Continue viewing this article with a TANK Digital subscription.

By Sophie Lewis

In 2012, a very young person sat beside me on the Q train as it crossed over the river from Manhattan to Brooklyn. At the time, I was shaving my scalp totally naked and liked to wear long dresses together with weather-beaten Doc Martens, and the child was looking at me with interest. As I recall, I glanced up from my book, acknowledging their obvious curiosity about me. They had a giant halo of stiff, glossy hair. For a while, in this way, we simply looked at each other. I think I was about to go back to my book when the child asked me a question. “Are you,” they wanted to know, “a girl or a boy?” Much to my own surprise, my spontaneous reply came out: “I’m not sure. I think I want different things. What do you think?” A pause. “You want to be a boy, because of your hair, and a girl, because of your dress,” the child pronounced. “That’s probably true,” I said. “So, how about you? Are you a girl, a boy, or something else?” Unfortunately, I never found out, because at this juncture, the hands of an adult (whose presence I hadn’t even noticed) swooped in and physically removed my companion from the subway seat. “My son doesn’t want to be trans!” the voice attached to the adult hands explained.

I would much rather have learned of the absence – or presence – of the desire for transness in the person to whom I’d been talking straight from them, but the conversation had been externally ended. Bystanders didn’t even blink at the imposition. We generally entitle adults to treat their children in this way, namely, as personal possessions whose very gender is theirs to mould; whose subjectivation, as sovereigns, they can unilaterally script. In the US, where I live, the suggestion that the authority of mom and dad might be subordinated (however momentarily) to a different principle – children’s autonomy, say, or social healthcare, or public education – is typically greeted by a cacophonous uproar from the right, the centre, and even parts of the left. Sometimes, the far right’s defence of the privately cissexualised white child against the spectre of the publicly “transed” one is framed as a matter of national, military and demographic security, no less. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, it is supposed, preside over populations completely devoid of “genderism”, a supposition based on a view of the non-Western world as less sophisticated and less plastic than the human beings in the white West. This is expressed with envy, admiration and fear (Tucker Carlson: “While China’s military becomes more masculine as it’s assembled the world’s largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine—whatever ‘feminine’ means anymore, since men and women no longer exist.”) In this formulation, diluting American parental liberty (read: parental power over kids) is a hammer driving in the last nail into US hegemony’s coffin.

Ten years have passed since my Q train encounter. I’m now a writer publicly associated with “family abolition”, a centuries-old anti-capitalist idea that aims to create a grass- roots-led deprivatisation of care, childcare and education. Dreaming of gender freedom, youth-run institutions of learning, and post-work care communes, those of us trying to revive family-abolitionism in the 21st century are typically exponents of “transgender Marxism”. We are seeking (in the immediate term) to make the private nuclear house- hold visible as an institution of the market and of the state: a structure held together by violence and coercion, both internal and external. As such, perhaps our most pressing challenge is linking ours and other present-day abolition- isms. In conjunction with police-, border- and prison-abolitionist movements, for example, a movement to deprivatise care must prioritise the undermining of the racist “family policing” system, colonial child-removal apparatuses, and the kinship violence of immigration officers. In conjunction with youth-led climate-justice campaigns trying to halt the desecration of humanity’s collective planetary household, those who aspire to the deprivatisation of care must articulate the centrality of youth liberation (child suffrage, gender autonomy, all-ages universal basic income, for example) to the future care-centric society that is now widely linked, in the popular imagination, to a “green transition”. Private households are both labour-intensive and ecocidal, after all. They are incubators of sexual and patriarchal violence. It is time to denaturalise them.

