Activismo de Padres Académicos Infancias Trans

Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015
for Trans* Kids: Academic Parent

Fighting
Activism in the 21st Century
KIMBERLEY ENS MANNING
Concordia University, Canada
CINDY HOLMES
Simon Fraser University, Canada
ANNIE PULLEN SANSFAÇON

Université de Montréal, Canada
JULIA TEMPLE NEWHOOK

Memorial University, Canada
ANN TRAVERS
Simon Fraser University, Canada
ABSTRACT In this article we explore some of the affective and ethical dimensions that
we have faced as parent academic-activists seeking to understand and undo some of
the structural transphobia that currently exists in Canadian society. Informed by
critical feminist, critical race and black feminist thought, trans* scholarship, queer
theory, and anti-oppression analysis, we discuss how our academic-activism assumes
complex configurations of privilege and vulnerability.
KEYWORDS transgender; children and youth; autoethnography; parental activism;

academic activism; social action
When we apply the insights of queer and feminist theory to the work of raising
children, we become invested in providing all children – not just those who show
the signs of gender non-conformity – with the social, cultural and political tools
they can use to simultaneously work with and against the gender binary. (Ward,
2013, p. 47)
Correspondence Address: Kimberley Ens Manning, Department of Political Science, Concordia

University, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8; Email:
kimberley.manning@concordia.ca
ISSN: 1911-4788
Fighting for Trans* Kids 119

Introduction
Gender expression and gender identity, understood as binary concepts, that is,
either male or female, are vivid examples of the very structure of domination
upheld in Western society. As academic-activists we have allied with our
children and with many others to better understand, explain, and undo
structural transphobia within broader contexts of ageism, racism, sexism,
heterosexism, and the ever-increasing criminalization of poverty (Hodgson,
2013; Kumashiro, 2002; Snorton & Haritaworn, 2013). In this article we
explore some of the affective and ethical dimensions we have faced as parent
academic-activists fighting for our trans* children.1
Many academic parents are familiar with the competing demands of
parenting children while trying to complete book chapters, course lectures,
and grant applications. It is almost an understatement to say that these
demands are stressful, if not at times totally overwhelming.2 As the primary
caregivers of transgender children, our academic work has, however, taken on
a whole new layer of meaning that we could never have imagined prior to
becoming parents. The allyship we undertake in relation to our children does
not comprise a form of “courtesy stigma” (Goffman, 1990, pp. 41-45), or the
allyship of sympathetic individuals who become “courtesy members” of a
marginalized group, as has recently been suggested of parents who publicly
support their adult gay and lesbian children (Johnson & Best, 2012). Rather,
we occupy a position of liminality; most of us are not trans* but given our
desire to ensure the well-being of our children, and the discrimination we face
advocating for and with them, we live a commitment to our children that
cannot be picked up or put down as we like.3 At the same time, our struggles
are also shaped by our commitment to finding ways for our children and other
children to safely speak their truth and self-advocate at a moment when they
are perceived to lack the capacity for self-determination.
Informed by critical feminist, critical race and black feminist thought,
trans* scholarship, queer theory, and anti-oppression analysis, we explore
some of the anxieties and privileges that give rise to and shape our allyship.
In particular, we consider how the economic, cultural, and social capital

1 Transgender or trans* is an umbrella term that describes a wide range of people whose gender
identity or gender expression differs from what they were assigned at birth. It may include those
who identify as transsexual, Two-Spirit, transitioned, bigender, genderqueer, cross-dressers,
gender variant, gender fluid, or simply man or woman (Grant et al., 2011; FORGE, 2012). In
some contexts, an asterisk is used (trans*) to actively include non-binary and/or non-static gender
identities. ‘Gender creative’ is one of many terms that describe “children whose gender identity
and/or gender expression differs from what others expect of their assigned (natal) sex. Others
include ‘gender independent’, ‘gender non-conforming’, ‘gender variant’, ‘transgender’, and in
the case of Aboriginal children, ‘two-spirited’” (Pyne, 2013, n.p.).
2
See Castañeda & Isgro (2013); Mason, Wolfinger, & Goulden (2013); and O’Brien Hallstein &
O’Reilly (2012) for three thoughtful recent explorations of gender and family in academia.
3
Our reference to liminal allyship draws upon the work of Ryan & Runswick-Cole (2008), who
are academic parents of disabled children.
Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

