Trans-Affirmative Parenting. Elizabeth Rahilly
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to more local LGBT organizations and centers, whose advocacy on behalf of transgender children is expanding. Through these online searches and their ensuing interactions, parents encounter proliferating infrastructural supports, where childhood gender nonconformity is addressed not as a problem to be corrected, nor necessarily as “proto-homosexuality,” but as a matter of gendered difference, and, in many cases, as transgender.
LGBT/Q Rights
Alongside this clinical history, the modern-day “gay rights” movement has made LGBTQ identities increasingly visible on the sociopolitical stage. Several major federal decisions reflect the growing normalization of gay identity in US society. This includes the repeals of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy and the Defense of Marriage Act in 2011 and 2013, respectively, and the historic Supreme Court decision in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage in all states.85 By some accounts, successes in gay rights have helped precipitate advances in transgender rights, which the proverbial “LGBT” moniker suggests. Reflective of these associations, the May 2014 cover story of Time magazine, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” opens with the caption, “Nearly a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, another social movement is poised to challenge deeply held cultural beliefs.”86 The “transgender movement,” as the author calls it, has gained momentum, with figures like Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, and Caitlyn Jenner giving trans identity a very public face.
Indeed, at multiple government levels, as well as within both public and private bureaucracies, trans-related policies are expanding and improving. This includes identity documents, health care coverage, and employment nondiscrimination protections. The majority of states, for example, no longer require the traditional surgical or medical criteria of “sex reassignment” to change identity documents. Moreover, as of the writing of this book, at least fifteen states now provide for nonbinary designations on licenses and/or birth certificates. Trans-exclusionary health care policies are being rewritten as well, although a majority of states still do not offer specific protections against trans-exclusionary care.87 These changes have also included traditionally sex-segregated institutions: as of June 2015, all of the Seven Sister women’s colleges allow transgender students to enroll.88
But the notion that “LGB” rights necessarily mean progress for the “T” is flawed. First, the expansion of trans rights is hardly uniform, but varies considerably between states, municipalities, employers, and health insurance plans. This has created a complicated, and often contradictory, legal patchwork for trans persons to navigate. Nor do these formal legal protections necessarily address the routine harassment, policing, and violence that gender-nonconforming persons face in everyday life, including in bathrooms, on public transportation, and at security checkpoints, to name but a few scenarios.89 Moreover, the Trump administration, installed after the 2016 election, has hauled in a reactionary, anti-trans agenda, challenging if not rescinding key protections in housing, health care, education, and the military.90 In 2018, for example, a White House memo indicated that the administration might try to redefine “gender” strictly according to biological criteria at birth (i.e., genitalia), causing widespread concern about the implications of this for transgender rights under Title IX. This memo has been described as an attempt to “erase” trans persons from legislative existence.91
The limitations of “gay rights” for actual trans progress, however, have a deeper ideological history than these recent political challenges. As anthropologist David Valentine explains in Imagining Transgender, the linchpin of the mainstream LGBT rights movement is the idea that gender and sexuality are fundamentally separate parts of the self.92 That is, “gay” is about sexuality and sexual orientation, “trans” is about gender identity, and the two should not be confused. On these terms, “gay rights” are indeed quite distinct from “trans rights”—they address different parts of human social experience and identity.
In contrast to these mainstream understandings, Valentine found that many low-income, marginalized, gender-nonconforming persons of color in New York City sooner identified as “gay” than “trans,” including those assigned male at birth but who lived as women. Ultimately, Valentine argues that other social factors, like race and class, do not merely influence how “gender” and “sexuality” are experienced, but can fundamentally shift which parts of the self these categories signify. As Valentine says, “Age, race, class, and so on don’t merely inflect or intersect with those experiences we call gender and sexuality but rather shift the very boundaries of what ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ can mean in particular contexts.”93 For his particular informants, “gay” signaled something as much about their gender as it did their sexual orientation. I return to Valentine’s work in chapter 2.
Nevertheless, distinctions between “gender” and “sexuality” are considered part of the mainstream LGBT awareness canon, and they were reiterated throughout my interviews. As one mother advised, the “LGBT” acronym actually offends her; it erroneously lumps together two wholly different things, “gay” and “trans.” Precisely because of these logics, many LGBT activists have argued that gay rights have been advanced at the expense of transgender issues. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act, for example, was plagued by these divisions and was stalled in Congress for years. Protections for “sexual orientation” were included, while clauses for “gender identity and expression” were routinely debated and struck out.94 As the critics note, separating issues of “gay” from “trans” in these ways is remiss, given that instances of “homophobia” usually concern visible manifestations of gender nonconformity, not same-sex attraction.95 And, of course, these statuses are hardly exclusive: trans persons can identify as LGB, and vice versa.
For these reasons, the mainstream LGBT rights movement has been criticized for succumbing to overly “assimilationist,” “homonormative,” and gender-normative approaches, primarily serving cisgender gays and lesbians and doing little to crack the real cultural ideologies that underlie sex- and gender-based oppression.96 Nor do these approaches serve the most marginalized segments of the LGBT population, including and especially low-income, gender-nonconforming, trans-feminine persons of color, who experience alarmingly disproportionate rates of homelessness, joblessness, criminalization, and homicide.97 The crucial roles of transgender activists within the movement have been overlooked, too. As historian Susan Stryker documents in Transgender History, the 1966 riots at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco marked the first concerted protests against police brutality toward gender-nonconforming persons in public, predating the famous Stonewall riots that occurred three years later.98 Stonewall itself, considered the catalyst of the modern-day “gay rights” movement, was led by several trans women of color, a crucial part of LGBT history that has been “whitewashed” and “gay-washed” in its legacy.99
Starting in the late 1980s, these concerns galvanized a more radicalized, “queer” brand of LGBT activism, aimed at addressing the trans-exclusionary tendencies of the movement, as well as its racist, classist, and sexist undercurrents.100 These “queer” political efforts have sought to shift the movement’s priorities away from marriage equality and the military and toward issues like affordable housing and health care, job training and education, and criminal justice reform—matters that present more pressing life-or-death challenges for many LGBT persons.101 Pursuant to queer deconstructionist theorizing, which has interrogated static and stable understandings of gender and sexuality, queer politics have also challenged exclusively binary and/or medicalized perspectives of transgender identity, ushering in greater awareness for nonbinary, gender-fluid, and/or more visibly nonconforming identities and expressions. This includes identities that do not reflect traditional body modification expectations or transitions.102 In a related vein, “queer-of-color” and “trans-of-color” critiques have challenged mainstream agendas for privileging certain kinds of transgender subjects over others (i.e., white, economically stable, middle-class to upper-class, medically transitioned, binary-presenting, and holding legal