This group might save your LGBTQ kid’s life – The Washington Post
How the Mama Bears, a nationwide network for parents of queer children, does the impossible: Change people’s minds.
I’m at the booth run by the Mama Bears, a nationwide group of parents of LGBTQ kids. They stand outside the booth in rainbow tutus, fanny packs, practical sunhats and “Free Mom Hugs” shirts. A group of kids walk by and giggle, then one ducks shyly into a hug, and finally all the kids are hugging a mom, as the moms whisper into their ears (“You are loved” or “We’re so glad you’re here”) until the kids walk away, dabbing at their glittery eye makeup.
A hug may seem like a small thing — often brief, perhaps slightly careless regarding covid-19 — but the recipients describe it in big terms. Receiving a hug from the Mama Bears was “like drinking hot cocoa on a chilly night right next to a fire,” 12-year-old Remus, wearing rainbow knee socks and a trans flag cape and surrounded by family members, told me. To Riley, 20, her hug gave her “that feeling where … everything is just muted around you and you’re just in the moment.” (Remus and Riley asked that their full names not be used.) Jared Clayton, 30, told me that he rarely sees his parents after years of conversion therapy, and “to have my mom as my best friend that I no longer get to see or hug, and then to just really feel the moms out here — it’s a lot. Because you don’t realize how much you miss it until you can’t have it.”
Christina Pierce, an occupational therapist from outside of Dallas with loose red hair and an exuberant smile, shows up to the Mama Bears booth wearing a large button reading “BAD THEOLOGY KILLS.” Her first hug of the day is for an 18-year-old wearing a floral shirt who gives their name as Veil. (Veil also asked that their full name not be used.) Pierce steps into the embrace wholeheartedly, flinging her arms around Veil’s back. After a startled moment, Veil closes their eyes, leans a cheek sideways on Pierce’s shoulder and just rests there for a long, quiet time.
Pierce’s journey to this hug was not simple. She grew up in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a conservative denomination that views homosexuality as sinful. Although she’d had gay and lesbian friends, the church’s teachings on LGBTQ people mostly passed by her unnoticed. When her son Jonathon came out as bisexual in 2018 (he now identifies as pansexual), she joined the Mama Bears and found life-changing support. “I don’t know what I would’ve done” without the Mama Bears, Pierce told me. “I had no one to talk to.” The group supported her as she left the church.
It may seem logical that learning a child is queer would drive parents to question received anti-LGBTQ beliefs, even those enforced through the dual spiritual and social pressures of a conservative church. But, of course, it doesn’t always work that way — often with tragic consequences. According to research by the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, even a moderate level of what’s called “rejecting behavior” from parents — like refusing to use a new name or pronouns or mocking a child’s identity — can accompany a tripled risk of depression and a doubled risk of suicidal thoughts and attempts in queer children. “The difference between having an affirming parent and a rejecting parent is huge,” Caitlin Ryan, director of the Family Acceptance Project, told me. “It has a powerful impact on that young person’s entire … life course, on what they think is their birthright.” In the midst of a nationwide wave of anti-LGBTQ laws passed by GOP politicians, queer kids are particularly vulnerable to mental health issues. According to the Trevor Project, an organization focused on suicide prevention for queer children, 45 percent of LGBTQ kids seriously considered suicide in the past year — up from 40 percent two years ago.
Why do some non-affirming parents of LGBTQ kids change their views while others don’t? And at a time when LGBTQ kids may need their parents more than ever — to advocate for them in school systems and states where their rights are under attack — how can that change be fostered? The Mama Bears — consisting of over 35,000 members, many of whom underwent the same spiritual and emotional journey that Christina Pierce did — may point to some answers.
As a queer person myself, I felt some hesitation when I initially joined the Mama Bears Facebook group several months ago, and read post after post from parents describing “grief” after a child came out as gay or trans. If this feels hard for you, I’d think, try being your queer child. But as I began to better understand the rapid and disorienting trajectory that many of these women were on, I saw how the group’s tactics, which echoed social-science research, accomplished a task that, in America in 2022, is nothing short of remarkable: helping change minds around a seemingly intractable cultural issue.