120 Kimberley Ens Manning, Cindy Holmes, Annie Pullen Sansfaçon,
Julia Temple Newhook, Ann Travers
inherent in our academic positions enables us to support trans*-positive

scholarship about gender independent children both within and outside of our
university contexts. Yet, even as we maximize these relations of power, we
also recognize their limits; our power is conditional on secure academic
appointments and tenure (circumstances disproportionately associated with
whiteness and class privilege), on activist-positive and parent-positive
academic cultures, and on our own finite energies to manage the many
demands of teaching, research, parenting, and activism as they blur together,
sometimes productively and sometimes problematically. As white scholars
and teachers we also recognize our power to silence non-academic
communities and epistemologies and thus work to build anti-racist strategies
into our activism and scholarship.
We begin with a brief discussion of some of the collective work by
academics, practitioners, and community activists underway to create a more
gender-expansive society. After an introduction to research methods, the
main section of the article will focus on five short analytic autoethnographies.
Cindy explores the interplay between lived experience, queer and feminist
community work, and the analyses of critical trans* academic-activists, and
how these various facets shape her parenting, activism, and research; Annie
discusses how her background in ethics deeply informed her decision to
accept her transgender daughter; Kimberley reflects on how the intersecting
processes of grant preparation, research, and writing propelled her into
activism and provided her with new tools to understand and engage in social
movement activism; Julia uses insights from black feminist theorists to
explore the pressures of silence and disclosure when parenting, activism, and
academics overlap; and Ann draws on her own scholarship in critical race
theory and necropolitics to discuss the raced and classed dimensions of
supporting a transgender child. As will be evident in the following
discussion, academic work, activism, and parenting have become intensely
‘blurred’ in our lives. While the theoretical frameworks that have guided our
scholarship have helped us navigate parenting our trans* children and
provided us with resources and platforms from which to advocate for change,
we all struggle with the costs of advocating for our children.
Background
Over the last five years, a small number of Canadian educators, lawyers,
academics, community activists, physicians, and youth have sought to
educate the public about childhood gender diversity and to create new gender
expansive possibilities in educational, social, and medical support and care
for children and youth. Disregarding theories that childhood gender non-
conformity could be ‘fixed’ by altering parental behaviour, these individuals
sought to challenge the systems of gender normativity not only affecting
trans* children, but all children and youth; an approach that Travers (2014,


pp. 54-68) calls a “transformative gender justice perspective.” It was not until
the national conference on Gender Creative Kids held in October 2012,
however, that some of us met together for the first time (Manning, Pullen
Sansfaçon & Meyer, 2014; Annie, Ann and Kimberley attended the
conference). Spurred on by that gathering, and a subsequent workshop held
by Rainbow Health Ontario a year later,4 many new academic collectivities
have taken shape in the country, including the preparation of several large
team grant applications.
At the same time that all five of us have been involved in drafting grant
applications, publication projects, and presentations focused on transgender
children and their families, we have simultaneously become increasingly
involved in public activism beyond the academy. In 2014, we participated in
various forms of activism: Annie filed a human rights complaint in Quebec in
the hope that her child might change her gender identification documents;
Ann and Cindy worked hard with others to apply anti-racist ethics to found
the British Columbia Safer Schools Coalition in support of the Vancouver
School Board’s trans*-positive update to their gender and sexual diversity
policy (see BC Safer Schools Coalition, n.d.); Julia began to offer training in
children’s gender diversity to professionals who work with young children
and founded both a local support group for parents of gender diverse children,
as well as a national social media-based support group that now has nearly
300 members; and Kimberley, as a founding member of Gender Creative
Kids Canada, co-facilitated workshops on gender identity and expression at
the English Montreal School Board.
Given our strong on-going commitments, all five of us have member
research status in communities and projects supporting transgender children
and their families. These experiences have provided us with a basic starting
point for employing analytic autoethnography, the methodology we have
adopted in writing this article. The value of analytic autoethnography is that
it attends to narrative visibility of the researcher’s self, and incorporates a
strong commitment to theoretical analysis and thereby engages in a larger
enterprise of social science debate (Anderson 2006, p. 378). The following
five autoethnographies were written by each author and are based, in part, on
semi-structured interviews – conducted in person or via skype – that
Kimberley undertook with Annie (May 9, 2013), Julia (November 21, 2014),
Ann (November 25, 2014), and Cindy (January 12, 2015), and that Annie
undertook with Kimberley (January 5, 2015). Ann decided not to reflect on
her interview per se, but rather to focus her autoethnography on a family
crisis that emerged after the interview had already taken place.

4
Rainbow Health Ontario “works to improve the health and well-being of LGBTQ people in
Ontario, and to increase access to competent and LGBTQ friendly health care services across the
province” (Rainbow Health Ontario, n.d.).

