If you are a historian of childhood, today’s U.K. announcement about under sixteens being unable to make decisions about their gender goes against pretty much everything in our methodology and practise -

For a long time historians also took the perspective that children belong to their parents, or only reflect back what they are told. That they are just the product of external circumstance: family, school, workplace legislation, institution, and so on.

Also also many historians thought children are totally biologically bound - they are defined by their inability and incapacity. They are asocial tabula rasa, without society and culture, and best when “innocent” and ideally kept apart from society. -

Trans children suffer effects of these beliefs: their parents, doctors, hospitals, schools decide their gender. it is deemed they don’t “know” themselves - simply meaninglessly parrot what adults say. Also how colonial teachers saw non-western kids and adults, how men saw women.

As @gp_jls points out, even medicalised transition forces trans children to rely on the medical establishment to officially mark their existence -

But historians of Childhood - especially currently- unequivocally reject the debate “do children have agency?” and subtext “are they historical and historically knowable?”. We accept they have interior lives, a sense of self, profound relationships, and social/cultural knowledge-

As Walter Johnson points out, asking if someone has agency is the same as asking if they are human. And measuring someone by their rationality, independence, command of circumstances and regimes of literacy, is uncritically regurgitating the discourses of Enlightenment selfhood.

Enlightened selfhood categorised women, black and indigenous people, colonised subjects, queer people, disabled people, and mentally ill people, as imprisoned in their bodies and without interiority and self control. And subject to white, cis, straight, Western, able bodied men.

There are whole bodies of scholarship on how Enlightened selfhood defined what is human in a way that put most people outside it. This includes children. But we need to stop asking “are they human”, regardless of whether they don’t or can’t master circumstance or change history.-

Accept that, as @gp_jls points out, trans children exist whether or not the medical establishment is there to help assign gender. Children have interiority, own their bodies, know the self, and are a part of our society and culture with LGBTQ+ life. They are a part of the world.-

Yes: children might change identity over their life - don’t adults? And children in the past used historical change to selfhood to play with identity - didn’t adults? And our categories of gender might differ or be outmoded in 40 years - haven’t we all lived through the same?

Indeed adults often impinge on children’s selfhood: the right to freedom from violence (your boss can’t punch you for disobedience), the right to touch (go hug your uncle!), the right to privacy (look at these photos/videos!), the right to act as a child in public (Tamir Rice)

And @shonfaye on how, a middle class child will be able to fund transition outside the U.K. - and that will not bother lobbyists. Because working-class children are historically seen as less rational and independent, less individual and case by case https://www.instagram.com/tv/CIQzBwQFkFl/?igshid=v78qsatvh88v