Rethinking queer failure: Trans youth embodiments of distress

Youth: Constructions and constraints

To understand how young people experience gender non-conformity, it is useful to keep in mind a number of things about the construction – and the constraints – of youth. Particular points of interest include: the assumption that one will grow out of feelings one has as a young person; the assumption that any distress one experiences during one’s teens may disappear as one enters adulthood; and that uncertainties and ambivalence (e.g. about identity or about one’s body) will pass to some extent as one enters adulthood. There are also very real material and familial constraints that can include: daily attendance at a school where binary gender and other norms are fiercely policed; participation in a family where queer possibilities might be unthinkable or forbidden; limitations on access to money (e.g. for professional support or medical interventions); reliance on parents to cover the costs of living and education; and the near-impossibility of finding alternative financial support. These things condition the way gender and the body are experienced during the years when a child or young person may first be questioning their relationship to normative gender, exploring their relationship to their developing sexed body, negotiating the emotions that come with that process, and navigating the (familial and peer) relationships through which norms are policed.

The following two excerpts offer examples of young people’s emotions being minimised or passed off as a phase. These excerpts come from websites where young people were writing about their self-harm and gender questioning. The first contributor, ‘A’ writes of being 14 years old, having a male body, and having worn make-up for the past three years. A writes about seeing a television programme about transsexuality that was pivotal in helping hir ¹ to understand hir own experience. A also writes of cutting hirself:

I have been cutting myself and only now, gradually, I understand why I am so unhappy. I have been wearing my mother’s make-up over the past three years and just the other day I bought a whole lot of my own. People at school think I am gay because of the female way I move.

‘B’ writes of being 15 years old and describes wearing boys’ clothes as a child but being expected, by hir mother, to wear more feminine clothes after leaving primary school. B links this to starting to self-harm. B now describes hirself as transgender.

When I was a small child, I thought I was a boy. But as I got a bit older, people constantly told me I was a girl. I thought I would go through puberty and be a guy. When my chest started to develop and I got my period, I just went ‘woooaah’.

Both A and B are writing online about long-standing experiences of gender-related distress and cross-gender feelings. What they write reflects some of the constraints they face as young people: both are affected by others’ sense that cross-gender identification could be a passing phase. Both report substantial and enduring investments in cross-gender identification. In short, A and B present trans youth narratives that are not uncommon and that reflect particular common sense understandings about youth: young people are allowed to deviate from norms to some extent but are assumed to ‘grow out of it’ as they approach adulthood. Common sense understandings about gender and youth play a key role in structuring and maintaining norms.

Trans and youth normativities

Considerable work within gender and sexuality studies has developed around the idea that being literate in normativity is a measure of being human (Berlant, 2009), and that successfully registering as normatively sexed and gendered is a prerequisite for being intelligible as human (Butler, 1993, 2004). To some extent, parents and clinicians are bound to help gender non-conforming youth to become literate in normativity and to be intelligible in relation to binary gender so that they will measure up as human, so that they will succeed in becoming the happy young adult they are expected to become. As a counterpoint to this, I invite readers to imagine a gender non-conforming young person whose experience does not fit with the gender binary, whose parents are not on board with offering gender-related help, and for whom professional support is unavailable. If, as Berlant suggests, ‘our sense of reciprocity with the world as it appears normatively … saturates what becomes our visceral intuition about how to manage living’ (Berlant, 2009: 263), then it is understandable that not being literate in normativity might bring some gender non-conforming young people to the edge of their ability to manage living, to the edge of feeling human.

When one’s literacy in gender normativity comes into question to the point of persistent distress, possible solutions may be presented. For some children and young people, well-intentioned adults try to help steer a course back to normative, binary gendered ways of being (Ehrensaft, 2011a). For a select few, health professionals offer puberty-blocking and early medical transition, with the intention of steering a gender non-conforming young person onto a (cross-sex) binary pathway. ² For many, the attempt to hide distress and cope alone may lead to strategies such as self-harming, and for some living on the edge of feeling human leads to suicide. The norms that are implicated here include youth norms, binary gender norms, emotional norms, and trans norms. One of the norms that has emerged in recent years, with the growth of puberty suppression, suggests that early intervention is preferable to later intervention: that stopping unwanted pubertal changes is a way to prevent distress for some. This has been substantially critiqued in relation to the heteronormative effects at play in this shift to early intervention (Bryant, 2006). One of the trans norms that has been open to debate for some decades relates to the tension between notions of trans that prioritise medical reassignment versus those that do not (Roen, 2002). Another norm is that gender non-conformity, trans identity, and distress go hand in hand: there seems to be a naturalness and inevitability to the connection between trans youth, embodied distress, and self-harm. Each of these norms needs unpicking.

