Studying Each Other: Review of Trans Kids by Tey Meadow

Sociological Forum, Vol. 37, No. 1, March 2022 DOI: 10.1111/socf.12793 © 2021 Eastern Sociological Society Book Reviews Studying Each Other Freeden Blume Oeur1 Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century. Tey Meadow, Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. One of many arresting moments in Tey Meadow’s Trans Kids comes at the coda to the book’s Introduction. Meadow surprises the reader by adopting the secondperson voice. “Perhaps while reading this chapter,” Meadow (2018:23) writes, “you turned the book over in your hands, searching for an author photo. Perhaps you wondered if, in fact, I am transgender.” I like the tactile nature of this statement: the book is something you touch and hold, which draws attention to the theme of embodiment that is central to Meadow’s story. It also turns out to be a provocation; had you reached that point in the book and had not yet searched for a picture of the author, curiosity may have gotten the best of you. You would gone searching and found that, in fact, a headshot of Meadow appears on the back cover. And so what? Why would that matter? As Meadow suggests, the eagerness to find certainty amid the “the complexities of gender”—indeed, as the book convincingly shows, gender is increasing in significance today, despite the premonitions among some that gender would eventually be “undone”—is a common feeling. “You are like many of us,” Meadow notes. It is a statement that both brings a sense of relief (had you been caught off guard by Meadow speaking directly to you, as I had, then it is comforting to know that one should not feel so embarrassed) while urging responsibility of the reader: to locate oneself and reflect on one’s relationship to gender and how one relates to the gendered identities of others, and all uncertainties, confusion, and assumptions that go along with these relational practices. The book’s opening chapter is titled “Studying Each Other,” and Meadow, as I see it, is signaling that readers are not merely studying the young people in the text. You cannot study trans kids— and by extension, what gender means—without studying yourself. Trans Kids has by now received much recognition within Sociology and beyond, culminating in the book receiving the 2020 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association. It is well deserved because Trans Kids is a remarkable book. For a few years, I reviewed albums for a music and culture website and somehow avoided this favorite line of music reviewers: that an album “rewards repeated listens.” I have my chance to use it now. Trans Kids urges and rewards just this: the patience to read closely and re-read, to reflect and return to its pages. I was 1 Department of Sociology, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155; e-mail: [email protected] 333 334 Blume Oeur made aware of this as this is the third opportunity I have had to engage the book. I assigned Trans Kids in my seminar on masculinities in spring 2019, which enrolled 15 undergraduates. I next had the privilege of being a panelist for a book salon for Trans Kids at the 2021 meeting of the American Sociological Association. This was alongside fellow “critic” stef shuster, whose wise observations at the event helped me appreciate the depth of the book’s contributions, as well as Kate Henley Averett, who organized the event and posed many excellent questions that have helped frame the current review. I also sat down to write this review when my own relationship to book reviews has changed, as I am a book review editor myself. So I am composing this review while mindful, I hope, of the audiences which might read this and for what reasons. Alongside the many contributions to scholarship the book makes, it is also an excellent book to teach, and for the same reasons. It is rich in questions regarding gender, identity, and institutions that urge deep reflection, and attuned to historical change and continuity. How Meadow arrived at a study of transgender children was “pure serendipity” (Meadow 2018:229). At a meeting of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Meadow met a man named Jordan Scott, who shared with Meadow and others his work supporting transgender and gender nonconforming children with the organization Gender Spectrum. For 4 years, Meadow traveled to where the families of transgender children were, and in doing so the study canvasses the complex and shifting terrain of transgender life in the twentieth century. In five cities, Meadow attended numerous conferences and meetings, visited schools and churches, and met parents, children, and physicians, and other specialists. Meadow closely followed two organizations, Trans Youth Family Allies (TYFA) and Gender Spectrum, which would become central to her story about trans kids. The author also interviewed 62 parents of transgender and gender nonconforming children. The result is a deeply immersive and intimate view of the map of trans identity, from the inner-workings of a consumer-based model of care and its investments in trans youth, to the bedrooms of trans kids who spoke to Meadow while they played with their dolls. In the book’s final pages, Meadow considers the irony of how a crucial discussion of her embodiment— how the project “propelled my gender, my body, my comportment, my modes of interaction and imputed identity, to the forefront of many of the interactions I had” (Meadow 2018:238)—is slotted into an appendix. But it is worth your time, as Meadow reflects on not only the embodied and sensuous