“Are You Trying to Make Them Gay?”: Culture Wars, Anxieties about Genderplay, and the Subsequent Impacts on Youth

Abstract

Using a queer theoretical lens, this conceptual paper explores the complexities of working with queer youth in leisure spaces by using genderplay to explore gender identity. Given the current social and political climate in Canada, researchers in this area face considerable professional road blocks from gatekeepers, despite providing often life-saving access for youth to queer mentors, community, and health resources. This paper, therefore, provides insight into the pervasiveness of the image of the child that informs the anxiety present in current political, social, and cultural discourses about queer children and the danger that image is putting these actual children in by limiting access to the above stated resources. Moreover, we expose how the image of the child is always invested in ideals of middle and upper-class whiteness, able-bodiedness, and imagined straightness from the outset, which further limits access to leisure spaces for queer children who may be otherwise marginalized.

Keywords:

• Childhood sexuality
• drag performance
• institutional review boards
• queer youth
• research ethics

Introduction

Existing research in the leisure field has identified challenges for Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (2SLGBTQI) people in accessing community recreation, which often results in these individuals working to conceal or tone down their gender and sexual identities in these spaces (Kivel & Kleiber, 2000; Litwiller, 2018; Oakleaf, 2010; Oakleaf & Richmond, 2017). For example, some researchers have found that public leisure spaces, such as coffee shops, are complex sites of constant negotiation that require diligent monitoring of physical and emotional safety. If a space is perceived as unsafe, queer people will often tailor their behavior and mannerisms to fit gender expectations in order to mitigate potential harm (Lewis & Johnson, 2011). As a result of this self-monitoring, there are few leisure spaces where 2SLGBTQI youth can freely express and experiment with gender. In an effort to provide such a space, and in response to the articulated desires of a particular queer youth community in Canada for an opportunity to engage in free gender play, the second author has collaborated with a number of queer organizations to offer drag performance workshops to local 2SLGBTQI youth (aged 14 to 21).

Drag performance, for many artists, is an exaggerated expression of masculinity or femininity, most often on stage. In the workshops that we are drawing on in this article, adult drag artists mentor youth who have queer gender identities (including transgender and genderqueer) and gender expressions (including androgynous) to freely explore their gender and be intentionally creative in this expression through the use of make-up, movement to music, and costuming. For example, youth are shown how to use make up to contour their faces for masculine or feminine effect, eye shadow techniques, and how to use make up to amplify for theatrical expression or for everyday use. The workshops culminated in a semi-private performance in front of their peers. In spite of the benefits that youth accrue from the workshop (e.g., fun, connection to resources and queer culture, self-exploration, able to be one’s truer self, cultivation of new friendships) this workshop, and the kind of work we engage in with queer youth, continues to feel risky. It is by reflecting on this feeling of riskiness that we offer a discussion of the way our Euro-Western society continues to view children as innocent, as always already heterosexual, and the danger inherent in these assumptions. For example, one community member¹ expressed concern about the sexualized nature of drag performance and its appropriateness for youth by posing the question ‘are you trying to make them gay?’ This question provides insight into the influence the image of the idealized child that continues to pervade our social and cultural spaces, and therefore is the question much of our analysis circulates around and which potentially limits youth’s agency, experimentation, sense of play and their lifelines to queer mentors and resources. While concern for, and protection of, children and youth is paramount, we contend that ongoing resistance to discussing gender with children on behalf of law-makers, government officials, and the general public reveals untenable narratives that are reliant on cultural understandings of the innocence of the child. We recognize, and are working alongside the specter of, the fact that these larger social conversations have the potential to impact or curtail our, and other researchers who work in this field’s, important and often life-saving work. In order to highlight the social conversations that make our work a challenge, we include a discussion of the social media blow-back we received while recruiting participants for our project.

Our interest in gender play workshops with queer youth is situated in our own positionality. The first author is a white, queer, rurally-situated independent scholar working largely in humanities-based narrative research on intersex artistic production through the lens of queer theory and analysis. The second author is a white, genderqueer researcher who is interested in leisure opportunities for queer youth and how leisure affects their mental health. We came to this theoretical work as two researchers invested in the flourishing of queer, trans, and otherwise gender and sex-non-conforming youth within leisure spaces.

