Trans-american children

I tuned in partway through the rebroadcast of Barbara Walters' 20/20 report last year on transgendered children and their parents tonight.

Watching the report was interesting to me in part because it reinforced the point we try to nail home for the anthropology 101 students about gender as a social construction, and how gender is enculturated. It's amazing how attached parents are to the ideas of what a boy is, or what a girl is, and that they can mourn the loss of that boy even when they still have the transgendered child who is alive and well and insisting that the world recognize her as a girl. I'm not meaning to dismiss the pain that these families experience, because it is real, but I just mean to say that culture is a profoundly powerful force in building our understandings of the world and the way it ought to be.

Maybe this was out of context, since I tuned in late, but I was also struck by the fact that Walters initially seemed stubbornly to return to the pronoun that anatomy declared rather than the one the child -- and, in most cases, the families too -- used for himself or herself. This shifted over the course of the broadcast, and by the end she seemed generally to use the pronoun used by the family.

Another thing that I can't help but notice in American journalism is the isolationist kind of approach to the subject of gender, as if the US is the only country in the world where this could happen*, and that given the biologically driven theories that many people currently believe, there's no room for talking about culture. Even the explanation Walters offers of this theory belies the American cultural framing of science, where anatomy = biology. She explains that many believe that a hormone surge during pregnancy results in "the wrong gender" for these children. Why "wrong"? Because a penis necessitates male gender identity, a vagina female gender identity? The orientation is puzzling to me, for sure. We know that dark matter populates the universe with far more than we know how to identify in cosmology; why is there the popular assumption we have biology all figured out?

I've seen the interesting film No Dumb Questions a couple of times in social work classes taught by Liz Gershoff, which also deals with children and their conceptualizations of gender and gender identity, but from the point of view of children watching their relative transition from being Uncle Bill to Aunt Barbara, rather than a child experiencing a transgendered identity himself or herself. Though it's rougher in its production, I think it's somehow more intelligent in certain ways than Walter's piece, because its absence of an omnicient narrator leaves more room for interpretation and self-discovery, rather than pronouncement.

One thing that Walters does do really nicely, though, is capture (ethnographically) the parents' varied reactions to their own children's declarations of alternate gender, and given the large audience of its mainstream broadcast, it has the potential to have a huge impact on people who share exactly the same assumptions that she herself falls into at times in the documentary. As she claims in the final moments of the one-year-later broadcast, there has been an enormous rise in the number of trans-identified children participating in conferences since the initial airing of the episode, and there's been a great deal of attention given the show by internet readers as well as schools.

Even with the faults in the program, I'm thrilled to see this topic being talked about in mainstream media with a fair amount of sensitivity. Hooray for Barbara Walters.

*The wonderful French film Ma Vie en Rose (1997) deals with just this topic from the child's perspective.