Until recently, raising a young child as transgender was culturally unintelligible. Most scholarship on transgender identity refers to adults' experiences and perspectives. Now, the increasing visibility of gender-variant children, as they are identified by the parents who raise them, presents new opportunities to examine how individuals confront the gender binary and imagine more gender-inclusive possibilities. Drawing on Foucault's notion of "truth regime" to conceptualize the regulatory forces of the gender binary in everyday life, this work examines the strategies of 24 such parents, who represent 16 cases of childhood gender variance. Specifically, i analyze three practices-"gender hedging," "gender literacy," and "playing along"-through which these parents develop a critical consciousness about gender binary ideology and work to accommodate their children's nonconformity in diverse discursive interactions. taken together, their newfound strategies and perspectives subvert traditional conceptions of "gender-neutral" or "feminist" parenting, and reveal new modes of resistance to the normative transmission and regulation of gender practices.
This chapter turns to the area of gender and sexuality, and examines parents’ contrasts between “just gay” and “truly trans” explanations for childhood gender nonconformity. Given age-old statistics that link childhood gender nonconformity with adult homosexuality, these deliberations are no small part of parents’ journeys. Modern-day LGBT rights discourses assert a firm distinction between “gender” and “sexuality”—gender identity is one thing, sexual orientation is another. However, parents’ deliberations signaled something more fluid and potentially permeable between these two realms of self, across a morphing “spectrum” of possibilities. This conceptual work, the chapter argues, gives increasing intelligibility to (trans)gendered understandings, versus ones formerly understood within a grid of (homo)sexuality. In social-constructionist terms, this is not merely descriptive labor, but productive labor, helping to bring broadening transgender possibilities into being. This work also prioritizes child-rooted shifts in a way that further troubles firm distinctions between these categories of the self.
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