Saving Children and the Rhetoric of “Protecting Trans Kids”

• In Event: The Children Are the Future: Tracking the Rise of Anti-Trans Rights, Eugenics, and Book Bans in the 21st century

Abstract

In 1977, Oklahoma resident Anita Bryant led the nationwide “Save Our Children” campaign to repeal a recently passed ordinance in Dade County, Florida that protected gays and lesbians from housing and employment discrimination. While the successful Save Our Children campaign has been enshrined in the history of the US gay rights movement, effectively mobilizing diverse constituencies on either side of the political spectrum in support of and against homosexuality/gay rights, it has since revealed the significance of the figure of the child to both right and left wing cultural and political discourses. For, as Lee Edelman famously contends, we need the image of the child to imagine any kind of future, reproductive or otherwise.

Although Edelman critiques reproductive futurity as inevitably regressive, the impetus to “save our children” has had incredible staying power, fueling anti-abortion, abstinence, and parents rights programs, to name but a few. Given the ways in which childhood innocence/vulnerability has been deployed to justify curtailing rights (i.e. over one’s body or to an education), it should be unsurprising that “saving” or “protecting” children has been core to debates about trans rights and trans youth. While much of the anti-trans legislation targeting schools and school children is motivated by a desire to save cis children, this paper looks at the ways in which “saving” or “protecting” trans children has become a mechanism for both restricting and proffering rights. To understand how both anti-trans and trans rights movements have utilized the language of “saving” or “protecting” trans children and to what ends, I consider the political discourse around the 2024 “Cass Review” alongside the activist slogan “protect trans kids.” I argue that the Cass Review, commissioned by NHS England in 2020 to evaluate medical protocols and recommendations for trans care for youth, assumes that gender affirming care is essentially dangerous to children, that the “trans child” is pathological, and that an increase in patients seeking gender affirming care indicates an unruly medical establishment rather than an increase in patient access. Trans children, in this case, need saving (read “conversion”) from brainwashed medical professionals gone off the rails. I argue that the “Protect Trans Kids” slogan employs a similar logic that makes trans children more visible through the mechanism of protection. In other words, trans children become legible only when placed under the care of more knowledgeable and capable adults. Leaning on Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child and Laura Briggs’ concept of “taking children,” I historicize the trans child within a context of both threat and powerlessness. Ultimately, I conclude that “saving” or “protecting” trans children perpetuates a kind of reproductive futurity that limits rights more than it ensures them.

Author

• Jude Hayward-Jansen