Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body

Heather Brunskell-Evans, Michele Moore

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Apr 18, 2018 - Education - 244 pages

This book is a collection of essays about the current theory and practice of transgendering children. Essays are written against the grain of the popularised medical definition of ‘the transgender child’ as a young person whose ‘true’ gender lies in the brain, or pre-social ‘identity’. Contributors contest this diagnosis from a range of perspectives, including as social theorists, psychotherapists, persons living as transgender, individuals who have de-transitioned, and parents of adolescents identifying as transgender. They argue that medicine, social policy and the law build ideas about ‘the transgender child’, and contend that it is politics, not science, which accounts for the exponential rise in the number of children diagnosed as transgender by gender identity clinics. They conclude that today’s medical and social trend for transgendering children is not liberal and progressive, but politically reactionary, physically and psychologically dangerous and abusive.

Contents

• Chapter One: 1
• Chapter Two: 16
• Chapter Three: 41
• Chapter Four: 64
• Chapter Five: 87
• Chapter Six: 107
• Chapter Seven: 123
• Chapter Eight: 139
• Chapter Nine: 166
• Chapter Ten: 181
• Chapter Eleven: 201
• Chapter Twelve: 218

About the author

Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans is a social theorist and philosopher with an interest in the work of Michel Foucault and in feminist philosophy and politics of the body. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at Kings College London. Having been an academic for nearly three decades, she now also works on national and international political agendas driving the rights of women and children. She is a Trustee of the charity FiLia, and co-ordinator of its Stop Violence against Women and Girls section. She is a commentator on TV and radio. Her latest book is The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography: Performing Sexual Liberation (2016).

Professor Michele Moore is Editor of the world-leading journal Disability & Society and an expert in the field of Inclusive Education. She works on developing inclusion in communities at local, regional, national and international levels. She leads consultative participatory human rights projects across the world to support children, their families and those who work with them. She has published widely on education, childhood and family life, disability and inclusion.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body
• Editors: Heather Brunskell-Evans, Michele Moore
• Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018
• ISBN: 1527510360, 9781527510364
• Length: 244 pages
• Subjects: Education / General; Social Science / Disease & Health Issues; Social Science / Gender Studies