I’ll just let that sink in for a moment.

And repeat:

There’s no such thing as “healthy food”.

It’s true.

There is Health Food, as a cultural construct¹, but, as a cultural construct, it is ever changing; currently we are undergoing a cultural shift from low-fat to low-carbohydrate food earning the appellation. But, aside from the fact that we simply cannot agree on what qualifies, there is so such thing as “healthy food”.

One of the most frustrating things about being a fat woman is: everyone is convinced they have The Perfect Diet, and if I would just follow it, the fat would just walk away². Everyone. Everyone. The veg*ns. The Paleos. The Atkin adherents. The raw food peeps. Eat no fat; eat tons of fat. Eat no grains; eat soaked grains. Eat a fastfood turkey sandwich every day; eat nothing from a store. Everyone is convinced they have The Truth on what is Healthy Food, and what the other guy (or the fat chick) is eating ain’t it.

Or, maybe, for the super open minded and tolerant, they’ll say we’re not quite sure just what healthy food is (except you won’t find it at McDonald’s). But by all the saints and Starbucks, don’t question the idea that there is such a thing as Healthy Food, because surely, if we just apply Science/Prayer/Common Sense/Historical Analysis/Noble Savage Wisdom, we’ll figure it out. And no one will ever die.

What? That’s the logical conclusion to the idea of Healthy Food. If we eat right, we won’t get sick. If we eat right, we won’t get fat. If we eat right, we won’t become diabetic. If we eat right, our kids won’t get autism. (If we eat right, we won’t be infertile, and we’ll be able to have children, who will obviously be free of all illness and defect.) If we eat right, we won’t be crazy. If we eat right, we won’t die from heart attack or stroke or cancer or liver failure or kidney disease or AIDS — and, if we eat right when we’re pregnant, neither will our children.

These are all things believers in the myth of healthy food have said. Half of them to me.

Ok, but let’s say that’s a hyperbolic misrepresentation of the position of Healthy Food’s believers³. Let’s say that when you say “she got diabetes because she ate like crap” you don’t actually mean “she wouldn’t have gotten diabetes if she’d eaten right” which itself could only be true if “no one who eats right gets diabetes”, which is utter bollocks. Let’s say that, instead, you have amazing powers of sight into alternate dimensions and a perfect ability to predict outcomes of statistical likelihoods⁴ — because that what it comes down to, risk, with some eating patterns carrying, on a population scale, different risk profiles than other eating patterns. You’re just saying healthy food improves your odds, not actually calling healthy food a panacea. But there’s still healthy food and unhealthy food, right?

No.

If we are not claiming there is a food, or a way of eating, that brings perfect health (which is assuming we can even meaningfully define “perfect health” in the first place), then the best we can do with food is risk management. “Healthy” can only exist as a comparative, not absolute, value.

So, compared to what? Which is healthier, raw cultured butter from pastured cows, or cold-pressed organic olive oil? That depends on whether you’re vegan, or lactose intolerant, or live in a dessert without a means of keeping food chilled⁵, I’d say. Which is healthier, a plate of brown rice spaghetti in fat-free sauce made from tomatoes from your own garden, or a protein shake with artificial sugar substitutes — to a diabetic? Which is healthier, the home cooked meal a growth-delayed, sensory-averse child absolutely won’t touch, or the McDonald’s chicken nuggets they’ll scarf?

Food — all food — brings things that are “good” for us, and things that are “bad”; or, more accurately, things that we need in that moment and things that we can store for later and things we don’t need (right then or at all) and things that we have too much of and things that actively harm us. All foods have all of these — only the specifics and amounts of each change. And the specifics are variable depending on our needs, which not only are different from person to person but each person’s needs change all the damn time.

Given that no food can fill all needs simultaneously⁶, and eating is a practice in good enough balance over time, how can we call a food “healthy” as an absolute?⁷ Food is meant to meet our needs⁸, and can only be evaluated on its ability to do so. Even a Twinkie is “healthy” for a person starved for caloric energy.