Together, we use our interdisciplinary approach to gender to think through four main problems resulting from this implicit understanding of childhood innocence, including: 1) the inherent homophobia in the question ‘are you trying to make them gay?,’ as though ‘being gay’ is something that only occurs as a result of coercion (by an adult), and certainly is never, ever a choice; 2) that the cultural insistence on the innocence of the child works to position the child as an empty vessel, with the unacknowledged consequences of being filled up with the heteronormative fantasies and desires of straight adults’ own; 3) the conflation of non-normative gender variance and sexuality, with the being and doing of nonconformity and queerness as overly sexual, sexually perverse, and out of control; 4) the anxiety present in the examples we will forward, we contend, is not directed at racialized kids, kids whose queerness is already assured (insistently effeminate boys, for example [Sedgwick, 1991]), poor kids, or kids with disabilities, but kids whose future is already promised to be a privileged one. Considering that the youth we have worked with so far fall overwhelmingly into these further marginalized categories, it is vital that we work through the consequences of this misplaced anxiety that frets about queer kids, but does not see their racialized, disabled, and/or poor bodies as being part of that category.

The impact of the deployment of this idealized child narrative (the innocent child), we argue, potentially keeps leisure activities like a genderplay and drag workshops away from all kids, but also makes particularly obvious the ways in which the ‘protection of innocence’ rhetoric upholds the white middle-class, gender conforming child and erases marginalized kids, leaving them even more vulnerable to social, cultural, and institutional exclusion. We draw on the unfortunately small body of work in queer theory on childhood sexuality to help us think through how these investments in childhood sexuality (keeping them straight) continue to pose significant threat to children and youth and limit the kind of work we can do in Leisure Studies.

Defining the child

It is important to define what we mean by the child, or children, before we continue. The category of the child has shifted over time, and is imagined differently in different cultures and contexts. But, in our Euro-Western context and our current time and place, the child, or childhood, is quite often defined by heteronormative standards, innocence, and in relation to deviance and victimhood. For example, in their edited collection Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004), Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley point out that in discussions about ‘age-of-consent laws,’ persons under that age (usually sixteen) are considered children. However, teenagers who engage in what we consider to be heinous crimes like rape or murder, are not innocent and therefore are often tried as adults. Another oft-used marker of childhood is the person’s capacity to reproduce, which betrays a ‘stunning index of the heteronormativity that infuses theories of human development’ [p.xxv]. The prevailing system for defining the child seems to be juridical, rather arbitrary, and demarcated by individuals, institutions, and governments who speak on behalf of those who are apparently unable to speak for themselves.

According to Katherine Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009), the child is a category constructed by adults to explain a particular temporal moment in life that is governed both by an impossible ideal of innocence, but also one that is entirely based on adults’ own nostalgia. She writes: ‘the child is precisely who we are not and, in fact, never were. It is the act of adults looking back. It is ghostly, unreachable fancy’ (p. 5). Children, therefore, both occupy the space of childhood, but have no agency to name themselves ‘children’ nor decide when that childhood is over. What adults do know about childhood and children is that they ought to be protected because they will inherit the imagined future to come.

Thus, according to Lee Edelman (2004), to be in the service of children, or on the side of the children, elicits a ‘“self-evident” one-sideneness – the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense’ (p. 2). The Child (which Edelman capitalizes in order to gesture to The Child as an ideological mechanism and not any one particularly child), becomes the ideal political tool, because one cannot be ‘against’ the child, because then one would be against the future, against a ‘reproductive futurism’ that assures the legacy of our society. In brief, the Child ‘remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’ (p. 2). It is vital to underline the way The Child comes to be figured not as one specific child, but as a figure that is informed by individual nostalgia (one’s own childhood that is not really knowable because memory itself is unstable) as the securer of our society’s future. As a result of this comingling of politics and individual narrative, the child cannot ever be ‘real,’ but only ever a fantasy being talked about and acted on behalf of instead of talked to and acting with.

