Proto-gay

But the biggest challenge—medically, psychologically and ethically—is the growing number of children (some as young as seven or eight) seeking treatment despite uncertain medical science. The significance then of this project’s attention to incipient homosexuality, is not the focus on children who ‘act out,’ but rather on the queer child who must negotiate feelings of difference, who don’t know how to act ‘in’ or ‘out,’ as they are so bound up in their feelings of abjection.

As at other stages, the concern remains that a young person may not persist in a trans identity yet feel pressured to continue. “I was excited to finally have something to call myself,” he says.

With the support of his parents and doctors, Payton began taking birth-control pills to reduce his period to twice a year. In just a few months, the 14-year-old would attend a life-changing medical appointment.

In the figure of the incipient homosexual the closet is the silent and invisible space where queer children isolate themselves in order to come-to-terms with their 3 This is such because, regardless of politics, all subjects are subjects under hegemony and cannot truly act outside of it. The memory of my friend’s roomy walk-in closet and our subsequent exit of it—down the spiral staircase hand in hand, with our footsteps set to a symphony of our giggles—does.

I call this moment, and the gendered and (trans)sexual activity that transpired there, “Eve’s closet.” Play in Eve’s closet is my descriptor for queer and trans pleasure in the curvature of sexual and gendered spaces, what Sedgwick described in a response to an essay by Jacob Hale as an “identification with what is, at any given moment, understood to be the growing edge of a self.” It recalls moments of childhood play—“of daring surmise and cognitive rupture”—between queer and trans kids (here trans feminine and trans masculine), where clothing, make-believe, and toys are the “very stuff” of queer sexuality and/or where friendship is a medium for gender transition or sex change.

Increasingly, we live in a world where younger and younger people discover and understand their sexuality earlier in life due to increased visibility and representation of homosexuality in accessible media.

A tomboy as a child, Payton began questioning his gender at 11 as friends began getting crushes. Edelman, L. (1994). London, England & New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. Post-queer politics. “Our model is to listen to the young people. 17-38. Thus, in effect, when adolescents agree to cross-sex hormones, they or their parents are consenting to lifelong infertility.

Can a young teen understand this?

Some, she says, are “proto-gay” and likely in adolescence to come out as gay, lesbian or bisexual. For instance, Steensma says, two adolescent girls who were no longer trans struggled for some time to change back to their female identity because of “fear of teasing and shame to admit they had been wrong.” He wonders whether counseling children on coping with their gender variance until early puberty might be a lesser evil than having them make a complete social transition twice, including a name and pronoun change.

“One True Test of Gender”

Adolescence is a powerful time—physically, psychologically and socially—in determining lasting gender identity, experts say.

While I am interested in the content of the essay (especially a film still of Divine and the “Infant of Prague” from John Waters’ 1970 film Multiple Maniacs, and I certainly have my own stories of play in fat women’s closets as a girly-boy), for the purposes of this report, I want to dwell on Moon and Sedgwick’s collaboration for what it teaches us about the pleasure and play of the trans masculine and trans feminine relation.

Generating literacies: reading gay culture and the AIDS epidemic.