How might gender non-conforming youth respond to the network of norms impacting on what kind of experience is possible and what kind of subjectivity is possible? In some instances, puberty suppression and early transition may make it more possible to live in relation to existing norms. For some, puberty suppression may provide a way into feeling competent at being human, a way into managing living. Puberty suppression and early transition are potentially providing the foundation for a new set of trans norms where transitioning earlier becomes privileged over other possibilities. For some, a new relationship with norms may be crafted as new corporeal possibilities open the way for identification within, or in relation to, binary gender. But for many, medical intervention is not a solution, is unattainable or undesirable, and binary gender does not provide a safe space of belonging.

Various researchers and clinicians have been contributing to opening up habitable space outside binary gender (Ehrensaft, 2011b; Lev, 2004) and arguing that gender non-conformity itself is not necessarily distressing (Langer and Martin, 2004). Some researchers and clinicians highlight the importance of holding open spaces of uncertainty (Möller et al., 2009; Roen, 2016), and point to the risks of seeing the foreclosure of (binary gender) identity as a solution (Wren, 2000). Holding open spaces of uncertainty might be seen as a fundamental aspect of therapeutic work: psy-professionals working with gender non-conforming children and youth have a duty to hold open a space where questions of gender and identity can be explored, experimented with, wondered about, and teased out. It is not the job of such health professionals to shore up identity, to fix gender, or to push clients into a predetermined space of gender certainty (Roen, 2016). Indeed, holding open space for uncertainty, exploration, and fluidity is something that any supportive person or group can do, including all health professionals who work with young people, and support groups, families, schools, and peer groups.

I am interested in how young people, for whom binary gender (and the possibility of medical transition) is not a solution, are feeling their way towards trans or gender queer possibilities, the way they are articulating non-binary selves (either with or without a vision of transition in years to come), the way they are using online spaces to forge understanding about alternative genderings, the way they are crafting alternative relationships to norms, alternative relationships to the body and embodied distress.

To think critically about the various norms conditioning the options that appear available to trans youth, it is important to examine emotional norms. First, we might consider the notion of the ‘happy family’ that many trans youth find themselves navigating. For this purpose, Ahmed’s writing is useful in examining the workings of gender-normative happiness. She explains: ‘We can think of gendered scripts as “happiness scripts” providing a set of instructions for what women and men must do in order to be happy, whereby happiness is what follows being natural or good’ (Ahmed, 2010: 59). Ahmed (2010) sets up the idea that happiness is not a good thing, and that children have a ‘happiness duty’ (Ahmed, 2010: 59) insofar as their parents have given up happiness, deferred their happiness to the next generation, in the process of raising the child. ‘The duty of the child is to make the parents happy … Going along with this duty can mean simply approximating the signs of being happy – passing as happy – in order to keep things in the right place’ (Ahmed, 2010: 59). Ahmed’s work shows that a happiness imperative is used to police those who do not fit, who make others feel uncomfortable, who are marked out as awkward:

Happiness scripts could be thought of as straightening devices, ways of aligning bodies with what is already lined up. The points that accumulate as lines can be performatives: a point on a line can be a demand to stay in line. To deviate from the line is to be threatened with unhappiness. (Ahmed, 2010: 91)

If gender non-conforming children, like other children, have a ‘happiness duty’ to their parents, and if gender questioning youth are somewhat bound, like all of us, by happiness scripts, then emotions such as happiness are intricately woven into the norms that structure gendered development and the process of coming into being as a young (trans) adult. Emotional norms circulate around the process of becoming a man, a woman, trans, genderqueer, or gender questioning. One of the norms operating relates to the expectation that we all strive for – and achieve – happiness, if not in our teens, at least in adulthood. Those who persistently do not achieve this, and those who do not seem to strive for it, are judged (as not looking after themselves), pathologised (as mentally unwell), and discredited (as unintelligible). It is this mesh of emotional norms that provides the context within which it makes sense for some children (but not others) to be encouraged to explore gender-crossing at primary school, and the context within which it seems reasonable for some children (but not others) to be given the puberty suppressing medication they and their parents seek.

