Don't Give Up Hope!

 

Just waving my little trans flag. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 margin that states have the right to ban puberty blockers and any other gender-affirming care being provided to minors. Its supposed reasoning was that the science is unsettled and the topic controversial, so the matter must be left to the states to decide how best to protect trans children.

 

The Court treated flawed, biased, and debunked research by transphobes that has been rejected by all of the major American medical associations as being as valid as reputable, peer-reviewed research. The "medical controversy" it centered is not a controversy within the reputable medical science community.

 

Nor did the Court mention that the Trump administration has cancelled the funding of every single scientific study of trans health, gender affirming care, and the experiences of discrimination of trans, nonbinary, and intersex Americans. (Such funding made up less than 1% of the NIH budget, but has accounted for half of all grant dollars cancelled.) How can such research be considered both vital and determinative by the Court, yet the fact that the federal government is doing everything it can to terminate any such research go unmentioned?

 

The Court also did not care that puberty blockers have been prescribed to thousands and thousands of children who are not trans for decades, with zero controversy, and that this continues today, again without controversy. Nor did the Court note that intersex children who do not request puberty blockers regularly have them imposed--and not only is this accepted by the transphobes who have banned trans care, but framed as obligatory.

 

And all of this is supposed to be to protect trans kids. The youths themselves are thus framed as having no true self-knowledge. The parents who see how gender-affirming care has markedly improved their children's mental health are told that states may hold they are wrong, and are actually abusively exposing their children to harm, when they are in fact doing everything in their power to protect their children's wellbeing.

 

This is not about the government protecting children. It is about the state controlling them, based on bigotry against people like them, like me, like my wife. Want a little proof? On the same day that the Supreme Court announced this decision, the Trump administration ordered the Trevor Project, which provides suicide-prevention hotline services to queer and trans youth, to cease its work. The cruelty is, as ever, the point. They want us to know they don't care if we die.

 

But I care! I see you, all you lovely trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex folks out there, of every age. And so do so many other people! I wave my little trans flag for you. We cannot be erased--not by some ludicrous executive order, not by some wrongly-decided SCOTUS case, not by all the bigots who blather about their freedoms while blatantly denying freedom to others to live and love as their hearts urge them to do. 

 

Don't give up hope, and never stop fighting and shining!

The Real Problem When it Comes to Trans Kids and Athletics

 

At the time I write this, 12 states now ban either trans girls, or all trans youth, from participating in school athletics. Eight more currently have bills pending, and others have bills waiting to be introduced.

Attacking trans youths, especially trans girls, is all the rage in America's "red states." This is claimed in the most outraged tones to be necessary to protect cis girls. Trans girls are misgendered as "males" and framed as barging into girls' spaces. Lawmakers say the people of their great states are panicked over the need to protect cis girls' privacy, and outraged that "biological females" participating in sports will no longer be able to win trophies or ribbons, because of "males' natural advantage."

Context

Generating sex panics to energize conservative culture warriors is nothing new. Between 1998 and 2012, the same states now banning trans girls from sports banned same-gender marriage. These discriminatory laws were called "Defense of Marriage" acts, and it was claimed that allowing people of the same gender to form legal families would somehow imperil the family as an institution and destroy moral values. My own lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, stated, "This is a slippery slope. . . at what point are we going to be OK marrying inanimate objects? Can I marry this table, or this, you know, clock? Can we marry dogs?" To allow same-gender marriage was to condone bestiality and table-marrying.

The movement to ban same-gender marriage was bigoted and ridiculous--as bans on trans kids' sport participation are bigoted and ridiculous. Allowing two people of the same gender to marry actually strengthens investment in families, protects children, and does exactly zero to harm marriages between women and men. But claiming that supporting LGBTQ+ families would somehow destroy society was extremely effective in generating political energy and funds for conservative political candidates.