Cindy – Interdisciplinary Studies (Sociology, Social Work, Geography):

“Not a problem of identity, but of discrimination.”
My activism and scholarship about gender and sexual diversity and the
marginalization of trans* and gender non-conforming people was already part
of my life before I became a parent, with connections to my own lived
experiences of hetero/cisnormativity and sexism as a queer femme partner of
a masculine woman, combined with my community work in lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, two-spirit, queer (LGBT2SQ) feminist, and other social
justice movements. I became politically active in the late 1980s when I got
involved in feminist activism on my university campus and worked as a front-
line advocate in community-based feminist anti-violence organizations.
Through intensive dialogue with other activists (many of whom were lesbian
feminists of colour and Indigenous women) I was introduced to the writings
of academic-activists Audre Lorde (1984), bell hooks (1989), Chrystos
(1988), Leslie Feinberg (1993, 1996), Kate Bornstein (1994), and others. I
began to develop a critical analysis of the harmful interlocking effects of
sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, racism, and classism in society, which in
turn became the focus of my community-based and academic work. I worked
with feminist nonprofit organizations and social justice movements
addressing social and health inequalities and my subsequent academic
research, which focused on colonial violence and violence in the lives of
LGBT2SQ people, grew directly out of these experiences.
Since welcoming our child into the world twelve years ago, my partner and
I have consciously tried to bring a critical social justice approach to our
parenting and family life. We embraced queer and anti-racist feminist
politics; my partner expressed her masculine parenting identity as a ‘lesbian
dad’ (Fleming, 2011; Holmes & Fleming, 2009). Our queer feminist values
meant that we changed the words while reading children’s books, bought a
diversity of clothing styles and colours for our child, avoided referring to
‘girls’ and ‘boys’ clothes, and in so many other ways tried to resist the gender
binary by challenging sexist, racist, and heterosexist assumptions about what
it means to be a girl/boy. But when our child began to experience
discrimination based on their gender expression at age four and five, I
developed a deeper understanding of the regulation of gender and the impact
of gender-based violence and discrimination on gender non-conforming
children’s health and well-being.
[our child’s] gender non-conformity was not… something where I turned to

anyone or anything about…until [child’s name] began to encounter
discrimination from the outside world....But when they started to experience
discrimination and harassment….I guess we started to really have problems at
school when [child’s name] was in kindergarten because they were having
problems accessing bathrooms and being harassed in the bathroom and being told
they were in the wrong bathroom, being harassed on the playground… (Cindy,
individual interview, January 12, 2015)


My partner and I had numerous meetings with the teacher, the vice-
principal, and the counselor at our child’s school. Although they were caring,
they did not know what to do beyond assigning a bathroom buddy (which was
not enough). On the whole, we felt that the seriousness of gender-based
violence in the lives of young gender non-conforming children was not
understood and that the school lacked training and policies to create safe
learning environments for gender diverse kids. I turned to support from
transgender activist Aiden Key, who founded the Gender Odyssey Family
Conference in Seattle Washington in 2007 for families of trans* and gender
non-conforming children. Here, I found the validation and concrete support I
was looking for from someone with a critical analysis of the impact of
gender-based and transphobic harassment and discrimination on the lives of
young children like my own.
I also turned to handbooks for families and professionals that address the
experiences and needs of transgender and gender creative kids (Brill &
Pepper, 2008; Ehrensaft, 2011). However, I found it necessary to ground my
understanding of my child’s experiences of discrimination and threat of
violence in the work of critical trans* academic-activists (Bauer et al., 2009;
Namaste, 2000; Spade, 2011) and grassroots trans* community groups (e.g.
FORGE, 2012; Sylvia Rivera Law Project, 2012). The theorizing and
organizing by these critical trans* scholars and grassroots trans* community
activists offers an intersectional framework to understand the broader cultural
and political contexts of erasure that structure gender non-conforming and
trans* children’s lives. Namaste’s analysis of erasure has been critically
important for theorizing and documenting the way trans* people are made
invisible–through discourse and institutionalized practices–and excluded from
health care, social services, and anti-violence organizing (see, for example,
Bauer et al., 2009). This work can help us more deeply understand the
intersecting systemic and structural relations of power that marginalize trans*
and gender non-conforming children.
Through my experiences as a parent I entered into new forms of advocacy
and activism, including building a coalition to mobilize support for policies to
support gender non-conforming and trans* children and youth in schools and
developing new relationships with other parent activists of trans* and gender
creative children. These forms of activism overlap with, and blur the
boundaries between, my past and present academic research about violence in
the lives of queer and trans* adults. They have also led to new research
trajectories and academic collaborations centered on the health of trans*
children and youth. This work, as a cisgender queer parent academic-activist,
has been transformative on many levels.
I had academic knowledge, I had community social work experience, I had my

partner’s experience. But this is a…deeper level of understanding in seeing how
my child navigates the world. I understand the policing of gender and its impact
on their body on such a deep, deep level. (Cindy, individual interview, January
12, 2015)

