Studying Each Other

The introduction sets the stage for the intricate discussion of a new identity category, the transgender child, and the first generation of families actively facilitating gender nonconformity. In a context of rapidly shifting legal, administrative, and social norms around gender, new possibilities for gendered life are emerging. These possibilities underscore that gender transgression no longer merely incites sanction; now it can also lead others to change social gender assignations. Rather than disrupting the gender order, these new forms of gender underscore gender’s increasing importance to psychic and relational life and its further embedding in the fabric of social institutions.

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.

Gender Troubles

This chapter introduces the families in the study and the diverse ways they came to understand that their child had a gender issue that penetrated to the level of core identity. While many children engage in atypical forms of play, certain types of gendered statements and behaviors led these parents to decide that their child had a problem significant enough to seek support from an outside expert or advocate. Some also came, in time, to understand that their child had a gender identity that conflicted with their social assignment. The processes through which parents generated these understandings differed significantly for male and female children, reflecting how we valorize normative masculinity while simultaneously treating the category “male” as exquisitely fragile. Parents then shift their behavior, “giving gender” differently to their children, revealing the ways our identities come into being in interaction with significant others.

Telling Gender Stories

This chapter outlines a new set of narratives parents consolidate to make sense of their child’s gender. While we typically think of medical and psychiatric discourses as inherently normative, these families appear to repurpose them, along with biomedical discourses, to fashion a more mutable construct of gender than they once held. Families use rhetorics from biomedicine, psychiatry, and even religion to imagine worlds in which their child’s self-understanding is inevitable, intrinsic, and immutable, the sorts of justifications demanded by the institutions from which they seek social support.

Building a Parent Movement

This chapter introduces the two organizations responsible for the bulk of family advocacy work done during my research period. Begun by parents of transgender children, these organizations employed vastly different rhetorics in their education efforts and cultivated distinct presentations of self. Despite these often conflicting efforts at impression management, they aligned in certain key ways to create a movement distinct from earlier attempts by adult transgender people to secure social acceptance. Today’s parent movement is fundamentally a cisgender movement, and it suggests that today’s transgender children will look vastly different than those who came before them.

From Failure to Form

Finally, in the conclusion, we return to one of the children we met earlier in the book, Rafe, who is now a young adult—on the other side of puberty and living in the world. Returning to the questions that animated the initial study, I draw conclusions from Rafe’s story about the significance of childhood transgenderism for understanding the ways we all gender one another in the contemporary moment. Gender is at once both a deeply personal, subjective identity and a way of anchoring social relationships. We are interpellated into gender categories, and in the moments we contest them, rather than evacuating them of their meaning, we draw them more fully into our subjectivities and intimate, relational lives.

The Gender Clinic

In previous generations, families with significantly gender-transgressive children would almost uniformly bring their child for corrective psychiatric treatment, if they had sufficient financial means. Today they are doing something different. This chapter follows families through the arduous process of medical decision making for transgender-identified adolescents. The anxiety generated by the gravity of social and medical decisions underwrites a rapidly expanding research agenda by clinicians seeking stable predictors for adult transgenderism. Chief among its architects is Dr. Ken Zucker, who once ran the world’s most respected clinic treating transgender youth. We enter the clinic and meet some of the families who utilized its services, and then we accompany Dr. Zucker as he faces his dismissal and the subsequent closure of his clinic. The complexity of these medical decisions and the rapid reinterpretation of Zuckert’s clinic from the very vanguard childhood gender to a relic of an outmoded and largely abandoned clinical practice tell the story of larger cultural shifts in the psychology of gender.