Abstract
One fundamental aspect of social life is gender. Consequently, much theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to outlining and explaining the role gender plays in constraining and facilitating subjectivity, agency, and more broadly, life chances. More recently, this body of work has begun to take seriously the implications of a binarily gendered world on those living between or outside of the binary. Counted among this small but growing subfield is Ann Travers’s The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution. In this work, Travers draws on interviews with 19 transgender children, some of whom identify within the binary (i.e., “boy,” “girl,” “trans boy,” “trans girl”) while others do not (e.g., “gender neutral,” “agender,” “gender nonconforming,”), and 23 parents of transgender children in the United States and in Canada.
In the book, Travers seeks to identify and understand (1) the forces that afford agency to some trans children and not others, (2) the roles that poverty and racial and gender violence play in impacting the lives and experiences of trans children, (3) ways to improve the lives of trans children, and (4) how social and policy change successes of visible trans children might inadvertently marginalize more precarious and/or less visible trans children or oppressed cisgender children.
Travers answers these questions by focusing on and underscoring prominent institutions that constrain and facilitate one’s experience of gender and gender identity, which are logically organized into distinct yet related chapters. In the first chapter, the coping strategies employed by trans children in response to the gender binary are enumerated, and Travers contextualizes the book with precarity as its main theoretical framework. In so doing, they draw on necropolitical ideologies of the state as promoting or discouraging life in complex, insidious ways, and the social model of disability—both of which combine with racial and colonial forces to differentially make some lives more precarious than others. Following this chapter, Travers focuses in on schools in the second chapter, spaces (e.g., public bathrooms and locker rooms) in the third chapter, parents in the fourth chapter, and health care in the fifth chapter. In the concluding chapter, Travers discusses the potential for adopting a both/and approach to social change that sensibly employs a human rights discourse that focuses on reducing violence trans children experience in the moment that exists within an anti-oppression framework that holistically encompasses all (trans) children. This approach will bring us closer to centering the most marginalized and precarious trans children, which has the potential to engender the most beneficial social change.
Overall, since children, by definition, lack agency as a result of their age and socially constructed features of modern life that prohibit children’s own decision-making, children, as well as their gender, are constrained by the “tools they are given” (p.17). These tools are granted or denied by the institutions featured in the book, such as schools, bathrooms, and the family. In schools, trans children’s experiences are not only affected by the binary sex markers on school documents, such as class and attendance sheets, some of which are publicly displayed for other children to see, but also by school administrators, who may or may not revise databases in support of the student’s affirmed gender identity. Support from administrators or from teachers in the classroom encourages resilience, which, Travers argues, goes a long way. Another site of contestation for trans children is public bathrooms, one of the most highly sex-segregated spaces in the modern world. Children whose stories are highlighted discussed the fear and anxiety induced merely by the thought of using the restroom at school or in public. These emotions are heightened by policing from their peers and a lack of protection from authority figures or passersby. In some instances, students deliberately dehydrated themselves or refused to relieve themselves. Families with the necessary social and economic resources sometimes chose to uproot themselves as a result of the violence a transgender family member experienced. Moves such as these make all their lives more precarious, deftly referred to by Travers as “collateral precarity” (p.150). In this way, Travers seamlessly makes connections between the multiple institutions that work in tandem with or in opposition to one another in fostering or obviating the production of trans children’s agency.
Paramount to trans children’s subjectivity, agency, and resilience are parents themselves. Indeed, parents exercise a great deal of power over their children regarding activities in which they are allowed or encouraged to engage and how they perform their gender. Parents also serve as their child’s primary advocate as they navigate the gender binary in the real world, one in which sex segregation is highly prevalent. In the fourth chapter, Travers focuses on the emotional and physical labor mothers, although not exclusively, engaged in as a result of raising a trans child. They worked to teach themselves, partners, family members, friends, and people with whom their child interacted about being trans, with hopes of preventing a harmful situation for their child and their emotional and mental well-being. They also provided emotional support during tumultuous times and instilled a sense of self-worth and resilience. Poignant here is the fact that Travers documents so clearly how a certain degree of race and class privilege—those with “time, know-how, money, contacts, training, [and] ‘respectability’” (p.129)—is what enables the mothers to engage in voluntary care and advocacy work. One mother of relative wealth and cultural capital, for instance, took it upon herself to offer workshops on gender-inclusivity at her son’s school. Others, with fewer economic and social resources at their disposal, had fewer opportunities to do this voluntary labor.
