Rebuilding Relationships in a Transgender Family: The Stories of Parents of Japanese Transgender Children

ABSTRACT

This study considers the process by which parents accept their transgender children through an analysis of the stories of parents in Japan. The study also considers how the gender identity of parents is affected by their child and the discourses related to queer identities. The mothers were strongly motivated to understand their child and reconstructed the image and life stories of the child. Through these processes, the mothers came to reconsider their own gender identities in queer ways. In contrast, the fathers had a lack of motivation to understand their child, and their masculinity was not significantly influenced by deessentialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• parental role
• diversity
• gender identity
• gender differences

Funding

The research was funded in part through the Sasakawa Scientific Research Grant from the Japan Science Society.

Notes

1. In early times, there was no concept of transgender, i.e., the assigned gender is different from the gender identity. Therefore, the concept of cross-dresser related to the history of transgender is considered at first.

2. Mark McLelland sums up the shift in the model with which transgender people identify as moving from the Kabuki onnagata model, in which people took pride in their femininity with a male body in the 1950s, to the surgical creation of a womanlike body in the 1960s (2005, p. 113).

3. The decision of the court acknowledges the significance of these treatments per se, and it points out some problems: The defendant performed the surgery without administering psychiatric and psychological tests to the patients, exploring their life history and relationship with their family, and engaging in mutual consultation with other specialists. Also, the defendant did not observe the patients after the surgery and create a medical certificate, receive a certificate of consent from them (Tokyo District Court, 1969).

4. Informed consent was obtained from the interviewees, and this research followed all institutional guidelines. The interviewees were provided a working draft of the article for validation and had the opportunity to respond to the author about the content and findings. Alterations were made in accordance with the wishes of the interviewees.

5. In the participant observation, almost all the mothers who came to a GLBT Rainbow meeting for the first time were in tears. Some mothers also blamed themselves as bad child rearers (e.g., Hubbard & Whitley, 2012).

6. The term x-jendā includes both meanings of FTM and MTF.

7. Menvielle (2012) pointed out that the parental emotional response for gender variance changed from a threat to a positive one.

8. As mentioned above, the interviewees tried to affirmatively reconstruct their stories, but not all of the life stories that were collected were told in a positive way. Two mothers whose transgender female children had a mental disorder engaged in self-injurious behavior or domestic violence and went to the psychiatric hospital. They expressed that they faced difficulties in supporting their child and had fear regarding the future. Therefore, these parental stories were related to the mental and emotional health of their child.