Trans-Affirmative Parenting. Elizabeth Rahilly
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Beyond discussions of intensive parenting, most scholars of childhood development give parents a primary role in children’s socialization.47 Indeed, the import of parents’ roles in their children’s development is the focus of this book: the parents are the ones buying clothing, permitting toys, scheduling haircuts, conducting online searches, registering for conferences, meeting with school administrators, consulting health practitioners, writing letters to other parents, deciding to switch pronouns, and ultimately embracing transgender labels and understandings of their children. That said, both psychologists and sociologists have increasingly emphasized the work of children themselves, rejecting traditional models that frame children as passive learners of adult society and understanding them instead as active agents in the socialization process.48 As sociologist Barrie Thorne wrote, children are “complex actors, strategists, performers, users of language, creators of culture,”49 whose “interactions are not preparation for life, they are life itself.”50 Similarly, sociologist Spencer Cahill said, “Children are not passively molded by the environment but interpretively organize and respond to the environment along lines laid down by their native language.”51
In this vein, childhood development scholars have dubbed parent-child socialization in more dynamic terms, such as “reciprocal influence,” “bidirectional,” and “interdependent.” Childhood sociologist William Corsaro, for example, proposes an “interpretive reproduction” framework, which moves beyond simple, linear theories of children’s socialization and instead envisions a multivalent dynamic between parents, children, and their changing social environments. According to Corsaro: “Children are not simply internalizing society and culture but are actively contributing to cultural production and change.”52 In this way, childhood socialization is not a mere means to an end, but legitimate sociological terrain on its own terms.
While this book centers on parents’ developing perceptions and practices, the foregoing perspectives on the agentic child, who acts within and against a wider sociocultural milieu, strongly resonate with the trans-affirmative phenomenon I encountered in the field. Parents acted as much in response to their children’s expressions and articulations as in accordance with their own assumptions, norms, and values—including the LGBTQ-inclusive ones they were learning along the way. Indeed, “follow the child’s lead” resounded as the modus operandi within the parental forums I observed. At almost every possible juncture, it was their child’s articulations of who they were, what they preferred, how they would come to be identified, who would know about it, and what medical treatments they wanted, if any, that governed parents’ decisions. One could say it was the parents who were being socialized to their children’s gender as much as the other way around. Moreover, parents felt bound to focus on the “present,” and their children’s current assertions, regardless of what their child’s development may bring in the future. As one mother said via e-mail, “You raise the child standing before you.” All told, child-directed, child-centered parenting, spurred by active, agentic children, is a pertinent theoretical framework for the trans-affirmative practices I recorded and the social mechanisms that enabled them.
Feminist Precursors
Intensive, child-centered parenting is not the only historical development in child-rearing that has impacted the families I studied. Attentive to the complexities of gendered inequalities, many second-wave feminist scholars and activists called for child-rearing practices that resisted the stereotyping of male and female children, often referred to as “gender-neutral” or “feminist” parenting.53 Growing through the 1970s and 1980s, this brand of parenting included modeling egalitarian divisions of household labor, as well as permitting gender-inclusive toys, interests, and activities for young children. Feminist psychologist Sandra Bem, for example, one of the pioneers of such “gender-aschematic” parenting, as she termed it, often modified the characters in her children’s storybooks to undo gendered patterns (e.g., drawing breasts and long hair on a truck driver or a beard on an elementary schoolteacher).54 She also let her son wear barrettes and other stereotypically feminine items to school.55
However, Bem advised that she always tried to reduce the difference between boys and girls to anatomy when speaking to her children, ultimately reiterating a cisgender relationship between sex and gender: “A boy, we said again and again, is someone with a penis and testicles; a girl is someone with a vagina, a clitoris, and a uterus.”56 On these terms, gender-neutral parenting failed to rupture the quintessential link between sex and gender, even as parents tried to minimize the relevance of that link, effectively erasing childhood transgender possibilities. In fact, excerpts from other practitioners of this genre at the time seem stunningly transphobic and homophobic.57 In short, in its original formulations, gender-neutral parenting encouraged boys and girls to pursue whatever interests they wanted, regardless of stereotypes—but they were ever and always cisgender boys and girls, respectively, and ideally heterosexual.
More recent feminist sociologists have exposed the “stalled revolution” of these parenting ideals, which they largely attribute to lingering, negative associations between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality. Sociologist Karin Martin, for example, reviewed a variety of parenting guides published through the end of the twentieth century and found that gender-neutral parenting was still not wholeheartedly endorsed due to fears over encouraging homosexuality.58 Martin concluded that “the gendered socialization of children seems only to have mildly waned since the height of the second wave.… There may well be rich research territory in the area of gender socialization that has been abandoned by many feminist researchers.”59 Similarly, sociologist Emily Kane found that even the most gender-progressive parents will succumb to the “gender trap,” or social expectations that limit parents’ best intentions against traditional gender norms.60 This was especially true in the cases of male children and “icons of femininity,” such as frilly skirts and dresses and Barbie dolls—parents drew the line at these.61 Indeed, few, if any, of the parents in Kane’s research seemed cognizant of the prospect of a transgender child. As one particularly gender-inclusive mother said, “ ‘Eli, you’ll never be a girl, but if you want that Barbie pool you can have it.’ ”62 Evidently, as conventionally conceived and practiced, gender-neutral parenting has remained ignorant of, or perhaps resistant to, transgender possibilities. For all its limitations, however, this legacy has enabled a baseline level of openness to children’s gender-atypical preferences among contemporary parents, which I discuss in chapter 1.
The Transgender Child
Children’s normative gender identity development has consumed decades of research and theorizing in the fields of psychology and social psychology.63 Sociologists, too, have studied the ways in which young children actively incorporate, and sometimes challenge, normative gender expectations.64 The governing questions of much of this research are, what are the processes through which children become normatively differentiated boys and girls, in accordance with the expectations of their assigned birth sex, and how are aberrations from those norms addressed or regulated among otherwise culturally compliant children? In these ways, perhaps refreshingly so, much of the traditional research on children’s gender development aimed to explain gender-conforming outcomes, not the nonnormative ones.
Gender-nonconforming children, however, have consumed a different vein of psychological research, namely that of “gender identity disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).65 As sociologist Karl Bryant has documented, longitudinal studies of gender-nonconforming children, or of “feminine boys,” as they were often called at the time, took hold in the 1960s, following the development of adult transsexual medicine in the United States.66 Though these children were originally surveilled for insights into the potential origins of adult transsexuality, the resulting data suggested a strong statistical correlation between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality. That is, most of these children allegedly