trauma in a Sample of Adults Diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria

Comparisons of subgroups, defined by natal gender, showed that trans women, compared to control males, had more involving and physically and psychologically abusive fathers, and were more often separated from their mothers; trans men, relative to female controls, had more involving mothers and were more frequently separated from and neglected by their fathers.

Many authors have speculated about the influence of trauma, abuse, dysfunctional parental conduct (such as a mother’s extreme closeness with her child), parental dynamics or pathology (such as maternal depression or the absence of a father) and parents’ atypical psychosexual development (such as their confusion about their own feelings of masculinity and femininity) on children. It has been thought that such environmental patterns might limit children’s opportunities to identify with the same-sex parent and to experience cross-gender reinforcement patterns. Transsexualism has often been interpreted as an extreme dissociative defense against trauma experienced in early relationships. However, to date, no solid empirical support has been produced by studies testing these hypotheses. The co-occurrence with dissociation, for instance, suggested by many theoretical and clinical studies, was recently effectively disputed

Perceived Parenting Styles of Individuals With Gender Dysphoria

Results showed that transgender men rated both (fathers and mothers) as more rejecting and less emotionally affectionate, but only their mothers as more protective than their rated female control counterparts. Furthermore, transgender men and women differed from each other in some aspects (lower scores on parental emotional warmth and higher scores on maternal rejection for female patients).

When the perceptions of transgender women regarding maternal and paternal parenting styles were analyzed separately from those of transgender men, it was possible to observe that the women perceived the maternal parental style with a positive value on average, characterizing a regular parenting style. The transgender women perceived the paternal parenting style as negative, corresponding to a style that offers risk. The transgender men perceived both maternal and paternal parenting styles as negative, both corresponding to risky parenting styles.

The transgender women had on average a positive perception of their relationship with their mothers and a negative perception of their relationship with their fathers.

For practice D, the paternal mean for the transgender men was higher than the maternal mean for the transgender women, showing that the fathers of transgender men were perceived to exhibit more negative behaviors than the mothers of transgender women.