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Elizabeth Rahilly, Review of Trans-Affirmative Parenting: Raising Kids Across the Gender Spectrum, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 1, September 2021, Page e8, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab022
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Reviewer: Amy L. Stone, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA
In Trans-Affirmative Parenting: Raising Kids Across the Gender Spectrum, Elizabeth Rahilly provides a unique and timely analysis of how parents of transgender and gender nonconforming children understand their children’s gender. Through in-depth interviews with these parents, Rahilly adeptly shows the way parents navigate their children’s understanding of gender, paradigms pushed by LGBTQ advocates, and their own comprehension of how gender works. In this book, Rahilly effectively analyzes meaning-making of these parents around their children that is not always in neat alignment with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) advocacy and indeed is sometimes at odds with it. Parents balance that advocacy with their child-driven understanding of gender. This child-driven understanding fits into the child-centered parenting that these parents engage in.
In sophisticated but readable analysis, Rahilly shows how parents of transgender and gender nonconforming children embrace their child as “truly trans” but debating whether or not they are “just gay.” The long historical association of gender nonconformity with homosexuality informs this debate between “just gay” and “truly trans,” a debate that is at odds with LGBTQ advocacy. These parents negotiate nonbinary and binary possibilities for their children’s gender which is shaped by how hard or easy it is to live outside the gender binary. This parental meaning-making about the gender binary is critical for understanding how the new generation of nonbinary youth may be perceived. Rahilly also analyzes how parents had biomedical understandings of transgender embodiment and used language about disability to explain these biomedical understandings.