And before the panic about same-gender marriage on the right, there was panic about laws that would prevent job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The 1970s and 80s saw the "Save Our Children" movement and its spinoffs, which claimed that because "homosexuals cannot procreate," they sought access to children to "convert" to homosexuality via pedophilic abuse, and were seeking bans on discrimination so they could access vulnerable children as teachers or scouting leaders. This slander about pedophilia was very useful in funneling evangelical Christians and large amounts of money into Republican campaigns, and so Republican politicians keep stoking it, decade after decade. Consider what Gov. Ron Desantis' press secretary Christin Pushaw recently tweeted, in defending Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill that bans discussions or children's books mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary schools. She claimed, "The bill that liberals inaccurately call 'Don't Say Gay' would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill. If you're against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don't denounce the grooming of 4-8 year-old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn't make the rules." The term "grooming" refers to preparing a child to be sexually abused-- recycling the same old claim made by "Save Our Children" decades ago. LGBTQ+ people are seeking to get at your children, to abuse and convert them. 

And before sex panics about LGBTQ+ people, America had developed a long tradition of justifying racial segregation and racial terrorism as necessary to protect white women and girls from Black men, framed as monstrous sexual predators. I've written before about how tactics deployed against trans people in the U.S. today are heavily modeled on those developed to oppress African Americans, after the end of slavery and the withdrawal of Reconstruction. 

The Problem

So, America has a long history of using panics about sex, gender, and sexuality to keep the conservative masses politically engaged. I know it's nothing new. But I hear a lot of cis people who mean well say that as if it is supposed to be comforting when it comes to state bans on trans youth participation in sports. "Don't worry, they're always saying this about someone." Either I'm told that they'll lose interest eventually and turn their attention to some other target, or I'm served some narrative about progress being inevitable. And anyway, I'm told, there aren't really a lot of kids being affected--the bans are symbolic. Basically, we're being trolled and should just ignore the trolling.

OK, let's look at these claims one by one.

Progress is unfortunately not inevitable; it requires a deep investment of time and energy. But even if it were, this blasé mindset ignores the tremendous damage done to people's lives during the long years while that progress is being fought for--including years in which other hate campaigns take center stage. It's true that to keep levels of political outrage high, conservative politicians and influencers shift their focus around to keep the news fresh. But when news cycle is focused elsewhere, the discriminatory laws and policies don't fade. Nor do the negative interactions marginalized people have with bigots go away because the particular flavor of hate aimed at them isn't a media focus at that moment.

Then there is the idea that not many people are affected, or the impact isn't serious. The spotlight in evaluating the impact of bias gets focused on the many who do not survive. Over 4000 Black people were lynched in acts of white supremacist racial terrorism between the end of Reconstruction and 1950. More than half of all trans youth reported that they had seriously considered suicide in 2020, and about 1 in 5 trans youth of color reported having attempted to kill themselves.

But I think the focus on mortality both understates and misstates the problem. Well-meaning cis allies are correct: very, very few trans kids are getting kicked off of their school athletics teams now as these bans are being passed. And nobody dies of being kicked off a team.

But the reason so few kids are getting kicked off teams is because, formally or informally, almost all trans youths are already being kept out of school athletics. Tennessee passed a law banning trans youth from sports, despite the fact that the transphobic activist organizations and legislators could not find a single example of a trans girl ever participating in Tennessee school sports. Neither could North Dakota, or Indiana, but their legislatures passed bans. Utah found exactly one trans girl participating in school sports. 

This demonstrates the real problem, which is that trans girls aren't overrepresented in sports--they are drastically underrepresented.

Trans boys and nonbinary kids assigned female at birth are also deeply underrepresented--even though the "logic" of trans sport participation bans doesn't apply to them at all. The claim is that "biological males" inevitably beat "biological females," giving all trans girls, trans women, and nonbinary folks assigned male at birth an unfair advantage. This myth has been debunked at length elsewhere. (And that one trans girl athlete in Utah? She works hard, but her performance is totally middle of the pack.) In any case, by that "logic", transmasculine youth should be at a sport disadvantage, with cis boys having an innate advantage over them. But because bigots like to cloak their bigotry in an appearance of fairness, many of the trans sport participation bans apply to all youths.

So, trans kids of all birth genders and all identities are being kept out of sports. Individual principals or coaches or school boards may have formally banned their participation. But it's rarely necessary. Because trans kids see clearly what is going on. It has been made crystal clear to them that if they try to participate in school athletics, peers will attack them in locker rooms, adults will spit at them in school board meetings, their parents will be targets of hate and perhaps death threats, and now that they might be removed from their family homes, because familial support of trans youths is being framed as child abuse by right-wing culture warriors. 