The group’s founder, Liz Dyer, was in the tent at Dallas Pride that day, dispensing hugs, water bottles and sunscreen, trailed by her son Nick, 35, wearing crisp white shorts and carrying a rainbow printed fan. Dyer, an energetic woman with short hair and a wide, warm face, wore a T-shirt with an image of a raised fist that read “The First Pride Was a Riot.”
A Dallas resident for the past 35 years, Dyer had long been active in her Southern Baptist church. Then in 2006, Nick, the older of her two sons, came out as gay. At the time, she viewed homosexuality as an unhealthy aberration. “I believed that something had to go wrong to make them be confused,” she said. Initially, Dyer sent Nick to a counselor who claimed she could help Nick “stop being gay.” Dyer “was trying to do what she thought was best,” Nick told me later, “and I was making a cognizant decision to be very patient while she did that.”
But as Dyer did more research, reading the Bible and Christian blogs, her views evolved. One day she came upon a blog post about how Christians needed to be nice to gay people. One of the comments stuck out to her; as she summarized it to me, the argument went: “ ‘You know what? I don’t care if you’re nice to me. If you don’t believe that it’s okay for me to be gay … then just get the F out of my life.’ ” Dyer continued: “I thought to myself, You know what, if I was gay, that is exactly how I would feel.” All along, she’d been thinking that she was being a good Christian by trying to preserve her relationship with Nick, but Nick was “a better Christian, a better follower of Jesus, a better person in general. Because you still want to have a relationship with me.”
In 2008, Dyer began attending progressive Christian conferences. At the time, as gay conversion therapy was coming under broad public attack (the major evangelical ex-gay ministry, Exodus International, finally shut down in 2013 after its leaders admitted that efforts to “pray away the gay” were harmful), it was becoming more acceptable in certain circles for conservative Christians and even evangelicals to be openly LGBTQ while remaining in the church. “Evangelicals aren’t a monolith, of course,” says R. Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, noting that views began to shift gradually in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “You’ve got those folks that have very strong anti-gay views, and then a rising number of people who say this is just not a big issue.”
Even within the world of LGBTQ-friendly Christians, however, Dyer saw a diversity of opinion. Some advocates for LGBTQ evangelicals, as well as other Christians, say that the Bible is a historical document not meant to be interpreted literally. Queer people are children of God, they argue, and God wouldn’t err in creating them to love each other and be their full selves. Other Christians support LGBTQ individuals but still believe that having gay sex goes against God’s will, meaning that a queer person could remain in the church provided they chose celibacy or marriage to a straight person.
For Dyer, these two approaches were not equal. As she built connections in the world of queer Christianity — blogging first at a page she called Grace Rules, then moving to a new one called Serendipitydodah in 2010 — her new friends began referring other parents to her, mostly evangelical and conservative Christians in the early stages of learning their kids were queer. Dyer often spoke to these parents on the phone or met in person if they were local. She heard heartbreaking stories of suicidal children, families who were permanently estranged — and the lifelong costs of trying to force celibacy or heterosexual marriage. (The research bears out Dyer’s instincts: According to Darren Freeman-Coppadge, a psychologist in Maryland who has studied queer Christians attempting a celibate lifestyle or mixed marriage, those choices, even when self-selected, can lead to “a great deal of anxiety, depression and even suicidality.”)
The existing groups that supported Christian parents of LGBTQ people were too open to the second approach, Dyer believed, leaving families in an ambivalent limbo that could last a very long time. Given the high rates of suicide attempts among LGBTQ kids, this seemed actively dangerous to Dyer. “I had gotten to the place where I realized, when our kids come out, they really need us right away,” Dyer recalls. She wanted to create a space that would encourage parents to fully and quickly affirm their children.
