Raising Trans Kids by Default
Feb. 21st, 2015 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timI am planning on becoming a parent within the next year or two, and while I don't exactly how I will do that yet - getting pregnant and giving birth myself, adopting a baby, or adopting an older child through the foster care system - I know one thing about how I'm going to treat an infant who comes into my care in one of the first two ways.
I know that it's impossible to determine what a person's gender is without asking them, and that, therefore, I don't know the gender of any child who is too young to talk. I also know that 'sex' is a synonym for 'gender' that cis people use when they want to misgender us in the name of 'science'. So, I know that if I become the parent of a newborn, I won't know their gender - or sex - immediately at birth, much less before birth. How could I? I wouldn't have access to any better tools than the ones my mother, and any medical personnel who were helping her, when I was a baby boy in 1980. If I don't accept my own misgendering at birth, I can't justify doing the same thing to somebody else.
I have talked about wanting to raise a child in a way that was gender-agnostic up until the time when they were old enough to express their own gender. But sometimes people misunderstand what that means, and think it means forcing a boy or girl to be androgynous instead, past the point where they know their own identity. Of course, that's not so - the point is for me to respect my hypothetical child and not gender them without their consent.
But I'm wondering if it isn't better to talk about raising a child starting from the default assumption that the child is trans. Normally, we make a default assumption that a newborn infant is cis. We assign a gender marker that is difficult to impossible to change later, based solely on an observer's assessment of an infant phalloclitoris as a potential instrument for penetrating vaginas, or as not potentially suitable to this task. We also try our hardest to mold reality to our assumptions by rewarding child behavior that confirms it and punishing behavior that contradicts it. It doesn't work, of course - treating trans kids like we expect them to be cis doesn't produce cis kids, just traumatized trans kids.
I don't have to explain to any trans person that it *is* traumatic to be expected to be cis before you even have the language to protest, and if you're cis, just take my word for it. It is. But even parents who are themselves trans usually re-enact this process on their own kids. I don't blame them, exactly. Social pressure to conform is strong, and not everyone is up for explaining to any stranger who comments on the baby that everything that believe about sex/gender is wrong.
Personally I can't conceive of doing to a child something that was so harmful when it was done to me. At the same time, I know I don't exist in a vacuum apart from peer pressure. Perhaps it's easier to resist the assumption that cis is default if we assume something different instead; humans tend to have an easier time thinking about positive than negative statements.
I think it's understandable to latch onto genitals as a differentiator since babies are otherwise pretty similar. Like finding out your baby's zodiac sign and constructing an imaginary personality around it, picking a binary gender gives you a place to start imagining who this tiny stranger might be. But unlike an arbitrary horoscope, building a story around a gender marker has devastating consequences if you pick the wrong one. Any trans teenager who's been abandoned by their parents - who were more attached to that story than to the real, living child they were raising - can tell you that.
So rather than rejecting gender, I want to suggest an alternative narrative, at least to myself. That is, should an infant come into my care, I will assume they have a gender identity that isn't 'male' or 'female'. By assuming non-binary rather than whatever binary sex they weren't assigned at birth, I can do two things. First, as a person whose gender is one of the two socially sanctioned options, I can remind myself to be extra attentive to the needs of a child whose gendered experience I don't understand firsthand. And second, assuming that male and female are duals is just another way of accepting sex assignment at birth (if I pick the opposite of what the doctor said, I'm still letting a doctor tell me what to do.)
So what if my child turns out to be a boy or a girl? Well, if so, I'll accept that from the moment he or she says so - self-definition wins above all else. For a 3-year-old, that just means using his or her pronouns to refer to her or him and, if he or she chooses, supporting him or her in using a gendered name. Of course it also means letting the child wear or play with whatever they want, but I would already be doing that.
What are the advantages of a non-binary default over a cis, or trans binary, default? Wouldn't no default at all be better? Maybe, but I suspect that my best intentions, my brain will construct something to fill a void, so it's better for me to be explicit. That said, what if the child turns out to be a boy or girl? Will they have been harmed by the assumption that they weren't?
Maybe; I can't know for sure. I don't think the potential harm is nearly as great, though, as the harm done by the alternative, the harm of a cis default to a child who isn't. I know that harm from personal experience, so I don't need to elaborate, except to encourage you to consider the effect on your self-concept of having the world tell you - having the adults you have to trust most tell you - that a basic, fundamental thing about yourself you know too deeply for words is false. That they know better.
The non-binary default doesn't have an entire society mobilized to enforce it, so for that reason - power asymmetry - I don't see how expecting a child to be NB could possibly do as much harm as expecting a trans child to be cis does.
Many parents, trans and cis, say they're assuming their child is cis because statistically, that's the most likely thing. I would hate to have to explain to a child, 'I hurt you because of statistics'. They say they won't uphold gender expectations (except, of course, the expectation that the child is their assigned gender) and will affirm a trans child's gender if their child comes out as trans.
