“We Don’t Own Kids”: On the “Inconvenience” of Transgender in Childhood

Abstract

This paper examines arguments that defend anti-transgender policies and legislation aiming to censor discussions about gender identity and restrict access to affirming interventions in three Canadian provinces. Building on psychoanalysis and queer theory, we suggest that such policies and legislation are symptomatic of an increasingly precarious and volatile social and political world in which transgender existence is a target of projected anxiety and aggression. We further demonstrate how anti-trans legislation fuels and feeds on moral panics that erect binaries and foreclose the conditions needed to bring complex emotions into language, where conflicts of gender and childhood can be used to inform thought and reflection. Inconvenience is offered as a surprising resource to rethink cross-generational bonds that can welcome and work through dynamics of anxiety and aggression that emerge from not already knowing the meaning or future of gender and childhood.

Keywords:

• transgender children,
• transphobia,
• childism,
• psychoanalysis,
• anti-trans legislation,
• moral panic