What is being presented over and again in magazines, books, online video clips, and documentaries are popular representations of young people who are going through puberty suppression and early transition to emerge as happy heterosexuals who are part of happy heterosexual nuclear families. ³ Some young people, through early transition, are rendered as heterosexual and binary-gendered youth whose families are visibly proud of them. Would such images of family togetherness and parental pride be made public in instances where a young person visibly does not conform to the gender binary, does not conform to heteronormative desire, and does not have such a ‘finished’ identity to present to the world? The sense of closure and gender-normative happiness in many popular representations of trans youth deserve our wariness, as does the enthusiasm for rushing some gender non-conforming youth through early transition and pronouncing their finished binary-gendered identities as a kind of clinical success story (Roen, 2011).

Many children struggle with gendered ways of being that do not fit, many young people struggle with pubertal development, but only some find their way to the particular framing of childhood, youth, and gender that means it makes sense for medically-supported gender transition to take place. Only some become subject to the particular emotional norms through which a happily post-transition heteronormative young person is supposed to emerge from a protracted period of puberty and medical intervention. This particular mesh of emotional norms also provides the context in which it makes sense for some children and youth to use self-harm as a way of coping with intense and difficult emotions that accompany their pubertal development. The imperative to be happy, to strive towards a particular kind of happy, gender-normative adulthood is implicated in self-harm and suicidality among gender-questioning youth.

The point of thinking critically about happiness is to interrogate the taken-for-granted ideas circulating around what it is to be happy – and what it is to be distressed – and the cost that emotional norms bring to those whose struggle against binary gender is at times intensely distressing. Rethinking the relationship between happiness and distress – re-thinking the role of distress – might open up a wider range of possibilities: possibilities that neither involve straightening or alignment, nor lead to suicidal feelings; possibilities that allow different ways of thinking about the success or failure of youth subjects. The point of this is to provide a space for critical reflection.

To explore in more detail the relationship between self-harm and trans youth, it is also useful to draw on Ahmed’s work on stickiness and sliding. Ahmed (2004) explains that:

signs become sticky through repetition; if a word is used in a certain way, again and again, then that ‘use’ becomes intrinsic … It is hard to hear words like ‘Pakis’ without hearing that word as insulting … This repetition has a binding effect. (Ahmed, 2004: 91)

I am interested in exploring the idea that self-harm is becoming ‘stuck’ to trans* bodies (McDermott and Roen, 2016). Research on youth self-harm and suicide is often risk-orientated, identifying those groups who report higher rates of self-harm and suicidality as being ‘at risk’. Such research produces a particular type of knowledge about gender non-conforming youth. The repeated findings that pair gender non-conformity with self-harm produce understandings that have a performative effect: trans youth at-risk, and distressed trans youth, are materialised through this process of knowledge production. Just as Darwin’s ‘native’ was ‘not dirty’, so trans youth who are not self-harming still get burdened with the weight of being ‘at risk’ of self-harm and suicide. What gets lost are alternative readings of the relationship between gender non-conformity and distress, or between trans youth and self-harm. Such alternative readings might help to loosen the grasp that self-harming seems to have on trans youth – to shift away from the sense of inevitability of the association between being trans, being distressed, and self-harming.

Here, Ahmed’s description of ‘sliding’ is also useful. It is worth considering how words such as transgender, transsexual, gender questioning, and genderqueer might slide towards notions of wrong body, hormonal intervention, surgical reassignment. They might also ‘slide towards dysphoria, depression, self-hatred, self-harm and suicidality’ (McDermott and Roen, 2016: 93). Reading what some trans youth write online about their relationship to their bodies and self-harm points to a kind of sliding – an apparent inevitability of association – between being trans and harming one’s body.

H: I completely hate my body because I am transsexual, and I cut myself because I cannot stand this otherwise.

G: I would guess that nearly all people in the trans community self harm. The bodies we were born with are not really ours, so it does not feel wrong to harm them. Cutting does not bother me, although I know that it should.

E: I am transsexual which leads me to absolutely hate my body. Sometimes I would love to take a pair of scissors and get rid of those damn things hanging in front of me. Sometimes I don’t want to eat because it means these ‘female’ curves go away.

Trans youth embodied distress: Reworking the relationship to the body

The concept of embodied distress (McDermott and Roen, 2016) is intended to help us respectfully rethink the role that self-harm plays for some trans youth. This concept resonates with what Chandler describes as ‘embodied emotion work’ (Chandler, 2012). In the context of Chandler’s work, the focus is on people who experience self-harm as ‘a method of gaining control over otherwise uncontrollable or intangible feelings’ (Chandler, 2012: 454). Chandler points to the way self-harm is often conceptualised as irrational but, by framing self-harm as a kind of emotion work, it can be understood as a ‘rational, perhaps logical response to a difficult situation’ (Chandler, 2012: 449–450). This way of thinking is useful insofar as it weaves together the emotional and the embodied aspects of self-harm and presents people who self-harm as agentic (rather than pathologised, stigmatised, or otherwise discredited). With the concept of embodied distress, and the focus on trans youth experiences of self-harm, I am also keen to foreground the various ways in which distress is embodied, and the role self-harm can play. This is an attempt to rethink self-harm, with the view that stigmatising and pathologising those who self-harm does nothing to ease distress but only leads to further marginalisation.

