What does it mean to do gender in a world in which the system of gender, from a white, cisgender perspective, is seemingly changing? Tey Meadow's Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century aims to answer this question by utilizing ethnographic analyses that provide thick description, complex answers, and even more questions for future research. The book makes valuable contributions to the sociology of gender and families, but its lack of engagement with critical trans epistemologies and use of outdated language limit its contributions to trans studies. In Trans Kids, Meadow argues that parents’ and adults’ perceptions of trans kids are shifting within the family, medicine, and activist spaces. The majority of the parents in the study utilized essentialist logic to understand their child's transness. Such logic ranged from gene mutations to psychological and neurological divergences to spiritual ideas of transness being “a status that's entrusted to souls”...
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November 1, 2021
Issue Editors
Book Review|
November 01 2021
Parenting Trans Kids in a Cisgender World
Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century
. Meadow, Tey. Oakland
: University of California Press
, 2018
. 320
pp.
Alithia Zamantakis
Alithia Zamantakis
Alithia Zamantakis is a PhD candidate in sociology at Georgia State University. She is also the director of LGBTQ+ Programs and Services at Shippensburg University. Zamantakis is a scholar of racialized cissexism, trans/nonbinary dating and hook-up culture, and critical cisness studies.
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TSQ (2021) 8 (4): 579–581.
Citation
Alithia Zamantakis; Parenting Trans Kids in a Cisgender World. TSQ 1 November 2021; 8 (4): 579–581. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9336267
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