High time, in fact. Because, on the other end of the political spectrum from us, a self-described “anti-gender” backlash is doubling back down on care’s privatisation (anti-genderism worldwide includes conservatives, white nationalists, Nazis, Catholics, and, infamously, trans-exclusionary, self-described “gender-critical” cultural feminists). Simply put, the desire of the anti-gender coalitions is for everyone to become family men and family women: that is to say, if not literal parents, then at minimum kin- and country-oriented workers who accept their racial place and don’t question their assigned sex and class. Our desire, in contrast, is to become internationalist race traitors and post-gender comrades. We have the magnetism of the anti-proprietary horizon Alexandra Kollontai called “red love” on our side. Unlike ours, their movement is funded to the tune of billions of dollars. Sensationalising the figure of the trans child as an ultimate emblem of the family’s alleged crisis, these familists are destroying public schools, banning books, and empowering parents to prosecute gender clinics that cater to young people, all in the name of the same slogan advanced by singer and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant against queer life in the late 1970s: “Save our children.” This time around, trans-affirming school teachers and clinicians are special targets of the fascists’ rage, as are, increasingly, trans adults, kinksters, cross-dressers, all trans-affirming adults, and even non-uniformed “strangers” who speak to children without immediately asking, “Where is your mum?” In theory, the goal is to shore up the “right” of parents to impose on their progeny whatever ontologies of male- and femaleness that they wish (without challenge). In practice, however, in certain US states, teaching the “wrong” ontologies will increasingly be counted in law as “child abuse”. 

The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children”, an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:

a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.

In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret – rather than simply register factually – the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.

It should be noted that, by focusing on strangers, the anti-gender movement has succeeded, rather impressively, in turning the concept of the “groomer” on its head. Originally, as the American feminist historian Linda Gordon has written, “in the early 1970s, when a radical feminist consciousness pulled incest out of the closet, we thought we were engaged in an unprecedented discovery. In fact, charity volunteers and social workers a century earlier dealt with incest cases daily.” And just as 19th-century feminists had begun reversing the idea that the primary threat to women lay outside the home, 20th-century women’s liberationists in Europe and North America developed an analysis of intrafamilial “grooming” to drive home the point that perpetrators of child sexual abuse in their societies were overwhelmingly non-strangers: parents, priests, coaches, church counsellors, relatives, caregivers, cousins and siblings. The groomer, in short, was originally the very opposite of “stranger danger”. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, the word is thrown around in the anglo- sphere to tar the public speech of queer academic theorists who defend children’s bodily autonomy, or the creative offerings of TV and film directors deemed insufficiently committed to the law of child asexuality (“innocence”), or the provision of gender-affirming counselling and suicide helplines to young people alongside accurate information regarding puberty blockers.

Of course, the fact that child sexual abuse still now occurs overwhelmingly within cisheteropatriarchal family structures does not result in similar scrutiny on the family- form. In fact, the traditional practice of grooming kids into cisgenderism and heterosexuality is quasi-universally supported and encouraged: this is what is referred to as a decent upbringing, a.k.a. the invisible transmission of the “right” kinds of re/productive desire, which many of us seem to sense is coming unstuck. As such, the current Anglo-American panic over trans people can be thought of as a reproductive crisis, specifically, over the educative functions of biological and social reproduction. Tried and true grooming mechanisms may be breaking down (“nobody wants to work any more”). We may be witnessing a convulsion of grown-up confusion, not so much about whether “we” want children or not, as whether the children will want children. After all, why should they? Morbid symptoms of today’s moral panic suggest, to me, some level of anxiety about capitalism’s ability to ensure its own posterity by educating the general population’s appetite for more of itself. In this context, flashes of utopian possibility may or may not shine through the anti-utopian blanket of the present: what, ultimately, do we want (children to want) to be? And what might solidarity with others’ becoming require us, in turn, to become?

Max Fox argues that, for over a hundred years, child- molestation panics in Europe and North America have periodically followed breakthroughs in antidiscrimination and equality activism, or else changes in the gender- and age- composition of the waged labour force, including sex work. In light of this, today’s trans “groomer” panic begins to look like a reaction to, and appropriation of, #MeToo. Notice that within the framework of the 21st century’s save-our-children-ists, the existence of self-declaring trans children is a sign of sexual violation in and of itself: an outside corruption of cis girlhood, or a “forced feminisation” of boys, if you will. This imagined wound mirrors the widely reported narrative of male labour’s emasculation at the hands of changes in first-world labour-market composition – changes heralded by sociologist Maria Mies in the 1980s as the “feminisation” or “housewifisation” of labour. Simultaneously, in the home, there is a steady (albeit glacially slow) equalisation taking place in the gender distribution of unwaged work, according to a five-decade Oxford University time-use study of 19 countries. Men, though still lagging behind, were widely reported in 2022 to be doing “more housework than ever before”. Amid these trends, and in the context of declining “domestic” birth rates, juvenile transness is held up by the right like a portent of apocalypse: evidence that, following patriarchy’s dilution, Western “civilisation” itself has been castrated.

