Trans-Affirmative Parenting. Elizabeth Rahilly
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(laughs) … and here I have these two kids that exploded that notion for me.” Over time, embracing Amy as a girl just felt right, much more than resisting or hedging around her self-expressions.
Jayne admitted that she felt relieved to start using female pronouns with a feminine-presenting child; the pronoun “he” was starting to feel increasingly awkward and tense out in public. Jayne also confessed that she preferred the term “gender-nonconforming” to “transgender” because it sounded less permanent or real to her—like there was room for change—and because it sounded more like a “medical diagnosis” that she could use with others. For Jayne, as for many parents, referring to a biomedical diagnosis or “condition” helped to assuage a sense of undue judgment from others, in terms of her potential influence on her child’s gender. On these terms, Amy was born with this; her parents and her home life did not cause or “create” her gender nonconformity. While they came to reject the notion that gender nonconformity is any kind of “birth defect”—more a birth “difference”—Jayne and Glenn do recall using this as an explanatory framework with family and friends. Ultimately, they enrolled Amy in a new school so that she could start fresh as a girl, with only necessary staff knowing about her identity. As of our interview, Jayne and Glenn had fully embraced the term “transgender,” too.
While Amy preferred to be private about being transgender, Jared felt much more open about his gender nonconformity among peers, which grew more pronounced following the medical management of his Asperger’s. When we first started e-mailing, months prior to the interview, Jayne and Glenn had been identifying Jared as gender-fluid or gender-neutral—“somewhere in the middle”—and not as transgender. During this time, Jared was switching readily between male and female identifications and expressions, sometimes multiple times per day, with related wardrobe, name, and pronoun changes. As Jayne described it, Jared was “gender wild.” Admittedly, Jared’s fluidity felt taxing to both school staff and parents, who struggled to keep up, but Jayne and Glenn were grateful for the new school director, who was fully committed to gender inclusion. Jayne and Glenn joked, too, that Jared’s fluidity didn’t really faze them, since in earlier years Jared had insisted on being a “donkey” or “dog” as well. Jared’s case was always more of a “mess” and “chaotic” for them, Jayne explained, and it was hard to tease apart what was a matter of his gender and what was a matter of his neurodivergence—perhaps they were related. She joked affectionately, “I’ve learned to accept the mess.” Only recently had Jared started identifying full-time as a boy, and as of our interview, Jayne and Glenn were still trying to get used it. Their transition with Jared was not any easier for them because they already had one transgender child, they advised, but perhaps just faster.
Throughout our interview, I learned how intensely involved Jayne was, in particular, in raising their three children full-time and in managing all aspects of their childhoods, including the gender nonconformity and the autism. As Glenn said, “In all of this, Jayne has been the pioneer, the front-runner, and I sort of grudgingly follow, kicking and screaming behind her.” Jayne also took on an advocacy role in the school community, hosting workshops and trainings for staff and students about both transgender identity and autism. In addition, Jayne and Glenn started a support group in the area for other families with trans kids—a more local alternative to another one several hours away. As part of this, they helped to create a masterful online database of trans-aware resources and professionals for local parents like them. In short, their active parental advocacy labor, with clinicians, schools, and other parents and families, was apparent throughout their experiences. Months after our interview, I happened to run into Jayne at a conference on trans identity and community. Excitedly, she told me that since launching their support group’s web page, their e-mail had been “blowing up” with interested parents.
Trans-Affirmative Parenting
Jayne and Glenn’s story echoes themes I encountered throughout my research on parents who raise gender-nonconforming and transgender children, themes that shape the substantive focus of this book: parents’ shifting understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality, refracted through “male” and “female” expectations; parents’ use of biomedical and disability frameworks; parents’ fraught negotiations with binary and nonbinary gender possibilities; and parents’ intensive advocacy labor on behalf of their children. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than fifty parents in the United States, as well as two parents in Canada, this book captures a burgeoning social phenomenon of trans-affirmative parenting. My analysis contributes to, and in some ways complicates, a rapidly growing conversation in the social sciences and beyond.
The parents I interviewed certainly do not represent the first parents to confront childhood gender nonconformity,6 but they did feel like no one in their lifetimes has done what they are doing: identifying and raising a young child as the “other sex,” from early childhood on. The volume of work unfolding on families like this, just within the last few years, is a testament to how radically new, and radically expanding, the terrain is. Several sociologists have offered foundational insights into these new trans-affirmative families, whose works serve as key interlocutors in this book. In The Trans Generation, Ann Travers examines how binary bureaucracies and spaces unduly dis-able and disadvantage transgender kids, especially in school settings—from class rosters and other school documents to bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams. Travers calls for policies that make these settings more inclusive for trans students, especially those students at the most marginalized intersections of race, class, ability, and nationality. In Trans Kids, Tey Meadow documents several fundamental aspects of the trans-affirmative parenting phenomenon across key institutional arenas, including the medical clinic, the state, and the law, as well as within the major advocacy organizations and their differing rhetorical strategies. Meadow also examines parents’ strategies for understanding their transgender children, including refashioning traditional conceptual frameworks from biology, psychiatry, and spirituality to embrace and normalize gender variance. Ultimately, rather than signaling the “erosion” of gender, Meadow argues that gender is becoming that much more significant to social life, both personally and institutionally—including diverse, nonnormative forms of gender.7
This book explores a new constellation of insights and nuance in parents’ experiences. At the heart of the stories I examine are parents’ shifting understandings of their children’s gender and how they come to help their children make sense of their identities and their bodies. However, throughout these processes, I show that parents’ meaning-making and decision-making often challenge LGBT advocacy discourses, as well as queer political and theoretical tenets, in unexpected ways. I demonstrate these dynamics in three main conceptual areas: first, gender and sexuality; second, the gender binary; and third, the body and biomedicine.
First, I examine parents’ deliberations between gender identity and sexual orientation as the relevant axis of understanding their children’s nonconformity. There are deep-rooted associations between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality, just as Jayne and Glenn’s family friend indicated above. As such, how these parents come to embrace their children as “truly transgender,” and not as “just gay,” is a key sociological question. Reigning LGBT rights discourses frame “gender” and “sexuality” as fundamentally separate parts of the self, and the parents I interviewed certainly reiterated these distinctions. However, parents’ comments also signaled something more porous and open to reinterpretation between these two realms, where some nonconformities once understood as “just gay” might well be relevant to “truly trans” understandings after all. This is the deliberative and productive labor, I argue, that is helping to bring broadening (trans)gendered possibilities into being—for their kids and for others.8 This labor also troubles the idea of finite, distinct realms of self in the service of child-rooted developments and understandings throughout the life course.
The second area concerns parents’ negotiations with binary and nonbinary possibilities for their children’s gender. Despite mounting sociopolitical emphasis on nonbinary, gender-fluid, and/or genderqueer possibilities, gender-expansive child-rearing often looks very binary and gender-stereotypical, per the children’s own assertions and expressions. In fact,