Trans-Affirmative Parenting. Elizabeth Rahilly
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of children’s voices throughout academic literature, including in the realm of childhood studies, is a problem, which several scholars have sought to address. Travers’s book The Trans Generation, for example, and sociologist Mary Robertson’s book Growing Up Queer are works that prioritize kids’ vantage points. To be sure, children’s accounts are a critical part of this research terrain.
But this “limitation,” I would argue—the parents’ perspectives, practices, and decisions—is intimately related to the range of identities that are made possible for these children in the first place and thus is inherent to the sociology of the phenomenon. In addition, I felt that my status as a cisgender, gender-normative researcher was overly risky vis-à-vis young gender-nonconforming children. I did not want to make them feel “abnormal,” interrogated, and scrutinized.18 The majority of parents echoed this stance preemptively, too, and preferred that their children were absent for the interview (though several parents, I understand, advised their children of my project and asked for their permission to proceed). My ethical concerns in this regard trumped any interests in seeking interviews with the kids, and I never requested permission from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to include the children in my study.19
The last term I introduce, “social transition,” further reflects this study’s emphasis on the parents, not the children. In this book, “transition” or “social transition” refers to parents fully affirming their children’s (trans)gender identity, including permitting related name, clothing, pronoun, and hairstyle preferences of the child, as well as enrolling them in school and other activities as such. Parents often go to friends, extended family, and other adults in the child’s life to request recognition of this new identification. In this way, “transition” really emphasizes the parents’ thoughts and actions, including how they come to recognize their child, and not any real gendered transformations on the part of the children (especially not in any physical or embodied aspects).
The Parents
The overall sample in this book represents an amalgam of different groups of parents, recruitment venues, and snapshots in time between 2009 and 2015, both within these families’ lives and within the broader historical context of the last ten to twenty years. Broadly, there were two rounds of recruitment and interviewing for the project, resulting in two main parental groups or “cohorts.” First, I interviewed an original group of parents in 2009–11, representing thirteen childhood cases. I conducted follow-up interviews with these parents several years later (2012–13), which I refer to as the “follow-up” group throughout this book. Then, I interviewed a much larger group of parents during 2013–15, which entailed thirty new childhood cases. All told, the stories showcased in this book concern the forty-three cases from the cumulative sample (2012–15), inclusive of fifty-five parents (plus one eighteen-year-old sibling). Children ranged in age from five to eighteen years at the time of the interviews; the average age of the child was eight.
I recruited these parents, in part, from two annual conferences held by a major advocacy organization, which were designed to educate, support, and affirm parents and gender-nonconforming children. I also reached parents via online parent blogs and, indirectly, via online listservs and local parent support groups of parents I already knew. As a nonparent, I did not have direct access to support groups or online forums—a boundary I strictly observed—and parents posted blurbs on my behalf instead. Given my recruitment avenues, this book is limited to a very specific, “purposive” subpopulation of parents, who were immersed in a particularly affirmative set of discourses, practices, and advocacy communities.20 As such, these families do not represent all parents who have gender-nonconforming children, who exhibit variable degrees of support and affirmation. There are other kids, for example, outside this book, who must leave their families to live as their most authentic selves, a very different scenario from the stories showcased here.21
Geographically, more than half of the families (twenty-three) resided in California, while the rest came from various locations throughout the United States and Canada. Regionality is an important factor in LGBTQ studies.22 Some of the parents felt they lived in more “conservative” parts of the United States, but many of the families came from areas that could be characterized as “liberal,” especially those from California, which has been a forerunner in LGBTQ-inclusive legislation. This also certainly impacted the kinds of stories I collected and the degree of trans-affirmative parenting represented in the book.
Racially, the majority of parents were white-identified (just over 80 percent of participants). Nine of the parents were persons of color: four were biracial (including one white/African American, two white/Latinx, and one white/Middle Eastern), and five parents were Latinx.23 However, this does not reflect the ethnoracial profiles of the children: several white parents, for example, adopted children of color (American Indian, Asian American, and Latinx), and several of the children are biracial, but only the white parent participated in interviews. The majority of households (thirty-six) were classified as middle-class to upper-middle-class. More specific demographic details are provided in appendix I.
Altogether, considering income, occupation, and education, the sample is predominantly white and middle-class to upper-middle-class. The focus of my analysis is parents’ shifting understandings of gender, sexuality, the binary, and the body. Though I draw on critical race perspectives in the context of medical care in chapter 4, more extensive racial analyses and comparisons of the interview data would require a more diverse research sample. Nevertheless, parents’ raced and classed positions certainly influenced the ways they were able to intensively advocate for their kids, which I discuss later.
Storytelling against Time
Researching these families posed a host of methodological, political, and ethical considerations, on which I elaborate in appendix II and which are key to understanding the sample and the study. First, the two groups of parents represent two different cohorts and samples, both temporally and in terms of the networks from which they were recruited. This presented both limitations and insights. While there were only two to four years between the two rounds of interviewing (2009–11, 2012–15), the advocacy infrastructure for transgender children has evolved rapidly over the years, meaning that interviewing people just a few years apart can mean encountering them in radically different sociohistorical contexts. The parents who started researching childhood gender nonconformity on behalf of their kids prior to 2009—which my first cohort and interviews reflect—were operating within a moment that seemed far less aware of transgender children than is the case now. This is very different from parents in the second group, who waded into the issue after 2009. Indeed, the major advocacy organizations I connected with for the project only launched in or around 2007, and within a few short years of that, their following burgeoned by the hundreds, either at the annual conferences or on the listservs. Moreover, the first major televised special, which arguably put transgender children “on the map,” occurred in 2007 on 20/20 with Jazz Jennings and her family. Since that time, landmark cases, policies, and celebrities have dotted an increasingly trans-aware sociopolitical landscape across the United States and Canada.
Tellingly, one of the first parents I interviewed in 2009, Theresa, said that she could not find a single practitioner or support group in her area who was familiar with childhood gender nonconformity when she first reached out. In fact, her therapist advised her to start one up herself. Her city, a large metropolis, is now home to a thriving support group network and hosts one of the most robust clinics for trans youth in the United States, inaugurated in 2009. Like several parents in my sample, Theresa had to do a lot of start-up educational work, both for herself and for others—doctors, therapists, schools, and hospitals—that many parents now find alive and kicking in their hometowns. Additionally, one of the advocates I interviewed said that since 2013, their listserv’s growth rate actually “leveled off,” not because fewer parents are raising transgender kids, in her view, but because of the “information overload” everywhere else: “Three, four, five years ago, we were basically the only game in town; now there’s a lot of local resources that schools will [use] to do a training … and there’s