experience of an “enactive ethnography,” but also the complex emotions (intimacy and vulnerability) that accompany a study of the science of gender. Beyond its focus on transgender identity, Trans Kids proves to be immensely valuable as a meditation more generally on gender, in its many forms: as lived experience, self-identity, and analytic category. Trans Kids poses many big questions. What is gender? What does it mean for gender to be a category? How can gender be made through interaction and social situations while also felt as core feature of oneself? What is the ontological status of gender? What is the relationship between identity and the body? One of the book’s major theoretical interventions is to address the issue of how the sociology of gender does gender. The answer, in part, is that the framing is no longer sufficient. The idea of “doing gender,” a cornerstone of the subfield, has reached its outer limits when confronted with the case study of trans youth. So Studying Each Other 335 Meadow submits that the notion of being a gender provides more conceptual traction. If “doing gender” is about managing gender through interaction, always at risk of failing to do gender appropriately, then the book’s retort is that the gender nonconformity of trans kids is not an example of failed gender. Rather, the youth (and their parents) felt they possessed gender deeply. In Chapter 5, “Anxiety and Gender Regulation,” Meadow tells the story of Christine and one of her adopted children, Emmy. One day, Emmy had locked herself in the bathroom. As Christine recalled to Meadow, Emmy, who had earlier presented as a boy, had taken a knife and had planned “to make herself a big black hole so she could be a girl” (Meadow 2018:147). It was a turning point. “Mom,” Emmy said, “I’m really just a girl. . . I have a girl mind and I have a girl heart.” Christine understood at that moment that Emmy’s identity as a girl was her true self. And so Christine fought valiantly to get support for Emmy (including getting connected to TYFA), but the town reacted negatively, even violently, to the news of a transgender child. Christine came under the watchful eye of the state, cluing Meadow into how vulnerable these families are to the encroachment of Child Protective Services and other authorities. Christine and Emmy’s story was a vivid example of how the “the state and its administrative actors have. . . deepen[ed] their investments in the classification of and interaction with new forms of gender” (Meadow 2018:226). As Meadow shows, rather than moving toward an androgynous gender minimalism, as desired by some currents of second-wave feminism, quite the opposite has happened, and quite dramatically. There has been instead a move toward what I came to see as a kind of “gender maximalism,” an intensification around gendered social forms. Here, not only have institutions like the market, the state, and medicine been invested with greater gendered meanings, but so have ideologies and enduring debates (e.g., whether and to what degree nature or nurture is responsible for gender). And not only have the stakes gotten higher, but so has increased the pace by which gendered change occurs. As Meadow writes, despite the persistence of a “gender binary,” the idea of “gender identity” has proven to be quite flexible, as forms of gender identification and gender subjectivity have proliferated in recent years. There are now “terms that literally didn’t exist ten years ago” (Meadow 2018:215). Meadow explains that she did her research (2009–2013) during a “watershed moment for gender diversity,” when meanings and terminology were changing rapidly; during the course of her research, for example, Meadow shifted from using “gender variant” to “gender nonconforming” to reflect changing understandings among communities. The book gives us many ways to think about gender just as the ground beneath us is shifting so much, and we are likely to find that our conceptual tools will also require constant scrutiny and revision. That 4-year period and “watershed moment” happens to be when I completed graduate school and began teaching as a faculty member. And, like Meadow, I too have “struggled mightily” to make sense of the many new gender descriptors and forms of identification. At the start of my teaching career, it was not common for anyone in class to share their preferred pronouns, and when it started to happen I already felt many steps behind. My own students have often taught and explained these terms to an ignorant-me, and they have found many spaces for talking and 336 Blume Oeur learning among themselves outside of the classroom, from social media to outlets that are (perhaps unexpectedly) progressive and radical, like Teen Vogue. (I am sure many readers will be grateful for the book’s lengthy glossary of gender terminology). In my masculinities seminar, our discussion of Trans Kids motivated several students to share their own gender identification and how, for some, that has changed just during their time in college. In an anonymous course evaluation at the end of semester, a student described how they appreciated the chance to speak openly about themselves in these ways. But they expressed frustration over my own relative silence. They had been studying me! Of course. I had been oblivious. And so I have found myself asking: What obligations do instructors have to participate in and to insert themselves in the very classroom conversations regarding gender identity they helped create? My students and I also had a terrific conversation about how masculinity plays a role