In order to talk to, and act with, youth in ways that give them agency, the Canadian Tri Council Policy allows youth who are engaging in minimal risk research and who are competent to make informed decisions about their research participation rather than assent through a third party (e.g., parent, guardian) (TCPS-2.,2, 2014, p.32). In the second author’s ethics application for the pilot study, they requested that Mature Minor status be granted to participants aged 14-18 years so that these youth could sign their own consent forms (a strategy and rationale that is fully articulated elsewhere (e.g., Taylor, 2008)). The second author reasoned that Mature Minor status was necessary in order to successfully conduct the research because some parents do not support their child exploring gender identity and gender expression or do not know about their child’s questioning or queer identities.² Further, they argued that the research (i.e., participation in a drag performance workshop, focus groups, and interviews) was minimal risk as defined by the Tri Council Policy: ‘research in which the probability and magnitude of possible harms implied by participation in the research is no greater than those encountered by participants in those aspects of their everyday life’ (2014, p. 22). The requirement of youth to obtain parental consent places many youth at greater risk than their everyday lives. If these youth need parental consent and in the asking reveal a previously unknown queer identity, either implicitly through their interest in the workshop or explicitly, there is the distinct possibility that their parent or guardian will ostracize, reject and/or deny housing to them (Ryan et al., 2010). The everyday lives of youth who do not ‘fit in’ because they express themselves in non-normative ways often results in physical and verbal harassment from other students and teachers at school (Taylor & Peter, 2011). A research project that encourages youth to play and experiment with gender through make up, costumes, and movement to music poses no greater risk to youth than their everyday lives. In fact, the safer space created by caring adult mentors, where youth can learn about the possibilities for their queer identities, is a lesser risk than the homophobia and transphobia experienced in their day-to-day lives. Finally, unbeknownst to parents and guardians, youth can already be attending a queer organization’s programs.

In spite of the clear rationale detailed above that articulates the need for queer spaces and access to queer mentors, these spaces and resources are always at risk because of the way these youth are made to be innocent within the discourses surrounding youth and sexuality in the larger cultural context. As recently as the summer of 2019, the appropriateness of teaching 2SLGBTQI issues in schools was a hot topic of debate across Canada, as the Doug Ford government in Ontario released their new curriculum. They had run their election based on the promise that they would amend the previous Liberal government’s proposed Sex-Ed curriculum that included discussions of gender identity starting in elementary grades (Bialystok, 2019). Much of the Ford election campaign was fueled by so-called anti-progressive views that expressed rage at the thought of teaching kids that sex and gender are not intrinsically linked, but also, that teaching them about gender as, in part, socially constructed was forcing them to become grown-ups too early and sexualizing them (Alphonso, 2018). The new Ford curriculum now begins discussions of gender identity in grade eight, after many kids will have already begun thinking about gender and have already entered puberty. It also allows parents to opt-out of education that would have their kids learn about 2SLGBTQI identities (Alphonso, 2019).

As many columnists and academics have argued (Castle, 2019; Martino et al., 2019; Peters, 2019), the debate about “gender identity” has become the main rallying point for the current culture wars waging across the globe. The culture wars, according to Castle (2019), defines the way groups become polarized about cultural issues made central, like abortion, largely according to religion or party politics. The result of this polarization is often an unnuanced and characterized attack of the other pole’s arguments or concerns in ways that can become hostile. Castle argues that gender identities, but specifically trans people, have become a key touchstone within a culture wars framework in popular media (Castle, 2019). By placing trans people, and increasingly trans kids, in the center of the culture war, it augments the cultural anxiety that swells around these kids – these same queer kids who may be questioning their gender identity or sexuality at a vulnerable moment in their lives. The media storm around their identities only serves to make this vulnerability more acute for a group that is already at high risk for suicide (Center for Suicide Prevention, 2019).

In our experience, the culture wars have informed online trolling that have been posted as comments on our recruitment poster, which we shared on Facebook and Instagram. While we and our potential participants did not receive direct threats to our safety, these comments made us feel uneasy and we diligently made sure that they were hidden from public view. Examples of these comments are: “THIS IS THEIR DISGUSTING EVIL PROGRAM” with an accompanying meme that reads “AWAKE YET?,” over two pictures: one of a drag queen at a library whose costume includes horns, and the second a picture of a sculpture that mimics the drag queen and depicts children listening to Satan. The meme also references I John 2:18, which reads “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour” (New King James Version) (18 Jan 2020). Other comments simply read “SICK” (10 Jan 2020) and “Fck off with your twisting minds” (15 Jan 2020). Another comment followed an open discussion of whether gender play is for children:

it’s not [.] Adults have every right to do [as] they please. Children rely on adults to make proper decisions for them until the time comes they are adults and have the life skills to make proper decisions [. I]f at that point they want to join in great! I’m all for adults doing what they want. Obviously your household would be completely inappropriate for my children to ever come over if you think this way…disgusting.³ (15 Jan 2020).

