Accepted Panels

As the mother of a trans boy I find myself using a narrative that ‘I’m literally fighting for his life’.  This trope is born out of the fact that trans people as a marginalised community have a 50% chance of attempting and/or succeeding in suicide as a response to their suffering.  Research has found that ‘reflected appraisals and social stigma’ mediate the ability of parents to slowly ‘undo’ and ‘redo’ gender when negotiating their relational identities to their children (Whitley 2013).  Parents of a transgender child both encounter stigma and fear being blamed for their child’s transgender status. This sits beside feelings of guilt when they chose not to explain their child’s transgender status to friends, other family members and strangers who can and do misgender their child. Discursively ‘fighting for their children’s lives’ obliges many parents to slowly ‘undo’ and ‘redo’ gender through a logic of intimate care.  Equally, many trans children face parental obstruction via intimate ‘failed enactments’ of their gender acting upon them through a logic of care.  This paper examines uncertain parenting and discursive practices of parents of trans children where they are faced with intimate affective and ethical dimensions of their marginalised children’s diversities and have allied (or not), more or less with their children (and with many others) to slowly undo and redo gender.