Normalizing Trans (?): Privacy, Biomedicine, and Body Logics

• In Event: 2410 - Disability and The Body

Abstract

A new generation of parents who raise and support transgender-identified children show new modes of confronting the gender binary. Drawing on insights from intersex and disability rights literatures, as well as interview data, this paper examines parents’ privacy negotiations on behalf of their children and, relatedly, their biomedical understandings of transgender embodiment. For many of these parents, transgender is strictly a biomedical, bodily matter—as some interviewees argued, akin to a “birth defect”—and thus nobody’s business except for the medical professionals they consult. As Meredith said of keeping her child’s status private, “I don’t go around telling everyone I have a vulva.” These perspectives seek to normalize transgender experience and disassociate it from any kind of mental illness, while affording their children the privacy and safety they deserve. However, such perspectives also raise questions about how best to advocate for transgender awareness while not reiterating the very embodied expectations that lead to transgender stigma in the first place. I explore the intersection of these themes—privacy, body logics, disability analogies—to cautiously and critically consider the ways parents, advocates, professionals, and scholars alike newly attempt to conceptualize and normalize transgender in the 21st century, particularly in the context of early childhood development and middle-class modes of childrearing.

Author

• Elizabeth P. Rahilly, Trinity University