How transgender children will change adults’ language (2017)

Several recent media events have brought transgender, transsexual, or gender fluid children into the spotlight. These young people, whose realities remain largely unknown and almost always discriminated against, herald the future of our “sexual identities” and our “gender identities.” Are we adults ready to allow ourselves to be surprised? To what principles, what precautions, or what defenses are we clinging as if to life preservers? For the storm is raging… in our minds, and in our language.

Avery Jackson, aged 9, living in the United States, transgender since age 5, has just appeared on the cover of National Geographic dedicated to Gender Revolution. The magazine known for its historic photographs has certainly produced, with her, an exemplary special issue that has not gone unnoticed. Modern as it is, the thematic dossier covering a multitude of subjects does not, however, free itself from gender stereotypes, nor from a binary approach as divisive as it is reassuring, it seems, for readers or editors. Thus, becoming a girl is associated with the “risks” of being one, and becoming a boy as a “construction,” undoubtedly more socially interesting if one is to believe the magazine. While these approaches resonate with elements of undeniable importance, the predetermination of the future of “both sexes” is rather troubling, even outdated.

Another situation. The France 5 channel broadcast on January 10 a film entitled Becoming He or She, followed by a debate. Beyond the statements of the children and adolescents (and also their parents), whose intelligence equals their maturity, the medical teams also express themselves about their support work. Many viewers retained the style of the Dutch teams, which is enough to disconcert the French viewer, unaccustomed to such pragmatic resolutions, supported by a very welcoming discourse. Without constituting a panacea, however, the comparison that emerges in the film highlights in the French teams some unfortunate linguistic habits where “sexual orientation,” “mutilation,” and others continue to betray our cultural blockages. So many somewhat rigid discursive practices that contrast with the linguistic freedom of these children.

Last week, Ameko Eks Mass Carroll, 11 years old, gender fluid, was nominated for an award presented at the Leo Awards (Film Awards – Canada). And this in two “categories” as the press writes: both “feminine” and “masculine.” While it is indeed about rewarding talent and cherishing diversity, there is no escaping categorization, as if it were necessary or unavoidable. As with sports competitions, anatomical division takes precedence over subjective position; the institution is directly challenged but does not know how to respond.

All these children display, claim, and create horizons so vast that adult normativity cannot help but reduce them, simplify them: through competition, editorial readability, or discourse. There are, however, many very important questions that adults must address responsibly, for example, the question of puberty-delaying treatments, that of hormone prescription. There are many aspects of children’s lives that adults must particularly attend to, such as schooling, social or family life. But must we adults burden ourselves with certain cultural and social constructions that these children tell us are no longer so necessary? Not that they never were, but that we can begin to think differently, as they demonstrate to us, as they announce to us that things have changed.

Will we accept the invitation extended to us? Perhaps. But under what conditions? First, by allowing the notion of “psychic bisexuality” supported by Freud to evolve and, in the same movement as him, observing that our psychic sexual potentiality, if it must be qualified, now deserves to be characterized by “psychic transsexuality.” Not that we are all transsexual, for we were no more all bisexual in 1905, but to elevate the fact that sexual diversity at the heart of human psychic life has not finished transforming our culture. Second, by abandoning once and for all the reading of amorous choices as identifiable and interpretable “sexual orientations.” No need to ascertain the direction of the wind; we are done finding directions where there are above all impulses, feelings. Third, continuing after Lacan this historical interrogation that makes “feminine” and “masculine” two enigmas that neither scientific truth nor cultural facts can resolve, not even the “man” and the “woman” to which we cling. Fourth, if necessary, remembering that the famous “symbolic order” is only symbolic in responding to our imaginary necessities in our effort to understand the living, when we seek to stabilize what makes us waver. To those who will listen…

One thing is certain: we are being challenged and questioned; I am as much as anyone. What if we allowed language to continue supporting us without preventing it from translating the experience we are living? For it is to new poetics, to more flourishing orthographies and less normative grammars that these children invite us, through these lives of today that create the thought and language of tomorrow.

Vincent Bourseul