Trans girls do not present a threat to cis girls in sports. But because they are claimed to do so, almost all of the many thousands of trans youth around the country do not participate in athletics. As usual, conservative culture warriors reverse victim and offender, and abuse the marginalized. 

I don't really think I need to tell you this, but participating in athletics is healthy for children and adults, while being inactive is not. 

So: these bans may just formalize what is already the praxis. Trans kids are already kept from sporting participation. But the same was true of same-gender marriage bans. States passed them despite the fact that same-gender marriages weren't being performed. The importance of this legal discrimination is that the act of campaigning about and passing discriminatory laws is meant to create fear and silence. To cause people to stay in the closet. For the privileged to erase and "cancel" the marginalized, while claiming that it is they, the privileged, who are the real victims, the real targets of "cancellation."

Telling trans folks to just ignore these bills as trolling because there are few trans kids affected ignores the fact that the vast majority of trans kids, of every birth sex and every gender identity, are already affected.

It's really important that we see the real problem here for what it is. Because framing transfeminine people as a threat generates energy for right-wing politicians and for TERF influencers addicted to the "culture war," trans kids are vastly underrepresented in school sports. They have been segregated out formally, and terrorized informally into self-segregation. 

Young people need our support and encouragement, not to be terrorized. People who recognize the humanity of trans kids should be pointing this out every time some bigot starts with the TERF/right-wing claims that their actions are motivated by care about girls' and their participation in sports. 

A Bathroom Panic Bill Hits Wisconsin

I suppose it was only a matter of time. A transphobic bathroom gender-policing bill has hit my home state and its Republican-controlled legislature. 

Republican state legislators have proposed a bill to require that Wisconsin schools:

1. "Designate all locker rooms and bathrooms for one gender exclusively;"

2. Only allow students to access facilities matching their "biological gender" as determined by chromosomes and anatomy at birth (a framing which incidentally puts intersex children in a terrible position, apparently banned from using any bathroom);

3. Allow transphobic parents to "file a written complaint if they feel their student’s privacy is being violated because of transgender students’ use of a school’s bathroom or locker room;"

4. If transphobic parents are not satisfied by the school's resolution of the complaint, allow them to "file a lawsuit against the district seeking money or other kinds of damages" (among which is mentioned in discussion by one of the bill's sponsors the expulsion of the trans child from the school); and

5. Require the state Department of Justice to defend school districts in lawsuits alleging the policy is discriminatory.

Now, mind you, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights has determined that Title IX guarantees trans students protection, including access to facilities that match their gender identity. The U.S. Department of Justice holds that forcing trans students to use a specially-designated separate bathroom instead of the regular gendered facilities violates that student's civil rights. So a lawsuit will follow, and I as a taxpayer will have to pay to have the state lawyers argue that people like me and my wife should be segregated and excluded and treated as a threat.

The legislators introducing this bill use the same-old, same-old tactic of disguising their hatred of trans people as a noble urge to Protect the Children. "What if a [cis] girl is followed into a restroom by someone and she can't tell if it is a trans gender student or a dangerous [cis] male up to no good?" Time after time, cities and towns and school districts voting on whether to protect trans people from discrimination have been faced with hysterical claims that (cis) women and girls would be attacked by a flood of predators if trans people's rights are respected. Time and again, it hasn't happened. You see, it is already illegal to assault people. (Which is not to say that girls and students of other genders aren't sexually assaulted with depressing frequency at high schools. But what is enabling this isn't that their assailants are pretending to be trans--it's that they are seen as very normatively masculine, their behavior is written off with a shrug as "boys will be boys," and it's the victims who get shamed. If Republicans really wanted to protect students from sexual assault, they'd attack rape culture, not trans students.)