As a parent academic-activist of a gender creative child I am always

learning. My learning is shaped by the complex intersections between our
lived experiences (as a queer parent, my child and partner’s experiences), my
past and present community work, critical scholarship and trans* activism,
and the way my fear for my child’s safety and my fierce love for their
happiness and well-being propels me toward further activism and research.
Annie – Social Work: “Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk.”
Values of social justice, self-determination, and human dignity, understood

through anti-oppressive and critical lenses, have always been pivotal to my
articulation of professional ethics in teaching, research, and professional
practice in social work. From an early stage of my career, I have been driven
by a desire to develop a deeper understanding of, and develop tools to
facilitate, ethical practice and conduct in professional social work. To do so, a
virtue ethics framework (MacIntyre, 1985; 1999) has led me to argue that
ethical practice can be achieved through the development of character traits
anchored in collectively agreed upon professional values that would lead a
person to act ethically in any given moral situation, and to display those traits
in every sphere of his or her life. Virtue ethics is a form of moral philosophy
proposed by Aristotle that challenges the use of moral principles for ethical
life and, instead, claims that one needs to develop character or personality
traits that, once acquired, will always influence the person to act rightly.
Those traits, which are developed through habituation by drawing on practical
reasoning abilities, have to strike a balance between vice and excess, and
promote human flourishing of self and others. Courage, which is neither
recklessness nor cowardice, is often cited as a virtue (see Pullen Sansfaçon
and Cowden 2012 for further discussion). When I found myself parenting a
trans* child, applying an analysis of gender and age discrimination5 with
regard to broader social justice issues similarly helped me to accept my
daughter as a transgender person who deserves my respect and support.
Furthermore, a virtue ethics framework has helped me in my journey to
become an academic-activist, and to reflect on the way forward for us as a
family when we moved to a new neighbourhood in 2009. At that time, my
child was seven and increasingly persistent about her gender identity. As her
mother, I had always been supportive of her true self, but perhaps because of
worries about her security and what others might think of her, I was still a
little reluctant to allow her to display her gender non-conforming behaviour
outside of our home. I was also finalizing a book on social work ethics
(Pullen Sansfaçon & Cowden, 2012) that stresses the importance of critical

5
In the province of Quebec only adults can change their gender marker on official documents
(e.g. birth certificate, health card, driver’s license). Because transgender children and youth
cannot obtain a civil status that matches their gender identity, many experience discrimination in
their day-to-day lives.


and ethical reasoning during deliberations about ethical issues and dilemmas.
I vividly remember writing a case study about a gender non-conforming child,
and thinking “my gosh, I have been off the track the whole time with my
child!” Accepting your child, despite his/her differences with others is
fundamental to the value of human dignity and self-determination, but
mobilizing oneself to challenge constraining environments is also essential to
confronting oppression, furthering human rights, and defending the concept
of social justice. Integrating virtue ethics into my reflection on parenting
therefore brought my understanding of gender identity and expression to a
new level.
My scholarly work has, in this sense, contributed to my reflection on, and
understanding of, ethical approaches to parenting. However, embedding this
theoretical framework into every sphere of my life has also led me to realize
that ‘talking the talk’ was not sufficient: I needed to ‘walk the walk’ and to
begin to challenge those inequalities and experiences of oppression in the life
of my family. To do so, I needed to develop and draw on important character
traits, such as critical thinking, courage, and righteous indignation. It is from
this moment that I started working more proactively to make my daughter’s
environment a safer place by challenging oppressive structures of our
environment, rather than only trying to keep her safe inside the home.
My position as a faculty member was definitely helpful in the process as it
enabled me to network with other academic parents. Indeed, being a
professor played a key role in building my confidence and allowed me to
move from advocate (supporting and defending my daughter's needs in her
social environments such as school, health centre, etc.) to activist by
attempting to challenge broader injustice through political and social action.6
It also gave me direct access to current scholarship, which I slowly began to
draw upon to assert myself. To this end, being a scholar provided me with
the legitimacy to take positions on the care of transgender children.
Yeah, so I think people around me are okay [with her being gender non-
conforming]. I had some people who were not so keen on us facilitating [child’s
name]’s transition, but then again it comes back to values and virtues. For me
you know if I want to be coherent with who I am, then I’m not going to say - ah
yeah you know of course I understand what they’re saying, I understand its
destabilizing, but it’s … In the end I always say it’s my way or the highway, for
that [supporting my child] is non-negotiable. (Annie, individual interview, May
9, 2013)
Also, as an academic, I could begin to engage in research and contribute to

knowledge production on the topic of transgender children. However, I had
to re-orient my research career and enter the field of gender studies with a
PhD in Ethics. Furthermore, the decision to engage in knowledge generation

6According to Piven (2010) and Flood, Martin & Dreher (2013), generating supportive networks
of like-minded scholars is an essential component of undertaking academic activism.