These comments paint a clear picture of the general hatefulness in response to gender play as a leisure activity for youth. Those of us that put on these programs are positioned as “sick,” “twist[ed],” the “antichrist,” and generally trying to seduce kids into activities that are age-inappropriate. In these comments lies an understanding of youth as easily persuadable (that the antichrist will be welcomed by the unassuming youth), and in need of protection. Further, the line between the “adults” who can “do what they want” and children is not clear, and makes further obvious the messiness of defining children in the first place. The lack of specificity of age, or of what is abhorrent about the workshop, within the posts encourages us to question what the kernel of concern is, a concern that seems both obvious enough to make a comment like simply “SICK” effective, and vague enough to make the source of this vitriol (i.e., homophobia) intangible. A closer exploration of the interweaving of sexuality and gender in relation to children is required in order to think more pointedly about the complex source of the rage expressed in these comments.

Children and sexuality

Children and sexuality have, for a very long time in Western history, been positioned as almost oxymoronic. As Bruhm and Hurley write: ‘there is currently a dominant narrative about children: children are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, however, children are officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual’ (p. ix). The Western narrative about children, therefore, forms a kind of double-bind. At once, the child must be free of sexuality, but they are also assumed to be heterosexual. Therefore, the examples we list above gesture to a certain panic that the child is not yet gay, but that any encouragement, explicitly or otherwise, by adults might ‘make them gay.’ Bruhm and Hurley go on to assert that ‘people panic when [childhood] sexuality takes on a life outside the sanctioned scripts of child’s play. And nowhere is this panic more explosive than in the field of the queer child, the child whose play confirms neither the comfortable stories of child (a)sexuality, nor the supposedly blissful promise of adult heteronormativity’ (p. ix).

We, therefore, contend that the drag workshops are a sort of ‘child’s play’ but a kind that is decidedly queer in the sense that it veers from scripts of normal childhood fun that is expressly gendered male or female. The goal of the genderplay workshop was to provide youth – who are coerced into heteronormativity through violence and harassment – a relaxed atmosphere to try out versions of gender without fear of backlash. However, this kind of gender play threatens ‘comfortable stories of child (a)sexuality’ because of what Judith Butler terms the ‘heterosexual matrix’ whereby any transgressions of gender necessarily threaten heteronormativity.

As a result of the aforementioned anxiety about exposing children to discussions, information, or play about gender identity makes workshops of this kind targets for rhetorical (as we see in the above comments), and potentially even physical, attack. This fear of retaliation against drag workshops for youth stems from the culture in which we swim, which exposes obvious investments in the erotic life of the child. The underlying concern for those that reject gender play or exploration for youth is that they grow up straight, which requires a sexualizing of children from the start, a trend that is acutely worrying for those us engaging in youth-oriented work.

Perversion, innocence and the child

We have made clear, through the example above, that childhood is maintained on the basis of innocence (protecting youth from being exposed to ‘overt sexuality’). Through the rhetoric of innocence, children are assumed to be blank slates of sexuality and gender that are maintained until such time as puberty renders an unavoidable determinant of a binary expressed gender (and sexuality). Queer children who consistently demonstrate characteristics, behaviors, and desires that are non-normative, openly and publicly contest the assumption that children are devoid of sexuality. Because queer children are disrupting gender normativity and tacit assumptions about normative expressions of sexuality, they make visible a process of sexuality that is usually unobserved, unnoticed, or taken for granted.

Gender identity, gender expression, sex assigned at birth, and sexuality, while illuminating different axis of the human experience, are often in everyday parlance conflated under the term ‘gender.’ Queer theorist Judith Butler (1990) outlines gender as a social process through her theories of the heterosexual matrix and performativity. The heterosexual matrix explicates the way physical sex informs gender identity and sexuality along scripts of heteronormativity. For example: infants are categorized as either male or female at birth based on external genitalia, which thus scripts everything from which colors their bodies are wrapped in, to which toys fill their play area. In later years, implicit cultural acceptance of the use of physical and verbal harassment is quite often deployed to coerce children and youth into binary gender expectations that bolster heteronormativity (e.g., by turning a ‘blind eye’ to bullying). Further, the matrix makes invisible the complexity of gender by, for example, reducing expressions of non-normative gender to sexual perversion. The reduction of an effeminate boy’s gender expression to sexuality – i.e., his assumed homosexuality – is a prevailing example of just such logic. However, we know from Butler’s exploration of performativity that gender expression may not always comingle with queer sexual desire. Regardless, one community member was curious about why we would be making youth exaggerate their gender expression through what they stated was overly sexual behavior, which clearly enmeshes gender and sexuality within the popular imagination.