I hope that Rep. Jesse Kremer, R-Kewaskum, and Sen. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, and their counterparts in the other cities and states who are introducing a rash of transphobic "bathroom bills," some day come to feel the full weight of shame their actions deserve. Bear in mind that 78% of trans K-12 students are harassed and assaulted at school. A large-scale study of college students found that a quarter of trans students were raped during their college career. And as a result of pervasive mistreatment and disrespect, 41% of trans people report having attempted suicide in their lives. The transmisogynist trope of "men in dresses" posing some pervasive social threat to cis women and girls conceals the reality: that trans children and adults are victimized and abused and murdered at terrible rates. And the actions of legislators like Kewaskum and Nass treat this state of affairs as all well and good--as in fact, a state that should be made worse.

We really need to work to protect trans children in schools, not attack them. A fair number of school districts in Wisconsin have instituted policies to protect trans students, including the one in which I live and the districts of Menasha and Madison. Students here in Shorewood have been very supportive of the protection of trans students' rights to use the bathroom in peace. In Madison, any student who is possessed by an irrational fear of possibly encountering a trans person in a bathroom is directed to use a special single-stall nongendered facility. There have been no issues, no rash of cis boys suddenly telling everyone they are trans so that they can assault cis girls.

What Republican legislators here in Wisconsin and elsewhere who are introducing gender-policing bathroom bills want to do is reverse the modest degree of social progress trans people have made. They are standing on the side of hate, and their victims are the children, teens and adults who really need protection.

"No, You're Not Going to be an Astronaut When You Grow Up"--Transphobia Translated

(Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of depression with drugs. He has a side gig writing pop psychology opinion pieces for the New York Times, and on August 22nd, the Times published an op-ed of his on trans people. Friedman has no special knowledge or expertise on trans issues or gender transition. In fact, he cites ridiculously outdated forty-year-old research on the "sissy boy syndrome" (which basically held that boys who wish to and are permitted to play with dolls grow up to be "homosexuals"). But Friedman uses his social authority as a professor of medicine to frame his personal negative opinions about gender transition and trans experience as The Truth. And his opinion piece immediately became one of the Times' most emailed and read items. This blog post is a parody of Friedman's piece, following his line of arguments but replacing sexuality and gender with career paths.) 

How Changeable Are Career Interests?
By Richard A. Friedman, MBA
Professor of Finance, Burberry Business School

Space exploration has been much in the news recently, with the New Horizons spacecraft providing dramatic images of Pluto's "heart," and astronauts on the International Space Station shown munching on lettuce grown in orbit. While astronauts make up a tiny percentage of the employed population, they have been getting a lot of media attention.

Certainly we should allow people to have whatever careers they wish, including atypical ones like becoming an astronaut. Society once looked down at "computer geeks," but today developers of software and applications run successful businesses and are embraced by many. We now know that therapies aimed at curing nerdiness by withholding computers and forcing individuals to play sports or take ballet classes are not effective. Is something similar true for those who profess a desire to pursue a career as an astronaut?

Scientific evidence does seem to show that while most people are intrinsically drawn either to jobs that pay well, or jobs that are stable and secure, career desires exist on a spectrum. Some people are, for whatever reason, committed to careers that are both insecure yet rarely make them wealthy, such as being in a band or venturing into space.

So, how should career counselors approach individuals who profess an interest in becoming a drummer or piloting a space craft, and state they cannot be happy unless they enter these careers?

Unfortunately, research shows that people who pursue these careers do not achieve the happiness they seek. Many aspirant rock stars find themselves playing small gigs in local bars, unable to support themselves, disappointing and angering their parents. The chances of those who wish to become astronauts ever being launched on a mission are low, and those who do go into space face mortal risks that destabilitze relationships with spouses and children. It seems that many would be much better off getting a job in middle management, and making Spotify playlists or building model spaceships as a hobby. And, in fact, this is what many people in the end choose to do. It seems that an interest in unstable careers is more malleable and is more of a choice than a fixed characteristic such as nerdiness.

Still, we are good libertarian individualists, and believe that people should be able to make whatever career choices they wish. If a grown man or woman believes that they could be the next Beyoncé or Neil Armstrong, despite all the eye-rolling they get from others, so be it.

But what about the children?