about transgender children and families also created new challenges, such as
being a parent and a researcher engaged in the same issues that I experienced
at home as a parent, in a world that seems to mostly value research production
that is disinterested. I moved into a perplexing phase of my academic career
when I first started to speak out as an activist.
It’s about that balance between disclosing what I do for work and what I do for
life. That’s the main challenge for me. Because if I was not in my position, it’s
like a bit of a vicious circle, because my position gives me access to resources to
be able to advance the cause but I think if I didn’t have that position, I would be
able to get out even more. It’s constraining and enabling. (Annie, individual
interview, May 9, 2013)
It took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that I could undertake
research on a topic so close to my heart without being biased. With time,
however, I came to accept that research can be situated and critical. Despite
both its constraining and empowering possibilities, scholarship was central to
my becoming an activist insofar as it provided me with access to knowledge
and resources. If one is to integrate values into every sphere of one’s life, one
must start by reflecting on one’s own possible relationship with the broader
society, and how one would act if driven by social justice, human dignity, and
self-determination. Adherence to these values, which came through critical
reflection and scholarship, was central in the early years of supporting my
child as she affirmed her gender non-conformity, and will continue to be
central in my scholarly activism on transgender children in the future.
Kimberley – Political Science: “The Grant Proposal as Manifesto.”
But the activism for me is really thinking about the more global changes that
need to happen. We need to change society, not the child, right, and so that’s
kind of been the approach since we prepared the first grant application.
(Kimberley, individual interview, January 5, 2015)
For the past 20 years, I have focused much of my scholarship on the gender
dynamics of social movements in the People’s Republic of China. It thus
came somewhat of a surprise to my tenure review committee in January 2011,
when I submitted a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant application on the topic of the
social and political worlds of gender non-conforming children and their
families in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States.7 The decision to
write this team grant had been last minute. Up until that point, I had
struggled to see how my scholarship could be translated into an arena in

7
The SSHRC Insight Development Grant is designed to support scholars who are choosing to
depart from their previous area(s) of expertise to pursue a new focus of research.


which I had carried out no previous work and about which I felt I understood
so little. In part, my struggle can be attributed to the fact that I was still
beholden to a view that the study of transgender children was the exclusive
domain of physicians, psychologists, and educational specialists, not parents
or political scientists.
Academic activism was not something unknown to me; in fact, my
Master’s thesis focused on the work of Chinese women academic-activists in
the early 1990s. In the heady two years leading up to the 1995 Fourth World
Conference on Women (a moment when the term gender, shehui xingbie, was
first being used in the People’s Republic of China), I sought to understand
how women intellectuals were striving to change conditions in China through
their researching, speaking, and organizing efforts. But it was not until I
realized that my child’s gender expression was likely going to be a lightning
rod for discrimination and violence that I felt propelled to resituate my own
scholarship in more political terms. Writing the grant would play a key role
in this process.
Over the course of three weeks of intensive research and writing,
something quite unexpected happened: my fairly isolated journey as a parent
advocate began to shift into being part of a larger community, and my own
understanding of the issues affecting trans* children and their families began
to politicize. On the one hand, colleagues immediately stepped forward to
provide the ideas and research support necessary to craft a strong grant
application. On the other hand, the process of reading and writing rapidly
transformed my own consciousness, helping me to begin the hard work
necessary to understand the intersecting origins of trans* oppression. In
particular, I drew upon the work of Judith Butler (1990; 1993) to make sense
of the pathologizing literature that still dominated the North American study
of childhood gender non-conformity and Viviane Namaste (2000) to
understand the erasure of trans* lives in Canada. By the time my co-
applicants and I finished and submitted the final draft of the proposal we not
only had a template for a research project, but a powerful blueprint for social
action. Although we did not understand it then, we helped lay the conditions
for the emergence of our own activism.
Four years and a conference, website, community-based organization, and
several media events later, I have just finished writing a paper on the recent
explosion of parental advocacy in Canada (Manning, 2015). Similar to
Annie, I have abandoned the idea that my ability to contribute to new
thinking in this arena requires me to work from a place of ‘detached
neutrality’. Instead, I have fully embraced analytic autoethnography as a
central methodology in my work, a concept I was first introduced to in the
context of collectively working on this article, “Fighting for Trans* Kids.”
At the same time, I have found my understanding of the gender dynamics of
social movements immeasurably enriched by my academic parent activism.
Indeed, even with an open academic culture, extensive social support, and a
feminist partner, I have encountered tremendous challenges to ‘undo gender’

