The Emergence of the Transgender Child: Parent Politics and Social Change

Recent research suggests that strong parental support of transgender youth dramatically reduces their otherwise extremely high risk of self-harm and suicide. The challenges that parents and caregivers face in supporting and advocating for a transgender child, however, are immense. This project is a national study of parent advocates of transgender children and youth. It has two objectives: 1) to explain both advocacy success and the ongoing challenges that parents face, and 2) to create new networks, organizational links, and templates for practice within rural and urban Canadian communities in which parents are advocating for their children.

Transgender children began to emerge in the Canadian public eye in 2013 when several originally independent initiatives simultaneously got underway in several parts of the country. In the space of a few short months, parents began speaking to the media, creating support networks, and lobbying to have laws changed. Resource mobilization theory, which focuses on external resources, and political process theory, which focuses on frames, offer partial explanations for this sudden burst in activity, but a shift in emotional response has also played a vital role. Many parents have moved from a position of anxiety, that gender non-conformity was a problem produced by parenting to a position of parental pride.

This project combines group auto-ethnography and participatory action research in four different regions across Canada. It involves qualitative interviews with parent advocates and a critical media analysis of representations of transgender youth and their families to better understand the phenomenon of parental advocacy. It approaches advocacy as a type of gendered work that involves a large commitment of time, energy, resources, and emotional labour and considers the many affective and ethically fraught challenges that parents of transgender children face, including public backlash. It also examines how gender and heteronormativity, whiteness, class, and urban privilege shape collective parental strategies. Thus it contributes to forging a new conversation about care work in social movements, and directly contributes to grassroots knowledge mobilization.