The issue of whether to encourage children who say they plan to be astronauts when they grow up is extremely controversial. In fact, most career counseling professionals I spoke with refused to discuss the issue on the record. I was warned that if I dared to write about the reasons why such encouragement is a bad idea, I would be attacked by the astronaut lobby. 

But I must speak truth to power. And that truth is that children often have unrealistic fantasies about their future careers. Many children state that they want to dig up dinosaurs or be elected president or become a professional gymnast when they grow up. And studies show that of all the children who write a school essay about their intent to become an astronaut, as many as 80% may grow up to have typical corporate jobs in adulthood.

Now, when astronauts are interviewed, we do find that virtually every one of them first expressed interest in this career as a young child. But how can we possibly tell whether a child who says they want to go into space some day will be one of these "persisters," when most children lose interest in such an insecure career path? So if you are, say, the parent of an 8-year-old who says she is going to be an astronaut, we can see why you might tell the child, "No, you won't."

Some claim that there are many studies that show that supporting children in their atypical career interests increases their self-esteem, improves their mental health, and betters their future financial success. But these are all flawed, because the researchers do not randomly assign the children studied to have typical or atypical career interests! Instead, we should focus on a forty-year-old study that found that boys who were allowed to obsessively play space-themed video games like Asteroid were likely to grow up to be nerds--not astronauts. Clearly, this study is much more relevant, and shows that we should not take a childhood interest in space seriously.

What is troubling is that many parents are in fact not just tolerating their children's probably transitory interests in atypical careers, but encouraging them. If the children claim an interest in space piloting, they are decorating their children's rooms with posters of the solar system, enrolling them in science enrichment courses, helping them with science-fair projects about comets--even sending children as young as 7 to Space Camp. Children who say they want to be pop stars are purchased instruments and enrolled in music lessons, given dance classes, permitted to adopt extravagant hairstyles, and applauded while participating in talent shows and even karaoke.

These actions may be irreversible.

What a school career counselor should do, given the social and psychological realities, is to tell parents to do nothing to encourage a child who expresses an interest in an insecure career, but take a wait-and-see approach. The parents should not enroll the child in science or music camp, or purchase them a telescope or keyboard. They should ask teachers not to encourage their children's stated interests in an insecure career. Children should not be allowed to wear t-shirts picturing the International Space Station or Skrillex. Career counselors should emphasize that most children will outgrow their youthful fantasies and become ordinary and respectable business and professional employees--accountants and assistant managers and customer service representatives.

Activists such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson and advocacy organizations such as the American Federation of Musicians do urge parents to support children's interests in astronomy and music.  They claim that children, even young ones, should be supported in any career interest they express, and that to refuse to do this is equivalent to the conversion therapy that was formerly practiced on computer nerds. Such a position is misguided. Career choices are malleable, and we must not take radical action based on cherished personal beliefs about valuing all careers equally.

We must be skeptical and demand more data, rather than damaging children by supporting their interests.

Camp You Are You

Recently, Slate ran an article on You Are You, a summer camp for children who were assigned male at birth and who would like to have two weeks in which they are free to dress in feminine attire.  The article, illustrated with photographs by Lindsay Morris, has gotten a lot of attention in my online social circles, and I wanted to reflect on it.

(The photo on the left is not one of Morris' photos, which are copyrighted; it's a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a young boy.  No, he wasn't crossdressing--young boys wore frilly frocks in his day.  Gender norms change a lot over time. . .  But you can look at Lindsay Morris' photos by clicking here.)

I celebrate camp You Are You for giving children and their families a safe space to enjoy freedom of gender expression.  What I want to do here is to discuss the article, and the commentary on it I've encountered in my online milieu.  I'm not going to attempt to respond to the public comments on the Slate site, as reading such comment sections often makes a sane person despair of the human race.  Instead I want to address the issues raised by people with good intentions.

As such articles go, the Slate article is a good one.  I appreciate the framing of camp You Are You in the article as being about the joys of gender expression, rather than about "tragic" children's lives, which is a more common and frustrating trope.  Now, the subtitle of the article is "A Boys' Camp to Redefine Gender."  I appreciate the recognition that a person--child or adult--can identify as male but prefer a feminine gender expression. People so often assume that gender identity and gender expression need to match, which is silly--I myself know a young boy who is both very clear that he is male, and very, very glittery and feminine in his presentation. He's lucky enough to have parents who support him in his desire to wear what makes him happy, and correct others who say "what a lovely girl you have" in a matter-of-fact manner.

