Great story and I so glad you told it. I’m a therapist running Google ads in that exact market and conversion therapy votes are spending a lot of money to drive folks like me (offering affirming support to gender diverse kids and their families). I’m trying not to let them drive me away, but I only have so much many for Google ads.
I did a little expansion on your searches; I thought the results might be of interest.
1. I changed the query by dropping "what to do" in favor of "how do I support my trans child" because it seemed too easy to read the phrase "what to do" as "how do I fix this." Turned out it made some but ultimately little difference. The AI summary was somewhat gentler but the links covered much the same ground.
2. I changed the original query to "i'm jewish my child is trans what do i do." The results pretty much consisted of sites addressing finding support for the child while navigating through the various Jewish traditions.
3. Finally, I dropped the reference to religion so the query was just "my child is trans what do i do." The results were good. The top one was a sponsored link to the Strong Family Alliance (a project of PFLAG and damn, I'm old enough to remember what that originally stood for), the next was to HRC, and the third was to a trans-affirming therapist. Changing it to "how do I support my trans child" were even better.
So yeah, it's pretty clear that it's the reference to Christianity that sends Google down that dark alley.
Oh, one last thing: I tried the same thing with a different search engine (DuckDuckGo, to be specific) and the results in each case were different but all among the same lines. It's not Google in particular but an assumption that referring to yourself as "Christian" is taken as being anti-LGBTQ+, particularly anti-trans.
I can’t understand how we can live in 21st century and still some people think that different sexuality is a “sickness”? This is insane.
Really, my Google ads console tells the same story as your reporting. Thanks again for spreading the word!
Great story and I so glad you told it. I’m a therapist running Google ads in that exact market and conversion therapy votes are spending a lot of money to drive folks like me (offering affirming support to gender diverse kids and their families). I’m trying not to let them drive me away, but I only have so much many for Google ads.
I did a little expansion on your searches; I thought the results might be of interest.
1. I changed the query by dropping "what to do" in favor of "how do I support my trans child" because it seemed too easy to read the phrase "what to do" as "how do I fix this." Turned out it made some but ultimately little difference. The AI summary was somewhat gentler but the links covered much the same ground.
2. I changed the original query to "i'm jewish my child is trans what do i do." The results pretty much consisted of sites addressing finding support for the child while navigating through the various Jewish traditions.
3. Finally, I dropped the reference to religion so the query was just "my child is trans what do i do." The results were good. The top one was a sponsored link to the Strong Family Alliance (a project of PFLAG and damn, I'm old enough to remember what that originally stood for), the next was to HRC, and the third was to a trans-affirming therapist. Changing it to "how do I support my trans child" were even better.
So yeah, it's pretty clear that it's the reference to Christianity that sends Google down that dark alley.
Oh, one last thing: I tried the same thing with a different search engine (DuckDuckGo, to be specific) and the results in each case were different but all among the same lines. It's not Google in particular but an assumption that referring to yourself as "Christian" is taken as being anti-LGBTQ+, particularly anti-trans.