The concept of embodied distress forces us to engage with the workings of emotion on and through the body. Emotions that are specifically relevant include shame, fear, and hate. Ahmed considers the effects of hate on the bodies of those who are hated. She writes: ‘Attending to the politics of hate allows us to address the question of how subjects and others become invested in norms such that their demise would be felt as a kind of living death’ (Ahmed, 2004: 56). When Ahmed considers the effects of hate on the body, she is thinking that it is ‘others’ who are hated. In the case of some trans youth who are self-harming, it is one’s own body that is hated. One’s own body becomes the hated ‘other’ insofar as that body carries sexed markers that are hated, wrong, and seem to belong to an ‘other’. This investment in maintaining particular ideas about sexed bodies – and the conviction about some bodily markers being wrong – does feel to be a living death for some trans youth. Indeed, it does lead some to end their lives.

Young people who write online about the distress they feel in relation to gender identity and their sexed bodies, and who have experience of self-harm, write about this in various different ways. Some write of specifically harming the sexed body parts they would like to get rid of, while others write about more generic forms of self-harm such as punching a wall, or scraping or picking one’s skin. Some write about feeling suicidal and having attempted suicide. For some, the focus of distress is very clearly on sexual development, such as the unwanted growth of breasts. For some, the distress is described as relating to wider life circumstances and ‘stress’ at home, school, or work. The concept of embodied distress is useful here as a way of elaborating the possible relationships between trans embodiment and self-harm. Here, I draw from online posts to explore how young people who are questioning their relationship to binary gender, and who may be experiencing distress in relation to their sexed bodily development, do emotional and identity work with and through their bodies, including via self-harm. The following two excerpts from online posts give examples of embodied distress. F writes of having experienced skin picking since the age of 11 or 12 years, and is writing to tell others about skin picking as a form of self-harm. This contributor links their distress and their self-harm to unwanted pubertal changes.

F: I think that skin picking started for me around the time my body was changing in a way I didn’t really like [female puberty], and didn’t really expect … it seemed to be my way of proving to myself that I was unattractive in some way … I can’t help but think that picking has something to do with my gender struggles, and I think it is significant that my chest is the place I have caused a lot of damage.

Trans youth: Failed youth?

In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam (2011) writes of dismantling ‘the logics of success and failure with which we currently live’ (Halberstam, 2011: 2), and offers alternative understandings of the kinds of rewards that failure can bring. This fits nicely with the kind of thinking about the representation of ‘successfully’ heteronormative trans youth, and the effect of trans norms, that has occupied me. Halberstam points out that ‘failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods’ (Halberstam, 2011: 3). This resonates with Ahmed’s queer, feminist critique of happiness, and promises to show how, for ‘nonbelievers outside the cult of positive thinking … there are definite advantages to failing’ (Halberstam, 2011: 4), especially with regard to the potential to ‘confront the gross inequalities of everyday life’ (Halberstam, 2011: 4). Halberstam explains that failure at doing gender, failing at womanhood or manhood, ‘can offer unexpected pleasures’ (Halberstam, 2011: 4). Halberstam’s work offers a way to rethink how some (trans) youth are figured as at-risk, and are shamed. Here, we have an opportunity to rethink what it means to persistently fail: to fail in relation to binary gender norms, and psycho-medical norms of health and well-being, and trans norms.

Some youth write online about feelings of not measuring up, fearing others’ judgement, or feeling that they have failed in the eyes of someone important to them. The following three people all refer to not wanting to tell parents or grandparents about their distress or about their gendered feelings:

E: The worst thing about my transsexuality is that I cannot tell Mum. I have the idea that I am not good enough anymore. I also think she would let me down, although there is no reason to think that.

D: I can’t cope with being a cross-dresser. I hate myself because of this … I am not seeing a therapist. I don’t really want to, partly because I don’t want to bother my parents by telling them what is wrong.

F: I don’t want my body to become any more feminine than it already is, but taking hormones is not an option for me right now. That would mean coming out to my mother and my grandmother, and I don’t think she could handle it. I don’t want to upset her … I am terrified of coming out and being disowned and hated.

