Paper short abstract:

Ordinariness is a common theme in narratives of transgender childhood. I examine what constitutes the ordinary from the different perspectives of transgender children and their parents. This child-centered approach complicates analyses of gender normativity.

Paper long abstract:

Normalcy is a common theme in narratives of transgender childhood. Yet while parents and health professionals often emphasize normalcy, invoking the categories of “ordinary parenting” and “ordinary childhood,” I ask how transgender youth experience and articulate ordinariness themselves. I draw on fieldwork conducted with youth receiving care at a gender-affirming clinic within a large children’s hospital. I found that transgender children and adolescents, like many adults in their lives, narrate their experiences in “ordinary” terms, but that in the context of a young person’s own narrative, ordinariness takes on different meanings. For my interlocutors, ordinariness is an experiential category which indexes a wide array of social contexts and relationships, which may exceed biopolitical frameworks of gender recognition. By rethinking what constitutes the ordinary from the different vantage points of transgender children and their parents, this paper complicates analyses of gender normativity by reorienting to a child-centered point of view. I argue that attending to both the intense valuation of ordinariness and its multiple, divergent meanings helps elucidate the ongoing racialization of transgender childhood and allows us to envision a less deterministic conceptualization of gender identity development.