Circulating Responsibility: Children’s Emotional, Interpretive, and Interactional Labor in Trans-Parent Families

• In Event: LGBTQ+ Families

Abstract

Objective: This study examined how responsibility is organized within families when a parent undergoes gender transition.
Background: Parental gender transition is often framed as an individual identity process, yet it unfolds within moralized expectations about caregiving, protection, and family stability. Scholarship on intensive parenting emphasizes intensified and morally scrutinized parental responsibility, but less is known about how responsibility may be redistributed within families during periods of change.
Method: Data were drawn from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 adult children of transgender parents who transitioned during participants’ childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood. Interviews were conducted between 2014 and 2015 and analyzed using an abductive qualitative approach to identify patterns in how families organized responsibility through emotional management and the regulation of social visibility.
Results: Participants described parents delaying or staging transition in relation to children’s perceived vulnerability. At the same time, children reported engaging in sustained emotional, interpretive, and interactional labor, including monitoring parental well-being, managing pronoun use, regulating public visibility, and anticipating social reactions. These practices reflected a redistribution of responsibility across generations during periods of gendered change.
Conclusion: Parental gender transition reorganized family life by circulating accountability for emotional management, social interactions, and family stability across parents and children.
Implications: Findings extend scholarship on intensive parenting and emotional labor by showing how responsibility can circulate within families under conditions of social scrutiny.

Author

• Jaclyn Ann Tabor, Lincoln Land Community College