Читать книгу Trans-Affirmative Parenting - Elizabeth Rahilly - Страница 7

Jayne and Glenn’s story echoes themes I encountered throughout my research on parents who raise gender-nonconforming and transgender children, themes that shape the substantive focus of this book: parents’ shifting understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality, refracted through “male” and “female” expectations; parents’ use of biomedical and disability frameworks; parents’ fraught negotiations with binary and nonbinary gender possibilities; and parents’ intensive advocacy labor on behalf of their children. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than fifty parents in the United States, as well as two parents in Canada, this book captures a burgeoning social phenomenon of trans-affirmative parenting. My analysis contributes to, and in some ways complicates, a rapidly growing conversation in the social sciences and beyond.

The parents I interviewed certainly do not represent the first parents to confront childhood gender nonconformity,⁶ but they did feel like no one in their lifetimes has done what they are doing: identifying and raising a young child as the “other sex,” from early childhood on. The volume of work unfolding on families like this, just within the last few years, is a testament to how radically new, and radically expanding, the terrain is. Several sociologists have offered foundational insights into these new trans-affirmative families, whose works serve as key interlocutors in this book. In The Trans Generation, Ann Travers examines how binary bureaucracies and spaces unduly dis-able and disadvantage transgender kids, especially in school settings—from class rosters and other school documents to bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams. Travers calls for policies that make these settings more inclusive for trans students, especially those students at the most marginalized intersections of race, class, ability, and nationality. In Trans Kids, Tey Meadow documents several fundamental aspects of the trans-affirmative parenting phenomenon across key institutional arenas, including the medical clinic, the state, and the law, as well as within the major advocacy organizations and their differing rhetorical strategies. Meadow also examines parents’ strategies for understanding their transgender children, including refashioning traditional conceptual frameworks from biology, psychiatry, and spirituality to embrace and normalize gender variance. Ultimately, rather than signaling the “erosion” of gender, Meadow argues that gender is becoming that much more significant to social life, both personally and institutionally—including diverse, nonnormative forms of gender.⁷

This book explores a new constellation of insights and nuance in parents’ experiences. At the heart of the stories I examine are parents’ shifting understandings of their children’s gender and how they come to help their children make sense of their identities and their bodies. However, throughout these processes, I show that parents’ meaning-making and decision-making often challenge LGBT advocacy discourses, as well as queer political and theoretical tenets, in unexpected ways. I demonstrate these dynamics in three main conceptual areas: first, gender and sexuality; second, the gender binary; and third, the body and biomedicine.

First, I examine parents’ deliberations between gender identity and sexual orientation as the relevant axis of understanding their children’s nonconformity. There are deep-rooted associations between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality, just as Jayne and Glenn’s family friend indicated above. As such, how these parents come to embrace their children as “truly transgender,” and not as “just gay,” is a key sociological question. Reigning LGBT rights discourses frame “gender” and “sexuality” as fundamentally separate parts of the self, and the parents I interviewed certainly reiterated these distinctions. However, parents’ comments also signaled something more porous and open to reinterpretation between these two realms, where some nonconformities once understood as “just gay” might well be relevant to “truly trans” understandings after all. This is the deliberative and productive labor, I argue, that is helping to bring broadening (trans)gendered possibilities into being—for their kids and for others.⁸ This labor also troubles the idea of finite, distinct realms of self in the service of child-rooted developments and understandings throughout the life course.

The second area concerns parents’ negotiations with binary and nonbinary possibilities for their children’s gender. Despite mounting sociopolitical emphasis on nonbinary, gender-fluid, and/or genderqueer possibilities, gender-expansive child-rearing often looks very binary and gender-stereotypical, per the children’s own assertions and expressions. In fact, for many of these parents, nonbinary possibilities proved as much a crutch in trying to avoid “truly trans” transitions for their children as any authentic identities of the kids’, especially for the transgender girls. To be 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.