The history of this enmeshing of gender and sexuality is long and entrenched in Euro-Western society and very tricky to untangle. Michel Foucault illustrates two ideas in the History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1990) that make plain the ways sexuality has been policed in children: the first is ‘the pedagogization of children’s sex,’ which he claims occurred during the Victorian period in the Euro-West, and which leaves in the hands of ‘parents, families, educators, doctors, and eventually psychologists’ the protection of children from themselves in relation to sexuality. Foucault explains that there is an underlying acknowledgment that children are ‘prone to indulge in sexual activity,’ but at the same time that such activities, being ‘“contrary to nature,”’ ‘posed physical and moral, individual and collective dangers’ (p. 104). The legacy of the ‘pedagogization of children’s sex’ remains in our current moment through the disciplining of children’s sexuality by various gatekeepers and guardians, which is haunted by the knowledge that children are always already sexual.

Childhood sexuality, however, is read quite often through youth’s expression of gender, particularly if that gender does not easily equate to their assumed physical sex. Foucault makes clear is that homosexuality is not constructed simply as a sex practice, but as a perverse way of being that is saturated into the soul and personhood that plays out not only in desire but in gender. For Foucault, the act of sodomy was not just a practice by the Victorian period in the Euro-West, but evidence of a ‘kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul.’ In short, he famously claims that ‘the homosexual was now a species’ (p. 43), which came with clear physical and behavioral indicators that sexologists began creating diagnosis and taxonomies for. The heteronormative logic that bolsters the heterosexual matrix and the construction of the homosexual as a “species” that is wholly other not just in terms of sexual desire but in every way (including gender expression, every day performance of self, etc.), concludes that if youth explore or even solidify a queer identity in the workshop, that queer identity equates to an intrinsic perversion that cannot be erased. In other words, not only does the resistance to this project reveal a fear that youth will be made to misbehave but also that they will be made explosively and irrevocably perverse.

By participating in a workshop that allows them to explore the spectrum of gender play regardless of their own diagnosed sex at birth, youth would be permitted to take the cap off their effervescent sexuality that is bubbling just below the surface. They would be projected into the perversion of being queer (e.g., ushered into being a member of the queer ‘species’) and explicit immorality, leading directly to anti-social, predatory behaviors, and perhaps the most heinous of crimes. As further proof of this discourse which forms the undercurrent of the Facebook comments above, historically and currently the helping professions (e.g., psychiatry) have pathologized and disordered gender deviance (e.g., DSM II Homosexuality, DSM III Gender Identity Disorder) and supported coercive interventions meant to sculpt the child into conformity (Tosh, 2011), practices that are currently publicly protested and that scholars heavily critique.⁴

The idealized child

Up until this point, we have argued that impetus to keep kids straight has fueled the anxieties espoused by community members in response to discussions of gender identities with youth, which we argue might impinge on the effectiveness of work with queer youth. However, we want to be sure to point out that it is not all children that fuel these anxieties, but a select few onto whom a bright future is conferred. Lee Edelman makes an important claim in his polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), that that the image of The Child (not a specific child per se but the imaginary child that inherits the future – of the nation, of the race, and so on) as an empty slate is particularly potent in Euro-Western culture because The Child can inherit an ideal future that we, as adults, have failed to embody. As a result, we put the image of The Child to work politically as the figure of the future nation. The Child will inherit our world, and is our only hope. However, José Estoban Muñoz (2009) challenges Edelman’s formulation of The Child. He writes: the future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not thesovereign princes of futurity. Although Edelman does indicate that the future ofthe child as futurity is different from the future of actual children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white (p. 95).

We suggest, based on an understanding of Muñoz, that when community members express concern about over sexualizing children, they are not imagining racialized kids, kids already queer through their overt rejection of social norms, or poor kids. They are imagining affluent straight white kids with bright futures, which will be destroyed by a perverse sexuality that is cultivated in a genderplay workshop.

