Ping Your Spaceman

Most recently, the article “A Boy’s Life,” in this month’s edition of The Atlantic, has been floating about the blogs. It’s a fairly traditional trans youth story, even in its inability to keep from overemphasizing and indulging in manufactured ‘trauma.’  

There’s one thing I’ve noticed which I have yet to see people comment on as I read this story and others: How the rise in stories focusing on trans children, especially young children, are the perfect reinforcement of the ”born in the wrong body” medical narrative and traditional gender roles, the true/false dichotomy. As the general culture becomes more willing to validate and accept the feelings of trans youth, in particular young trans youth, it enforces even more strictly the need to match obvious binary gender standards.

Trans children must express certain symptoms to receive treatment, because it is presumed children are so innocent they will not express their transness except in the two traditional gender categories. A young butch trans girl? Impossible. Butchness is something regailed to adults, a ‘purposefully transgressive’ identity. Instead, girls are “tomboys,” in a phase they will grow out of. And let us not wander over to the idea of a “sissy” trans boy, the medical trans gatekeepers silently declare.

Thus, those youth who don’t fit these classic narratives and molds are silenced because they are young, innocent, given to a shifting of ideas, easy to talk down to; it is always more easy to invalidate a person’s feelings when they are not felt in the right ways.

I admit, I am one of those kids who would have been talked out of their transness. I never “felt I was a boy,” but after watching a special on intersex children wondered for years after if I had been born intersex and my parents chose the wrong gender–I felt acutely that life would have been easier for me had I been able to present as a man. Not ‘be’ male, but present as such. My personality and mental space are ungendered, essnetially me. Only the exterior would change.

And what would have happened had I expressed these feelings but been convinced of their falseness, Zucker-ed into the ‘right’ gender slot? Would I have eventually transitioned anyway? I can’t say. However, Rosin’s article and medical professionals set up a kind of “trauma threshold:” ‘You must be this much of a dysfunctional basketcase post-therapy and express said trauma in certain acceptable ways to really be trans enough to eventually need treatment.’

This entire idea places in question the ‘rightness’ of huge swaths of people: late transitioners, genderqueer individuals, butch trans women, femme trans men, just to list a few. And this is why it is very important to be cautious of stories that focus on trans children. For all the good they do in making visible the idea of accepting transness as more ‘inherent’ and less ‘manufactured,’ they’re also extremely harmful in their emphasis on the incorruptable, essential innocence of children.

An innocence constantly connected with binary gender expression.