Abstract
Despite being nearly absent from the public imagination only a decade ago, transgender children are taking a precarious—but potentially liberating—position near the center of political and academic discussions of gender. In Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-first Century, Tey Meadow conducts a timely and necessary ethnographic exploration of school policies and processes regarding a host of issues that intimately affect trans youth. These issues include name procedures, bathroom use, and medical transitions. Meadow revisits new potential directions for feminist theory in regard to the nature and construction of the gender binary. This thought-provoking text examines “the social process of gendering” (p. 13): how we do it to others, how it manifests in ourselves, and what we hope and expect for our children in a changing era as we head deeper into the twenty-first century. The author questions whether we have we reached “the beginning of the end of the gender binary” (p. 5) or if we are instead in a new era of a multitude of gender categories that add to the male–female dichotomy. Meadow eventually concludes the latter and suggests that the subjects of the study represent the “inverse of widespread feminist ideals of gender neutrality” (p. 226).
Meadow examines the claim that “gender is fundamentally relational, though paradoxically, many of us also believe it to be immutable” (p. 9). To do this, she rigorously conducts family observations and interviews two subsets of parents of transgender children who are supportive of their child’s transition. The subgroups include parents seeking advocacy and support from nonprofit organizations (whom she terms “facilitative families”) and families receiving medical or psychological services (labeled “clinical families”). Meadow also shadows key stakeholders who simultaneously function as gatekeepers. Those interviewed include leaders in the nonprofit movement who support parents and families of transgender children as well as a former leader in the medical field. Through these interviews, Meadow gains valuable insight into the medicalization process and barriers surrounding the gender transition of children diagnosed with gender identity disorder.
Meadow builds trust with three key organizations to gain access to parents. She conducts 80 in-depth interviews with 62 parents of 50 trans and gender-nonconforming kids between the initial ages of 9 and 13, with follow-up interviews at later stages. She spends an impressive amount of time in the field, conducting a significant number of interviews and countless hours of participant observation between 2009 and 2013. The author attends 20 conferences in multiple cities and shadows 17 formal workshops. Her rigorous methodological approach fundamentally grounds the author’s analytical claims. In doing so, she reveals the gut-wrenching stories of parents. The parents she interviews often experience momentous hardship in their efforts to support their children in a society that is often far less accepting.
As trans issues enter the political sphere, bathrooms are a locus for disagreement. In the first chapter, “Studying Each Other,” Meadow addresses the history of the transgender youth movement and why issues such as the restricted use of school and public bathrooms are now coming into the forefront of gender discussions and political advocacy and looks at policy changes. The author rightly acknowledges that we have reached the “transgender tipping point” (p. 3). Meadow asserts that “trans” is an industry, not simply an identity anymore. In examining why we have we reached this precipice, the author suggests a few of the following causes: (1) parent activism is changing practices of medical providers, (2) some governmental insurance coverage now includes trans health care, and (3) the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders went through a pivotal revision challenging the previous pathological context of trans diagnoses.
Chapter 2, “Gender Troubles,” explores families’ accounts and how parents understand their trans children as having a “core identity.” The author notes a shift from corrective treatments of the past and looks at the differences between the ways parents react to trans boys and trans girls, thus emphasizing the fragility of masculinity. Chapter 3, “The Gender Clinic,” discusses parents’ accounts of their medical decision-making process for their transgender teenagers’ medical transitions, particularly related to irreversible effects of hormone therapy and surgery. The bittersweet removal of Dr. Ken Zucker and the demise of his clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health were hailed by trans activists. This controversial situation is handled carefully by Meadow, who grew to respect Zucker. She, however, does remain skeptical amid a precarious relationship built throughout the research process.
