Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the study and the book, including the historical and cultural developments that contextualize the research sample and related theoretical paradigms for understanding parents’ experiences. These include “feminist,” gender-neutral parenting principles; “intensive parenting” in the twenty-first century; and the LGBTQ rights movements. The introduction also examines the history of psychiatric research on gender-nonconforming children, leading up to the present-day.

“She’s Just Who She Is”

This chapter offers an intimate empirical portrait of the families who make up this study, including how these parents first come to view their children as gender-atypical and, ultimately, as transgender. This material showcases the child-driven nature of this phenomenon, as well as the extension of “feminist” parenting it signals. It also notes important differences across cases, challenging any one simple “profile” for a transgender child. Finally, it highlights the troubles with female masculinity and the “tomboy” epithet—as much as troubles with male femininity and “princess boys”—for parents of transgender children. Overall, the chapter provides a critical empirical foundation for the chapters ahead.

Conclusion

The conclusion synthesizes the major themes and findings of the book, highlighting the limits as well as the great liberating potential of the trans-affirmative parenting phenomenon. All of these themes mark critical aspects of the new trans-affirmative parenting paradigm among twenty-first-century parents. They exemplify parents’ love and support for their children while at the same time troubling cherished LGBTQ paradigms, on several key fronts: Gender and sexuality do not necessarily present as inherently, disparate aspects of the precultural self, but are more fluid and open to reinterpretation, given new cultural contexts, opportunities, and awareness. “Gender-expansive” child-rearing often looks, fundamentally, very binary and gender-stereotypical, despite increasing visibility around nonbinary possibilities. And normalizing transgender experience, for many of these parents, often entails highly medicalized, potentially pathologizing frameworks for bodies and genders. All told, these families depart from conventional practices and understandings for sex, gender, and sexuality, but in ways that prioritize child-driven, child-rooted shifts and expressions, not necessarily LGBTQ politics. This proves new ground for understanding the mechanisms and parameters of the (trans)gender change afoot.

“Our World Has Been Rocked”

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.

“Picking the ‘Other Box’”

This chapter examines parents’ newfound awareness of nonbinary possibilities. These were often described as being “somewhere in the middle” of the spectrum, where a child “doesn’t have to be just one or the other.” Despite increasing sociopolitical emphasis on nonbinary, gender-fluid, and/or genderqueer possibilities—especially those that defy trans-normative, gender-normative ideals—most of the children in this sample were adamantly binary-identified. For many of these parents, nonbinary possibilities proved more of a crutch to evade “truly transgender” outcomes than any reality of their children’s authentic selves. In making sense of these options, parents engaged in queer deconstructionist debates about the gender binary, hearkening to age-old polemics about “reifying the binary” or not. However, this material also emphasizes the challenges of living out nonbinary identities for male children specifically.

“A Regular, Normal Childhood”

This chapter examines the arena of the body, and evaluates parents’ biomedical accounts of transgender embodiment, which they often analogized to a “disability” or a “birth defect.” These frameworks often validated their children’s own embodied sensibilities, but they also reiterated cisgender body logics as natural and normal, in a way that LGBTQ discourses would resist. Many of the informants here signaled the potential erasure of a more politicized trans consciousness among these children as well—especially those growing up within the relative safety of middle-class and upper-middle-class families and the biomedical interventions they afford.