All of that said, I see that this is a camp that is really for kids who were male assigned at birth and who enjoy feminine gender expression, whatever their gender identity. I presume, as the article notes, that some of these kids are trans* girls. Framing a trans gender girl as a "boy" troubles me, as does calling all the kids "he".  I understand that this is an article for a Slate audience, but I don't think it would be very difficult to say, "'You Are You' is a camp that lets children who were assigned male at birth enjoy the freedom to glory in feminine dress in the company of others who enjoy the same thing. Camp organizers don't care how these children will identify in adulthood--as gay or straight, as cis or trans*, as genderconforming or gendertransgressive. The camp just gives these children a space to enjoy themselves as they are now, however they identify."

Interestingly, in discussions of the issue of the author referring to all the children at this camp as boys, I saw people coming to opposite conclusions by looking at the photographs: either seeing the kids as mostly trans* girls, or seeing them as mostly self-identifying as boys. 

My perspective is that from the article and from looking at the pictures, none of us can tell how these children identify. Some of them may look just like cis girls to us, and others we may perceive as clearly male-assigned-at-birth children wearing dresses. That has no relevance at all to gender identity. Some people who have gender transitioned look like cis people, and some of us are visibly trans* our whole lives. The only way to tell a person's gender identity is to ask them.  I find people's speculating on others' gender identities based on how well the person "passes" as a cis person hurtful, not helpful, and I hope as a trans* person that our allies will soon learn to avoid it.

Another theme that I encountered in responses to the article was a concern that the photographs of the children at You Are You revealed that someone was teaching or forcing the children to be hyperfeminine, perhaps sexualized, in their expressions of femininity.  This often came up in comments from cis feminist women.  It arises, I believe, out of a lack of frame of reference, especially since so often references were made to drag queens, and how their hyperfemininity made the commenters uncomfortable by seeming to "mock" or stereotype women.  So I want to elaborate a frame of reference for understanding the many different sorts of gender expression engaged in by different groups that can all find themselves collected under "the Trans* Umbrella."

Let's start with adults, and the drag queens often cited in this conversation.  In adult culture, drag queens and kings generally display an exaggerated femininity or masculinity that we call camp. It's not meant to be a portrayal of how everyday women or men look--it's performance, often ironic. It can explicitly address, acknowledge, and play with gender stereotypes, and pay homage to cis gender celebrities' gender performances as just that: iconic enactments of particular styles of embodying and displaying gender.

People who are unfamiliar with the genre of the drag show may presume that drag queens (or kings, but as a culture we're much less fascinated by them) are attempting to embody everyday femininity (or masculinity) and not getting it right. But a drag queen performing a Lady Gaga routine is aware of the artifice of Lady Gaga's performance of femininity, and that the women she sees at the grocery store rarely look like that. So the concern is misplaced and comes from lacking the frame of reference.

Then there are adult crossdressers, who are not performing in shows, but dressing up at home. The key phrase here is "dressing up." A cis woman who is dressing up for a date often dresses in a manner not just more carefully considered than her everyday clothes, but more self-consciously feminine (the party dress, not the jeans). If someone is crossdressing at home for sexytimes, of course they're going to want to put on a sexy outfit. Because of the way our culture associates femininity with beauty and sexual attractiveness, even a very straight, very male-identified man may at times slip on a pair of thigh-high fishnets at home and feel sexy. He may be uncritical about the way in which articles of feminine attire are considered sexier, and how this constrains women in everyday life, but he's certainly aware that most women don't wear thigh-high fishnets every day.

And then there's the phenomenon we can call "Halloween crossdressing." Halloween is one day a year in which we're encouraged to costume in the U.S., and many people take the opportunity to crossdress and go out in public. ( I've found that while cis people tend to be a lot more comfortable with Halloween crossdressing, trans* women who have transitioned are often uncomfortable with it, because they encounter a lot of bro-ish men who base their costumes on their vision, not of cis women, but of some conflated image of drag queens and trans* women.)