Chapter 4, “Building a Parent Movement,” compares two trans youth advocacy organizations: Gender Spectrum and TransYouth Family Allies (TYFA). These two groups are sometimes conflicting in ideology and representation, with parent members often taking one side or the other. In some cases, parents are reported to have to strategically navigate through both groups to meet differing family needs. We learn the story of “accidental activist” Kim Pearson (p. 96) and her dynamic role in supporting families of trans youth through the nonprofit TYFA. Her role is contrasted to that of Stephanie Brill, “a pioneer on the cutting edge of queer family life for close to two decades” (p. 106). We also meet the affable gender expert and lifelong educator, Joel Baum, who succeeds Brill as the director of Gender Spectrum and hones “a far more professionalized persona than [Pearson]” (p. 131). This chapter provides an interesting theoretical intervention in her discussion of two groups run nearly exclusively by cisgender folks, one using a “heterosexual, nuclear family” (p. 98) rhetoric and the other clearly tied to coastal “LGBT activist struggles” (p. 98) within an educational context.
Chapter 4 concludes by stating, “This movement for transgender children is innately a movement by non-transgender adults, aimed at non-transgender adults” (p. 141). Meadow’s analysis could be juxtaposed with a study of TransActive Gender Center, which was founded and directed by dedicated transgender community leaders and volunteers in Portland, Oregon. The inclusion of a nonprofit organization run by transgender adults might fill a potential gap in theorizing about the future of trans youth advocacy. Furthermore, it may assist in addressing the author’s stated concern, “what of trans culture as adults know it will be lost to this discourse remains to be seen” (p. 141). Comparative analysis of youth outcomes as they are impacted by divergent positionalities and philosophical approaches of organization leaders might be useful moving forward, as well.
Chapter 5, “Anxiety and Gender Regulation,” examines the dual role of the state as both a threat and a resource for families depending on their social location. The state is a risk insofar as it enforces normative societal rules on more vulnerable, low-income, minority families. It is a tool for the more privileged groups who utilize the state as a resource, in contrast, to support their families. The stories told by parents to make sense of their child’s gender can be found in chapter 6, “Telling Gender Stories.” In the first chapter, we were introduced to Rafe, an important figure in this text and also featured on the cover, whose narrative arc bookends the stories told in the text. Chapter 7, “From Failure to Form,” returns to Rafe and artfully provides nuance and complexity to the narrative of the trans child, five years later, into adulthood. Through Rafe’s story and other stories like it, Meadow comes to the recognition that the more we contest gender, the more we draw it into focus.
Meadow argues that “gender is both proliferating and becoming ever more important,” and parents are increasingly able to see their child’s gender as immutable (p. 19). Thus, these parents work to transform their children’s environments to accommodate their child’s need to be seen and accepted. This is specific to their desire to express their unique gendered embodiment, as “gender is . . . an iterative, interactive process, constantly in negotiation among individuals” (p. 11). Parent choices to assist in altering their children’s environments include transforming their child’s body, through hormone blockers and treatments, but not without pause and careful pointed consideration. Meadow makes two overarching claims: first, that gender is fundamentally relational and, second, that parents participate in the creation of their child’s gender (p. 227). Meadow leaves readers with the thoughtful conclusion that gender-nonconforming children are neither failing nor negating the gender binary; rather, they are creating new and different forms of gender.
Trans Kids makes a vital claim that “it may look like gender is becoming more fluid, but in fact it is becoming more highly differentiated” (p. 226). While this is certainly the case for the participants in the study who have sought out specific services to aid their children in making social and medical transitions, it may not pertain to a population of nonbinary and trans youth who either do not seek these specific services or interventions or do not reveal their identities to their parents. Given the sampling of this specific study, which specifically excludes parents who are raising children using different gender structures (e.g., gender-neutral childrearing), we may be missing portions of the population who are becoming more gender fluid. Averett (2016) explores the queering of childrearing and demonstrates that some parenting styles may intrinsically allow for greater fluidity through their buffet-style approaches to gendered choices in parenting. Another population that may be excluded from this analysis might be those youth not seeking medical transition yet who possess a fluid gender presentation and/or embodiment. Meadow concedes that “it is, in essence the parents’ stories that I am telling” (p. 227). Parents in this study are “searching for ways to assist their children in articulating an authentic gender while also striving for social assimilation and connection” (p. 217). While these data are key to better understanding the families of transgender youth, children’s views on their own experiences are also essential.
