Abstract
This chapter focuses on data from ongoing ethnographic research with young (age 3–11) transgender children and their supportive families in the United States. For the parents in the study, who are without exception cisgender, parenting trans children has been complicated by the experience of difference, questions of safety, and what Solomon (Far from the tree: Parents, children and the search for identity. Scribner, New York, NY, 2012) calls “horizontal identity,” in a culture that so obviously values affinity, conformity, and assimilation. For many middle-class American parents, this has created a difficult confrontation with their cultural beliefs and practices about protective parenting strategies, contamination narratives, and dangerous unknowns. Many US parents believe that they can protect and advantage their children via preparatory knowledge of the terrain of adulthood, but in the instance of the transgender child, this is, quite literally, an unknown country. Many parents struggle with cultural expectations and shifts in parenting beliefs, particularly around parental power and the role and place of the child.
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Notes
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This speech is paraphrased to disguise personal details.
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The popular and empirical literature uses many terms to describe children’s and adults’ gender identities and experiences, including but not limited to “transgender,” “gender nonconforming,” “gender-creative,” “gender fluid,” and several others that may or may not be appropriate for use in all communities. Even though many of these terms have specific contextual meanings and should be subject to careful scrutiny, for the purposes of this discussion I will use two terms favored by the included child participants and their families: (1) gender nonconforming and (2) transgender. “Gender nonconforming” is used in this paper to indicate children who do not, for whatever reason, conform with conventional gender expectations or who see themselves as being neither male nor female, or both male and female, possibly preferring to use the pronoun “they.” The term transgender, meanwhile, is used here to indicate a child who identifies as a different gender than they were assigned at birth (such as a child who was identified female at birth and is an affirmed male).
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Research on the experience of transgender parents is similarly growing; however the overwhelming majority of transgender children have cisgender parents (Bartholomeus & Riggs, 2018).
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In this study, none of the transgender children had transgender parents. Indeed, the occurrence of such a parent-child dyad would be significant and unusual.
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All participant names and identifying details have been altered to protect their confidentiality. Because this population can be more easily identified in many context, significant details have been changed to further disguise them.
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Brill, S., & Pepper, R. (2008). The transgender child: A handbook for families and professionals. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press.
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Galman, S.C. (2020). Parenting Far from the Tree: Supportive Parents of Young Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Children in the United States. In: Ashdown, B.K., Faherty, A.N. (eds) Parents and Caregivers Across Cultures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35590-6_10
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