And so we come to trans* folks. People who have transitioned are just living our lives in our identified genders (female, male, or some other gender). That is not to say that there's nothing performative about that, as we must often calculate how best to present ourselves in a manner most likely to ensure that others recognize and reflect our gender identities back at us.  Depending on our bodily configurations, this may mean that we need to display some very carefully selected, quite gendered items to maximize our chances of being recognized in our identified genders without somehow coming across as "overdoing it," which can make dressing for the day more work for us than it is for many cis people.  But cis people perform gender as well. Anyone needing proof of that should just spend a day at a middle school (egad: the selfconsciousness, the awkwardness, the hypermasculine grunting, the oddly-applied makeup). It's just that after reaching full maturity, many cis folks stop being aware of the performative nature of gender, as it's become as second-nature as riding a bike. And people who gender transition experience a similar trajectory: at first, there's a period of awkward exploration of one's personal style, but it eventually becomes second nature.

OK, then, what about the kids at camp You Are You? Well, first of all, I'd point out that in the contemporary U.S., kids' clothing is more highly gendered than that of adults. I know that my cis gender daughter and her friends struck me as a pool of miniature drag queens when they were around five and moving through the Princess Phase, dressing up as their favorite icons of exaggerated Disney femininity and prancing about in glittery pinkness. Meanwhile their male-assigned peers ran around with masculine emblems emblazoned on everything (Batman, sports heroes, dinosaurs driving trucks emitting lightening bolts). It seems to me that our society teaches children to learn to do binary gender by sending them all to Camp Camp.

Now, the hypergendered nature of kids' attire drops off as they get older, though it re-emerges in a pseudoadult form at puberty. Many of the children at camp You Are You look to be in the "big kid" range, when boys and girls alike tend to run around at summer camps in t-shirts and shorts. But "dress-up" clothing for big kids remains highly gendered.

So my take on the kids at You Are You is that they are going to a special camp that allows children assigned male at birth to wear feminine attire. They could go to some other generic summer camp and wear shorts and t-shirts very easily--but here, they are allowed the freedom to glory in feminine expression. So of course they want to dress up! Perhaps some of them are trans* girls living full time as such with the full support of their communities, but I presume that this is not the case for many of the children. So maybe in their everyday lives, they can wear t-shirts designated "for girls" without harassment, but showing up at school in a dress is a very different story. This is their chance to do that. And remember: kids' dress-up clothing is often hypergendered. It's not that these children think, "real females must wear lots of flounces and makeup and heels instead of jeans, and mustn't play sports or build things because they'd break a nail." They're just dressing up in the same way cis girls putting on a fashion show for their friends would, in the attire our society sells for girls of their age.  And note that the photographs of the fashion show are the ones used to illustrate the Slate article.  A good part of the reason that readers get an impression that these children are wearing very feminine attire that would make hiking around at camp difficult is that we see photographs of them at their fashion show, but not of them going for a hike in more practical girls' clothing.

As for the accusation that the children are acting in a sexualized manner, I think that's an adult projection. We associate crossdressing with sexuality in adult lives, and project that onto children who are just embodying femininity. (Trans* women often suffer from a similar conflation of ideas, and are rudely presumed to be hypersexual.) Yes, it is problematic that our society sexualizes femininity, but these children are not to blame for that fact. I find it creepily reminiscent of rape culture when people (often feminists!) accuse trans* girls and women, and feminine boys and men, of being sexually provocative. Any person of any gender and any age should be able to go out in a dress without being assaulted, and without being accused of "asking for it."

So: for those who feel uncomfortable with the photographs of the children at camp You Are You, please bear these things in mind. The kids are dressing up, and are aware of that fact, and how girls and women dress to go to the supermarket. The photographs we see are those that are most "dressy," because of our society's anxiety about, and fascination with, crossing gender lines. And we should not demand that those who are marginalized be the people who solve the social problems associated with gender, such as the association of feminine dress with sexual provocation, when those with gender privilege can wear the same clothes to go out to a party or on a date without the same demands being made of them personally.

Trans and Intersex Children: Forced Sex Changes, Chemical Castration, and Self-Determination

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