In May 2014, with about 150 moms she’d met at progressive Christian conferences or through blogging, Dyer created a private group on Facebook: “Serendipitydodah: Home of the Mama Bears.” As she began building the forum, Dyer made some deliberate choices. Many of the members were joining before going public in their communities or even their families about having a queer child. For these parents to feel comfortable sharing photos and names, everyone joining the group had to come directly through Dyer. She vetted new members carefully, asking questions about family history, checking social media profiles to verify information and enforcing a set of principles: “Sexual orientation and gender identity are not a choice. … Sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be changed although there may be a process of self-discovery for some people. … Conversion therapy in all forms is damaging no matter how kindly it is presented.”
She was also intent on making the page a space for joy. In June 2014 — the first Pride after launching the Mama Bears — Dyer invited moms to share happy photos and stories about their kids. It’s now an annual tradition: Parents have posted photos of their kids going to prom or graduating, but also of uniquely queer rites of passage, like a trans girl’s first dress-shopping trip. “I wanted them to learn to wholeheartedly celebrate their kids, because I felt like if parents can do that, then they can really get passionate about changing the world,” she told me.
Kimberly Shappley, a Connecticut woman with a trans daughter, joined the Mama Bears in the early days, when it was “still very much centered on being Christian — otherwise, I wouldn’t have stayed in the group, to be honest,” she told me. Reading other Christian moms’ posts celebrating their queer kids was transformational for Shappley. “I had never been exposed to LGBTQ things in a way that wasn’t negative or derogatory,” she recalls. “And here were these people in the group presenting pictures of their children; their parents are proud of them and they’re going to college, and they have somebody they love.”
“I had gotten to the place where I realized, when our kids come out, they really need us right away,” says Mama Bears founder Liz Dyer.
The Mama Bears grew steadily, buoyed by key endorsements from progressive Christian leaders, including pastor and author John Pavlovitz and writer Rachel Held Evans. In 2015, the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage ushered in a new wave of parents. Soon the group’s purpose expanded, with Dyer coordinating meetups where members make blankets or create care packages for LGBTQ people needing maternal comfort. Dyer has also linked up with activist Sara Cunningham, who pioneered the “Free Mom Hugs” concept and now runs a group called Free Mom Hugs; the two groups, recently featured in a documentary called “Mama Bears,” sometimes work together to provide support at events like Pride. There are now over 35,000 members and at least one chapter in most U.S. states, along with chapters in the United Kingdom and Canada. Dyer has created offshoot forums: a group for fathers and other non-mom allies; a group for moms of trans kids; groups for the Mama Bears’ children, so they can connect with one another IRL; and a group for parents of children who are both queer and on the autism spectrum. There are hundreds of posts in the main Facebook group every month, sometimes dozens of new posts daily.
Recently, members have protested anti-LGBTQ legislation. Shappley is now a prominent LGBTQ activist; her daughter Kai’s self-possessed testimony to Texas state legislators on gender-affirming care went viral in 2021. “Once [the Mama Bears] get you in, it takes like a hot minute to turn everyone into full-fledged activists,” Shappley told me. “Burn s— down, make signs, march on whatever needs to be marched on. … It’s contagious to see people fight for their children.”
When I first joined the Mama Bears Facebook group, I found myself uneasily drawn to the posts written by parents who were struggling: unable to get used to new pronouns, uncomfortable with physical changes, worried about reactions from family or community members. I could understand that it’s lonely and terrifying moment to be the parent of a queer child, especially a trans child — yet those comments pressed on some of my most ancient bruises.
Over time, though, I came to believe that most Mama Bears put their darker thoughts on the site as a way to grow past them, instead of marinating in them or inflicting them on their kids. And I also saw how the support and acceptance offered by the group is always coupled with a steady and effective push to change.
