Trans-Affirmative Parenting. Elizabeth Rahilly
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of the state.
In short, both scholars and activists have argued that the mainstream LGBT rights movement has failed to address the real sources of precarity, and wider structural inequalities, that so often impact LGBTQ persons and experience, especially transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming persons. Today’s generation of LGBTQ politics is thus increasingly trans- and nonbinary-aware, and deeply committed to more intersectional concerns of racism, classism, and nationalism.104
Many of the parents I interviewed had little familiarity with transgender identity early on. They confessed that their early associations with the terms “transgender” and “transsexual” entailed rather sensationalistic portrayals from daytime talk shows, as well as The Rocky Horror Picture Show or “show girls in Vegas.”105 All but one of the parents I interviewed were cisgender, and the majority were heterosexual-identified (forty parents) and/or in heterosexual marriages. For most parents, however, “gay” did seem to offer a familiar reference for “transgender,” by “LGBT” association. Many participants, for example, had cisgender, gay-identified friends or family, whom they readily referenced in our interviews. In our first interview, Lorraine, a forty-six-year-old, white, middle-class woman and the one explicitly “queer”-identified member of the sample, commented on the “gulf” she had observed between parents of trans kids and the LGBTQ community, which she considers her home turf. This includes specifically trans and queer affiliations:
A couple of things occurred to me about that whole process for them [heterosexual parents]: one, for the first time in my life, I felt like we [LGBTQ parents] were in a position of privilege, because that’s our community, we don’t have to go very far to get the information that we need, and we both have had to navigate the community already.… They not only have the experience of their child being transgender and having to figure [that] out … but they have to go out and find someone in their territory to get the information that they need … and for us, once we realized that Jamie is transgendered,106 it wasn’t that big a deal because, you know, we’ve already got so many friends in [our city] who are transgendered, [our city] is a mecca for transgendered folk … for once in our life, it’s a good thing that we’re queer.
Lorraine’s commentary resonates with Meadow’s observation of the “transgender activism, cisgender logic” of the parent movement, a thread I return to in chapter 4.107 Like Lorraine, fifteen of the parents were nonheterosexually identified, which includes five same-sex partnerships and four heterosexual partnerships among them (and two who identified as “none” in heterosexual marriages). These parents could claim a more personal identification with LGBTQ politics and/or community. As Bruce, a white, upper-middle-class, gay-identified married man, said, “I was a child of the sixties … when genderfuck was alive.” However, at the start of their journeys, most of these parents seemed no more comfortable with the prospects of transgender identity for their children than the rest of the sample. In fact, several LGB-identified parents confessed to feeling viscerally uncomfortable about their child’s ensuing gender nonconformity and “cross-dressing” early on, and one described herself then as “borderline transphobic.” Altogether, the ways in which LGBTQ paradigms and discourses did, and did not, impact parents’ trans-affirmative journeys are an overarching focus in this book.
Overview of the Book
With these historical and cultural trends in mind, this book turns its focus to parents’ logics for gender, sexuality, the binary, and the body, which often challenged LGBT advocacy discourses, as well as queer politics and theorizing, as much as they harnessed them. This includes parents’ deliberations between “just gay” and “truly trans” interpretations of gender nonconformity; parents’ negotiations with binary and nonbinary possibilities; and parents’ biomedical frameworks for transgender embodiment. These dynamics are explored through parents’ evolving practices and perspectives on childhood gender nonconformity, as they respond to their children over the course of early childhood development and as they become immersed in trans-affirmative education, discourses, and support networks.
Chapter 1 offers an intimate empirical portrait of the families that make up this study, including how these parents first come to view their children as gender-nonconforming and, ultimately, as transgender. Many stories have been shared about parents and trans kids, from media exposés to memoirs to documentary films, illuminating key themes and patterns across cases.108 I include a chapter like this at the outset of my analysis so that readers can know more intimately the families that populated my project, as well as to provide a critical empirical foundation for the chapters ahead. This material showcases the child-driven, child-centered nature of this phenomenon, as well as the extension of “feminist” parenting it signals. I also note important differences and caveats across cases, challenging the notion that there is any one “profile” for a transgender child. Finally, I highlight parents’ troubles with female masculinity and the “tomboy” epithet in the cases of transgender boys, as much as parents’ troubles with male femininity and “princess boys” in the cases of transgender girls.
In chapter 2, I turn to the first key area, gender and sexuality, and examine parents’ contrasts between “just gay” and “truly trans” explanations for childhood gender nonconformity. Given age-old statistics that link childhood gender nonconformity with adult homosexuality, these deliberations are no small part of parents’ journeys, nor of the historical juncture they represent. As noted earlier, mainstream LGBT rights discourses assert a firm distinction between gender and sexuality—gender identity is one thing, sexual orientation is another. However, parents’ deliberations often signaled something more fluid, and potentially permeable, between these two realms of self, gesturing to a morphing “spectrum” of possibilities. This conceptual labor, I argue, gives increasing intelligibility to explicitly (trans)gendered understandings, versus ones formerly understood within a grid of (homo)sexuality. In social-constructionist terms, this is not merely descriptive labor, but productive labor, helping to bring broadening transgender possibilities into being. Parents’ perspectives also prioritize child-rooted shifts and understandings, in a way that further troubles firm distinctions between these two categories of self.
In chapter 3, I turn to the gender binary, and discuss parents’ newfound awareness of nonbinary possibilities. These were often described as being “somewhere in the middle” of the “spectrum,” where a child “doesn’t have to be just one or the other.” Despite increasing sociopolitical emphasis on nonbinary, gender-fluid, and/or genderqueer possibilities—especially those that defy some trans-normative, gender-normative ideal—most of the children in this sample were adamantly binary-identified. For many of these parents, nonbinary possibilities proved more of an attempt to evade “truly trans” outcomes than any reality of their children’s authentic selves. In making sense of these options, parents often found themselves engaging in queer deconstructionist debates about the gender binary in parent forums, hearkening back to decades-old feminist polemics about “reifying the binary” or not. Ultimately, parents affirm the self-conceptions their children express, however “young” or “soon” this may mean for their child’s transition. In this area, I also examine several follow-up vignettes, highlighting the complications of nonbinary identities for children assigned male in particular.
Finally, in chapter 4, I turn to the area of the body, and evaluate parents’ biomedical accounts of transgender embodiment, which they often analogized to a “birth defect.” These frameworks often answered to their children’s own embodied sensibilities, and worked to protect their privacy and autonomy, but they also reiterated cisgender body logics as natural and normal, in ways that LGBTQ platforms would resist. For several of my informants, these frameworks signaled the potential erasure of a more politicized trans consciousness among these children as well—especially among those growing