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Elizabeth Rahilly and transgender people

Elizabeth P. Rahilly (born October 12, 1981) is an American sociologist who has written on gender diverse youth and their families.

Background

Rahilly earned an undergraduate degree in anthropology from New York University in 2004 and a PhD in sociology from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2015. Her dissertation was titled Parenting the Transgender Child: Transitions in Gender, Sexuality, and Identity.

She took a position at Georgia Southern University in 2019.

Trans-Affirmative Parenting

In 2020, Rahilly published Trans-Affirmative Parenting: Raising Kids Across the Gender Spectrum. Below are a couple of relevant passages:

In addition, one of the leading researchers on childhood gender nonconformity, Dr. Kenneth Zucker, was required to shut down his clinic in Toronto, Canada, due to allegations of conducting conversion therapy.

On the biomedical side, several major gender clinics have been established across the United states, including in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Beyond providing pediatric and endocrinologic expertise, including hormone therapy for kids, these clinics often connect parents to affiliated specialists in mental health, the law, and education and advocacy. The use of hormones and puberty blockers on children has been another source of debate, including when to administer them and what health risks they may pose. Originally, many researchers, particularly in the Netherlands, advised waiting until at least age twelve to consider social transition, including using puberty blockers, and until age sixteen for cross-sex hormones. These protocols were known as the “Dutch Model.” But, as I learned, these recommendations were unpopular stateside, and have faded as the use of blockers has become normalized among clinicians.

Today, many advocates believe in transitioning a child whenever they assert the desire for this (well before twelve years old in some cases), especially since using blockers alone does not cause any known medically permanent damages changes for the child. Practitioners may also endorse the start of cross-sex hormones at a time that achieves “peer concordance” with the rest of the child’s cohort (sometimes sooner than sixteen years of age). Fundamentally, the reigning medical approach is to treat each child on a case-by-case basis. As one of the physicians I interviewed explained, who is considered an expert in the medical management of transgender children in the United States: each child is so unique both physiologically and psychosocially–and gender is such a “highly subjective” experience–that every case is carefully assessed on an individual basis.

Despite these affirmative trends, some clinicians are more reserved about early childhood transitions, in part because of the longitudinal statistics I have described: most childhood gender nonconformity does not “persist” into adult transsexuality, as it is often put, but allegedly “desists,” resulting most commonly in “just” homosexuality, if anything nonnormative at all. In 2012, for example, two leading mental health practitioners [Jack Drescher and William Byne] issued the following precautions in a special issue of The Journal of Homosexuality: “There are no reliable screening instruments that differentiate between young children in whom [gender dysphoria] will desist and those in whom it will persist,” and “Some clinicians believe that facilitating childhood gender transition may increase the probability of persistence into adolescence an adulthood.” As another psychiatrist [Richard A. Friedman] wrote in a 2015 New York Times op-ed, “If anything marks what a child really is, it is experimentation and flux. Why, then, would one subject a child to hormones and gender reassignment if there is a high likelihood that the gender dysphoria will resolve?”

These concerns were echoed more recently in 2018 in a high-profile article in The Atlantic by journalist Jesse Singal, “When Children Say They’re Transgender.” Singal opens up with the story of fourteen-year-old Claire, who tries to pursue medical transition despite the reservations of her parents, but who eventually reneges months later, believing “that her feeling that she was a boy stemmed from rigid views of gender roles that she had internalized.” The piece stirred widespread controversy over the idea that trans-affirming approaches have gone “too far,” especially when it comes to transitioning young kids. Many commentators felt that the piece dangerously inflated transition “regret narratives,” fueling an anti-trans agenda. Others felt it was more measured and balanced, offering a welcome consideration for the experimentation that childhood should be allowed to reflect. Regardless, sex-deterministic, cisnormative logics undergird all of these precautionary tales and debates: Should you formulate transition a child, and if so, when? Is there an age that is “too young” or “too soon” to do this? Does one risk (over)determining a certain gendered outcome for a child? Should you really believe your child when they tell you they’re different? Why uproot your child’s sex category until you’re “absolutely sure”? What if you get it “wrong”?

Rahilly (2020) pages 27-28

References

Rahilly EP (2015). Parenting the Transgender Child: Transitions in Gender, Sexuality, and Identity. [doctoral dissertation] https://escholarship.org/content/qt9pb4k1x4/qt9pb4k1x4_noSplash_9e62f6e7d336600569088f689304d480.pdf?t=prk1dj

Rahilly, Elizabeth (2020). Trans-Affirmative Parenting: Raising Kids Across the Gender Spectrum. NYU Press. ISBN 978-1479817153

Rahilly, Elizabeth (2018). Re-interpreting Gender and Sexuality: Parents of Gendernonconforming Children. Sexuality & Culture: 1-21.

Rahilly EP (2014). The Gender Binary Meets the Gender-Variant Child: Parents’ Negotiations with Childhood Gender Variance. Gender & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243214563069

Rahilly, Elizabeth (2013). “The Parental Transition: A Study of Parents of Gender Variant Children,” in Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices. Fiona Green and May Friedman (Eds.). Ontario: Demeter Press.

Drescher J, Byne W (2012). Gender Dysphoric/Gender Variant (GD/GV) Children and Adolescents: Summarizing What We Know and What We Have Yet to Learn. Journal of Homosexuality 59(3):501-10. https://doi.org10.1080/00918369.2012.653317

Freidman, Richard (August 22, 2015) Opinion: How changeable is gender? New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/sunday/richard-a-friedman-how-changeable-is-gender.html

Resources

Linkedin (linkedin.com)

Georgia Southern University (georgiasouthern.edu)