“When I put things [on the Mama Bears page] at the beginning, there were many people who would just give me back that unconditional love and be like, ‘It’s hard, we understand, you’re doing a great job, mom.’ And you need that,” says Heather, a Mama Bears member from Missouri with two trans daughters who asked that her last name not be used. “But you also need someone to [say]: ‘What you’re doing is not okay. What you’re doing could hurt your child.’ And there were those people that did that, as tactfully as possible.” For instance: Heather had openly cried in front of her child; other Mama Bears helped her see that her behavior was hurtful. “Sometimes I needed someone to kinda push me, to be like, ‘You gotta stop talking about how you’re feeling about this, because this isn’t about you.’ ” Dyer doesn’t consider the group to be a “safe space,” she says. “When people think of a safe space, they expect to be in a place where they never feel uncomfortable or challenged. Growth is uncomfortable.”
The ethos created by Dyer in the Mama Bears recalls the road-tested technique for helping people change minds known as “deep canvassing.” Deep canvassing is a door-to-door tactic developed by the Los Angeles LGBT Center, in which a canvasser asks open-ended questions of a voter who’s considered persuadable. The canvasser listens in a nonjudgmental way and shares their personal story of how their own views were shaped, before making a more direct case for the issue at hand. In a series of peer-reviewed studies by political scientists Joshua Kalla of Yale University and David Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley, the approach has been shown to reduce prejudice, regardless of whether the canvasser is themselves LGBTQ. While the shift may sound modest — a few percentage points higher than traditional door-to-door canvassing — it was still enough to potentially swing tight elections on discriminatory legislation. And, unlike with more traditional methods, the effect endured for four and a half months after the initial conversation.
The deep-canvassing model is not, of course, applicable to all interactions. The morning after Pride, I took a 4 a.m. Lyft ride to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. The driver asked why I was in town; I told him about my story and mentioned that I am queer. He began asking polite but slightly intrusive questions. In my deep-canvassing research, I’d learned that it could be useful for people processing complex issues to ask awkward questions, so, as an experiment, I tried to answer openly. Within a few minutes, on a deserted stretch of Texas highway, he shifted to asking about my genitals. There are major risks, both psychic and physical, for queer people in these types of conversations, and in real life no one is given the training and support deep canvassers get.
But the Mama Bears — who are mostly allies, not queer people themselves, and who are encountering each other online and not in person — do seem to manage a kind of collective deep canvassing: leaving space for complex feelings while steadily promoting a viewpoint through personal narrative. Together, they have created an accountability community, not dissimilar from a church itself, and, in many cases, replacing the community and accountability structure lost from a rejected church. And at least anecdotally, this has been tremendously effective in helping its members grow and change.
Heather Diaz grew up in the Nazarene Church, a highly conservative offshoot of evangelicalism. “I was raised that [homosexuality] was a sin,” she told me. In 1998, she married a fellow evangelical and they moved to San Diego, where they raised two children in a conservative nondenominational church. Then in 2016, her older child told Diaz that she thought she might be queer. “She was terrified to tell us,” Diaz says. Diaz didn’t feel she could tell anyone in her church community. But she did have one friend with a gay son, who told her about the Mama Bears. “At that time … I felt so scared to talk to anybody around me in my immediate world because I knew that they would not have supported me in the way I would’ve needed,” she told me. “They probably would’ve been like, ‘I’ll pray for you.’ ” But the Mama Bears “take you in right where you are, no matter where you are in the journey.” The group gave her much-needed support when she chose to leave her church, feeling that it wasn’t a safe place for her daughter.
Two years later, Diaz’s younger child came out as trans. For Diaz, this was a much more challenging revelation. “I was very angry for a very long time,” she remembers. “Being trans is super hard to understand regardless. … [And] it’s terrifying because of the way things are right now.” Every step felt painful: calling her son by a new name, going to doctor’s appointments and watching him start hormone injections, seeing him deal with his own depression and self-harm issues. While she stumbled during those months — “I believe there was a lot of damage to our relationship that I’m still trying to repair,” she says about her son — she was able to climb out of her darkness, thanks to her therapist and the Mama Bears.
