Although I have been buried in copy edits, the latest media explosion about a transgender child has been a hard story to ignore. Here is the video about 7-year-old Ryland Whittington, which has gone viral:
Here is a very short article about them posted to the "Good Morning, America" website. And here is one of the many (many) negative, judgemental reactions to the video and their story.
One of my (very astute) former students nudged me on Twitter, wondering about my stake on the story. As I am fond of pointing out, I am a historian, not a psychologist. I am going to take the lazy way out and post a long quote from the last chapter of my book.
Even while juvenile clothing has become more gendered than ever before, it has also become a site of growing parental discontent and resistance. The push back against early sexualization of girls is one sign of dissatisfaction with the double standard that stems from the gender binary. Another sign is the revolt against pink, princess culture and the lack of neutral or even nuanced options. As infants grow into toddlers, they become active participants in the gender binary fashion show, much to the amusement, chagrin, or dismay of their parents. For many boys and girls this participation is enthusiastically embraced. These are the girls who insist on wearing nothing but pink and prefer dresses to any form of pants and the boys who clamor for buzz cuts and ubiquitous sports imagery. But what about the others? What about tomboys, the little girls who in earlier decades could have worn plain girls’ styles or their brother’s hand-me-downs without appearing out of the mainstream? What about boys who feel out of place in hypermasculine clothing and are drawn to softer colors and fabrics, but for whom the English language has no positive term? What about the one person in one hundred classified as “intersex,” whose body differs from standard male or female, or those whose inner sense of identity may not conform to the gender chosen for them at birth by their parents? Clearly one consequence of a strong gender binary in children’s clothing is the lack of expressive options for children’s fluid identities, especially for children who are chafed by stereotyped, binary images of masculinity and femininity. As the categories have tightened, squeezing out neutral options, a growing number of adults have realized that children who don’t fit the binary suffer real distress. Increasingly their response is not to “fix” their children, through training, punishment, or therapy, but to argue for cultural change.
This is a beginning, but we are still years, if not decades, from resolving all of the issues raised by the sexual revolution. Change will come, because so much of what happened fifty years ago cannot be undone. Civil rights can be undone, but not un-thought. Oral contraceptives will not be un-invented, nor abortions prevented, by making them illegal or difficult to obtain. In the words of Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, made famous by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., I do believe that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this case my vision of justice includes freeing ourselves from the assumptions and stereotypes that are the logical byproducts of outmoded categories. I have no idea what you or I, or our children and grandchildren, will be wearing when that day comes, but I like to imagine that it will be a perfect fit.
This is a beginning, but we are still years, if not decades, from resolving all of the issues raised by the sexual revolution. Change will come, because so much of what happened fifty years ago cannot be undone. Civil rights can be undone, but not un-thought. Oral contraceptives will not be un-invented, nor abortions prevented, by making them illegal or difficult to obtain. In the words of Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, made famous by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., I do believe that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this case my vision of justice includes freeing ourselves from the assumptions and stereotypes that are the logical byproducts of outmoded categories. I have no idea what you or I, or our children and grandchildren, will be wearing when that day comes, but I like to imagine that it will be a perfect fit.
