Trans-Affirmative Parenting. Elizabeth Rahilly
sure, LGBTQ platforms have never denied binary and gender-normative transitions; as I will discuss, some would argue they unduly exalt them. But nonbinary identities are gaining traction and visibility, especially among youth, and many parents grew compelled to think “beyond the binary” in their journeys—often excitedly so—with which their children simply did not align.9 I learned that parents reckoned with these prospects in markedly politicized and intellectual ways. They engaged in queer deconstructionist debates about the gender binary, and often felt the need to defend themselves against such deconstruction. At the same time, several stories in this area expose the difficulties in realizing nonbinary possibilities for the children who might desire them.
In the third area, I examine parents’ biomedical understandings of transgender embodiment, where analogies to “birth defects” and/or “disability” frequently came up in interviews. As parents embrace their transgender children, they turn to the realm of biology and medicine as another key grid of understanding—and as a means of protecting their children’s privacy. Parents’ biomedical frameworks often answered to their children’s own embodied sensibilities (e.g., “Why did God make a mistake?”), but these frameworks also reiterated and reaffirmed traditional cisgender body logics as much as they marked a refashioning of biological accounts.
Taking these three areas together—gender and sexuality, the gender binary, and the body—I show that parents’ practices and perspectives are as much a product of intensive, expert-driven, child-centered parenting as they are an outgrowth of LGBTQ paradigms, and the two aren’t always aligned. All told, these parents’ trans-affirmative journeys reveal important new processes for understanding gender, sexuality, the binary, and related social change.
The journeys parents relayed to me were not simple, linear, or clear-cut. The majority of children represented in this book were identified as transgender (thirty-four of forty-three children). However, some children developed in more cisgender directions following an original round of interviews, which I explore in several follow-up vignettes. These children were never formally identified or transitioned as transgender by their parents. Moreover, a few children were identified by parents as gender-nonconforming, including as “agender” or “two-spirit,” but not necessarily as “transgender”—just as Jared was for several months. All of these dynamics are part of the story, and the change, this book tells: parents’ moving and sometimes murky distinctions along an imagined “spectrum” of possibilities—a spectrum with (trans)gender, (homo)sexual, binary, and nonbinary connotations.10 Ultimately, I aim to highlight the profoundly liberating, as well as the potentially limiting, dimensions of this new brand of trans-affirmative parenting, for this generation and beyond.
Terminology
In this book, “gender-nonconforming” serves as an umbrella term for all the children represented in the study, whose expressions and self-identifications departed significantly from the expectations of their assigned birth sex.11 “Transgender,” or “trans,” in contrast, refers more specifically to a child who has a firmly “cross-gender” or binary identity and whose parents have affirmed them as such (i.e., children assigned male at birth who identify and live as girls, and children assigned female at birth who identify and live as boys). This is how I encountered this term being used among the parents and professionals I interviewed, and it reflected popular usages of the term at the time as well.12 Notably, this usage contrasts with the term’s queer-based formulations in the 1980s and 1990s—that is, as a broad catchall category for gender nonconformity, with purposefully less specific or binary connotations, especially relative to the gender-normative standards of the medico-psychiatric establishment and for those who did not pursue medical interventions.13 More recently, however, the increasing visibility and mobilization around “nonbinary” identity may be shifting “transgender” back toward these more fluid and/or queer connotations.
In interviews, parents’ use of the term “transgender” was similar to “transsexual” understandings and connotations, though many now reject that term, including these parents, especially when referring to their children. I note this because the children want to be recognized firmly as the “other” sex category, male/boy or female/girl, in ways that are decidedly more binary than the broader “gender-nonconforming” and that often entailed some gesture to body modification in the future.14 At the time of the interviews, the majority of the children had not yet pursued any medical or hormonal interventions, and would not yet, per their stage of biological maturity.15 Moreover, according to parents’ accounts, the children held more nuanced relationships to their bodies than “wrong body” or “body dysphoria” narratives would suggest (for several at the time, the body aspect was a nonissue), which I address in chapter 4. But per parents’ reports, many did indicate to them an interest in having different anatomy down the line (e.g., “I don’t want to grow boobs when I grow up”). These kinds of embodied possibilities and interests from children were a critical, although not necessary, distinguishing factor for parents from the broader “gender-nonconforming” label.
Of course, these are by no means firm definitions or distinctions. “Transgender” does not have to mean a binary identity or body modification, and “gender-nonconforming” does not have to preclude either. Someone can pursue a range of anatomical changes and transitions without identifying as one particular category or identity.16 Moreover, the operating terminology I use in this book does not necessarily reflect the preferred parlance of today, which is constantly in flux and varies from person to person, generation to generation. More recently, “gender creative,” “gender expansive,” and “gender independent” have surfaced as preferred terms, with and without hyphenation. However, to reflect the parents and professionals I spoke with, I use “transgender” to refer specifically to children who were assigned one sex at birth and identify as the “opposite” category. On a broader basis, I use “gender identity” to refer to a child’s self-expression as a “boy,” “girl,” or something less binary altogether (e.g., “two-spirit”).
“Gender-nonconforming” had more varying valences and connotations than “transgender,” which I examine in chapters 2 and 3. Sometimes it carried (homo)sexual and “gay” implications (chapter 2), other times it was more explicitly related to notions of gender, but in nonbinary capacities (chapter 3). The latter include a range of possibilities that cannot be characterized simply as “boy” or “girl,” including, for example, “two-spirit,” “agender,” or “gender-fluid.” While parents rarely explicitly used the term “nonbinary” at the time of the interviews, these were the instances of gender nonconformity where parents confronted and considered nonbinary possibilities for their children. “Gender-nonconforming” also pertains to several cases in which the children had developed in more cisgender directions as of follow-up interviews, but not necessarily as “gender-normative.” For example, a child here may identify with their assigned birth sex (male), use male pronouns, and present as a normative boy most of the time, but may occasionally play dress-up at home or don more feminine clothing items (e.g., bright pink jeans). They may also dislike stereotypically masculine interests (sports) and prefer conventionally feminine activities instead (shopping and fashion, dance, theater, etc.). I discuss these follow-up cases in chapter 3 as well. Despite this range of gendered possibilities, however, the majority of children were binary- and transgender-identified at the time of the interviews (more than 80 percent).
In all of these instances, I do not mean to assert objective definitions for these labels and the children to whom they refer. Nor can I tap into the children’s “real” gendered interiorities myself, unfettered and unfiltered—at every occasion, I am relying on parents’ reports of their children. This was a reigning