What’s transpiring? Wondering what’s going on with the seemingly sudden surge of transgender teens? by Kris Vagner | We asked them. krisv@newsreview.com
T
he last couple of years have been big for transgender visibility. In 2015, Bruce Jenner became Caitlin. In June, Jamie Shupe of Oregon became the first person in the U.S. to be legally declared “non-binary,” officially not a member of either sex. In October, 17-year-old James Charles, already Instagram and YouTube famous for his assertively creative makeup artistry, became CoverGirl’s first-ever male spokesmodel. (“Just a little DIY side note,” he says in a video as he draws constellations on a purple-sky background painted around his eyes, “If you have a pimple, turn it into a star. Oh my god! Wow! Problem solved.”) A New York Times analysis reported that about 1.4 million American adults identify as transgender. That’s about 0.6 percent of the population, double the number, 0.3, compiled by the Williams Institute at University of California, Los Angeles in 2011. As for transgender teens, there appears to be no official count—but here’s what I’ve seen in Reno lately. In May, the Washoe County School District became one of the first in the nation to allow students to use the restrooms that correspond with their chosen gender identities and to call students by their chosen names. Teens I know started changing the pronouns on their social media profiles from “he” or “she” to “they”—a choice that hasn’t yet caught on widely among non-teens, but has gained official approval by the American Dialect Society, which in 2015 deemed “they” acceptable as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun, and by the Washington Post, which adopted singular “they” in its style guide. Also, among the families that stream through the veritable revolving door that is my kitchen, a teen has occasionally asked to be called by a new name that
10
|
RN&R
|
11.10.16
signifies a new gender identity. Parents have occasionally wondered out loud at my dinner table, “What’s happening here? Is this a phase? Just a trend?” All of this has left me with two questions: Is this “new” gender fluidity among teens actually new? And what do trans teens themselves have to say?
History repeats itself Jeff Auer is the director of the Nevada LGBT Archives. He’s also a doctoral student in history at the University of Nevada, Reno and an adjunct faculty member at both Truckee Meadows Community College and UNR. I asked him whether any societies, past or present, had conceived of gender categories in ways other than the binary designations “male” and “female.” “There’s a long history of it here in America,” he said. “There’s examples all over the world, thousands of years of indigenous cultures.” Expressions of alternative gender identities throughout history have been met with various reactions from mainstream society. Molly-houses, for example—secret societies of men in 18th-century England who would dress up as women and, in some cases, engage in mock birth rituals—did not go over so well. “It turned into a scandal in British society,” Auer said. “Apparently they were quite common, which sort of horrified people.” On the other hand, there have been examples of transgender identities being widely accepted, or even revered, in traditional Native American cultures, for example.
“They had a completely different idea of gender,” Auer said. A blog post by LGBT scholar Will Roscoe, who lives in Seattle, explains the concept of Native American “two-spirits.” They were “male, female and sometimes intersexed individuals who combined activities of both men and women with traits unique to their status as two spirits. In most tribes, they were considered neither men nor women; they occupied a distinct, alternative gender status.” The two-spirits concept “was found in almost every Native American tribe in the United States,” Auer said. “I think you always should look to American popular culture for clues to what people are thinking is acceptable at the time,” he said. He traced a recent lineage of gender fluidity, as reflected in the glitter glam rock periods and bands such as the New York Dolls in the ’70s and Blur in the early ’90s. Other prime examples include the 1975 musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “It inspired a huge culture that basically lasts to this day,” Auer said—and television shows such as Transparent, in which Jeffrey Tambor plays a father who comes out as transgender once his children are grown, and Orange is the New Black, where transgendered actor Laverne Cox plays a transgendered character. “I think that emboldens youth who are immersed in the culture into accepting it and feeling comfortable enough to come out,” Auer said. “There’s a long history of this, especially in terms of adults. There’s more acceptance among younger teenage children today about gender.”
