Or, why children and young people’s safety is always invoked in discussions of queer rights and representation?
By Cristina Cabrera-Ayers (they/them)
CW: mentions of transphobia
Transgender people are as old as the concept of ‘gender’. That is not up for debate, as much as contemporary conservatives like to pretend trans people were invented in 1960, by enterprising plastic surgery companies and Western first-wave feminism. To hear them tell it: trans people are not born. Each person who somehow “acquires” a transgender identity (i.e., through sexual perversion, drugs, being raised with the ‘wrong’ morals, insert other strawman argument here…) will go on to prey and recruit, like vampires.
In their eyes, the freer transgender people are to exist safely within a society, the more exposure they will have to children. Therefore, the more children will be “recruited” into the transgender community. There are all kinds of underlying implications to this idea. Foremost is the implication that transgender people are inherently predatory towards children; therefore, it is a matter of social safety to continue to repress the community.
The implication of sexual predation, specifically, is not far behind.
Recently, over in Texas, (a place whose government continues to be a mire of racist, misogynistic tar, in spite of having one of the most culturally diverse populations of all of the states) there has been a fresh attack on transgender rights. The Governor of the state has called for social services to investigate the parents pursuing affirming treatments for their transgender children, as though they are participating in child abuse.
This move comes as a response to a push made by conservative ‘family first’ groups, attaching themselves to a Dallas custody battle. The father, Jeffrey Younger, lost custody of one of his children and took their mother to court because she permitted the child in question to undertake affirming care, and plan for medical treatment in the future.
So far, a judge has ruled against the Governor’s order and blocked parents of transgender children from being investigated as child abusers. This is just part of a long, existing struggle between transgender people fighting for the right to be recognised, and conservative governments and societies attempting to their erase identities.
The transgender ‘predator’ vs the invisible transgender child: or, where did all these trans people suddenly come from?
Are we following so far, transgender people are dangerous, unnatural deviants, and should be kept away from children lest they compromise the child’s cisgender identities.
But here’s the thing: I was never cisgender. I have always been non-binary.
Long, long before I had the language for it, let alone the living examples of out non-binary friends or media figures. I went to a gender-segregated school and remember feeling a pang of alienation and hurt every time someone referred to me with gendered pronouns. I remember feeling that the people who called me ‘girl’ couldn’t really mean it; they must have known, as I somehow knew, that ‘girl’ was just a game we all played at. No one was actually a girl.
Now I am older, wiser, surrounded by queer and gender diverse people, I know the truth. Girls are real. Boys are too. I am neither. I was raised in utter isolation from the concept of being non-binary and I still am.
Take that, Texas.
The transphobic narrative likes to argue that transgender people aren’t conscious of their identities from young ages. Some of us aren’t, sure, but some of us also roll out of the womb reciting our pronouns, or otherwise discover our identities before we are adults with agency. And agency is the key concept here: most of us, as adults, are able to assert our identities in some way. If our home environments haven’t been supportive, then many of us are able to gain some independence and get distance from those repressive environments.
What kind of benefit does it bring to the narrative, then, to argue that transgender identities only “form”, or become apparent, during adulthood?
Let’s turn to queer theory for the answer. This school of theory describes this defensive attitude towards children as ‘child protectionism’, which imagines every single child in the world as a future member of the heterosexual-cisgender mainstream. Therefore, when a child identifies themselves as non-cis and non-hetero, they are poaching from that mainstream.
The less people there are to maintain that mainstream, the less central to society it will become to be heterosexual-cisgender. This would mean a lot of changes in our institutions of power and culture, specifically, taking folks out of power who are used to being there.
Why should we acknowledge transgender identities in children?
For this, I’ll pull in a little bit of the research I did for a gigantic thesis I was obliged to write (by my own choices) last year, about transgender activism in Australia. I read a number of papers by many academics. One, Tiffany Jones, writes on the interactions of young people’s queerness with social infrastructure like education. For example, a paper written in 2016 by Tiffany Jones, and several others, who identify that trans and gender diverse, states that children are more likely to be aware of their non-normative identities earlier in life than their cisgender counterparts, because of the way gendered behaviour is taught from an early age. Gendered behaviours are taught and especially reinforced in schools.
Therefore, transgender children are often in need of earlier intervention and affirmation from transphobia than cisgender queer children need from queerphobia.
Besides that, being transgender is not always one of those things a person can just mask until they are an adult. Firstly, a lot of people aren’t going to be moving out of their family homes the minute they hit 18-20 for reasons ranging from financial, to cultural, to health-related, and so on. Secondly, for those transgender people who require a lot of medical intervention and affirmation, undertaking those treatments after puberty is more work than beginning affirming treatments can be, pre-puberty.
Lastly, a trans kid going through a puberty they do not identify with can be an incredible mental strain. Trans kids are, overall, at greater risk of self-harming behaviours and developing serious mental health conditions - in large part because of those puberties.
This is why early intervention is so important. This is why it is vital for trans kids to grow up in cultural and family environments where they feel safe in identifying themselves and have access to affirming healthcare.
Transgender children exist, whether conservative narratives want to recognise them or not. Using children’s “innocence” as a justification to limit transgender freedoms and rights, deliberately erases trans kids.
To really protect children - all children, it is necessary to create social and medical infrastructure that recognises and supports the existence of people who know they are transgender from childhood.
Bibliography
1) Tiffany Jones, Elizabeth Smith, Roz Ward, Jennifer Dixon, Lynne Hillier & Anne Mitchell (2016) School experiences of transgender and gender diverse students in Australia, Sex Education, 16:2, 156-171, DOI: 10.1080/14681811.2015.1080678
2) Goodman, J. (2022). How Medical Care for Transgender Youth Became ‘Child Abuse’ in Texas. Nytimes.com. Retrieved 19 April 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/us/texas-transgender-youth-medical-care-abuse.html.
3) Tiffany Mary Jones (2011) Saving rhetorical children: sexuality education discourses from conservative to post-modern, Sex Education, 11:4, 369-387, DOI: 10.1080/14681811.2011.595229