The Trans Generation

How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution

Ann Travers

• Publisher: U of R Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780889775800
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Compassionate and pragmatic, this is the book about trans kids that every parent, teacher, coach, caregiver, and policymaker needs to read!" Heath Fogg Davis, author of Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?"The Trans Generation is indispensable reading for anybody who wants to understand the gender climate-change our culture is currently experiencing. If you care about a kid who does gender differently…and want them to have the best future possible, then read this book, take it to heart, and start making that future a reality for them today." Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History"Ann Travers makes a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on trans subjectivity generally, and trans youth in particular…a pleasure to read." Jane Ward, author of Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men

1

Transgender Kids

Whenever we are crossing the Canadian-U.S. border, my instructions to Wren—and her response—are always the same: “I will be calling you ‘he.’” She always asks me why. We have had many discussions about this, and none of them have been satisfactory for either of us. But before we leave home each time, I insist that she refrain from wearing a skirt or a dress until we are across the border. (If we are driving, it’s not unusual for us to pull into the nearest shopping-mall parking lot to enable her to “change back” into herself.) Most of the time, she and I are in solidarity in the face of the failure of others to understand who she is or to realize that the categories they impose upon her are contrived and oppressive; but the erasure of her identity is real, and it hurts every time. The last time we flew to the United States, I watched as she came through the security sensor gate behind me. I didn’t even notice that one of her fists was clenched until the guard who was waiting to wand her asked her to open her hand. When she did, she revealed a delicate, iridescent pink hair scrunchie. I realized that she was trying to find a way to hang onto herself in the face of this denial of her person. I was stunned by her ingenuity and torn up by the way she was left empty-handed. I don’t tell her that security personnel might react intrusively and even aggressively, if they notice she is “really” a boy but presenting as a girl. We might be separated and questioned about the nature of our relationship—I am her adoptive mother—and the standard of care I am providing for her. These things have happened to families that I know. As she grows up, Wren will increasingly engage with gendered and racialized systems that put her at risk. She is only nine years old, and I fear that the truth about the extent of the potential danger lying ahead would harm her development.

—Jordan, parent

On an August afternoon in 2011, I found myself at a AAA baseball game in the U.S. Southwest, standing in a long line at the concession stand because I had promised my daughter a slushy. I was surrounded by kids of all ages. When the one in front of me turned around, she caught the involuntary look of surprise in my eyes and cheerfully called me on it, saying, “You thought I was a boy, didn’t you?” “I thought you looked like me,” I replied. She looked like I did when I was 11—an unmistakably queer kid. She went on to tell me that people think she is a boy all the time and that she doesn’t mind but her mom hates her short haircut. We chatted for a bit, but when we got close to the front of the line, I switched gears and got serious, saying, “I want you to remember me. Remember that I told you that someday, probably when you go to college, you’ll meet lots of other people like us, and they will love you. And your life will be great.” We stood there for a moment, eyes locked, saying nothing. I felt like I had reached across time to do for her what nobody did for me, and I found doing it empowering and portentous—until later that day, when I realized how elitist it was to assume a college escape plan was in her future.

The light at the end of the tunnel I attempted to provide to the presumably Euro-American kid at the ballgame came from my story, which is based on a combination of race and class privilege and good timing; but most transgender kids will never attend postsecondary school, and even most of those who do will be unable to remain in what for me has come to constitute a relatively queer- and trans-positive bubble. The world of the university did and does provide me with a favorable habitat. From what this kid told me about her parents, however, her family may not have the resources to send her to college: her dad ran the concession stand at the ballpark. Her gender nonconformity and her age—just on the cusp of puberty and the greater pressure that “tomboys” experience to conform to feminine norms as they grow into teenagers1—triggered my concerns about her vulnerability, and I wanted to throw her a lifeline. In my effort to speak to her, I spoke mostly to myself. She was full of resilience: she was unfazed by the responses of others to her gender nonconformity and really seemed to enjoy engaging with complete strangers about it. This was an important lesson about the tendency to project our own experiences and desires onto the children we feel affinity with. This theme drives the book: how to decenter my own whiteness, class privilege, and professional status to present a more nuanced analysis of transgender kids in North America.

