Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams.
Speaker: From a very early age, some children know that they're different from the sex category assigned to them at birth. A new book by Ann Travers examines how they make their voices heard to their parents, in schools, in public spaces, and through the courts.
Speaker: The trans generation is based on over five years of research in Canada and the US. The book offers a rare look into what it is like to grow up as a transgender child. And Travis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University and they join me in the studio this morning. Hello Anne. Hey Jane.
Speaker: Now you interviewed a lot of kids and parents for the book. How did you find people to talk to? I started by going to conferences for trans kids and their families. um Just even small gatherings that were held in Bellingham or ah in Seattle. So i' I started to meet people there, and it became known I was doing research on trans kids, and people started to phone me, and it still happens. I'm often one of the first points of contact for people who realize their kid is transgender. So that's both ah an opportunity for me to connect people to networks, which i I welcome. So if anyone's listening to this, and you need resources, please feel free to contact me, because that's one of the things I really value doing.
Speaker: And then I would get to know them and I would ask if I could interview them. The way that we refer to this kind of sampling in research is snowball sampling. You meet someone, they tell you about someone else. But I also managed to meet some trans youth via Facebook groups, which was fantastic because it allowed me to interview some trans youth who were without parental support, a population that would be difficult for me to reach otherwise. so You chose not to identify the kids in the book by the gender they were assigned at birth. Why not? Because they were fighting so hard to be seen for who they were and I felt that by recording that, by emphasizing this starting point, I would be in a lot of ways dismissing the incredible effort that they had put in and the courage they had in insisting on being referred to.
Speaker: Now, in the book, it's often obvious what category they were assigned at birth, but I i chose not to do it upfront because they are who they are. And ah as a reader, I find that it did give me um a moment's pause. You know that moment when you think, what gender was this kid at birth? And then you think, why does it matter? So that it was like, ah I found a very valuable choice. It was part of, it it was an intention because I wanted the reader to experience that same kind of
Speaker: liberation from fundamental categories that I came to feel. Because when I was writing the book, when I was doing the final edits of the book, I would often stop myself and there would be this loop in my head saying, wait, what were they really? And I go, what do you mean really? And then I would realize that I couldn't remember or I didn't even know and I felt such freedom. Like I felt like my process had gotten me to a really great place where I really was seeing people as gender regardless of genitals, which is the message of the book. And so I was hoping that I could bring the reader along on that same journey. Oh, I think you did. It was a surprise to me how young kids are when they start to assert that they're not the gender they've been assigned at birth. Is that, do you think, a common experience for trans and non -binary kids that they know really young?
Speaker: Some do and some don't. We have some trans people who are in their 40s and they they seem to have been happy with the sex they were assigned at birth, but then something shifts for them. and I'm not sure that you could even say it's a realization, but at whatever point in their lives they have a different understanding of their gender.
Speaker: and I don't think anyone is surprised when cisgender children assert their gender category. I mean, it's not unusual at all for three year olds to say, no, boys go there, girls go here. I mean, children learn the lessons of gender very early because we spend so much cultural effort.
Speaker: teaching them that A, you are a boy or a girl and B, those are the only two options and C, this is what girls are like and this is what boys are like. I mean the entire world that children circulate in seems to be organized around binary sex categories. So children learn that lesson very early and they often play a really significant role in teaching other kids that they are failing to conform to that category or what they really should be doing.
Speaker: You know, as I um was reading the book, i I kept thinking, things are so much better now, but they're still really, really hard. Yes, they are still really, really hard. And they're still hard for children in ah in a range of ways. We know, for example, that colonialism, the impact on indigenous communities was to very forcibly ah suppress alternate systems of gender, that that was one aspect of colonialism that um many indigenous nations had
Speaker: but You know a wider range of gender options and part of the process of colonization was to render those identities Criminal in a way and you know substantially deviant. So that's still going on and I do believe that for Trans kids who have relatively privileged parents, who have cultural and material capital to support them, both the skills and the time to advocate for them, as well as the familiarity with the way that school systems work, the ability to um even pursue a human rights challenge, I think those kids are in better shape
Speaker: than ah trans kids were 20 years ago, for sure. But those kids are still incredibly vulnerable. I mean, the most privileged trans kids are still incredibly vulnerable. But if you remember that the majority of trans kids are invisible because they know it's not safe to show themselves, you have to realize they're in every group and they're hiding. And they're hiding because it's not safe to show themselves. Many of the kids and parents report long battles with school administrations over bathrooms.
