About Stephanie

I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. These days I spend most of my time helping parents whose teenage or adult children have adopted a trans identity, and who aren’t willing to choose between affirming something they don’t believe and losing their child.

I didn’t set out to do this work. I earned my master’s in counseling psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and spent my early years as a therapist in community mental health, then in an outpatient clinic treating adolescents, adults, couples, and families. That’s where I was taught the gender-affirming standard of care. I practiced it in good faith, and over time I started seeing the cracks.

In 2020 I went into private practice and started researching what was bothering me. In 2021 I began saying so publicly, and quickly found myself defending against accusations of conversion therapy, which went nowhere. In May 2022 I launched my podcast, You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. In 2023 I appeared in the documentary No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care and became its spokesperson.

The media appearances brought parents. More of them than I could see, from all over the world, asking questions no one had good answers to. When health problems forced me to scale back my practice in early 2024, I stopped providing therapy and focused entirely on those parents. Out of hundreds of those conversations, I built ROGD Repair.

That’s the shape of my work now: the course and community, coaching for a small number of families, the podcast, and my writing.