Nine years ago, in 2008, gender educators Stefanie Brill and Rachel Pepper published The Transgender Child, a groundbreaking book that provided adult caregivers of and service providers for children who affirm a sex/gender identity other than the one assigned to them practical guidance and a supportive framework for navigating the process of social and/or medical transition. The emergence of affirmative (as opposed to punishing, “corrective,” or “reparative”) resources such as this one,2 for networks of parents and professionals focused on supporting transgender children,3 was in response to critical need. A recent report released by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law concluded that one in every 137 teens between the ages of 13 and 17 identifies as transgender.4 In Being Safe, Being Me, the authors of the Canadian Trans Youth Health Survey noted that nearly two-thirds of the respondents reported self-harm over the previous year, and one in three had attempted suicide.5 Equally troubling are the figures relating to poverty: one in five younger trans youth (14–18 years) and more than one in three older trans youth (19–25 years) went without food at some point in the previous year because they could not afford it.

In a study investigating school climate, the Egale Canada Human Rights Trust reported that 95% of transgender students felt unsafe in schools, 90% reported being verbally harassed because of their gender variance, and 50% said that their teachers and other adults in positions of authority failed to intervene when anti-queer or trans-oppressive comments were made.6 Other studies have reported that doctors, teachers, and classmates often misunderstand gender-nonconforming kids,7 which can result in damaging feelings of social isolation. Many are diagnosed with learning disabilities and/or psychological problems because of stress, depression, and suicidal tendencies.8 Recent data suggest that a disproportionate number of LGBT youth are homeless. Another study reports, “Most transgender children still live in the shadows, hiding from a world that sees them as freaks of nature. Rejected by their families, many grow up hating their bodies, and fall victim to high rates of depression, drug abuse, violence and suicide.”9 If this is where it can end, where does it begin?

The Two-Sex System

The seemingly “natural” basis of binary sex/gender systems assumes that “sex” is a biological term to describe a binary system of anatomy and that “gender” is a cultural term that describes social expectations of sexed bodies, yet these definitions have been challenged by queer, feminist, trans, and intersex theory. As queer theorist Judith Butler insists, sex “has been gender all along”;10 the very “fact” of the two-sex system is an ideological rather than a naturally occurring phenomenon.11With few exceptions, however, the “realness” of binary sex, and what are assumed to be naturally corresponding gender differences, is received wisdom so absolute that feminist scientific and cross-cultural evidence that establishes sex and gender variation beyond dyadic systems is dismissed.12 In short, this system continues to operate as a powerful and inflexible social and cultural foundational force. In fact, Canadian and U.S. sex/gender systems appear to be resilient enough to adapt to some transgender disruptions by restabilizing around binary categories, which may lessen the relative precarity of transgender kids who undergo affirmative medical intervention early enough to avoid puberty. In contrast to the view of transgender adults, dominant biomedical models view the prepubescent bodies of children as blank slates that may be subject to the kind of intervention that restabilizes binary gender systems.13 Transgender scholars Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah pointedly define gender “as a biopolitical apparatus that operates on all bodies to produce unequally distributed life chances; gender privileges not just men over women, but also the legibly or functionally gendered over those who become inhuman waste due to their incoherent, messy, resistant, or ambiguous relationship to biopolitical utility.”14

Research and anecdotal evidence indicates that children have a strong sense of their own gender identity by the age of three or four and some earlier than that. Indeed, one of the parents I interviewed described how her daughter, Cassandra insisted, “I is a girl,” at two and a half years of age. But the circumstances under which children experience gender—both the gender that is imposed on them and the gender they feel themselves to be—are complex and difficult to unpack. Anyone who has spent any time around babies and small children has to have observed how distinct their personalities are and how they bring something uniquely of themselves to every interaction and context. Children are not blank slates, as early approaches to child development and education insisted,15 but rather are fundamentally social beings who strive for the agency to construct themselves as much as they are constructed by interactions with people and institutions around them. Children engage with their environments in mutual developmental interaction between personal and social systems. Psychoanalyst Adrienne Harris captures this complex relationship in her description of gender as “soft assembly,” as “personal and social, personal and political, private and public. Any individual experience of gender is rooted in personal history, collective histories, and the slowly but also rapidly evolving, historically shifting world of bodies, words, and material life.”16 Much as Karl Marx asserted that “men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past,”17 gender necessarily emerges in context. Children make gender their own, but they are limited by the tools they are given. Transgender kids shine a light on the ways that children do gender and the creativity and determination they bring to this task.

