Tey Meadow believes passionately in gender diversity and supporting transgender youth

Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. While her research covers a lot of topics, the work she’s created that has had the biggest impact on me is her writing on the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, and the creation and maintaining of gender classifications in law and medicine. The book that we focus on here is the one she put out through University of California Press in 2018: Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520275041/trans-kids). This book is teeming with insights on how we acquire a gendered sense of ourselves, the powerful constraints placed on that process, and how those constraints are both generative and restrictive. We talk about the overarching concerns of Meadow’s work and the curiosities that motivate it, but we also work through the claims of Emily Bazelon’s controversial article in the New York Times from June of this year, “The Battle Over Gender Therapy.” Meadow explains that the way Bazelon gives “equal footing” to those that problematize gender-related care is actually very misleading, because we’ve luckily reached a point, after a history of struggle for legitimacy from groups advocating for transgender rights, where it’s no longer assumed, professionally or politically, that avoiding being trans is somehow “the best outcome.” There is, now, what Meadow describes as a “massive consensus” which says that “affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children leads to better psychological, social, educational, physical outcomes for those children.” What also clearly matters is who is speaking, and who isn’t. Because of the power of gender norms, and the compulsion to protect kids from harm, many parent organizations that advocate for trans identities, but are not led by transgender adults, often make it their goal to produce or to promote “the most normative non-normative kids.” The effect, in some ways, is to “create a version of transness without trauma,” and one that doesn’t necessarily learn from what Meadow calls the “incredible wisdom gleaned from decades of navigating cisgender culture.”