The author makes a logical, philosophical choice not to interview children. Thus, the youth perspective (from their own point of view) remains to be explored in sociological literature. To understand trans youth perspectives, retrospective data from trans adults accounting for their own childhoods may be most viable at present. However, this method cannot convey the in-the-moment feelings and expressions of trans youth who, for example, may potentially block out traumatic childhood memories relating to gender expression limitations and parental restrictions. As transgender youth continue to make gains in social acceptance and inclusion, interviews with transgender youth will hopefully become less problematic. In the future, participatory-action social research may become a means of empowerment for youth from a methodological and ethical perspective. The field of sociology will benefit from an increase in research done in collaboration with trans and gender-nonbinary youth.
Meadow’s study on trans kids, told through the eyes of their parents, doctors, and advocates, launches this subfield in the right direction. This text bridges the gap between a public sociology, appealing to parents of transgender youth desperate for more information about their trans children, and an advancement of the academic lexicon and theoretical approaches to gender within the field of sociology. Travers (2018) has also contributed to this body of literature, releasing a similar ethnographic, sociological interview study of parents of trans youth, adding a Canadian lens. This new wave of research on transgender youth in the United States and Canada will hopefully continue to produce literature that can provide better direction for parents and policy makers who wish to better inform their decision making.
Undergraduates and graduate students alike will benefit from reading Trans Kids in courses on gender and sexualities, families, children and youth, qualitative research methods, and social movements. Its balance of complexity and readability lends itself to a course at all college levels. Undergraduate courses, such as the Sociology of Families, the Sociology of Gender, and the Social World of Children, will be especially enhanced through an inclusion of this book. TRAILS provides useful activities that can pair nicely with a reading of sections of Trans Kids. Aulette (2010), for example, outlines a class activity for a midlevel college course that encourages students to think of their own childhoods as a tool to examine Thorne’s (1987) touchstone conceptualizations of youth as portrayed in public discourse as either learners, threats, or victims. When using this activity, I suggest incorporating the following prompt in step 1, tailoring the remainder of the activity to incorporate the concept, as well: Think about a time when you were younger than 14 when you violated a gender norm. As a child, how did you know that you had broken the social norm? Who [or what] made you aware that you had broken that gender norm, and how?
Meadow’s research can add nuance and complexity to Aulette’s class activity on public discourse on childhood. By exploring socialization and parenting processes that continue to dominate contemporary conversations on the topic of children, through a personalized lens, undergraduates will be challenged to engage their critical-thinking skills and apply theory to their own lived experiences while also building empathy for marginalized groups.
To foster even greater empathy in the classroom, I suggest pairing this assignment with MacNamara’s (2017) activity on experiencing misgendered pronouns. This exercise, which helps cisgender students understand what it might feel like to experience the process of misgendering, is meant to explore the boundaries of gender identity and can be appropriate for a course at any level. Building empathy is a pedagogy that Ghidina (2019:240) claims, in part, fulfills the “promise of sociology.” Ghidina’s article on using empathy to build students’ sociological imagination can be incorporated by introducing video clips of people affected by gender identity–based victimization and various forms of gendered “othering,” followed by a discussion. This pedagogical approach assists in reducing victim blaming and increases social understanding, without which students will have a limited capacity for sociological thinking (Ghidina 2019).
With such a wide range of appeal, Trans Kids will surely engross readers, as young as transgender adolescents, who may relate to experiences described in this book, while it also incorporates advanced theory about underexplored social phenomena such that it will inevitably also appeal to upper-level academic researchers. This book may stimulate important methodological discussions surrounding topics of reflexivity and positionality as well as the ethics of research with children. Graduate courses, including Qualitative Research Methods, ought to incorporate the full text to read as both an exemplar ethnographic interview study and an innovative theoretical text on the social construction of gender. Trans Kids could easily become required reading in any sociology graduate seminar on themes of gender and sexuality, or children and youth. The topic of gender identity and youth is given an engaging and empathetic portrayal by Meadow. Her essential book is uniquely well suited to many audiences at varied levels of exposure to gender theory and transgender youth experiences.