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

Abstract

Gender diversity in childhood has become an issue of significant public debate in Britain. Growing concerns have amassed around the exposure of children and adolescents to new forms of gendered knowledge and expression, arousing discourses of childhood ‘vulnerability’ and ‘innocence’. These ideas draw on a specific framework for understanding ‘childhood’, in which children are depicted as passive, dependent and in need of protection, as they follow a universal, predetermined developmental pathway. Among other effects, this has resulted in a dearth of empirical research that has explored gender diversity as a developmental experience 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 investment 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 informed 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.