Читать книгу Trans-Affirmative Parenting - Elizabeth Rahilly - Страница 13

As a researcher of gender and sexuality, I did not set out to study parenting and childhood socialization. However, it became hard to ignore the parent-child relationship, on its own terms, when listening to parents’ stories. The experiences I collected transpired against a larger cultural backdrop in the twenty-first century of a particularly intensive, child-centered approach to parenting, one that is marked by unprecedented amounts of time, energy, and money.³⁰ Indeed, as I will argue, parents’ trans-affirmative efforts were fueled as much by this modern brand of parenting, if not more, as by broadening LGBTQ awareness. These parenting dynamics intersect with socioeconomic factors as well. While my analysis in the chapters ahead does not foreground race or class—rather, I focus on parents’ shifting understandings of gender, sexuality, and the binary—parents’ sociodemographic positions certainly aided the kind of resource-rich, expert-guided, child-centered mode of parenting they practiced, which I discuss here.

As historians have shown, our very conceptions of “childhood,” and what “the child” is, are culturally and historically contingent, and change across time and place.³¹ For example, prior to the Industrial Revolution in the United States, many children worked as valuable laborers and producers in their own right, first of the farmland and the household, and later of the industrializing economy. This changed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the help of child labor laws and expanding school systems. The rise of the gendered division of household labor contributed as well, especially among the white middle class. New cultural ideologies, in tandem, marked the child as “precious,” as someone to be nurtured and protected at home under their mother’s care while fathers earned money outside the home.³² Of course, these cultural ideals relied on real structural inequalities, in which the low-wage labor of working-class families, immigrant families, and/or families and children of color permitted such idealized arrangements among middle-class nuclear households.³³ But this history demonstrates that “childhood” and “the child” are intimately tied to cultural, historical, and economic contexts.

Today, children are considered an all-important labor unto themselves, an individualized project to be “sculpted, stimulated, instructed, and groomed” by their parents.³⁴ Parents do this through a smorgasbord of resource- and time-intensive activities, from soccer practice and dance rehearsal to mommy dates and daddy dates to college prep and private tutoring, all coupled with the help of biomedicine, psychology, and psychiatry. As journalist Jennifer Senior put it, “Kids … went from being our staffs to our bosses.”³⁵ This intensive mode of child-rearing is not only reinforced by consumer capitalism, with a marketplace of goods, services, and experts that drive it, but is morally imposed and surveilled by a collective social other, in which “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong” parenting is constantly assessed and scrutinized—in popular discourse and media, across parenting blogs and advice pages, and within parenting groups.³⁶ Amid this wider culture of intensive, moralized child-rearing—and in the wake of both a feminist parenting legacy and the LGBTQ rights movement, as I chart later in the chapter—the gender-nonconforming child presents a particularly apt project for specialized attention, scrutiny, and care. Indeed, as I learned, the care of a gender-nonconforming child can entail a host of services and expenses, including mental health therapists, medical doctors, and related fees; annual conferences and summer camps; consultations with various advocacy organizations, as well as the time and the means to look into all these options in the first place.

Because child-rearing labor so often falls to women, sociologist Sharon Hays has labeled this modern mode of parenting “intensive mothering,” a highly gendered phenomenon: “The contemporary model of socially appropriate mothering … [is] a gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children.”³⁷ Hays describes this kind of mothering as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.³⁸ Sociologist Annette Lareau argues that such intensive parenting is a classed phenomenon as well. Compared with low-income families, with less capital at their disposal, Lareau found that middle-class parents actively, intensively managed their children’s growth. They invested in expensive extracurricular activities and resources for their children, and they engaged earnestly with their children’s thoughts and comments during mundane conversations. As Lareau said, “Children of middle-class parents have a sense that they are special, that their opinions matter, and that adults should, as a matter of routine, adjust situations to meet children’s wishes.”³⁹

Lareau argues that this parenting mode, or “concerted cultivation,” as she coined it, ultimately advantages middle-class children in other institutions—like schools—which privilege this demographic’s particular brand of self-advocacy and interacting. Similar kinds of intensive parenting were observed more recently by sociologist Margaret Hagerman, but in ways that are racialized, not just classed. In White Kids, the upper-middle-class white parents Hagerman studied took pains to pick the “right” kinds of neighborhoods, schools, and daily activities that would most benefit their children, seizing on the social capital they had to do so.⁴⁰ Hagerman argues that these parental decisions ultimately perpetuate racist hierarchies and advantages, which privilege their white children, even if unintentionally.

Research suggests, however, that this ethos of intensive child-rearing cuts across social classes, with all parents today spending more time and energy on and with their kids than earlier generations, even as the majority still don’t think they spend enough time with them.⁴¹ Moreover, many scholars resist the idea that less economically advantaged parents are somehow less child-centered, or structured, in their approach—let alone in ways that would implicate trans-affirmative parenting. As students of the CUNY Graduate School assert, in an article titled “Bodies and Violence,” focusing on “upper-class families [obscures] the history, traditions and ongoing existence of gender variance among working-class people and people of color.”⁴²

Nevertheless, while most parents today are compelled to expend this kind of time and energy on their children, not all of them have the literal capital to invest in their children in these ways, or the cultural capital to move institutional others accordingly, as Hagerman, Lareau, and others have shown. In addition, decades of Black feminist theorizing have emphasized the inextricable relationships among race, class, and other dimensions of social identity.⁴³ One’s relative position within broader social hierarchies—or, as Patricia Hill Collins calls it, the “matrix of domination”—will impact one’s experiences with other dimensions of difference and marginalization, including LGBTQ identity.⁴⁴ Even if two children are both transgender, their divergent socioeconomic backgrounds may well impact how they experience their gender in other social contexts, as well as the kinds of resources and support their parents are able to secure.⁴⁵ In “Retelling Racialized Violence,” for example, legal scholar Sarah Lamble documents how Pauline Mitchell, a low-income Navajo woman, was routinely dismissed by school authorities when defending her two-spirit child’s gender-nonconforming expressions.⁴⁶

In short, all kinds of parents practice intensive parenting and trans-affirmative parenting, but the relative socioeconomic privilege among many of my participants certainly assisted the ways in which they could engage on behalf of their kids. These parents met with school authorities to lay out specific accommodations, rewrite district policy, push for new teacher trainings, or even pursue litigation. They also urged doctors to take on trans-affirmative care for their children when doctors were otherwise resistant or unfamiliar. They intensively advocated for their children’s gender nonconformity, all in ways that could be more risky, or simply financially out of reach, for low-income parents, parents of color, and/or undocumented or immigrant families. Notwithstanding the critical caveats and perspectives noted here, I draw on “concerted cultivation” and “intensive parenting” as key conceptual models for understanding contemporary parenting. These models greatly resonated with my observations among the parents I studied, including how they intently observed their children’s self-expressions and sought out the resources, specialists, and support networks that would best assist.

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.