That June, just a few months after her son came out, Diaz went to her first Pride parade, along with her husband and son, to watch her daughter perform in the San Diego Pride Youth Marching Band. “It is the most loving, joyful atmosphere I’ve ever been in in my whole life,” she says. “I remember just standing on the sidewalk and weeping, overcome. I just felt, this is where we’re meant to be.”
Many women I spoke to described sweeping reversals not just in their personal lives, but in their political ones. Cathy Evans, an eighth-generation Texan, grew up with gay family members but was not prepared for her younger child to come out as gay as a high school freshman. “It was a long process for me of really, really feeling one hundred percent on board,” she told me. “And I hate that — I hate that for my kid.” She and her husband left their conservative Methodist church, growing uncomfortable within a congregation that they didn’t feel supported LGBTQ rights or people.
It was the correct choice, but it left her isolated. Then a gay cousin told her about the Mama Bears. “Almost immediately it was, whoa — there are people like me,” she says. Over time, as her faith evolved, her sense of civic responsibility deepened too. “What is amazing to me is that when this happens to you, it doesn’t just open up the door of your child, it also opens up the door to looking at all of the other things that are going on the world,” she explains. Earlier this year, she and her husband joined a group of Mama Bears at the Texas Capitol to protest Gov. Greg Abbott’s order that parents of transgender children be investigated by Child Protective Services. For Evans, it was a deeply meaningful experience. “I don’t feel comfortable sitting in church, which makes me sad,” she says. “But I feel like this” — meaning civic action — “is where God is.”
The joy and sense of purpose described by the mothers on the other side of this journey are echoed by their children. “It’s amazing to me that my mom’s love for me has transferred into her showing love to so many other people … who maybe don’t get to have the same kind of relationship with their parents,” says CJ Surbaugh, whose mother, Kathy — one of the Mama Bears at Dallas Pride — left their conservative Methodist church after CJ came out as trans. “I almost can’t put into words how much it means to me to see my mom advocating so hard on my behalf.”
While talking to Mama Bears members, I often wondered whether their rapid and intense journeys were replicable outside the group. The community is highly self-selecting, and the support and push to change that it provides is hard to find elsewhere. Without that kind of scaffolding, even the most well-meaning parents can move far more slowly or stall out.
The night before the Dallas Pride festival, I sat at a dining room table in a Dallas suburb with Christina Pierce, her husband, Scott Pierce, and her son and Scott’s adopted son, Jonathon Muniz, listening to Jonathon’s coming-out story. “It was spring break,” Christina began. The mother and son resemble each other closely, with hazel eyes and ready smiles. Jonathon, 23, a teacher’s aide, has long, dark hair and a forearm tattoo of the sigil of Rohan from the “Lord of the Rings” books. (The Rohan people “had no aid of magic or fantasy races, yet they made a stand and fought for what was right,” he explained later over text.) “It was funny,” Christina said, “because I was like, ‘I’m going to walk the dog.’ … And he just came running out …”
“And so I told her,” Jonathon continued, “and she was like, ‘Oh. Ohhhh?’ ”
“There was a little bit of silence,” Christina said, laughing.
“And then we were just, like, walking the dog.”
The two of them tag-teamed the story, poking fun at each other and comparing recollections of the same events, from Jonathon’s first inklings of his sexuality when watching Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean” to the massive personal and spiritual changes Christina underwent after that initial coming-out conversation. Of all the Mama Bears I spoke with, Christina’s transformation was the most substantial: Not only did she leave her church and upend her belief system, but she also expanded her family. Through the Mama Bears, Christina befriended Allyson Marcelle, an Oregon mother struggling with family members who didn’t accept her gay son. In early 2019, Christina invited Marcelle to move in. She is still living in the Pierces’ front room. “She’s my sister now,” Christina told me matter-of-factly. “I just expect her to stay with us for the rest of our lives.” (“We’re sisters,” Marcelle affirmed when I met her later that night.)
The Mama Bears have created an accountability community, not dissimilar from a church itself.
