Trans Kids

Trans Kids is a trenchant ethnographic and interview-based study of the first generation of families affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children. Previous generations of parents sent such children for psychiatric treatment aimed at a cure, but today’s parents agree to call their children new names, allow them to wear whatever clothing they choose, and approach the state to alter the gender designation on their passports and birth certificates. Sociologist Tey Meadow argues that these parents are negotiating gender in new and significant ways, with everyone and everything, from intimates to institutions. Drawing from sociology, philosophy, psychology, and sexuality studies, Meadow depicts the intricate social processes that shape gender acquisition. Atypical gender expression was once considered a failure of gender, but now it is a form of gender. Engaging and rigorously argued, Trans Kids underscores both the centrality of ever more particular configurations of gender in both our physical and psychological life, and the increasing embeddedness of personal identities in social institutions.