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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 also more doctors [and] more therapists around the country who are working with the kids.” In short, the second group 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.