Cripping Trans Childhood: A Critical Examination into the Legislating of the Trans Child

2023 has been a record-breaking year for legislation aimed at restricting and even criminalizing access to gender affirming care for minors. In response to these legislative efforts, many advocates rely on invocations of medical authority to defend the right of individuals to access gender affirming care. However, this reliance on the pathologization of transgender identity both reaffirms stigmatization of transgender identity as mental illness as well as forecloses on opportunities to affirm access to gender affirming care otherwise. The purpose of this research is to use disability justice scholarship, predominantly crip theory, to analyze these legislative efforts in-depth beyond the predominant critique offered by the medical-model. I demonstrate that these legislative moves to ban access to gender affirming care are part of a larger effort to prevent a trans future more broadly. Trans childhood has become a particularly fruitful site for this political action due to the ways in which normativities relating to time, biological plasticity, and capacity shape the way that their bodies are understood. I term those individual bodies which have such characteristics of non-normative temporalities, plasticity, and capacity/incapacity grafted onto them become “bodies of normative intervention” and explore how they become the laboratory sites for producing population-wide normative interventions. This legislative effort to restrict access to gender affirming care for minors represents a broader effort to legislate a trans future out of existence through the strategic targeting of trans children. This robs society of valuable trans knowledge and experience.