The untimeliness of trans youth: The temporal construction of a gender ‘disorder’

Abstract

This article explores a quasi-diagnosis, “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”, which constructs the pathologized untimeliness of trans youth. I argue that rapid-onset is a concept with multiple, shifting meanings that encompass various dimensions of temporality. I show how constructions of rapid or fast time are used to call into question the claims of trans youth and the judgment of clinicians who treat them. The discourse of rapid, hasty, and etiologically suspect gender dysphoria assumes a view of gender as essential, fixed, and asocial, and of adolescence as a developmental stage of passivity, susceptibility, and risk. The study’s treatment of its research subjects as untimely obscures their varied, emergent, and dynamic experiences, I argue, which should not be read as signs of “incorrect” gender identity, but rather as indications of gender’s material performativity.

Keywords

Trans youth gender dysphoria temporality

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