as a parent activist – challenges that were not unfamiliar to many Chinese

revolutionaries who struggled to juggle pregnancy and parenting with their
activism. To cite just one example, my child ‘came out’ to her peers at school
(an extremely emotional process that included a facilitated class discussion by
a professional psychologist) just days after my family moved into a partially
renovated house and the same day I opened the Gender Creative Kids
Conference. On maternity leave and caring for an eight-month old baby, it is
unsurprising that I collapsed with bronchitis less than two weeks later. For
me, there is little question that the embodied and affective processes of
‘mother-as-activist’ have at times pushed me to the limits of my endurance
and health, a critical struggle that continues to shape my understanding of
social movements to this day.
Julia – Sociology: “Silence.”
Your silence will not protect you. (Audre Lorde, 1984, p. 41)
Fear can be silencing. For parents of transgender children, silence about our
children’s gender diversity may also feel like the only protection we can offer
from a world that poses significant dangers to their safety and well-being. At
the same time, our silence serves to construct gender diverse children as an
invisible population (Hellen, 2009), further contributing to their
marginalization. As activists and academics we constantly have to weigh the
risks and benefits of silence as we advocate for our children and seek to
educate others about gender diversity.
While there were incredibly difficult personal moments when my child
transitioned, I was fortunate that my academic background provided me with
a framework to question the pathologization of children’s gender diversity
and come to terms with my child’s identity. The work of Ann Fausto-Sterling
(2000; 2012) made clear for me the complex inseparability of social and
biological explanations of gender. My background in feminist theory,
particularly black feminist and queer theories, helped me to understand how
dominant discourse can silence the experiences of marginalized groups.
I’m a sociologist working in health. So […] it’s not a big leap for me to see
transgender people’s lives as being medicalized and how transgender people
have been defined and continue to be defined by the medical system. It disturbs
me sometimes how much, still, transgender people have to depend on the
medical system for legitimacy. (Julia, individual interview, November 21, 2014)
In contrast, family, friends, educators, and health care providers were much
less comfortable with the concept of gender diversity. Many reacted initially
to our child’s identity with shock and confusion, and we experienced outright
hostility and rejection from a close friend who viewed transgender children
through the lens of pathology.


There’s so much fear […] there’s so many myths and misunderstanding. I think
unfortunately sometimes when people are driven by fear, that’s when it gets the
scariest. That’s when people have these almost violent reactions […]. (Julia,
individual interview, November 21, 2014)
For a time I felt immobilized and silenced by the loss of my friend, by the
reactions of disbelief and disgust we encountered, and by fear for my child’s
future. However, I came to realize that the only way I could cope with that
fear was to fight to change this transphobic world that sees my child as a
threat. Pain does not have to be stifling, but can be a catalyst for social
change. Just as bell hooks (2010) writes about turning passion into action for
political change, I realized that my love and desire to protect my child could
be funneled into a powerful force for activism and advocacy. I also
recognized that I could draw on my privilege as an academic health
researcher in order to be seen as a legitimate advocate for the well-being of
trans* children. Today, I regularly give training sessions on children’s gender
diversity, and my academic privilege provides a safe ‘mask’ from behind
which I can educate and advocate while still protecting my child’s privacy.
However, a recent experience made me realize that this mask of silence can
also render me unexpectedly vulnerable to the emotional work (Hochschild,
2012) of advocacy. I was asked to give a workshop on children’s gender
diversity to the staff of a junior high school. The response to this presentation
usually involves many questions and considerable skepticism, but in the end
the experience has been almost entirely positive. However, on this day, just
as I began, one of the educators in the audience stood up, banging the desk in
front of him. He loudly identified himself as “conservative” and opposed to
the “progressive agenda” that “these parents are trying to push.” Throughout
the presentation, he interrupted over and over again, ranting against
transgender children and their parents with anger and derision. This
individual confronted me as an academic; I believe he would not have spoken
so aggressively had he realized he was attacking me personally. Externally, I
remained calm, but internally I was shaking with the overwhelming fear and
anger of a parent defending her child. It took immense emotional effort to
maintain my professional academic mask. By the end of the workshop, I was
physically and emotionally exhausted.
It is a well-known feminist saying that the personal is political and, equally,
the political can be deeply personal. When your activism is connected to your
parenting, and you bring your activism into your academic work, all three
overlap until the boundaries are so blurred as to be almost non-existent. This
blurring of boundaries creates a constant tension: Are my actions to try to
change the world and to make it safer for my child simultaneously making her
unsafe? When I give an academic presentation to fellow researchers or a
training session to health care providers, I have to make a judgment about
how much to reveal or hide about my child and our family. Will this
information help create awareness and understanding? How safe is it for

