When Roz Keith’s child came out as a transgender boy 10 years ago, she immediately started looking around for support with all the issues surrounding the announcement, and she learned a disturbing fact.
There really wasn’t any.
It was easy to help Hunter do some of the immediate stuff – adjust his clothing, change his hair – but to do anything substantial, particularly in terms of emotional assistance, was nearly impossible. For instance, there was only one pediatric endocrinologist in the area, and she didn’t take the Keiths’ insurance.
“It took us about 10 months to get what he needed in terms of any kind of transition beyond his outward expression,” Roz Keith said. “That was the easy part — he could change his clothing and his hair — but to find a gender affirming therapist, to find a pediatric endocrinologist to looking for support groups, looking for community events. There wasn’t anything. It was pretty lonely and isolating.”
There’s help now. The lack of support for transgender youth and their families prompted Keith to take matters into her own hands and form “Stand With Trans,” a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to empowering and supporting transgender youth, creating a “world where gender diverse youth are validated and celebrated,” according to the group’s mission statement.
“It was a very lonely time and a lonely space,” recalled Keith, a former marketing executive who gave that up to serve as the group’s founder and executive director. “Very few people were having this conversation. We were this tiny little fish. We knew about affirmations, but we had to establish who we were and show some legitimacy and show that we could do the work and that we were credible and that we operated with integrity.”
Mission accomplished. The 11-year-old organization was recognized as a Diversity Champion at Corp! Magazine’s recent Salute to Diversity Awards and Conference.
The group got started with Keith as the executive director “begging family and friends,” she said, to be on its board. Initially, the group had a support group for parents and another for teens. Now, its work falls into three categories: Education, direct services and community building.
They have support groups that meet nearly 20 times a month between them. Stand With Trans started what Keith called a “Lifeline Library,” which has a variety of resources for people – regardless of what stage of the transition they’re in – provides education. The group also does training; for instance, they conduct one-on-one sessions for companies big and small, educational institutions, healthcare systems and the like.
The group hosts a summer picnic every year, a “Share the Love” event coming up in February and other social opportunities (Check out their website at Stand with Trans: Support for Trans Youth & their Families | Stand with Trans).
“Our community building is really important to those social opportunities,” Keith said. “It’s really important to bring people together and for people to know that they’re not alone. Parents have an opportunity to make friends with other parents in similar situations.”
It was a struggle at first, but Keith said people approached her to go public with what she was trying to do. A friend who was a writer at the Detroit Jewish News convinced her to tell the story, the Detroit Free Press picked up on it as did WDIV-TV.
“We wanted people to know what that support looked like and how important it was because our child was really struggling, and the floodgates opened,” Keith said. “Once we went public with our story, people just came out of the woodwork, families like ours who could 100 percent relate to the things that we were saying as parents, that I was saying as a mother, our child was going through. And it just opened the door for conversation that there were so many out there like us and nobody had support.”
Keith estimated Stand With Trans support groups help between 50 and 100 people a month. The group has a variety of virtual groups, which opens access to the support to people across the country.
She said “thousands of people” are getting help, through the support groups and other activities and on the group’s website. The support group’s are “a very important part” of what Stand With Trans does, and the Zoom link to their virtual meetings also helps people nationwide get access to assistance they might not otherwise be able to get.
“It’s really important that they have that because often they don’t have another family member to turn to,” Keith said. “Sometimes they can’t even turn to a spouse or the other parent. There may not be resources in their local area, even if they were to talk to a friend or a coworker about it. It’s hard for people to really understand until they’re going through it. “So the support groups are so important, just as a way to let your hair down and talk about the things that are concerning you,” she added. “It’s a really important component to what we do.”
