On this episode of the GenderGP podcast Helen and Marianne are joined by author and sociologist Tey Meadow (she/her). They talk about Tey’s research into trans kids, discuss the challenges facing the families and professionals who support them, and share suggestions for making life easier for young trans people.

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 Links:Anti-trans legislation has never been about protecting children | Washington Post

Tey is on Twitter @dr_tey, and her website is teymeadow.com.  Her book, Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century is available via University of California Press.

We support trans youth - find out more

 The GenderGP PodcastMaking Life Easier For Trans KidsHello, this is Dr. Helen. Webberley welcome to our GenderGP podcast, where we will be discussing some of the issues affecting the trans and non-binary community in the world today together with my co-host Marianne Oakes, a trans woman, herself and our head of therapies.

Helen:Hi everybody. Um, Marianne and I again here today, um, as usual and we have another lovely guest with us. I'd like to introduce Tae Meadow and as always, I'm going to pass straight over to Tey to say hello and welcome. Tell us all about you all about the work that you do and wherever you might want to come and talk to us, um, on a rainy afternoon.

Tey:Hi, thank you both so much for having me. Uh, I'm a sociologist and a professor at Columbia university in New York city. Um, and my work, uh, broadly is on gender and sexuality. So I've written on trans issues. Uh, I've written on sexuality globally, but with a particular focus on the United States and my most recent book, which came out in 2018 is called trans kids being gendered in the 21st century. And it's an ethnographic and interview based study of a generation of parents who are learning to facilitate gender nonconformity in their kids who are calling their trans kids by their preferred names and pronouns, and even approaching the state and other social institutions to change their kids' gender. And it seems to be a moment where that's you, you know, of a particular import in the United States. So that's been the focus of, of that particular part of my work.

Helen:Brilliant. So tell us, what did all the parents say? What did you find out? What did they tell you?

Tey:I mean, so many things, right? 300 pages worth of things, but really what was fascinating in the work was following parents who you are, not activists are not political people, just everyday people from all across the United States who had a child who said, or did things that they didn't expect. And so parents from rural areas or major urban areas, religious and secular parents, parents of every, um, you know, gender and, and, and racial distribution, you can imagine kind of being confronted with new forms of gender or forms of gender that were new to them and kind of watching them grapple with and come to understand this as being something foundational to who their child was as a person was really kind of fascinating to watch. And as they were doing that, they were also looking to me as an expert for answers. And so we were in this like reciprocal process of sort of studying each other and trying to figure this out in a mo...