I don't doubt their sincerity, but I know I have plenty of internalized cissexism. Once I decided to work off the assumption my child was cis, would I give up the social capital of having a normative cis that easily? Would I feel pressure to, subconsciously, encourage my child to fake cisness so I don't have to deal with the stigma of being a trans parent of a trans child (baggage even if I was cis, plus suspicion that I somehow made my child be like me)? I'm not confident that the answer is 'no'.
I also reject the argument from statistics. Look at a baby, and that baby has a 100% chance of being cis. Or a 100% chance of being trans. You just don't know which one yet. The limits of my knowledge don't change objective reality.
Rather than centering what might be best for a cis child because cis people are the majority, then, I'll center the needs of the most vulnerable group and trust that the outcome will be best for everyone. That's usually how it works, after all: for example, we have a modern 'LGBTQ rights' movement because trans women of color resisted violence. If we'd done from the beginning what the modern marriage-focused GL(B) movement (silent t) does now and center the needs of privileged cis gay men, we would have made no progress since the fifties.
I think that by centering what would be best for a child whose gender is non-binary - something I'll ask for advice on and educate myself about, since I lack firsthand - I'll be doing what's best for any child. A cis boy or cis girl won't be harmed by getting to declare his own maleness or her own femaleness. Either one has the rest of their lifetime to have the entire world backing them up.
The risk of assuming you know what your child's gender is and that it's binary is this: getting attached to an imaginary, idealized child instead of a real one. This is why some parents of trans children say, 'I feel like my son/daughter died': they are mourning the loss of a relationship they formed with an imaginary child, at the expense of the real child who could really use their support. I don't expect to say 'I feel like my genderqueer child up and died' in the face of my cis daughter or son, because there are no social structures encouraging me to value a genderqueer child more. So that's why I don't think my future child will be harmed by my assumption, even if they're cis.
I don't expect the rest of the world to understand, but that's okay. Like many queer people, I have the privilege of freedom from obligation to a family of origin, so I get to choose who will be around my kid, mostly. There are still strangers, babysitters, doctors, and so on, but not everybody has to understand. I feel okay knowing that within my own ability, I'll do my best by my kid, and not worry too much about other people's expectations that I can't control. And it seems like getting more practice in doing what's best for my kid even if the rest of the world resists, or is openly hostile to it, can only make me a better parent.
I know that it's impossible to determine what a person's gender is without asking them, and that, therefore, I don't know the gender of any child who is too young to talk. I also know that 'sex' is a synonym for 'gender' that cis people use when they want to misgender us in the name of 'science'. So, I know that if I become the parent of a newborn, I won't know their gender - or sex - immediately at birth, much less before birth. How could I? I wouldn't have access to any better tools than the ones my mother, and any medical personnel who were helping her, when I was a baby boy in 1980. If I don't accept my own misgendering at birth, I can't justify doing the same thing to somebody else.
I have talked about wanting to raise a child in a way that was gender-agnostic up until the time when they were old enough to express their own gender. But sometimes people misunderstand what that means, and think it means forcing a boy or girl to be androgynous instead, past the point where they know their own identity. Of course, that's not so - the point is for me to respect my hypothetical child and not gender them without their consent.
But I'm wondering if it isn't better to talk about raising a child starting from the default assumption that the child is trans. Normally, we make a default assumption that a newborn infant is cis. We assign a gender marker that is difficult to impossible to change later, based solely on an observer's assessment of an infant phalloclitoris as a potential instrument for penetrating vaginas, or as not potentially suitable to this task. We also try our hardest to mold reality to our assumptions by rewarding child behavior that confirms it and punishing behavior that contradicts it. It doesn't work, of course - treating trans kids like we expect them to be cis doesn't produce cis kids, just traumatized trans kids.
I don't have to explain to any trans person that it *is* traumatic to be expected to be cis before you even have the language to protest, and if you're cis, just take my word for it. It is. But even parents who are themselves trans usually re-enact this process on their own kids. I don't blame them, exactly. Social pressure to conform is strong, and not everyone is up for explaining to any stranger who comments on the baby that everything that believe about sex/gender is wrong.
Personally I can't conceive of doing to a child something that was so harmful when it was done to me. At the same time, I know I don't exist in a vacuum apart from peer pressure. Perhaps it's easier to resist the assumption that cis is default if we assume something different instead; humans tend to have an easier time thinking about positive than negative statements.
I think it's understandable to latch onto genitals as a differentiator since babies are otherwise pretty similar. Like finding out your baby's zodiac sign and constructing an imaginary personality around it, picking a binary gender gives you a place to start imagining who this tiny stranger might be. But unlike an arbitrary horoscope, building a story around a gender marker has devastating consequences if you pick the wrong one. Any trans teenager who's been abandoned by their parents - who were more attached to that story than to the real, living child they were raising - can tell you that.
So rather than rejecting gender, I want to suggest an alternative narrative, at least to myself. That is, should an infant come into my care, I will assume they have a gender identity that isn't 'male' or 'female'. By assuming non-binary rather than whatever binary sex they weren't assigned at birth, I can do two things. First, as a person whose gender is one of the two socially sanctioned options, I can remind myself to be extra attentive to the needs of a child whose gendered experience I don't understand firsthand. And second, assuming that male and female are duals is just another way of accepting sex assignment at birth (if I pick the opposite of what the doctor said, I'm still letting a doctor tell me what to do.)
