Anxiety and Gender Regulation
This chapter returns to the concept of gender assessments, this time examining how they work after parents have determined their child is transgender. While many parents perceived themselves to be acutely vulnerable to state regulation, families with sexual-minority parents or racial-minority children were much more likely to have interventions into their lives by the state. When the state actually did intervene, however, it was with great consequence, and those interventions intensified the inequalities those families already suffered. Families with the greatest emotional and material resources, however, could marshal the state to assist them in problem solving, demonstrating the double life of the state (as enforcer and as resource provider) and the ways in which it exacerbates preexisting inequalities.