Parents of transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) youth navigate various fears within a sociopolitical context that increasingly target their children's rights, safety, and access to care. The secondary minority stress model shows how parents of TGD youth experience minority stress while navigating systems for and with their children, contributing to mental health difficulties, including worry and fear. However, this framework primarily conceptualizes fear at the level of individual stress processes and does not fully interrogate the structural systems that produce and sustain these conditions. Drawing from Liberation Psychology, we conceptualize parental fear as a rational, relational, and socially produced response to systemic oppression rather than individual pathology. Using thematic analysis, we analyzed the greatest fears reported by 1,047 parents of TGD youth across the United States. Our findings identified five key themes of fear concerning (1) violence, (2) mental health difficulties, (3) interpersonal factors, (4) discrimination, and (5) medical concerns. Guided by Liberation Psychology, our findings situate these fears as natural responses to systems that marginalize and devalue TGD children and their families. This study underscores the importance of interrogating structures of oppression, such as legislation, institutional practices, and cultural narratives, and their effects on TGD youth and their families. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Martin et al. (Mon,) studied this question.