So there it is. There absolutely are foods that have a better need-filling to harm ratio in any given situation⁹. There absolutely are reasons to aim for eating foods that better meet more of your nutritional needs more of the time (though you have no moral obligation to do so). There so absolutely are reasons to call for large corporations to take out unnecessary harmful components from the food they sell and for, at the least, factual labeling about those additives. I disagree with not a piece of that, nor with helping people, should they wish, learn how to feed themselves in a way that meets more of their needs more of the time with less harm. Please, if that’s your calling, keep at it.

But the fact remains: there is no such thing as “healthy food”.

Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for rape and withdrawn consent.

The author sent it with this note: “I’m tempted to title it “A big fucking mistake,” simply because that’s literally what happened and I find that title humorous, except it doesn’t fit the tone of the post. Name it what you want.” I happen to have a similar black humor, a dearth of title ideas, and want to name it what the author wants, so:

A Big Fucking Mistake

I don’t even know how to start. So I’ll start with the hard part.

My husband raped me. But he’s not a rapist. Well, he is since that’s the definition of the word, but that’s not how I see him. To me, he’s very loving, soft-spoken, kind, respectful. Everything wonderful. Except one time, I wanted to stop, and he didn’t.

It was early in our relationship. We weren’t the adventurous kind, so needing a safe word never crossed our minds. Sometimes you get into positions that aren’t comfortable for both people and while I originally thought I couldn’t handle it, at some point, I wanted to change positions and so I told him to stop. But he didn’t. Because he was so close. But that shouldn’t even matter. Because I said stop and he didn’t and so he raped me.

Afterwards, he knew he shouldn’t have kept going. I felt betrayed, violated. I did not want to cuddle with him or talk to him. He apologized. He knew he crossed a line he shouldn’t. And he’s never done it again. And in the years since, we’ve become more open about communication and discussing sex. We’ve come up with a safe word because neither of us want that to happen again. I know it haunts him. He takes full responsibility, but he doesn’t know how to make up for it. I don’t know how to “fix” it either. He really is a good person who is gentle in every way. Except for that one time.

It makes my life as a feminist complicated. Because “no” means “no”. And we want to paint all rapists as bad and deserving to be on the sex offenders list. We want justice, we want it to never happen again. But then, there’s my husband. And he’s a rapist. But I’m not going to call the cops on him because it’s been years, we’ve remedied the issues that led to it, and he never ever wants that to happen again. I think our relationship has grown and moved on and we are in a better and safer place. And I don’t worry for the safety of me or other women and children he is with. He has no temper or violent tendencies. The one time I’ve seen him upset beyond what he could handle, he left the room until he calmed down. And that was once in 7 years of being with him. He doesn’t deserve the title “rapist,” except he does. Or did. That one time.

What do you do with something like this? “He raped me once, but he’ll never do it again,” can sound so enabling, so apologetic. Except that it’s true. And sometimes people make mistakes, even big mistakes.

——————————

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A friend and I were talking today about pregnancy, and the “making” of babies (that is not so much making as allowing to make themselves out of and using one’s self and substance), and the devaluing of the work of pregnancy, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t think of a word for the type of work it is.

Because it is work — perhaps the most elemental form of production around. It is draining, exhausting, and oh so challenging. It pervades (invades) every moment of one’s life for months, whether we are aware of its effects or not. Everyone who goes through it, every time, feels differently, but none are unaffected, and at the end the world is changed. A new person is born, or there is a gaping, grieving hole where a baby belonged. Either way, work has been done.

But it’s not the sort of work you clock into (though obstetricians are far too amenable to helping us clock out early), or set your mind to (though bookstores have shelves upon shelves dedicated to the idea that we can), or in any active, willful way do. And yet, forced pregnancies aside (by which I include any pregnancy without full and authentic choice, if not in the conception than in the continuation), it is chosen work, not work without agency. Not involuntary, not undirected (though that too), not passive (to the contrary!). Not unimportant, not insignificant, and not necessarily easy. Undervalued (though over-sentimentalized), unnamed, and thus unrecognized.