these people to be aware that my child is transgender? Even my participation

in this article, identifying myself as an academic parent of a transgender child,
is a risk, and not one that I have taken lightly. I constantly second-guess
myself on the risks and benefits of silence.
In the darker moments, when facing an audience who would see my child
as aberrant or ill, and my support for her as misguided or even abusive, the
mask of silence feels safer. But silence also creates shadows, creates fear,
and creates shame. As Audre Lorde so wisely reminded us, silence may
appear safe, but its protection can only ever be a precarious illusion.
Ann – Sociology: “That grinding feeling in my gut.”
I am a sociologist who works primarily on issues relating to sex and gender

while working hard to integrate critical race and class analyses into my
scholarship and activism. I am the leader of a research team that is working to
develop a video game model of the life experiences of transgender and gender
non-conforming children and youth in the Greater Vancouver area, and I
engage in social action research and participate in local, national, and
international initiatives on behalf of transgender and gender non-conforming
children and young people. I am also queer and trans* myself and
experienced a childhood of abuse, gender oppression, and self-hatred. I
became as invisible as I could to survive adolescence, but university gave me
a safe place to come out of hiding. Since coming out of that first closet, I keep
striving for greater authenticity and accountability. My efforts are grounded
in my own privilege as I enjoy a charmed life as a white, middle-class
professor and habitually comport myself with a sense of polite entitlement
and self-confidence.
I am the white trans/queer parent of two black children, one of whom is
transgender and I am working out much of my and their lived reality through
my academic work. The current manuscript I am working on situates
transgender and gender non-conforming children in the radical critical race
theory of necropolitics. As Mbembe (2003) defines in his groundbreaking
piece on the subject, necropolitics represents state power over who lives and
who dies. Some members of society are awarded with life and life-sustaining
resources while others are not. Though Mbembe focuses explicitly on state
atrocities on a large scale (e.g. colonialism, the Nazi concentration camp,
apartheid, Gaza), queer and trans* necropolitical analyses (Haritaworn,
Kuntsman & Posocco, 2014; Puar, 2007; Snorton & Haritaworn, 2013)
identify systemic racism, classism, and the power of the state as axes of
precarity that shape which categories of queer and transgender members of
the social body live and which either die or suffer a ‘slow death’ (Berlant,
2007). My own trans/queer identity, the blackness of my children and the
transgender being of my daughter means that I have ‘skin in the game’ and a


sense of urgency around the ways in which race and gender place my children
at risk.
While I have been an anti-racist ally since childhood, I notice how easy it
is, in some ways, to relax into the comfort of the whitestream (Denis, 1997;
Krebs, 2012) as a shaping force of my world, 8 or to expect to be
congratulated for resisting racism. But, for the past 10 years, anti-black
racism has been deeply personal to me. My 10-year-old child is a transracially
adopted African-American, 9 transgender citizen of Canada, with white queer
parents, one of whom identifies as trans/non-binary (and both of whom have
demanding full-time jobs), a white older sister, and a younger brother who is
African-American but lighter in colour and for whom it seems everything
comes easier. While I am currently on study leave with book project
deadlines, my partner and I have made the difficult decision to remove our
10-year-old from the school she has known and loved since kindergarten, and
where her transgender transition and status has been almost entirely non-
traumatic.
I have worked so hard to find safe spaces for our black transgender
daughter, including investigating various schools from the time she was three-
and-a-half and wearing dresses ‘as a boy’. Until recently, the school our
daughter has attended has provided a warm climate. Since the fall of 2014,
however, she has been explosive at home and talking about self-harm. She
also became engaged in a hostile dynamic with a newly arrived child in her
class who has experienced trauma of his own. The ongoing challenges
resulting from our daughter’s learning disabilities, combined with being
targeted by this student (behaviour that has been stopped but that has had a
residual effect on my daughter’s sense of comfort), has pushed our vulnerable
child over the edge. The solution for children like mine, recommended by the
professionals we have consulted with (and paid for out of pocket), is some
form of home schooling until an appropriate alternative school is found. I
may just be the most reluctant home schooler in the world, but pulling her as
closely into my orbit as I can right now while seeking out a range of
professional and social support for her, feels like the only right thing I can do.
And I am not sure it is right at all: our daughter is incredibly upset to be kept
out of school. This, not my book project, has me up at five in the morning
with that grinding feeling in my gut.
The kind of support our daughter needs requires wealth and maternal
resources and this rankles me. In addition to the personal wealth necessary to
support her, it requires a bank of maternal caregiving (Messner, 2011). That

8
For example, I arrived at the U.S. border recently to realize that I had left my passport at home.
Although I was worried, I knew my race and class privilege meant there was a good chance my
drivers’ license would be accepted as sufficient identification. As I expected, the whitestream
operated as a magic carpet; I was allowed to proceed with a warning to “remember to bring my
passport next time.”
9
The term “transracially adopted’ refers to circumstances where child and adoptive parents
belong to different racialized groups.

