Anxious publics, disruptive bodies: Online discourse about transgender children

Abstract

This chapter uses an intersectional approach to explore the mutual construction of raced/gender bodies and public space in order to theorize how certain bodies – specifically, the bodies of transgender and gender non-conforming children – elicit fear, terror, or anxiety by their presence in certain spaces. I analyze reader responses to online news reports of a widely publicized 2011 case in which a transgender child sought to join a Girl Scout troop. This chapter demonstrates how people use online spaces to reinscribe binaries of race, gender, and age as a way of dealing with the ontological anxiety that transgender children produce. I argue, then, that beyond serving as a measure of current public opinion about transgender and gender non-conforming children, such online discussions can also illuminate some of the connections among race, gender, embodiment, and belonging in the contemporary United States.