Grow gets closer, but it is the fetus who grows in us, and our bodies stretch to accommodate. To grow as in garden ascribes too much control of the result to the manure-applier (both in pregnancy and in gardening) — and besides, it is our bodies that passes the raw materials to the being inside; we only feed ourselves, and trust our bodies to feed the fetus. (And feed it they will, near regardless of what we eat; not enough dietary calcium? No problem, we walk around with a skeleton full; we’ll scrape some off there to pass to our parasites.)

Pregnancy is, in the imperfect language of metaphor, parachuting (and how strange that the most ready comparable activity is one utterly frivolous, to the inescapable seriousness of reproduction). We jump (or are pushed, and oh does that first moment determine the entire experience), and then, simply by continuing to be, we do. It is so very active, voluntary and willed into beginning at the best of times, and once begun, merely (as merely as can be, heading to an inevitable impact) a matter of survival, of daily, inescapable grind. It is not like anything else, yet not dissimilar to so many other endeavors — but without the right word, making those connections is so much harder.

I need this word.

I seek out the blond curls of my firstborn, his bright red “girly” blouse now covered by his bright red “boyish” coat. My tired-tight shoulders tense further in anticipation of too-long-passed events about which I now can do nothing, and make a noise for the teacher to continue his story.

“It was really upsetting him; he told them to stop, but they didn’t. I told one of them ‘some boys have long hair’, and he thought for a second” — here his voice fills with humor — “and he said, ‘well some boys do, but not with such a pretty face.’”

We both laugh, the conversation continues past my — yes, pretty — child’s eccentric relationship with gender performance and the discomfort it regularly provokes in his peers, and we continue home.

***

“I heard some kids were calling you ‘she’ at the party yesterday,” I ask, so-carefully-light in tone, as I set his oatmeal in front of him.

“Yeah.”

Sullen or distracted? How do you tell in a four (and a half, he would insist on adding) year old? I persist, lightly, lightly.

“Your teacher said you didn’t like it.”

Not distracted now, but agitated: “Yeah, I told them to stop calling me that, but they wouldn’t. They should have asked before calling me she!”

What is this? Echoes of our conversations on namecalling (“always ask someone if you can call them a name first, and only do it if they say it’s ok”), or something new?

“You wanted them to ask before calling you she?”

“Yeah, but they didn’t. They should have asked.” Really worked up now, oatmeal forgotten.

“But your teacher got them to stop, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did.” Calming again. Picks up his spoon, takes a bite. So do I. Then:

“Would you have minded if they called you she if they asked first?”

“They could have called me she if they asked first, but they didn’t ask.”

“Oh.”

We munch oatmeal while part of my mind wonders if talking with all four year olds feels so much like a scratchy record, skipping to repeat imperfectly but ceaselessly. Probably, another part responds.

The rest tries to count how many times I’ve asked this, to guess how many times I’ll ask again and whether the answer will ever change.

“Do you want me to call you she or he?”

A pause.

“He. They could have called me she if they asked. But I want you to call me he.”

“Ok.” I stand, pick up my empty bowl, bend over to kiss his still-chewing head. “Well, it’s good to know.”

It is.

C*nt. Bitch. Whore.

Likely you’ve read these and other epithets, and related threats, flying around the internet recently. If you’re not a woman or a feminist-minded blogger, you might not be used to seeing them quite so often, but rather than dealing with them each on her own, women and perceived-women writers have been talking about them publicly, culminating in a cathartic (and often triggering) sharing on Twitter under the hashtag #mencallmethings. As with many other moments in feminist activism, however, the protest has been as revealing about who is welcome and centered in feminist circles as it has been about the abuse and harassment all such writers, centered or not, receive.

Go read the rest, so the following makes sense!

Naturally, I’ve already been accused of indulging in grudge wank, engaging in Oppression Olympics, and coopting a movement that’s not really about what I’m trying to make it about.¹

Originally, when the editor at Global Comment commissioned the piece², I had envisioned it as part of a larger conversation about the exclusion of mothers and mother-feminism, with #mencallmethings coming so close on the heels of a similar exclusion in NY Magazine. Of course, then life intervened³, and I can’t expect anyone to engage with what I meant to write only with what I did. And while I stand by what I wrote, of course it is just a piece of a bigger story.