grinding feeling in my gut is there because my partner and I, with all the
cultural and material resources that we have and are able to muster, are unable
to protect this child from harm. According to Dean Spade (2011), gender,
race, class, and immigration status are vectors of vulnerability and security
that impact life chances. Add systems of normative ability to that list. Parents
of children who are made vulnerable by these vectors fear for their children’s
well-being in deep ways. I see our daughter’s future as a black transgender
woman or as an effeminate man (she is still deciding) and want her to excel in
school as a way to limit her vulnerability, but this is not happening and I am
extremely worried about her. When our daughter was a baby and I thought of
her as a boy, I would resist comments from white people such as “Oh, I bet
he’s going to be a great football player,” with “whatever he decides to do
after medical school is up to him.” This was an effective way of interrupting
racist stereotypes of physicality and embodiment but it traded on wealth and
cultural capital. That my partner and I may fail to protect our daughter from
exposure to future ‘risk’ is behind that grinding feeling in my gut. How are
we ever going to protect her and give her the resources she needs not just to
survive but thrive? I would do almost anything.
Closing Thoughts
In an era of “intensive mothering” (Hays, 1996, pp. 6-9) and in the face of the
contradictory institutional pressures that comprise academia, our liminal
allyship assumes affectively complex and, at times, contradictory
configurations. Underlying all five narratives is our fierce desire,
paraphrasing Cindy, to protect our children from harm and to give them the
resources they need to survive and to thrive. Our need to protect our children
is a strength, pushing us forward to actively fight for the rights of all trans*
kids. But it is also what renders us vulnerable to the emotional strain of
liminal allyship, no matter the resources we are able to access.
In the attempt to counter the gendered and racialized discrimination that our
children and so many other children face, we have all deepened in our
understanding of the queer, trans*, feminist, and anti-oppression scholarship
that has so long stood as a basis for making sense of our own identities and
for guiding our research. For the three of us who are tenured professors, the
academy has provided more than theoretical resources; it has supported our
professional decision to begin to research, write, publish, and speak publicly
about the challenges facing trans* children in Canada today. The 2012
conference on Gender Creative Kids, and the website that was designed in its
wake, for example, would never have transpired without the support of
colleagues and funding from SSHRC. In a post-recession era of fiscal
austerity, it is heartening that grant review boards have recognized this work
as valuable and worthy of significant funding resources. For the two of us
who hold postdoctoral fellowships and are currently seeking permanent


tenure track positions, the future is less certain. Without the institutional
security that tenure affords, our capacity to continue to engage in academic
activism remains in flux.
At the same time, we are also gendered as ‘mothers’ (although Ann’s
transgender non-conformity creates a queer fit for this category). More
specifically, we are gendered as white, middle class, academic ‘mothers’; a
privileged site of economic, cultural, and social capital. Indeed, we are
ethically accountable to our scholarly and activist communities. and to our
children and families, in the context of this privilege. A central challenge to
our liminal allyship thus not only entails interrogating the costs of silence
versus speech and the deep imperative to protect our children, but also
interrogating the limits of methodologies, including the autoethnographic
method, in which speech itself is weighted with power and thus requires
vigilant theoretical interrogation.10 We recognize that even as we advocate for
our trans* children and for the realization of gender justice more broadly, we
often find ourselves crashing ashore on the racialized, classed, and gendered
landscape that is early 21st century academic motherhood.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant. File number: 611-
2012-0078. Cindy acknowledges funding from Michael Smith Foundation for
Health Research.
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Activismo de Padres Académicos Infancias Trans

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Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

for Trans* Kids: Academic Parent

ANNIE PULLEN SANSFAÇON

JULIA TEMPLE NEWHOOK

KEYWORDS transgender; children and youth; autoethnography; parental activism;

Correspondence Address: Kimberley Ens Manning, Department of Political Science, Concordia

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

inherent in our academic positions enables us to support trans*-positive

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

Cindy – Interdisciplinary Studies (Sociology, Social Work, Geography):

[our child’s] gender non-conformity was not… something where I turned to

I had academic knowledge, I had community social work experience, I had my

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

As a parent academic-activist of a gender creative child I am always

Annie – Social Work: “Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk.”

Values of social justice, self-determination, and human dignity, understood

Also, as an academic, I could begin to engage in research and contribute to

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

Kimberley – Political Science: “The Grant Proposal as Manifesto.”

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

as a parent activist – challenges that were not unfamiliar to many Chinese

Julia – Sociology: “Silence.”

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

these people to be aware that my child is transgender? Even my participation

Ann – Sociology: “That grinding feeling in my gut.”

I am a sociologist who works primarily on issues relating to sex and gender

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4),

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 9, Issue 1, 118-135, 2015

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