The increasingly visible social movements of trans kids and their parents and caregivers insist that children do know their own gender identities and that they both are and should be the authorities when it comes to any claims about their gender. Yet prevailing attitudes about children and teenagers allow adults to dismiss the statements that young people make about themselves and the world around them. Nonbinary trans kids, or those who do not stick with one transition but retreat, move sideways, or go ahead in a different direction, are cited as examples to reinforce cultural norms and prescriptions that infantilize teenagers and preteens.

While some headway is being made to recognize the capacity of children to determine their own gender, this acknowledgment is extended much less to sexuality. Gender scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton observes that the circulation of transgender children in mainstream media depends on their being constructed as both sexually innocent and fundamentally heterosexual.18 This is a central contradiction that informs mainstream discourse about children, gender, and sexuality in general. In a groundbreaking study of kindergarten children and gender, critical childhood studies scholar Annika Stafford observes that “discourses of children’s innocence and discourses of difference work together to normalize rigidly gendered heterosexuality, compelling children to conform to such norms or face social othering in the form of isolation and persecution for their characteristics that do not fit within the strict boundaries of normalcy.”19 A considerable volume of research tells us that children develop physically and mentally in keeping with access to resources and opportunities.20 Drawing on new research findings relating to the “plasticity” of the brain, sociologist Raewyn Connell observes that there is strong evidence that social context/interaction drives brain development.21

Another factor to consider is what sociologist Barrie Thorne has observed in children and their peer cultures: they are not just passive recipients of society’s gender system but rather active interpreters and co-constructors of meaning.22 Similarly, Connell remarks, “Children deal with the same institutions and with overlapping groups of adults. One of the key competencies children learn is to recognize the prevailing masculinities and femininities in the adult world. Whatever ideology prevails in the gender order, children grow up under its shadow.”23

Coping Strategies

The kids in this book developed a range of coping strategies to deal with the shadow of the gender order. These include invisibility; trying to make the assigned category work; living a double life; engaging in self-harm; gender and/or sexual nonconformity; socially and/or medically transitioning; branching out beyond the binary; and engaging in education and activism to bring about social change.

Invisibility

All the kids in the book experience dissonance, if not a powerful disidentification, with and resistance to the binary sex/gender identity imposed on them. The fact that I was able to identify and interview them speaks to the degree of privilege that most of their families (birth, adoptive, or chosen) have been able to rally around their children’s gender self-determination. It does not mean that all participants come from relative wealth, however, although many would qualify as middle class. But these trans kids are known to me, and their experiences shed light on the many others who lack the safe environments required to show themselves. Speaking of the relationship between privilege and visibility, Kai, an LGBT youth worker, told me, “Young people are saying directly to me, ‘Like I already am so teased and bugged and bullied for these other aspects of my identity that there is no way I’m going to start outing myself on invisible identities.’ Like, ‘I’ll just restrict myself and conform and do whatever I need to do to not have to deal with that aspect of difference because these ones that everyone sees, no matter what I do, are taking up so much of the plate of my energy that I can’t even get to that.’”

Sucking It Up

Most trans kids probably try very hard to make a go of being the girl or boy that people around them expect them to be, either because they are not aware of any options or because rejecting one’s assigned identity can be overwhelming and difficult to undertake. For some, this process is short-lived, but even those who go on to adopt a more visible strategy often give it a shot. Cameron (18, Euro-Canadian) explained about his experience early on, “I was very passive in some ways, and if my parents told me I was something, then that’s what I was. But I never really totally felt like I fit in with girls or like with girls’ qualities.” Now identifying as a trans guy, Cameron described his experience this way: “I tried really hard to fit in when I was 12 because I still had no idea what was going on; I didn’t know that being transgender was even a thing. I never doubted that I was a girl because, you know, I was basically being trained to be a housewife; there were no other options.” Michael (17, Asian Canadian) described himself as having tried in his early teens to banish his discomfort about his body and assigned female gender role by putting his heart and soul into an exaggerated performance of femininity. Michael described himself as having been “rather extreme about it,” wearing makeup, feminine clothing, high heels, and the like. But, he laughed, “It didn’t work.” Michael began living as a m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Transgender Kids
• 2. Schools
• 3. Spaces
• 4. Parents
• 5. Supportive Healthcare
• Conclusion: Beyond Hope
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Recommendations
• Appendix B: Resources
• Appendix C: The Kids
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author