as Patricia Hill Collins calls it, the “matrix of domination”—will impact one’s experiences with other dimensions of difference and marginalization, including LGBTQ identity.44 Even if two children are both transgender, their divergent socioeconomic backgrounds may well impact how they experience their gender in other social contexts, as well as the kinds of resources and support their parents are able to secure.45 In “Retelling Racialized Violence,” for example, legal scholar Sarah Lamble documents how Pauline Mitchell, a low-income Navajo woman, was routinely dismissed by school authorities when defending her two-spirit child’s gender-nonconforming expressions.46
In short, all kinds of parents practice intensive parenting and trans-affirmative parenting, but the relative socioeconomic privilege among many of my participants certainly assisted the ways in which they could engage on behalf of their kids. These parents met with school authorities to lay out specific accommodations, rewrite district policy, push for new teacher trainings, or even pursue litigation. They also urged doctors to take on trans-affirmative care for their children when doctors were otherwise resistant or unfamiliar. They intensively advocated for their children’s gender nonconformity, all in ways that could be more risky, or simply financially out of reach, for low-income parents, parents of color, and/or undocumented or immigrant families. Notwithstanding the critical caveats and perspectives noted here, I draw on “concerted cultivation” and “intensive parenting” as key conceptual models for understanding contemporary parenting. These models greatly resonated with my observations among the parents I studied, including how they intently observed their children’s self-expressions and sought out the resources, specialists, and support networks that would best assist.
Beyond discussions of intensive parenting, most scholars of childhood development give parents a primary role in children’s socialization.47 Indeed, the import of parents’ roles in their children’s development is the focus of this book: the parents are the ones buying clothing, permitting toys, scheduling haircuts, conducting online searches, registering for conferences, meeting with school administrators, consulting health practitioners, writing letters to other parents, deciding to switch pronouns, and ultimately embracing transgender labels and understandings of their children. That said, both psychologists and sociologists have increasingly emphasized the work of children themselves, rejecting traditional models that frame children as passive learners of adult society and understanding them instead as active agents in the socialization process.48 As sociologist Barrie Thorne wrote, children are “complex actors, strategists, performers, users of language, creators of culture,”49 whose “interactions are not preparation for life, they are life itself.”50 Similarly, sociologist Spencer Cahill said, “Children are not passively molded by the environment but interpretively organize and respond to the environment along lines laid down by their native language.”51
In this vein, childhood development scholars have dubbed parent-child socialization in more dynamic terms, such as “reciprocal influence,” “bidirectional,” and “interdependent.” Childhood sociologist William Corsaro, for example, proposes an “interpretive reproduction” framework, which moves beyond simple, linear theories of children’s socialization and instead envisions a multivalent dynamic between parents, children, and their changing social environments. According to Corsaro: “Children are not simply internalizing society and culture but are actively contributing to cultural production and change.”52 In this way, childhood socialization is not a mere means to an end, but legitimate sociological terrain on its own terms.
While this book centers on parents’ developing perceptions and practices, the foregoing perspectives on the agentic child, who acts within and against a wider sociocultural milieu, strongly resonate with the trans-affirmative phenomenon I encountered in the field. Parents acted as much in response to their children’s expressions and articulations as in accordance with their own assumptions, norms, and values—including the LGBTQ-inclusive ones they were learning along the way. Indeed, “follow the child’s lead” resounded as the modus operandi within the parental forums I observed. At almost every possible juncture, it was their child’s articulations of who they were, what they preferred, how they would come to be identified, who would know about it, and what medical treatments they wanted, if any, that governed parents’ decisions. One could say it was the parents who were being socialized to their children’s gender as much as the other way around. Moreover, parents felt bound to focus on the “present,” and their children’s current assertions, regardless of what their child’s development may bring in the future. As one mother said via e-mail, “You raise the child standing before you.” All told, child-directed, child-centered parenting, spurred by active, agentic children, is a pertinent theoretical framework for the trans-affirmative practices I recorded and the social mechanisms that enabled them.
Feminist Precursors
Intensive, child-centered parenting is not the only historical development in child-rearing that has impacted the families I studied. Attentive to the complexities of gendered inequalities, many second-wave feminist scholars and activists called for child-rearing practices that resisted the stereotyping of male and female children, often referred to as “gender-neutral” or “feminist” parenting.53 Growing through the 1970s and 1980s, this brand of parenting included modeling egalitarian divisions of household labor, as well as permitting gender-inclusive toys, interests, and activities for young children. Feminist psychologist Sandra Bem, for example, one of the pioneers of such “gender-aschematic” parenting, as she termed it, often modified the characters in her children’s storybooks to undo gendered patterns (e.g., drawing breasts and long hair on a truck driver or a beard on an elementary schoolteacher).54 She also let her son wear barrettes and other stereotypically feminine items to school.55
However, Bem advised that she always tried to reduce the difference between boys and girls to anatomy when speaking to her children, ultimately reiterating a cisgender relationship between sex and gender: “A boy, we said again and again, is someone with a penis and testicles; a girl is someone with a vagina, a clitoris, and a uterus.”56 On these terms, gender-neutral parenting failed to rupture the quintessential link between sex and gender, even as parents tried to minimize the relevance of that link, effectively erasing childhood transgender possibilities. In fact, excerpts from other practitioners of this genre at the time seem stunningly transphobic and homophobic.57 In short, in its original formulations, gender-neutral parenting encouraged boys and girls to pursue whatever interests they wanted, regardless of stereotypes—but they were ever and always cisgender boys and girls, respectively, and ideally heterosexual.
More recent feminist sociologists have exposed the “stalled revolution” of these parenting ideals, which they largely attribute to lingering, negative associations between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality. Sociologist Karin Martin, for example, reviewed a variety of parenting guides published through the end of the twentieth century and found that gender-neutral parenting was still not wholeheartedly endorsed due to fears over encouraging homosexuality.58 Martin concluded that “the gendered socialization of children seems only to have mildly waned since the height of the second wave.… There may well be rich research territory in the area of gender socialization that has been abandoned by many feminist researchers.”59 Similarly, sociologist Emily Kane found that even the most gender-progressive parents will succumb to the “gender trap,” or social expectations that limit parents’ best intentions against traditional gender norms.60 This was especially true in the cases of male children and “icons of femininity,” such as frilly skirts and dresses and Barbie dolls—parents drew the line at these.61 Indeed, few, if any, of the parents in Kane’s research seemed cognizant of the prospect of a transgender child. As one particularly gender-inclusive mother said, “ ‘Eli, you’ll never be a girl, but if you want that Barbie pool you can have it.’ ”62 Evidently, as conventionally conceived and practiced, gender-neutral parenting has remained ignorant of, or perhaps resistant to,