In addition to the sense of having failed as a son or daughter, and a boy or girl, some gender questioning youth experience failure when they measure themselves up against popular notions of trans. As one person wrote about their efforts to find similar others online:

I would find accounts of people … who felt like they were ‘born in the wrong body’ … But it was difficult to find stories of people who didn’t really experience childhood dysphoria … I had felt quite a lot of discomfort about my physical form, yet the idea of hormones or surgery was scary. Am I ‘less trans’ if I don’t want to take those steps? (McDermott and Roen, 2016: 96)

In exploring what failure might look like, in relation to gender norms and trans norms, it is worth treading carefully around the boundaries and divides that structure understandings of trans* and trans norms. In no way do I wish to reinforce a notion of (trans) youth being simply divided between those who are binary-identified and those who are not. Nor is my purpose to privilege any version of binary or non-binary identification. Rather, I am encouraging us to see how this kind of thinking is exclusionary; how it limits the possibilities open to gender non-conforming children and young people; and how it restricts possibilities for gendered subjecthood. In this sense, trans norms – insofar as they operate within a politics of exclusivity and heated debate (Roen, 2002; Roen et al., 2011) – inevitably limit possibilities for living and thriving, and for imagining diverse gendered possibilities. Being able to imagine diverse possibilities for gender identification – not being constrained by binary understandings, wrong body discourse (Roen, 2001a), or other psychomedically-based framings of gender (Roen, 2001b) – opens up for a relaxation of constraints, thus making life more liveable (and suicide less likely) for everyone.

Trans youth online: Reworking the relationship to norms

Young people writing online about their experience of (trans)gender are part of the current era of sense-making in relation to gender, embodiment, and trans*. This process of embodied and collective sense-making may open up opportunities for disrupting transnorms. It may open up for readings of gender non-conforming experience that are freeing and enable a less isolated and distressed (less suicidal and self-harming) movement between childhood and adulthood (McDermott and Roen, 2016).

Halberstam’s work offers tools for understanding what trans youth are doing online, in relation to re-working their approach to bodily interventions, including self-harm. Halberstam draws from Foucaudian understandings of subjugated knowledges, i.e. forms of knowledge that ‘have not simply been lost or forgotten; they have been disqualified, rendered nonsensical or nonconceptual or “insufficiently elaborated”’ (Halberstam, 2011: 11). This resonates with what is happening online with queer youth, transpeople, and intersex politics. Being able to elaborate and articulate more fully – as valid ways of knowing – various kinds of queer-embodied knowing is crucial here. As Halberstam explains, ‘we have to untrain ourselves so that we can read the struggles and debates back into questions that seem settled and resolved’ (Halberstam, 2011: 11). What kinds of untraining are needed to shift thinking about the role of self-harm for queer youth, and the role of medical intervention for trans and intersex children and youth? I am interested in the kind of re-reading that interrupts simple formulations and resolutions to gender non-conforming experience (e.g. the wrong body framing, and the assumption that puberty suppression is ‘the’ answer), and the kind of re-reading that opens up for alternatives to distress, self-harm, and suicidality for trans* and genderqueer youth.

Through this work, I seek to unsettle the relationship between trans youth, distress, and self-harm. I am particularly interested in exposing that which is taken for granted, and questioning the way the relationships between particular identifications and emotions are established and made to seem natural. Some gender questioning youth are writing about themselves online in ways that suggest a crafting of alternative relationships to norms, and alternative relationships to embodied distress. For some, self-harm appears as part of this process, resonating with the understanding of self-harm as emotion work (Chandler, 2012). This perspective on youth subjecthood is vastly different from research that depicts self-harming youth in pathologising terms, and depicts queer youth as being at risk. (Self-harming, queer) youth are typically produced through such research in ways that do not suggest agency or the capacity to do embodied emotion work. Such research works with notions of gender and mental health that are orientated towards aligning bodies and emotions with what is already lined up. Here, I question any attempts (including transnormative attempts) to make bodies, genders, or emotions line up. I point to the straightening devices that may be at work in the presentation of young people who have been through puberty suppression and early transition, and I caution against the shoring up or fixing of identities. Rather than celebrating the successes and happiness of some trans youth (those for whom it has been possible, for now, to align with what is already lined up), I draw attention to the relationship between happiness and distress, and to possibilities that do not involve straightening or alignment. I urge us to explore possibilities that do not lead to self-harm and suicide, as well as possibilities that allow different ways of thinking about the success or failure of youth subjects.