When the conversation shifted to Jonathon’s coming-out conversation with Scott, Jonathon mentioned “theological discussions.” Scott, who had been quiet until then, spoke up. “My background is, I am a Catholic,” he said. “So, you look at the Catholic theology and then this kid that you love and couldn’t be more proud of.” Scott told me that the Church directs followers to love homosexual people, but that it views homosexual acts as “objectively disordered” and against natural law, a teaching he struggles with when it comes to his obviously beloved son. “If you believe in Christianity, and you believe in salvation, what’s going to be the best way to get a person to heaven?” he asked, not rhetorically. Jonathon stood up from the table and went quietly into the kitchen.
For parents like Scott Pierce — reluctant to join the Mama Bears but potentially open to evolution on LGBTQ issues — there may be other avenues for change, even some that are specific to people of faith. Austen Hartke, founder of the Transmission Ministry Collective and an advocate for transgender rights within faith communities, told me that he felt Scripture-based arguments for LGBTQ affirmation can be tremendously effective, treating the texts “as a table we can all gather around.” Matthew Vines, founder of Christian LGBTQ group the Reformation Project, says he believes that for conservative Christians to change, there has to be a combination of knowing an openly LGBTQ person — a “transformative relationship” — and an interpretation of Scripture that allows someone to shift their views without abandoning their faith. “I think there are many people who, if you put those factors together, that is what allows them to change their mind,” he told me.
And then there are researchers who argue that changing someone’s mind doesn’t matter; what matters is what people do, not what they believe. Caitlin Ryan, of the Family Acceptance Project, who has developed strategies to help conservative and religious families support their LGBTQ children, highlights the importance of cultural sensitivity and of focusing on behavior, not belief: “It’s their behaviors that are really affecting their child immediately. And they can change those behaviors even when they believe that being gay or transgender is wrong.”
After our meeting in Dallas, I called Scott to get clarity on his beliefs. He said that he’s already evolved a great deal just through knowing Jonathon — learning greater empathy for people’s struggles and more awareness of the challenges facing LGBTQ people. But when I asked Scott if he thought his underlying views on homosexuality would ever change, he said it was unlikely. “I would have to see some pretty convincing evidence that natural law, first of all, is not a thing,” he said. “I’m open to hearing people try to convince me of that. But I don’t know what somebody would be able to say at this point that would convince me otherwise.”
When I reached out to Jonathon, he told me that, although he had left the room during our interview to take a break from Scott’s theology, he didn’t fundamentally mind all that much. “I understand that it’d be very hard for other people to hear that,” he said, of his stepfather’s comments about homosexuality being “disordered.” “But I’ve grown to the point where I’m just like, eh, whatever.” What mattered was Scott’s actions, and those had always been kind.
And yet, the value of a fully transformed mind, and the way that transformation can reverberate throughout a community, remains clear. The morning after Dallas Pride, Christina Pierce posted an exultant Facebook message. “We connected with thousands of people and I think I gave a couple hundred hugs! I stayed 5 hours and left so hot and tired, but it was so worth it!” she wrote. “For ALL in the LGBTQI community, you are brave and you are beautiful.”
A few hours later she received a direct message from someone she had known as a younger member of her former church. “Hey mama bear!!” it began. “I myself am nonbinary and gay, and there’s almost no one in my life that I can tell safely. It’s been very lonely over the years, but it makes my heart burst when I see you speak out and be supportive of and heap love on the LGBT community.” I spoke with this person — who asked to remain anonymous — over Zoom a couple of weeks after Pride. They’d had coffee with Christina; Christina had immediately started helping them research affordable options for gender-affirming care. “I’m like, ‘Are you my mom now?’ ” they joked.
I asked about their own mom and dad and what it would’ve meant to watch them travel the path that Christina took in affirming Jonathon. They pressed a hand to their heart, eyes going soft. “I don’t even entertain the thought anymore,” they said quietly. “It’s just a fantasy at this point. But if they did, it would just be pure relief. It would be the first time in my life that I would be truly free.”
Britt Peterson is a writer in Washington.