So because this is my blog and I get to do things like say “And another thing!” here are some Another Thing!s:

• This sorta should go without saying, but pointing out exclusion does not imply accusing intent. I doubt any of the article authors sat down and said to themselves “Let’s see how much I can marginalize mothers today!” No, the point is, we’re too often simply not thought about, unless the topic is maternity leave or pumping laws. The commentary around #mencallmethings wasn’t the first and won’t be the last time it happens; it wasn’t particularly egregious, it was just there when I had time and inclination to write about this topic.
• Pointing out exclusion should not be seen as whining what about meeeee?? Because frankly, since more size = more trolls, I’m kinda fine not being a big, oft-linked blogger. Though it’s always thrilling to see my name in print, what I really want is to see my life reflected — or at least acknowledged.
• Pointing out exclusion is not engaging in Oppression Olympics; I don’t think it matters whether mothers have it any worse than other women, I think we have it different, and that by itself is important. And, mothers are hardly the only group frequently excluded this way, which is why I draw parallels with women of color, trans women, women with disabilities, etc — and, of course, all the lived combinations thereof.
• Finally, while again I don’t think this is a matter of intent⁴, framing the conversation as what men do rather than what we experience doesn’t leave space for the lived realities of not just women with children but trans women, gender-queer and nonbinary people, and others, who also experience gendered marginalization and, yes, abuse and harassment from other women. This framing — not an active choice, simply the unintended consequence of privileged habits — is why I speak up when mothers are erased from feminist discussion, because it won’t change until we are not seen as a particular case, a subgroup, not quite really a part of feminism, but women, full stop.

And — a reward, for those of you who made it this far! — here is an excellent example of how to include mothers in social justice discourse (and an important piece in its own right on mental health and the problems with compulsory “treatment”.). See? It doesn’t take much.

I am watching as Occupy Wall Street the camp is being destroyed by the NYPD, barely two days after participating in the protest against a smaller, but similar, dismantling of Occupy Portland. I am filled with rage and impotence and grief and fear — but also hope.

I hope that you know this night only as the inflaming of a movement, not its destruction. I hope that by the time you are grown, you do not understand Occupy Wall Street any more than I understand the women’s movement of the 1970s, because the changes we are agitating for have long been your reality. As with that wave of feminism, I do not kid myself that Occupy is perfect or that all our problems will be fixed, but if I pray, I pray that you will have moved on to a new movement to improve some other area of our public life. (I pray that we do not ruin your grandparents’ work and allow those progresses to be lost as well.) I hope that by the time you pay taxes, we will have returned to a healthy, progressive tax code, and that you will not be shouldering a larger proportional burden than the people employing you and your friends. I hope that if you ever need it, the government will provide for your safety net, as well as your libraries and health care and advanced education, and you won’t have to turn to an illegal encampment for it. I hope some part of you disbelieves us when we speak of peaceful protest being illegal, because that will be such an unfamiliar idea to you.

But if not: I am sorry. I am sorry we did not do enough, did not care enough, did not defeat our cynicism enough to provide you a better, more just life. I am sorry our apathy overcame our determination, sorry our fear won over our rage. I am sorry we continued to elect people who worked against us, who worked for the few obscenely rich people who helped them convince us to reelect them. I’m sorry we believed the stories told to us by a media willing to be bullied into silence. I’m sorry we failed you.

That, my children, is my deepest fear on this dark night.

I love you. I love you so much that if my fears are realized and we do fail you, it won’t be for lack of my trying.

Forever,
Your mom

He wears a baby now. Babies are cool.

This picture brings many thoughts to mind, none of which I have time to explore fully (because she’s back on my chest now):

• I know not everyone has jobs that can be done from home, but so many do who aren’t being allowed to (even The Man is only able to once a week). This is a part of the strict separation of “work” and “life” in most current societies — a ridiculous division which fails both at honoring and valuing home-work and at acknowledging that most of us want to work¹ and want to have it be part of our lives.
• Similarly, though many people don’t have work that is baby-friendly, many of us do who aren’t being allowed to. Even The Man’s work-from-home guidelines include a ban on performing any form of child care during paid work hours. It is true that having sole care of an infant while working would be exceedingly difficult for most², but again, the expectation that any parent have sole care is a result of the work-life separation mentioned above. There could be so many creative approaches that make far more sense, if we were willing to consider them.
• This is life in a “social media” world: communicating in multiple channels at once, often with the same people. Pundits who deride the “current generation” (usually teens or young 20s) for their “technology addiction” are utterly missing the point that communication technology³, is changing how we work and live. But the fundament remains the same: humans communicating and connecting, as we always have and will. Only the particulars differ.
• I have a damn adorable baby.⁴

Your thoughts?

