CRITICAL AND APPLIED APPROACHES IN SEXUALITY, GENDER AND IDENTITY Working with Transgender Young People Enrique A. Prilman and their Families A Critical Developmental Approach Damien W. Riggs Critical and Applied Approaches in Sexuality, Gender and Identity Series Editor Christina Richards Calver, Derbyshire, UK This series brings together scholars from a range of disciplines who have produced work which both informs the academy and, crucially, has real- world applied implications for a variety of different professions, including psychologists; psychiatrists; psychotherapists; counsellors; medical doc- tors; nurses; social workers; researchers and lecturers; governmental pol- icy advisors; non-governmental policy advisors; and peer support workers, among others. The series critically considers intersections between sexual- ity and gender; practice and identity; and theoretical and applied arenas – as well as questioning, where appropriate, the nature or reality of the boundaries between them. In short, it aims to build castles in the sky we can live in – after all the view is nothing, without a place to stand. Editorial Board: Christina Richards, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, UK Jon Arcelus, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, UK Surya Monro, University of Huddersfield, UK Simon DuPlock, Metanoia Instutite, UK Timo Nieder, Interdisciplinary Transgender Health Care Center Hamburg, Germany More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15443 Damien W. Riggs Working with Transgender Young People and their Families A Critical Developmental Approach Damien W. Riggs College of Education, Psychology and Social Work Flinders University Adelaide, SA, Australia Critical and Applied Approaches in Sexuality, Gender and Identity ISBN 978-3-030-14230-8 ISBN 978-3-030-14231-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14231-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934466 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ©Lilith Saintclaire This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For two special people, who lead me to this path Preface My intentions for this book started from a very simple premise: transgen- der young people exist, they know who they are, and they deserve all of the support and care we can give them. From the first transgender young person I worked with over a decade ago, to the many many young people I have worked with since, I have always been driven by the desire to listen and to affirm. As such, writing this book is certainly not the end point of my journey of learning: I learn with every young person who shares part of their life with me. But in putting up my hand to write this book, I did so from a place of knowing. Not of knowing everything, but of knowing that some of the insights I have gained from the young people I work with, and how they challenge both public and clinical representations of transgender people, are important to share. Writing this book, then, was very much a labour of love. It was a true intertwining of my own journey within critical psychology, and the jour- ney I have undertaken with the many young people I have worked with. As a field of psychology, critical psychology seeks to challenge social norms, to examine how power operates to both privilege and marginalise, and to be liberatory in the sense of opening up new vistas for thinking about subjectivity. As children, as people, and as active agents in the world around them, the young people I have worked with push the remit of critical psychology to new ends by asserting themselves in the face of cisgenderism, by speaking to power from a place of knowing, and in so vii viii Preface doing creating new vistas within which they and others (including myself) can think about gender. Just as this book was informed by a simple premise, my approach to writing this book was simple. I sought to bring together two forms of evidence: the fictionalized (though not fictional) narratives of some of the young people I work with, and the latest research about transgender young people and their families. In so doing my goal was to challenge much of the received ‘wisdom’ that circulates about transgender young people, not by engaging in unnecessary critiques of previous literature, or by giving space to the voices of those who oppose transgender young people and their families, but rather by using a critical psychological lens through which to situate clinical practice with transgender young people and their families. This meant that whilst I am fully aware of literature that seeks to challenge or question transgender people’s gender, it did not have much of a place in this book. By staying away for the most part from aspects of the literature and public narratives about transgender people that often leave us ‘stuck’ in cisgenderism, I was able to write a book that is both situated and optimis- tic. It is situated in the sense that it is situated in the context of transgen- der young people’s lives, and particularly their need for affirming clinical care. And it is situated in a literature that seeks to understand the speci- ficities of transgender young people’s lives. Importantly, this does not mean that the book shies away from debate when necessary. The situated- ness that I adopted within this book, however, means that the debates that I engage with are never about the veracity of transgender young people’s lives. Instead, any debates that I take up within this book chal- lenge the terms of the