in Meadow’s story. First there is the directionality of the transgender transgression. Parents were more likely to express worry and intervene at a younger age if their children assigned male at birth displayed feminine behavior. Meadow describes this as “brittle”; even tiny infractions caused alarm in parents. Second, mothers, as opposed to fathers, were leading the way when it came to activism and to shouldering the burden of the care work for their children. A third way is to consider how the relationship to both the state and the market was masculinist in nature for these families. With respect to the state, Meadow shows that the state has a double life for these families in that it both helps and harms. The state confers recognition of gender identity but punishes deviance. What this shows is that the state is masculine in a hegemonic sense: there is no alternative but to engage directly with it. As a scholar of childhood, I was especially interested to see how the book speaks to our understanding of young people in the United States. It is impossible to think about this without considering the outsized role that adults and parents play in the lives of these young people. One of the more fascinating chapters in the book is Chapter 3, “Building a Parent Movement,” which chronicles the emergence of parent activism and parent movements such as Gender Spectrum and TYFA. This parent activism has institutionalized concerted cultivation, where, especially for middleclass families, trans identity and gender identity are projects requiring enormous time and dedicated effort. Parents involved with both organizations seek to protect their kids from, and also prepare their kids for, the outside world; and they work diligently to monitor and restrict what their kids can do. (Meadow describes the parents as “membranes”). And the differences between Gender Spectrum and TYFA say a lot about the gendered possibilities for children. TYFA was the more conservative of the two. It was founded through the “accidental activism” of parents, and the organization framed itself around the narrower mission of helping families to build as normal lives as possible for their transgender kids as boys or girls. Conversely, Gender Spectrum was linked in its founding to queer and LGBT social movements and had a more expansive social justice mission than TYFA. The organization wanted to expand gender options for all kids. I was struck by Meadow’s decision not to interview children. Her decision was motivated by the desire to minimize the “othering psychiatric gaze” of a researcher who comes and goes, leaving it up to the children to read about themselves as the Studying Each Other 337 subjects of a future book. I wondered as I read this if it is possible to interview young people (and especially vulnerable youth) in a dignified way; and when, and under what circumstances, it was best not to interview kids in a study about kids. While I am inspired by feminist scholars who have shown that speaking with youth can be affirming, illuminating, and ethical, I was also left wondering how interviews with young men in my own past research may have made them vulnerable to the troubling analytic gaze (my own) that Meadow warns of. But Meadow is right that youth say plenty in their behavior, and it is a testament to the book that the lives and stories of young people are central in the book’s pages and that I never suspected that Meadow never formally interviewed the kids. Trans Kids could not be any more timely. The shifting terrain and reality of gender maximalism; the deeper investments in gender by the state, biomedicine, and the economy; the transition from gender nonconformity from “failure to form”: all have been met with backlash from conservatives who have placed gender identity at the center of larger culture war that itself is evidence of today’s deep political polarization. There is currently growing support for anti-trans legislation that seems to fight tooth and nail to defend binary gender. I am reminded of how, in February 2021, a Republican Congressperson placed a sign outside their office that read “There are two genders: male and female, trust the science.” Meadow’s book gives us the language to make sense of how trans identity has become the subject of political inquiry and debate. The book left me with many questions. What will happen to these youth? Could Meadow follow up with them and interview them as adults? What role does race play in this moment of heightened trans visibility, given that gender maximalism is occurring alongside the realities of anti-Black violence and rising ethnic and white nationalism? How might trans activism gain strength in tandem with today’s various youth-led movements? Trans Kids encourages us to study these interrelated topics just as we study and gender one another “intersubjectively” (Meadow 2018:226). Caregiving and Redemptive Love: a sociological memoir Janine Schipper1 Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption. Deborah J. Cohan, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. Deborah Cohan’s sociological memoir Welcome to Wherever We Are takes the reader on a journey through sensitive and complex terrain of growing up with an emotionally abusive father and subsequently caring for him in his elder years. With refreshing honesty, Cohan reveals a relationship filled with ambiguities as she regards her father’s abuse while also recognizing her feelings of deep admiration and 1 Department of Sociology, Northern Arizona University, PO Box 15300, Flagstaff, AZ 86011; e-mail: [email protected]