I made the mistake early in my pregnancy of asking the Boychick if he wanted a brother or a sister, meaning did he want one-of-the-above. But he heard me, paused for a moment, and announced “A sister!” I laughed, and tried again after explaining that we didn’t get to choose, but he was undeterred. From then on, he was adamant that a sister he would have.

And then came the baby, vulva first. (The line that ran through my head at the birth, which we weren’t expecting to be breech, was “I don’t think scalps have mucus membranes.”) We explained again, as we had throughout the pregnancy, that we were making a guess about her gender, based on her genitals, and we wouldn’t know if she was a girl until she told us, just like we didn’t know he was a boy until he told us¹. He was fine with this (it helps, I think, that he has an openly trans man in his life, so he’s familiar with vulva-but-not-a-girl) — as long as we were clear that she was his sister. “Sibling” just would not do.

So sister she is. And she she is, for the moment, as long as English insists on gendered pronouns. Oh, I could refer to her online as ze or s/he, but the truth is, we don’t do that in person, and it seems overly pretentious to do it online alone.

On pronouns and provisional assignments

Which, of course, begs the question: why is she she? Why do we, The Man and I, advocates of gender diverse parenting that we are, assign gender at all, no matter how provisionally? I’ve been asked this before, even been attacked because of it, and had my “commitment” to the “cause” be questioned.

Not, please note, by anyone with children of their own.

Because here’s the thing: this parenting gig? It’s fucking hard. It’s hard intrinsically, one of the most physically, emotionally, and mentally challenging activities one can engage in in life, and certainly the one with the longest haul and hardest hurdles to “quitting”. And my society, my dear, pressures-all-(privileged)-women-to-be-mothers-but-forget-about-actually-supporting-them society, makes it so, so much harder.

All parents are attacked for their choices by somebody²; any parent making a choice outside of the “mainstream” gets attacked even more viciously, by even more people; and the more marginalized a parent is, the more the attacks come not “just” in words³ but in tangible, terrifying ways.

Nearly every time I write about gender diverse/gender “neutral” parenting, I have a queer parent or a trans parent or a parent on public assistance or a parent dependent on the goodwill of their disapproving family tell me that they would be so much more radical/subversive/gender-diverse in their choices if they weren’t afraid they would lose custody of their children.

They have reason to be afraid.

I’m reasonably protected from the most catastrophic of the consequences, apparently living in a socially-condoned heterocentric, white, middle-class relationship — but even I still have so much shit to deal with, with my finite mental/emotional resources, that there’s only so much I can do. There are only so many choices I can make that take me out of the mainstream and into even-deeper public scrutiny, and still, y’know, survive.⁴ So I make the ones I do, the ones I can, the ones I am willing to defend in the face of the worst of the judgment.

(Just for not enforcing gender roles with my children, I am called a cunt and a dyke and a fucking crazy bitch and told I should have my children removed. There are all too real consequences for stepping out of kyriarchy’s line, before it even comes to the level of custody issues. It is not only unreasonable but actively harmful, a means of perpetuating kyriarchy and oppression, to demand that parents, already attacked on all sides, do all the work raising children radical. Society has to help make it reasonably safe for us to do so, as well.)

Vulva Baby or the Girlchick?

Girlchick seems the obvious blog moniker for this new child of mine, doesn’t it? We have a child with a penis, the eponymous Boychick, who was given that name years before his gender was self-declared, and now we have a child with a vulva. And I tried it on, used it in a post, tweeted it a handful of times — but it never sat right with me.