debates themselves (i.e., the idea that transgender young people should be a topic of debate). Focusing primarily on the lives of transgender young people and their families, then, allowed me to focus on topics that are often left to one side when debates over transgender young people predominate. Primarily it allowed me to think through what a critical developmental approach to working with transgender young people might look like. Mindful of the critical psychological deconstruction of ‘developmentalism’ (i.e., the idea that there is one ‘correct’ developmental pathway for all children), I was able to reconstruct an account of transgender young people’s gender Preface ix development, an account that emphasises diversity, that is both non- linear and non-normative, and which is grounded in a critical account of the latest literature in the field. Placing this alongside fictionalized case studies enabled me to provide an overview of the broad contours of gender development for transgender young people, without being prescriptive. To frame my thoughts about gender development I generated a mne- monic that, in both my own clinical practice and that of other clinicians who have undertaken training with me, enables transgender young peo- ple’s diverse journeys to be heard and engaged with. Eschewing diagnosis, the mnemonic is situated within an extended family context, and is mindful of the negative impact of cisgenderism upon all people. This situatedness and mindfulness means, I believe, that the GENDER mne- monic I outline in this book offers a critical psychological account of how to go about the work of adopting an affirmative approach to working with transgender young people. It most certainly owes more than a debt of gratitude to all of the scholars and clinicians who have advocated for affirming approaches, and who have made it possible for me to write this particular book. But it also builds upon this work, offering new avenues for thinking about how clinicians can best work with transgender young people through a lens that is critical of received wisdom, instead centring the knowledges that transgender young people bring with them to the clinical encounter. Importantly, and as I noted above, the GENDER mnemonic is not prescriptive. There is no requirement that aspects of the mnemonic be addressed in any particular order, nor that any one aspect must be of rel- evance to a particular young person and their family. In other words, the mnemonic is not intended as yet another form of gatekeeping, and thus should not be used to keep transgender young people in a holding pattern controlled by the clinician. Instead, its utility is its capacity to open up productive conversations, but whether or not these are productive or sim- ply not relevant can only be determined by young people themselves. This will mean that at differing ages or in the context of differing life experiences certain aspects of the mnemonic will be more salient. Again, it is young people who ‘activate’ our focus as clinicians on certain aspects x Preface of the mnemonic, rather than clinicians dictating what aspects should be given concerted attention. As I came to see, however, having written this book, nothing is ever quite as simple as the account above might suggest. I was very fortunate to receive critical feedback on this book from many people, including other clinicians, parents of transgender young people, and from transgen- der adults (acknowledging, of course, that these three categories overlap). Some of the changes that resulted from this feedback, and which I signal here, add necessary complexity to this book. Indeed, starting with the word ‘complexity’, I use it throughout this book to argue that clinicians working with transgender young people should not seek simplistic answers, and specifically to suggest that there is no one singular transgen- der narrative. This, however, is not to suggest that clinicians should situ- ate ‘complexity’ within transgender young people. We are all complex people, whatever our gender may be. Rather, my aim as a clinician is always to listen to the diversity of narratives that any one person brings with them, instead of trying to produce one definitive account of their life. This is different, however, to demanding that transgender young people spend unnecessary amounts of time ‘unpacking their gender’. As I will clearly argue in this book, my starting place is always that young people know their gender. But like all of us, living as we do in a context of social norms that regulate what forms of gender expression are intelligible, in my experience it is helpful to encourage conversations about what gender means and looks like, for both young people and their parents. This is in no way about questioning anyone’s gender, or suggest- ing that they should live their gender in a different way. Nor is it about suggesting in any way that parents are somehow ‘responsible’ for a child being transgender. Instead, by having complex and critical conversations about gender, my aim is always to help young people to understand that the way they express their gender is entirely a matter of their own deter- mination, and that there are no set rules about being a particular gender. For parents, and particularly those who may be struggling to understand a child who is transgender, talking to them about their own gender is about helping them to understand that just as they experience their gen- der to be true, so do their children. As such, discussions about gender