So what if my child turns out to be a boy or a girl? Well, if so, I'll accept that from the moment he or she says so - self-definition wins above all else. For a 3-year-old, that just means using his or her pronouns to refer to her or him and, if he or she chooses, supporting him or her in using a gendered name. Of course it also means letting the child wear or play with whatever they want, but I would already be doing that.
What are the advantages of a non-binary default over a cis, or trans binary, default? Wouldn't no default at all be better? Maybe, but I suspect that my best intentions, my brain will construct something to fill a void, so it's better for me to be explicit. That said, what if the child turns out to be a boy or girl? Will they have been harmed by the assumption that they weren't?
Maybe; I can't know for sure. I don't think the potential harm is nearly as great, though, as the harm done by the alternative, the harm of a cis default to a child who isn't. I know that harm from personal experience, so I don't need to elaborate, except to encourage you to consider the effect on your self-concept of having the world tell you - having the adults you have to trust most tell you - that a basic, fundamental thing about yourself you know too deeply for words is false. That they know better.
The non-binary default doesn't have an entire society mobilized to enforce it, so for that reason - power asymmetry - I don't see how expecting a child to be NB could possibly do as much harm as expecting a trans child to be cis does.
Many parents, trans and cis, say they're assuming their child is cis because statistically, that's the most likely thing. I would hate to have to explain to a child, 'I hurt you because of statistics'. They say they won't uphold gender expectations (except, of course, the expectation that the child is their assigned gender) and will affirm a trans child's gender if their child comes out as trans.
I don't doubt their sincerity, but I know I have plenty of internalized cissexism. Once I decided to work off the assumption my child was cis, would I give up the social capital of having a normative cis that easily? Would I feel pressure to, subconsciously, encourage my child to fake cisness so I don't have to deal with the stigma of being a trans parent of a trans child (baggage even if I was cis, plus suspicion that I somehow made my child be like me)? I'm not confident that the answer is 'no'.
I also reject the argument from statistics. Look at a baby, and that baby has a 100% chance of being cis. Or a 100% chance of being trans. You just don't know which one yet. The limits of my knowledge don't change objective reality.
Rather than centering what might be best for a cis child because cis people are the majority, then, I'll center the needs of the most vulnerable group and trust that the outcome will be best for everyone. That's usually how it works, after all: for example, we have a modern 'LGBTQ rights' movement because trans women of color resisted violence. If we'd done from the beginning what the modern marriage-focused GL(B) movement (silent t) does now and center the needs of privileged cis gay men, we would have made no progress since the fifties.
I think that by centering what would be best for a child whose gender is non-binary - something I'll ask for advice on and educate myself about, since I lack firsthand - I'll be doing what's best for any child. A cis boy or cis girl won't be harmed by getting to declare his own maleness or her own femaleness. Either one has the rest of their lifetime to have the entire world backing them up.
The risk of assuming you know what your child's gender is and that it's binary is this: getting attached to an imaginary, idealized child instead of a real one. This is why some parents of trans children say, 'I feel like my son/daughter died': they are mourning the loss of a relationship they formed with an imaginary child, at the expense of the real child who could really use their support. I don't expect to say 'I feel like my genderqueer child up and died' in the face of my cis daughter or son, because there are no social structures encouraging me to value a genderqueer child more. So that's why I don't think my future child will be harmed by my assumption, even if they're cis.
I don't expect the rest of the world to understand, but that's okay. Like many queer people, I have the privilege of freedom from obligation to a family of origin, so I get to choose who will be around my kid, mostly. There are still strangers, babysitters, doctors, and so on, but not everybody has to understand. I feel okay knowing that within my own ability, I'll do my best by my kid, and not worry too much about other people's expectations that I can't control. And it seems like getting more practice in doing what's best for my kid even if the rest of the world resists, or is openly hostile to it, can only make me a better parent.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-22 05:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-03-21 02:48 am (UTC)This makes a lot of sense. When I saw the subject it was like "wait, he's just going to assume his kid has the opposite gender identity to the one the doctor assigns? that's probably not an improvement." But gender-neutral baby raising makes perfect sense to me. (and I really wish it were more acceptable to use gender-neutral pronouns on strangers' babies without upsetting the parents.) Toddlers who are just learning to communicate and are socializing with other toddlers might be more challenging. :)
There's a generation gap with queer parenting that makes me a bit cautious; I know a disproportionate number of people raised by 2nd wave feminist lesbian parents who were *not* supportive of bisexuality, a nonbinary gender identity, or transitioning, because it goes against what they were concerned about at the time and they don't know how to react. so I don't know how people who were raised gender-neutral will feel about this in 20 years, or how we will measure up as parents compared to the previous generation, or if parents are likely to get attached to wanting their child to be androgynous in ways that turn out to be harmful.