I look at this child, and I don’t see “girl”. I see a baby, as her brother was once a baby; nothing screamed “boy” about him, the occasional acquaintance’s comments to the contrary, and nothing announces “girl” about her. She is very much not her brother: she spits up less, and farts more; she is happier to be in a carrier when awake, but more often prefers facing to the side instead of towards me; her elimination signals are clearer, and she wakes more frequently at night; her hair is redder, her eyes less goopy, her scalp more bumpy, her digits shorter. And she has a vulva. What about this makes her a “girl”, if we are to avoid essentializing gender to genitalia?

When strangers ask me “Boy or girl?”⁵, I’m apt to answer “she’s a she”, because saying “girl” just doesn’t feel right, or honest, or accurate; this answers the question they really need to know⁶, which is what language to use to talk about this adorable being. But it seems nearly obscene to that heavily put a gender on an infant this young; can’t she just be a baby for a little while, before we start telling her what role to play?

Resolving the conflict

That may seem like a contradiction, this use of “she”, this (mostly) avoidance of “girl”. But one is about survival in a society antagonistic to non-gendering; the other is saying “this far and no farther”. I cannot stop all damage from being done to this perfect child of mine, but I will do what I can to minimize it. I won’t pretend that she’ll be unaffected by others’ perceptions of her, but I will help her be aware of them; I won’t tell her what her gender is, but I will tell her what her society thinks her gender should be; I won’t subject her to every strangers’ disapproval of alternative pronouns, but I will tell her she can choose another if she likes; I will tell her she has a vulva, but I won’t tell her she has to stay that way. And I will tell her I will always, always, always love her, whoever she turns out to be.

Fatherhood strode from the sidewings to center stage in the form of the Lone Centurion (aka Rory Pond, nee Williams) in “A Good Man Goes to War,” and continued in “Night Terrors” and “Closing Time”. In these episodes, we see first a portrayal and then subversion of the most common tropes of fatherhood; respectively, the Hero (the aforementioned centurion-slash-nurse Rory), the Abandoner (Alex), and the Bumbler (Craig). Assisting each we have, of course, the Doctor — a man who, 10 incarnations and nearly 50 boringly linear human years ago, was himself a grandfather. Although most versions of the show between 1963 and now have glossed over the central character’s implied fatherhood, here he is portrayed in full Wise Patriarch mode, taking these three men — and the viewer — on a transformative journey that amounts to a guide to Moffat’s vision of Enlightened Fatherhood.

Finish reading at GC, because it’s good and because I managed to write it with a newborn — often one handed — so click over if only to be amazed that I formed cohesive sentences and semi²-cogent arguments.

Speaking of, one day I will write a memoir, and in it will be a piece about sitting in the living room holding a sleeping baby over the potty with one hand (because she fell asleep immediately upon finishing her business and if I moved her she might wake up again and that would just be unacceptable), breast hanging out of the nursing tank, laptop balanced on the arm of the chair, typing with the other hand because I was In the Middle of a Thought and also On Deadline. Because if there is a more perfect metaphor-and-example of balancing parenting and paid employment, I haven’t heard it.

Why does the media show transgender children more sympathetically?

For some reason, everywhere I go lately there’s stories about trans children.  Nightline ran an episode, while Dr Phil ran one on one trans and one intersex child.  And CNN currently has a video up of trans children about two children at the Gender Spectrum Family Conference.

Interest in trans people in general and trans children in particular isn’t really a new phenomena, of course, but what’s notable about these stories is how sympathetic and non-sensationalised these takes are.  While there’s of course the odd bit of sketchy language, the children’s rights and identities are largely respected, and in the case of CNN allowed to speak in their own words.

Of course, it’s not all hearts and puppydogs in the media–and there’s still a lot of scaremongering out there.  Just yesterday, a Canadian newspaper ran a full page anti trans hate ad that read “don’t confuse me. I’m a girl, don’t cause me to question if I’m a boy, transsexual transgender, intersexed or two spirited.”  And of course there was the “psychiatrist” on Fox in the Toemaggedon story (you know the guy).  The WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN mob always like to pretend as though there’s no such thing as a LGBT child, that we just need to violently enforce gender norms and then no child will ever be trans. Phew.

