Читать книгу Trans-Affirmative Parenting - Elizabeth Rahilly - Страница 8

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 methodological tension of the study, which some might consider “inherently problematic.”¹⁷ Indeed, the exclusion of children’s voices throughout academic literature, including in the realm of childhood studies, is a problem, which several scholars have sought to address. Travers’s book The Trans Generation, for example, and sociologist Mary Robertson’s book Growing Up Queer are works that prioritize kids’ vantage points. To be sure, children’s accounts are a critical part of this research terrain.

But this “limitation,” I would argue—the parents’ perspectives, practices, and decisions—is intimately related to the range of identities that are made possible for these children in the first place and thus is inherent to the sociology of the phenomenon. In addition, I felt that my status as a cisgender, gender-normative researcher was overly risky vis-à-vis young gender-nonconforming children. I did not want to make them feel “abnormal,” interrogated, and scrutinized.¹⁸ The majority of parents echoed this stance preemptively, too, and preferred that their children were absent for the interview (though several parents, I understand, advised their children of my project and asked for their permission to proceed). My ethical concerns in this regard trumped any interests in seeking interviews with the kids, and I never requested permission from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to include the children in my study.¹⁹

The last term I introduce, “social transition,” further reflects this study’s emphasis on the parents, not the children. In this book, “transition” or “social transition” refers to parents fully affirming their children’s (trans)gender identity, including permitting related name, clothing, pronoun, and hairstyle preferences of the child, as well as enrolling them in school and other activities as such. Parents often go to friends, extended family, and other adults in the child’s life to request recognition of this new identification. In this way, “transition” really emphasizes the parents’ thoughts and actions, including how they come to recognize their child, and not any real gendered transformations on the part of the children (especially not in any physical or embodied aspects).