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“Our World Has Been Rocked”

This chapter turns to the area of gender and sexuality, and examines parents’ contrasts between “just gay” and “truly trans” explanations for childhood gender nonconformity. Given age-old statistics that link childhood gender nonconformity with adult homosexuality, these deliberations are no small part of parents’ journeys. Modern-day LGBT rights discourses assert a firm distinction between “gender” and “sexuality”—gender identity is one thing, sexual orientation is another. However, parents’ deliberations signaled something more fluid and potentially permeable between these two realms of self, across a morphing “spectrum” of possibilities. This conceptual work, the chapter argues, gives increasing intelligibility to (trans)gendered understandings, versus ones formerly understood within a grid of (homo)sexuality. In social-constructionist terms, this is not merely descriptive labor, but productive labor, helping to bring broadening transgender possibilities into being. This work also prioritizes child-rooted shifts in a way that further troubles firm distinctions between these categories of the self.