of the phenomenon. These themes exemplify parents’ love and support for their children while at the same time troubling cherished LGBTQ tenets on several key fronts: Gender and sexuality do not necessarily present as inherently disparate aspects of the precultural self, but are more fluid and open to reinterpretation, given new cultural contexts, opportunities, and awareness. “Gender-expansive” child-rearing often looks, fundamentally, very binary and gender-stereotypical, despite increasing visibility around nonbinary possibilities. And normalizing transgender experience, for many of these parents, often entails highly medicalized frameworks for bodies and genders. These families depart from conventional understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality, but in ways that prioritize
child-rooted shifts and expressions, not necessarily LGBTQ paradigms.
109 All told, their experiences prove new ground for understanding the mechanisms and parameters of the (trans)gender change afoot. That is a story worth sharing.