Speaker: Yeah, bathrooms are one of the ways in which people who don't adhere to binary sex categories are disabled by the built environment. Our environments shape our understanding of identity and bathrooms are one of the key ways in which this is done, to navigate public space, to navigate public institutions, you're constantly having to make a choice. I remember one of the parents in my study talked about her daughter when she was five standing in front of the bathrooms at church saying, mommy, the bathrooms at church make me sad. And she described seeing her child with like she was almost crying and she didn't know which door to go in. So that is one of the ways in which
Speaker: binary sex category organization is very harmful for trans kids. And you think about children and you think about bathrooms and the amount of time that parents put into trying to get the kids to go to the bathroom and then you have these kids who have nowhere they can go.
Speaker: And they often experience severe mental and physical trauma as a result. Some of the kids in my study were physically prevented from using the bathroom of their assigned sex at school by groups of boys who considered them to be inadequately feminine and would therefore prevent them from going to the bathroom. And in one such case, in a Vancouver school with highly privileged, well -educated parents,
Speaker: who were unable to make sure it make the school provide safety to that kid, this kid ended up um having severe physical problems because she was so afraid of going to the bathroom she actually um damaged her bladder. You have a ah chapter on parents and you talk about how much of the work of of making the world safer for trans kids is being done by parents. What is some of the work that parents are doing on behalf of their kids?
Speaker: Parents are going into schools and delivering gender inclusive workshops for staff to train them so that their own trans child and other trans children will have a better experience at the at the school. They do this for free. They become educated. They become resource people. They also have built community organizations online and offline where they so they supply resources to other parents. It's also not unusual for parents of trans kids to end up supporting trans kids who don't have parental support. So parents are taking a leading role in educating schools, in educating community organizations, and also in ah political activism, the so -called bathroom bill in Canada when gender status was included as a human rights protection.
Speaker: That in a large way was led by white middle -class heterosexual female parents of transgender kids who have a unique resource kit for addressing issues relating to trans people.
Speaker: You have many white middle -class, seemingly heterosexual women who are parents of trans kids who are becoming powerful trans advocates. And in some way, they're more socially palatable than trans people themselves or queer identified trans people. And in a way, they're using their privilege to advance the cause of trans people more generally.
Speaker: And in fact, one of the more inspiring things that's happened with parents of trans kids is the connections they've made with adult transgender people and the LGBT community more broadly. I've sat in workshops for parents of trans kids, for example, where the speaker was the former chair of San Francisco Pride, a woman of colour, a trans woman of colour, who was talking about her own experience of having to move out from her family, engage in survival sex work, etc.
Speaker: And she was recounting the the milestones or the touchstones of LGBT activism, talking about things like Stonewell. And I was looking around and I saw the mostly white, seemingly heterosexual parents of trans kids nodding their head emphatically.
Speaker: like they have come to claim this history as important to them and that's it almost brings chills to me to think about the power in that that people who wouldn't have thought about gender or wouldn't have given a lot of thought to LGBT issues in general have started to own that so personally because they have trans kids.
Speaker: It was interesting to read about how some of those same parents who've come to be such incredibly strong advocates for their children reacted at first. you know there's there's There's one kid who identifies and as a boy and their feminist parents say, but girls can do all those things that you want to do. And in another case, other cases, parents encourage their kids to identify as gay. No, I think you're just gay. You're not transgender.
