Trans-Affirmative Parenting. Elizabeth Rahilly
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of parents, whom I started interviewing in 2013, were immersed in a very different sociohistorical context, wherein the prospect of a transgender child was far more crystallized in both popular and institutional consciousness. As one parent wrote to me in an e-mail, regarding the anonymity of my research subjects, “Sometimes I feel like everyone can find me … and sometimes I think our numbers are growing so large that I will just be another parent.”
Related to these factors, most parents from the second cohort came from an online listserv more heavily associated with specifically transgender-identified children. While the listserv’s organization would never exclude parents of children who are not necessarily transgender—and they certainly had such subscribers—by and large, the forum was populated by parents of transgender, socially transitioning or transitioned children. As one of the educators told me when accounting for the organization’s constituency, “transgender” is explicitly in its title. This contrasts with the first group of parents I recruited, who were drawn not from this forum but via a different organization’s annual conference, which many perceived as catering to issues of gender and gender nonconformity more broadly.24 In addition, the author of the parenting blog I used was actually a parent not of a transgender child but of a gender-nonconforming boy.
However, it would be remiss to distinguish these venues too firmly, as these characterizations did not always hold up. In fact, both times I attended the conference, parents of transgender children seemed to be in the majority and were a visible presence. (I also encountered several interviewees who gave diametrically opposing impressions of these organizations.) And most parents from the original group came to identify their children as transgender, just a bit later in time, especially for children assigned male. Nevertheless, these different forums and networks, and the time frames during which I recruited them, yielded different groups of families, some more trans-specific than others. The first cohort represented something more broadly gender-nonconforming than the second, which I explore in chapter 3.
Apart from these historical “cohort” dynamics, my analysis is complicated by the “history” of any one family and any one child’s life course developments, which is necessarily a terrain of movement, growth, and change. The interviews this book relies on present diverse but singular snapshots in time within the daily unfolding of family life, sometimes captured once, sometimes captured twice. It is thus hard to burrow into data that are specific to one particular moment but that stand within a much larger, moving trajectory, which my reporting could never keep up with in real time. This dynamic is most visible in the follow-up cases from the first cohort, wherein the parents were articulating different markers, pronouns, identifiers, and overall perspectives between interviews, just a few years apart. Capturing just such changes is further complicated by wanting to honor the children’s affirmed gender identities. In several places in this book, I quote parents who were using the wrong pronouns and identifiers at the time relative to a child’s later affirmed identity. Outside of direct analysis of the parents, I would never want to risk misgendering a child, but I decided to preserve the quotes verbatim in the service of capturing the parents’ journeys.
Emblematic of these dynamics, I often encountered among parents the notion that this is “their transition,” not their child’s, that “everyone’s on their own journey” and takes their own time. As such, while a child’s gender identity may or may not be in flux—and may be known and expressed from the beginning—the notion that the parents were part of an evolving, fluid process was integral to the analysis. Overall, while this background of constant change and dynamism can be challenging for in-depth qualitative research, it is also deeply connected to the sociology of the study: the practices, discourses, and processes through which social change, and gender change, come to pass, both within one family and in the culture at large.
The Outsider With(out)
In her essay “Learning from the Outsider Within,” sociologist and feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins discusses the unique intellectual insights of women of color scholars. As Collins explains, women of color carry specific cultural knowledge as marginalized “outsiders” within the white, male-dominated spaces of academia, a standpoint that has advanced Black feminist thought, among other spheres of knowledge. My own research experiences, however, could best be characterized as the “outsider without”: I am not transgender, and I present gender-normatively for my sex category most of the time. Equally important, I am not a parent, let alone a parent of a transgender child. My outsider status was further compounded by my role as a sociologist, including the theoretical paradigms I use in that capacity—such as the “social construction” of sex, gender, and sexuality. This theoretical perspective emphasizes the cultural and historical influences on human social experience and identity, not innate biology or genetic dispositions.25 A sociologist is not the typical role, or position, from which most parents seek support and guidance; parents sooner look to mental health specialists, doctors, and professional LGBT educators and advocates outside the academe.
Parents’ fundamental interests in my project were to help spread greater understanding about transgender children and to make the world a safer place for them to live. On that point, we were perennially aligned. However, social-scientific paradigms have had a fraught relationship with LGBT identities and activism. While not necessarily mutually exclusive, many feel that “social-constructionist” perspectives deny essentialist, “born-this-way” accounts for identity, which have been the rallying cry of the modern-day LGBT rights movement. Some scholars argue that social constructionism falsely insinuates something “caused” or “created” personal identities, while biological accounts about an innate, unabiding sense of self ring more true.26 I do not believe these paradigms are contradictory, but my sociological interests in the trans-affirmative parenting phenomenon—including what new understandings about sex, gender, and sexuality might emerge—did not always feel immediately in sync with my participants. This was intimately related to my positionality in the project and the “outsider” status I often felt viscerally in the field, which I address further in appendix II.
There is, however, one “insider” dimension I believe I shared with my actual interviewees: like the majority of them, I am cisgender, gender-normative, and from a white, middle-class, college-educated background. While never discussed outright, our common sociodemographic signifiers likely aided in building rapport, even when I had no personal claims to parenting or to trans experience. I often felt that being cisgender and gender-normative gave me an “in” with my cisgender, gender-normative subjects, who were newly encountering and processing these issues on behalf of their children, at times anxiously so, about which they dialogued with me in interviews.
Historical and Cultural Contexts
In The History of Sexuality, social theorist Michel Foucault famously argued that the “homosexual” was “invented” by the psychiatric sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While homosexual acts and desires have long existed, Foucault explained, the notion of a distinct type of same-sex-oriented person did not. Instead, this was a product of modern social-scientific discourses, knowledge, and systems of classification.27 In Foucauldian terms, my research project shadowed the emergence of, and “invention” of, the “transgender child,” a category largely inconceivable to parents prior to the twenty-first century.28 Like all parents, the parents I studied are situated in a very specific historical moment, one in which parent support groups and social networks for transgender children have grown exponentially across the United States and Canada, new medical options for childhood transitions have emerged, new possibilities for self-identity exist, and new terminology is ever evolving. The whole world of gender and sexuality, it seems, is being challenged afresh—and gender-nonconforming youth are at the center of these shifts.29
But beyond the sociocultural advent of the transgender child are broader historical developments that are key to understanding the contemporary families in this book. These developments include (1) intensive, child-centered parenting, including the raced and classed aspects of this; (2) second-wave feminism, which left an imprint on contemporary parents in