Abstract
Chasing Rainbows is a collection of personal accounts and research reports on “the challenges of exploring and maintaining an awareness of gender while parenting in a highly gender normative world” (p. 2). The authors of the 13 chapters are academics, activists, and/or parents (often all three), and almost all are Canadian, reflecting the fact that the impetus for the volume was a widely publicized story, first reported in May 2011, about the decision of a Toronto couple (Kathy Witterick and David Stocker) not to reveal the sex of their third child, Storm. Witterick’s chapter (“Dancing in the Eye of the Storm”) relates how her older children’s explorations of and “playing” with gender led her and her partner to the view that gender is a continuum rather than binary, is variable rather than fixed over the life course, and should be a child’s to choose and define. This chapter is useful as an introduction to the concept of gender fluid parenting. Several key themes that appear here are repeated throughout the book: advocacy of children’s creativity, agency, and self-determination; belief in gender diversity and variability; and deep wariness of the harms of gender conformity.
Seven other chapters narrate personal experiences with raising gender nonconforming children and/or growing up queer. Like Witterick’s chapter, many of these movingly relate the challenges (and moments of joy) involved in negotiating children’s forays into gender nonconformity in public spaces, playgroups, and extended families (e.g., Goldberg’s “The Boy in the Red Dress”; Wallace’s “We’re Having a Stanley”). The closing chapter in the volume is coauthored by an adult child, father, and mother, who take turns telling the story of how they lived “as a fluid family over the past twenty-five years” (p. 183). The adult child’s (Liam’s) story includes an intriguing discussion of color-blindness as an analogy for how he thought about gender as a child, and thoughtful descriptions of how adults and other children related to him, and he to them. As I read, I imagined my students’ reactions to these personal narratives as a barrage of questions: Is gender conformity ever “inherent” or is it always socially produced? If gender is performative and chosen, how do we think about social constraints on individual choice about gender—are these always “unhealthy”? If more children exercise individual agency about personal gender identity, will that lead to change in gender as a social structure?
Five chapters are based on original research. All rely on qualitative data (five media reports about transgender men’s experiences of pregnancy, several television documentaries and parents’ blogs about transgender and gender nonconforming children, interviews of 35 feminist parents, focus group interviews with 18 transgender parents, interviews of 24 parents of transgender or gender nonconforming children). Some are disappointingly thin on theory, methodological rigor, and/or analysis. One of the more satisfying is Pyne’s chapter on the distinctive strengths of transgender parenting. He analyzes how his 18 subjects complicate the “truth(s)” their children learn about gender (as binary and stable over the life course) and its relationship to sex (as mechanical and invariant) through their interactions with their children, family members, and their children’s friends. He suggests that these aspects of transgender parenting can help children become more “gender literate.” Another useful chapter is Rahilly’s analysis of how 24 parents view their own “transition” over time from a stance of carefully negotiating the boundaries of their child’s gender nonconformity (what Rahilly aptly terms “gender hedging”) to advocating for progressive gender ideologies in wider publics.
One of the limitations of the volume is that few chapters attend to how gendered identities and parenting practices may intersect with social class locations and racial or ethnic identities. Many of the contributors who offer personal accounts do not mention their own class, race, or ethnicity, much less how these might have shaped the challenges or joys of gender fluid parenting. One research-based contribution (Schneider’s “Producing Homeplace”) tantalizingly refers to class diversity in the sample of feminist parents, but does not analyze the interview data for variation by class.
However, precisely because Chasing Rainbows does provoke a myriad of excellent questions, it would be a good supplementary text in intermediate undergraduate-level courses in women’s studies, men’s studies, LGBT studies, or sociology. I might assign it in conjunction with R.W. Connell’s Gender: in World Perspective (2nd edition) in a course on sex and gender, or in conjunction with Emily Kane’s The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls (2012) in a course on families or children. It is sure to spark lively conversations in and out of undergraduate classrooms.