Speaker: I know it's that was a very common reaction that I heard mostly when I interviewed kids that they said that you know one of their parents said couldn't you just be gay and it's so interesting that what would have 20 years ago been seen as a completely depraved future is now seen as preferable. But the parents that I interviewed came around. um Some of them, for sure, had a feminist sensibility around gender and worked actively to keep gender stereotypes off their children, as I did with my own, and I found incredibly difficult. but So when their their child asserted ah a so -called opposite gender category, they
Speaker: you know They initially felt like, you don't need to choose. You can just be Jodi. You don't need to identify. But then they're faced with a kid who says, uh -uh, I'm a girl. And this is not negotiable. And they because they really care about their kid, they said, oh, wow, something's going on here. And they educated themselves. And there were some parents who never gave gender any thought at all.
Speaker: and or, you know, gay and lesbian rights. They weren't opposed, but they weren't really thinking about it. But then they're faced with a child who's really clear about their gender identity and they see for themselves the harm that is being done ah to this child by forcing them to live in a gender category that they don't own. And they start to educate themselves and they become really strong advocates for their children and trans kids and trans people. So in a lot of ways, ah that's that's a journey that I find the most fascinating. You say that the trauma of the wrong puberty is a central theme that runs through the interviews. What is the role of hormone blockers in helping kids at this stage in their lives?
Speaker: Well, there are kids who are reasonably happy with the sex category that they are assigned until puberty hits and as their body starts to change they experience incredible distress. There are other kids who are very clear about the gender they are early and as puberty approaches they're quite fearful of it.
Speaker: Hormone blockers is a particularly valuable um therapeutic intervention because it's fully reversible and it gives the kid a couple of years. You don't want to, for example, start treating an 11 -year -old with cross -sex hormones. It's a bit soon and you don't want to do that.
Speaker: But at the same time, for a 10 -year -old person who was assigned female at birth, having his period, growing breasts, etc., those things are really troubling. So there's the immediate problem in that your child is far likelier to self -harm or you know even attempt suicide and experience severe mental health issues.
Speaker: But also, if their body changes, and when they are 13 or 14, they're very clear, you know what, i'm I'm a man, I need to have testosterone, you're dealing then with a mastectomy, you're dealing with um body changes that will make it harder for them to live fully as a man in the future.
Speaker: requiring more intervention. So hormone blockers both buy the kid time, like a couple of years to just sit tight, know your body isn't going to go in directions you're not comfortable with, and really explore what works best for you. But it also saves you from having to undergo extensive and expensive surgeries and other kinds of physical alterations. And particularly with trans women,
Speaker: um Trans women who were unable to transition before secondary sex characteristics developed have more hair growth on their face, etc. to deal with, um skeletal changes that can't be undone, the voice drops, etc. But if you give trans boys hormone blockers for a couple of years and then they're clear by the time they're 13 or 14 that testosterone is for them, then they're not having to undo that development.
Speaker: in ah In a world that's that's gradually, and I'll emphasize gradually, becoming more accepting of trans people, it seems there's still pressure to choose one gender or the other. So you're either cisgender, the gender you're born, or or you change, but please don't get stuck in the middle.
Speaker: Well, I think that for some people, that kind of transgender identity is easiest to understand. And indeed, I've even had some parents of trans kids early on in their process of understanding refer to their child being transgender as having a birth defect. And the idea is that medical intervention can put this right, that you know that they are a boy trapped in a girl's body or a girl trapped in a boy's body. And by understanding it this way, by medicalizing it,
Speaker: They can make peace with it, and it doesn't challenge the way in which binary sex categories have been imposed by a patriarchal system. i mean Gender categories are not neutral. that Gender inequality is still a fact. It used to be incredibly relevant because you couldn't own property if you had an F on your identity documents.
Speaker: so In a lot of ways, accepting transgender people who are comfortable with binary categorization is much easier because it doesn't require any cultural reshuffling of the decks. Whereas people who defy both categories bring to to the fore the you know the fact that M or F on a form or bathrooms for men or women are a problem. And it it really calls into question so many things we take for granted, which is part of its power and something that I'm excited about. But for more traditional people, it's more difficult to adjust to. Well, it's a wonderful book. Thanks so much for coming down and talking about it. Thanks for interviewing me. I've been speaking with Ann Travers. Their new book, The Trans Generation, has just been published by the University of Regina Press.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio dot .org slash redeye.
