Supportive caregivers play an important role in the promotion of wellbeing among transgender, gender-diverse youth.
This is according to a sudy – “Patient Empowerment Among Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth” by Chaya Mangel Pflugeisen, Anna Boomgaarden, Aytch A. Denaro, Danielle Konicek, and Emily Robinson – that appeared in LGBT Health.
According to the researchers, patient empowerment is “becoming increasingly important as health care moves toward more collaborative models of care.” And so they wanted to evaluate and characterize patient empowerment in a sample of transgender/gender-diverse/nonbinary (TGDNB) youth aged 14–24, who have had at least one conversation with a medical health care provider about gender-affirming care.
For this study, the researchers adapted a health care empowerment scale for use with TGDNB young people and collected patient empowerment and sociodemographic data among TGDNB youth in the US over an eight-week period in the spring of 2022. Overall and domain-specific empowerment (including knowledge and understanding, control, identity, decision-making, and supporting others) were assessed on a four-point scale from a low of 1 to a high of 4. A total of 177 youth completed the survey, with 39.5% of them gender-diverse/nonbinary, 16.4% transfemme, 44.1% transmasc, and 81.9% White.
The researchers found:
- Average empowerment was 0.22 points higher in youth with supportive caregivers than those without (99% confidence interval [CI] 0.05–0.38, p < 0.001), and 0.20 points higher in youth who sought gender-affirming mental health support (99% CI 0.04–0.36, p = 0.001).
- Caregiver support increased youths’ sense of control over their health/health care (estimated increase 0.29, 99% CI 0.09–0.50, p < 0.001), and mental health support increased youths’ decision-making agency by 0.30 points (99% CI 0.06–0.53, p = 0.001).
“Our results also support the growing body of evidence surrounding the importance of supportive caregivers in the wellbeing of TGDNB youth,” the researcher stated, adding that “this is especially important across the 14–24-year-old age spectrum, as a high level of parental involvement might increase empowerment in emerging adolescents, whereas a similarly high level of involvement in emerging adults could, in turn, be disempowering.”
For the researchers, “further exploration into this issue is warranted to better understand the relationship between gender-affirming mental health support and patient empowerment”.