Moreover, we propose that disabled kids are also not afforded a future worth fretting about. As queer disabilities scholars like Robert McRuer, Alison Kafer, and Eli Clare suggest, disabled children are contained within childhood specifically through a limitation of their access to sexuality. An acute example this process, which all three of these scholars draw on, is 29 year-old Ashley, the so-called ‘pillow angel,’ whose body was surgically altered by physicians to remove breasts and a uterus that did not align with what they perceived as an adult body with the mind of a three month old. Ashley’s intellectual disability (her three-month old mind) meant for these physicians that she had no need of her breasts and uterus, which caused discomfort because of the way they both gesture to her body’s lurking sexuality despite a mental capacity of a child. Ashley’s example renders painfully obvious that there is no imagined future for disabled kids, who are locked into a perpetual kind of childhood innocence wherein they are expected not to look, desire, or act like ‘adults.’ They are, instead, expected to be forever innocent through an imposed asexuality and, in the case of Ashley, an asexuality that is medically imposed. Ashley’s case makes disastrously clear, childhood and sexuality are inextricably linked in the cultural and social imagination, even when – perhaps especially when – sexuality is the very thing trying to be removed from their body.

Keeping an eye on the way childhood is a constructed category depending on the nexus of race, ability, class, and sexuality, allows us to make visible the complex anxieties around youth innocence and gender play. When the child is expected to be straight, their bodies are always already sexualized and their opportunities for non-normative gender play are curtailed as a result. This curtailment is a policing all child bodies, but it is largely the white, middle-class, able-bodied, and seemingly straight kids, that are included in the ‘child imaginary,’ while other marginalized kids are rendered insignificant, unworthy of anxiety. Unfortunately, this rendering insignificant does not mean that the access to a gender play workshop by, for example, assuredly queer youth, is increased. Rather, it means that these bodies are unrecognizable and kept out of leisure spaces because they are not seen to exist in the first place. While more work needs to be done on the intersections of gender, play, and the way various modes of marginalization of youth affect their ability to engage in these expansive notions of that play, we offer a critique of the investments of adults in the constructed category of the child as a necessary and productive starting point.

Conclusion

We take the figure of the child in our culture, as a way into thinking about the reasons for, and tactics of, gatekeeping access to meaningful engagement with ideas and practices of gender for youth. The way in which the imagined child (already assured as white and privileged) is positioned as pure, innocent, waiting to be filled up with adult fantasies and desires, has the potential to color the questions asked and policing of the work we are attempting to do. Further, while youth who participate in the drag workshops engage in sexually expressive behaviors, these behaviors are not more sexual than the heteronormative expectations placed on youth and children in the everyday. That is, the youth are not exposed to an overly sexual queer perversion in the workshops, or sexualized any earlier than they may otherwise be.

Governing bodies at all governmental and institutional levels influence research by privileging certain kids over others through the idealization of the straight child. These disciplining institutions are complicit — through policy creation, political campaigns, and the manipulation of media reporting — in the creation of the category ‘Child.’ This category creation serves to provide a background against which the ideological investment of gatekeepers and other adults that have in the future life of the non-queer child can be unveiled. These ideological investments, as other researchers have noted, have significant influence over the kind of research we can do (Browne & Nash, 2010), and our safety and well-being as we enact it.

Notes

1 As further evidence of the messiness of leisure research, we are unable to identify this community member’s name, position, or relationship to this project. We will add, however, that they are a gatekeeper that had the potential to limit or completely shut down the workshop, so their comment serves as a poignant example of the impact that ideologies of childhood that are rooted in heteronormativity and innocence can have on queer youth’s access to leisure and care.

2 We use the term ‘queer’ here in two ways: first, as a shorthand for the 2SLGBTQI acronym. However, we are aware that within the discourse of queer theory, from which we inherit our theoretical tools in this article, ‘queer’ is used in myriad of ways, including as a gesture to any identity that is positioned against that which is ‘normative,’ particularly within a Euro-Western society. Therefore, second, we use queer as José Muñoz (2009) does, as a horizon that may never arrive, as a becoming without end (p. 1), which is particularly useful for youth whose gender identity, sexuality, and gender expression are often in a state of constant flux.

3 It is worth noting that the person who made this comment is arguing against an individual who writes that gender play is “for children, too” and lists themselves as an “abortion dula,” so it may be abortion that has become the debate here and not gender play.

4 Despite the move of the American Psychiatric Association to replace “Gender Identity Disorder” from the DSM V and replace it with “Gender Dysphoria,” to demarcate the difference between a disordered identity and instead name a condition of distress (APA, 2013), the policing of the binary body (e.g. explicitly male or female) by helping professions continues to be acute (see Monro et al., 2019).