This incisive and important book clearly shows the main ways social forces, determined by myriad social and material differences with historical and contemporary legacies, shape to make the lives of trans children precarious. As a result, I highly recommend the book to upper-level undergraduates and graduate students as well as to scholars interested in making sense of how sex differentiation impacts the lives of those who do not fit neatly into the socially defined categories imposed upon us. The book would be especially relevant to those in family, childhood and youth, or gender courses. Specifically, this book would be beneficial to those who wish to contend with the implications of gender beyond the binary in a world so highly sex differentiated and sex segregated, especially in childhood. In addition, due to the emphasis they place on race and class in constraining and facilitating how trans children experience gender, the book would also be appropriate for courses on race, class, and stratification if attempting to highlight well-executed empirical examples of research at the intersection of gender, race, and class. Instructors seeking to pair the book with an activity should consider one introduced in MacNamara, Glann, and Durlak’s (2017) article in Teaching Sociology. The activity focuses on the experience of being misgendered, which would encourage students to think more complexly about the book and about the lives of trans children and their family members.
Although there are advantages to reading and engaging with the text in its entirety, instructors looking to assign the chapters most relevant to their course are able to do so. In this case, I would suggest pairing the introduction and the first chapter (“Transgender Kids”) with a chapter more pertinent to one’s class. Instructors of sociology of education courses, for instance, might pair the introduction, the first chapter, and the second chapter (“Schools”), whereas instructors of medical sociology courses might pair the former two with the fifth chapter (“Supportive Healthcare”). In this way, Travers’s book has wide relevance to many sociology courses, and I’m confident that instructors and students will find something intellectually stimulating and worthwhile.
In a graduate seminar on gender, the book would pair well with Tey Meadow’s (2018) Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century. Although the books certainly differ in their contributions to sociological thought, they both take as their chief goal explicating the impact the gender binary has on trans children’s subjectivities and lives. While The Trans Generation is broader in its endeavor, Trans Kids focuses more on the role of the family, particularly parents. For this reason, these books would complement each other nicely and give graduate students desiring rigorous qualitative research and analysis on gender important insight into the current state of the field. A book review of Trans Kids by Lacy (2019) can be found in issue 4, volume 47 of Teaching Sociology.
Although Travers’ The Trans Generation offers important insights into how precariousness functions in the lives of trans children as a result of sex differentiation interacting with racial and colonial violence, poverty, and other oppressive forces, the piece offers little in the way for thinking about the future of gender (instructors looking to encourage thought on this topic would find important insights in Tey Meadow’s, 2018, Trans Kids), which I assumed Travers would have contended more with based on the title of the book. They take as evidence for the gender revolution the fact that most parents (and their children) tended to describe and think about gender as a spectrum and refused to impose any identity on them, rejecting binary views of gender in the process. Other evidence for the claim of a gender revolution materializes when Travers discusses the “collateral benefit” experienced by the family when a child is transgender, which is that it allows for other family members to “explore their own gender identities” (p.152). Yet a growing conundrum revolves around the effects of transgender identity on gender more broadly, and I found myself wondering how Travers would address this important theoretical question. Perhaps the formation of a transgender identity might indicate that gender is becoming more, not less, salient (see Meadows 2018), contrary to what gender theorists in the past might have too quickly assumed. If this is the case, then how does it complicate the notion of the gender revolution they identify?
Nonetheless, Ann Travers’s The Trans Generation is a fascinating, important, and welcome addition to research on gender beyond the binary, particularly as it relates to the social institutions that facilitate and limit the amount of precariousness trans children confront in their lives. An incredible book.