Gendering innocence: An empirical inquiry into the lived experience of gender incongruence in childhood

This article draws on evidence from interviews with 40 gender and sex variant young people and 30 caregivers of transgender children. Participants' accounts illustrate the deep psychic i nvestment in embodied gender incongruence that young people may manifest from the earliest years of childhood. They highlight the profound distress sometimes experienced by children denied external recognition of their internal (gendered) selves and required to conform to extraneous expectations inf ormed by essentialist understandings of biological sex. Far from ‘innocent’ of gender (difference), children can be deeply and actively involved in creating and adopting gendered subject positions, sometimes generating unanticipated forms of diversity.
Source: Children and Society - Category: Child Development Authors: Tags: ORIGINAL ARTICLE Source Type: research