But still, compared to the mockery, bathroom panic, and blatant victim blaming of trans murder victims, trans children get a comparatively sympathetic media treatment.  As such it’s worthwhile contrasting the sympathetic treatment of trans kids with the continued sensationalist treatment of trans adults, particularly women, and why there might be a such a great disparity between the two.

An idealisation of children as innocent

We as a culture have a bifurcated view of children as either angels or demons (but rarely full human beings).  In the first view, children are idealised as innocent.  Innocence is a Christianised theological category, connoting not just a lack of culpability or experience but also purity.  A lack of sin.  In the second view, we have the monstrous child, the demonic pure evil child familiar to us from horror movies and Stephen Moffat penned Doctor Who episodes.  This is the mirror image of the angel, its opposite.

But, in realistic cultural representations, the trans child is likely to retain their innocent status regardless.  In trans negative views, the mother or father are usually to “blame” for their transness, the culpability is shifted elsewhere.

An idealisation of children as natural

If children are considered innocent, then they are also often considered more natural than adults.  The idea of childhood as closer to nature is an old one, widely popularised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings (eg Emile) in the 18th century.  Nature is pure, culture is tainted.

So for a child to be trans is to be more “natural” than an adult transitioner.  The desire to provide a scientific explanation for any kind of LGBT identity is, in effect, to call something “natural,” innate.  It’s not a choice, baby I was born this way.  To be natural is, in effect, in innocent.  So trans children already have an advantage here in being considered more natural.   If they’re closer to nature, then their transness must be natural, too.

In contrast, the adult transitioner is easier to critique – blame – for “choosing” to be trans.  Julia Serano noted in Whipping Girl that media representations tend to emphasis the artificiality of trans women, with a focus on make-up and clothes.  Trans people, especially trans women, are considered fake.  Not “really” as real in their sexes as cis people.

A cultural idea of children as not sexual

This is a really important difference between the two.  Media images of  trans women in particular tend to be extremely sexualised–the trans sex worker of colour is a stock figure in crime fiction for instance. The cultural confusion between gender and sexuality results in people considering transness as an intensified form of queer sexuality–the trans woman as a drag queen who went “too far,” the trans man as the butch woman who did the same.  And anxieties about trans people as “deceivers” go even further, because as trans academic Talia Mae Bettcher has argued, gendered clothing itself works as a form of symbolic signalling about genital status and hence sexual availability.  It’s a code, which is why we speak, nonsensically about “women’s clothing” and “men’s clothing,” as though the cuts of clothing somehow is necessarily linked to gender and sex.

So trans adults are a threat because they “mismatch” (as Bettcher terms it) the codes of cissexual heterosexuality, the organisation of genitally-determined sexed bodies into “potentially fuckable” and “not potentially fuckable.”  Wearing the clothes of the supposed other sex is “cross dressing,” is a violation of the cultural line between sexed bodies, gender identity and gender expression.  And because heterosexuality is so frequently premised on its melancholic rejection of homosexuality, to be attracted to someone with the “wrong” genitals is a kind of psychic threat, which often results in violence to trans people (especially from cis men).  As Julia Serano says in her poem “Cocky”

“My penis changes the meanings of everything. And because of her, every one of my heterosexual ex-girlfriends, has slept with a lesbian. And every guy who hits on me these days could be accused of being gay.”

In contrast, trans children are considered to not be sexual yet – their transness is not as strongly mediated by ideas of sexuality.  Sympathetic portrayals of trans children are just about gender , without a sexual component¹.  Adult trans people have long battled the assumption that they transition for a sexual reason, or that they’re sexually promiscuous or sex workers, but trans children don’t hit those some fears.  They’re not considered dangerous in quite the same way.

So in conclusion.

This view of trans children as sympathetic may not be quite as progressive as it seems.  While it’s wonderful to see trans children treated as actual living breathing human beings, and more positive representations will definitely help those children gain access to blockers and hormones, what happens when they grow up?

Because at some point, most of those children will become sexually active teens and adults–and then we’re at the same point as before.  Until we start to really interrogate the ways in which we idealise children and then demonise the adults they grow into (from innocent to fallen), things won’t really have changed so much after all.