A Trans Studies Analysis of Child Gender Identity Development Theories

• In Event: Centering Trans Studies in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

The current debates and legislation of trans life have coalesced around two seemingly paradoxical positions that have as their most deleterious consequences reserved for those considered gender non-normative. The first position is that the regulation of trans life is needed to protect non-trans children, youth, and women from the unfair biological advantages or sexual proclivities of trans women. The second position is that the regulation of trans life is needed to protect the normal development of trans children and youth. In both positions, however, the instrumentalization of the Child becomes the fulcrum for the entrenchment of repressive state policies that restrict trans life. While the disconnect from state policy and scientific theory are quite large, I want to venture into the space they overlap, which is child development. The question of biological advantage and the sexual deviance of trans people are rooted in claims of sexed difference that assumes sex belongs to biology and gender belongs to culture. Following the lead of queer, trans, feminist and critical race science and technology studies, I bring the questions about the relationship between between science and culture, the political and the scientific, to bear on common approaches to gender development theories (Butler, 1999; Castañeda, 2002; Fausto-Sterling, 1992; Gill-Peterson, 2018; Jordan-Young, 2010).

I begin this paper with the premise that despite the advances of post-structuralist and deconstructive approaches to gender, the most common approaches in child development literature attempt to measure the development of gender in trans children, using non-trans children as a control to develop transgender models of development (Devor, 2004; Olson & Gülgöz, 2018; Olson et al., 2015). I bring together literature in science and technology studies, education, and trans studies into conversation about the relation between social, political, and economic influences on the practice of science, and the influence of the practice of science social, political, and economic structures to ask: what is the relationship between the normal development invoked in policy and the models of gendered development found in child development literature? And, secondarily, what is the relationship between the measure and the definitions of gendered development?

Ultimately, while the approaches within child development are aimed at creating a better social scientific approach to the study of gender development in child development, I suggest that the aim to establish a model of gender identity development is constrained by the same telos that makes trans life so difficult within conceptualizations of the social. That is, while the emphasis on creating revised models of gender identity development is meant to be inclusive, the method of incorporation is predicated on the maintaining of a teleological model of development that does not sufficiently account for social conditions. Thus, I situate my argument within critiques of ego psychology in which the emphasis is adapting to social conditions structured in dominance, rather than a structural critique about what makes trans life so precarious in the first instance (Sedgwick, 1991; Viego, 2007).

Author

• Alé Romero, Stanford University