The claim of lawmakers within what theorist Jules Gill-Peterson calls the “cis state” is that contemporary trans agitation poses an imminent threat to the proprietary sanc- tities of “parental rights” (notably parents’ prerogative to halt or regulate the pace of “sexualisation” of their property). But it seems to me that what we are fighting about when we fight about education, sexual and otherwise, in this way, is much bigger: arguably, nothing less than utopia. What do we want to say is “nature”? What do we want to call “impossible”? As with the gay panic of the 1980s, these are the questions we inevitably raise when we confront en masse the too-often repressed presence of the (oxymoronic, some say) queer children among us. Will these children jeopardise the gross national product? Are they alien visitors from another planet, or scions of strange new species? If so, is that a good thing? Can anybody really say that socially reproducing the present state of things is a desirable goal? So, then, what do we dream of? Which forms of life do we want to continue, and which might we end? Do we really want to “secure a future” (to steal some of the Nazi Fourteen Words) for this world? And so on.

Henry Le Jeune, Innocence, c.1853–1874
Courtesy Walker Art Gallery

The stakes are vertiginous, for all of us. If the patriarchal institutions of mum and dad – which manufactured us all! – are to survive, then private parents must retain control of the prerogative to inseminate the minds of kids with things like pronouns, proper nouns and other sexual spells. And none of us knows what deprivatising father-care or mothering-labour feels or looks like. Family abolition, as such, is hard (perhaps impossible, for now) to desire fully. But an inconvenient obstacle to the revanchist re-entrenchment of cissexualist right-reproduction exists, in the form of parents who affirm, support and care for transgender flourishing in kids. Regardless of the stubborn reality of trans parents, the task of anti-trans educators and propagandists is framed in terms of “parental rights”: how can politicians, along with suitably cissexist moms and dads, defend families, while also breaking them, in the quest to Make Kids Cis Again?

I’m not sure we can afford to be evasive about it any longer. If the figure of the trans child, by virtue of her sexual or gender self-knowledge, resists incorporation into the template of child sexual innocence (read: cisheterosexual national fertility), in whose name the political right or Mumsnet or QAnon fights, then it surely behoves trans children and their accomplices to unapologetically affirm their shared non-innocence: yes, transness is a desire, a trend, a pleasure, and a contagion, not (necessarily) a medical condition. Yes, gender is not neatly separable from sexuality, and needn’t be taught as though it is. And if our enemies’ version of “protection” is an expression of the property-form, then ours must be a liberatory image of the intertwinement of care (with maximal autonomy) and freedom (in interdependence). We should not let them spook us any longer. To borrow words from feminist organiser, writer, mother and Marxist feminist Madeline Lane-McKinley, “‘innocent’ is code for powerless – a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human”.

Unfortunately, it is only on the fringes of the left today that one hears any mention at all of child sovereignty, juvenile body-autonomy, or youth liberation – let alone calls to imagine abolishing the family for, and with, kids. In my experience, it has usually been in the skilful domains of anti-authoritarian or anti-state communist mutual-aid networks, social centres and grief circles, that problems of “adultism” and “adult supremacy” are taken seriously, rather than mocked (the same, by the way, goes for disability-liberation concerns). It is among anarchists that I have generally encountered conversations about trusting kids; believing kids about who they are; listening to them; supporting their self-organisation; and yes, learning both with and from them, practising, for instance, the arts of coexisting with others and their wants.

The segregation of the generations is both epistemic and material, as “kids’ libbers” in the late 1960s and early 1970s used to emphasise. Still today, children are not only the most disenfranchised, but also the poorest people in our societies. Their segregation, and also the omni-pervasive theory of education our institutions apply, whereby knowledge flows unidirectionally, downward, from “us” to “them”, stems from an “unspoken truth” that Lane-McKinley identifies: “while many children fear adults, many adults also fear children.” To conquer this fear, it may be necessary for leftists in the 21st century to first give up apologising for the production (and self-fashioning) of non-innocent young people, and practice vindicating it. Only then are we likely to move beyond the “defence” of trans childhoods, towards their celebration. In the final lines of her 2018 study Histories of the Transgender Child, scholar Jules Gill-Peterson writes: “If we adults really desire to learn to care for the many transgender children in our midst, we need to learn what it means to wish that there be trans children.” Let us, as a matter of urgency, set to training ourselves and each other in this wish. ◉