“I Was a Queer Child and So Were You: Toward Social and Cultural Transformation”

Inane, rambling and tortuous.

The blurby bit

I Was a Queer Child and So Were You: Toward Social and Cultural Transformation
Weaving memoir through new ideas, this talk engages gender’s strangeness, stretching what we think we know about matters surrounding genitals, clothing, and kissing—even reading—as they relate to children [my emphasis]. It also considers how race and religion undermine the notion of “two sexes.” What kinds of issues for everyone’s childhood—and adulthood—turn around dynamics for gay and trans kids? Prepare to enter a story that is yours. It holds key questions for social justice and human flourishing.

Trans-inclusivity Seminar Series
This talk is part of a multi-month series that started from 14th February continuing until June 2024 with a variety of talks given by leading academics and current researchers in trans-inclusive research and study. It is no coincidence that the series started during LGBT+ history month – as the Institute of Education (IOE), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, looks to celebrate trans-inclusivity with UCL’s own academics along with our invited external speakers. […] The Trans-inclusivity Seminar Series has been funded by UCL’s LEIG (LGBTQ+ Equality Implementation Group).

From Eventbrite

Introduction

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Dean of the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah, where she teaches queer theory, theories of race and racialized gender, and twentieth-century literature and film. She has written books on children, The Queer Child and The Child Now, both of which are explicitly about – what she terms – ‘childhood sexuality’. She is not someone I have ever come across in my forays into queer theory, nor have I either heard anyone reference her, so is a persona non grata as far as I’m concerned. Not so UCL’s Institute of Education, however. The event was held in person and you could also watch online (and still can, see below).

A day prior to the talk, UCL’s IOE circulated ‘key information’ about Stockton’s talk, which is worth a copy and paste, to demonstrate not only how head-up-arse the woman is, but also the vastly delusional nature of her thought process and what appears to be an unnatural preoccupation with children:

Description:

Contemporary organized backlash against queer children demands our tender replies. Entire systems sit upon apparently naturalized categories (“gay,” “straight,” “trans,” “cis,” “girl,” “boy”). Even when unacknowledged, gender is strange for every one of us—though in tellingly distinctive ways.

Weaving memoir through new ideas, this talk engages gender’s strangeness, stretching what we think we know about matters surrounding genitals, clothing, and kissing—even reading—as they relate to children. It also considers how race and religion undermine the notion of “two sexes.” What kinds of issues for everyone’s childhood—and adulthood—turn around dynamics for gay and trans kids? Prepare to enter a story that is yours. It holds key questions for social justice and human flourishing.

Outline:

Context for my queer/trans-affirmative talk: theorizing, storytelling

What we learn from definitions of “queer”

Why gender norms are particularly strange

How the phrase “same-sex” may present problems for queer/trans-affirmative understandings

–my playful questioning

–my own lived discovery

Why is kissing key to grasping children’s sexuality?

–kissing lips, kissing words

–how my childhood wish to kiss deeply confused me (in illuminating ways)

–I was where “gay” and “trans” collide:

how so, why does it matter, what can we glean from it?

–what do I mean by my “split temporality”?

My concept of “the backwards birth”

–what it is; how it ghosted the figure of “the gay child” in the 20th century

–is it reappearing for gay children now?

–how dynamics related to this concept lead to the constant, misguided worry that transkids will regret transitioning

Why the concepts “sex” and “gender” seem straight-forward but are not for anyone

–where the concept of “gender” comes from and how it was born

–how does race enter in? (were the United States founded on six sexes?)

–are children asked to kiss a word and system?

Kissing is neither hetero nor homo; trans nor cis. (Asexual folks and celibates partake.)

–but is kissing sex?

— how is the act of reading words or images, in a book or film, a form of kissing and sex-with-ideas?

— I illustrate via a Hollywood film—known for its famous “interracial kiss”—that I saw at age seven

–I explain how I related it to my desires as a gay/trans kid

Religion aided my childhood queerness

–how I ended up in the lap of religion, in quest of queer kissing

–how religious belief produced my twists and turns of gay and trans identities

–religious contradictions led to my first passionate kiss–and what it revealed about the incoherence surrounding how we’re made to conceive of gender, sexuality, and sex

Despite it all, the kiss….

From an email sent by UCL on behalf of Stockton on 24 March 2024

Inane, rambling and tortuous, anyone? How on earth did such insubstantial drivel become the subject of a talk? Proof that in gender studies, if you claim to be an expert on yourself, you are considered a bona fide expert, full stop. You won’t be surprised to learn that Stockton is a lesbian, albeit one that denies homosexuality exists.

The talk

Excruciatingly the talk was very much in line with the outline circulated, in which Stockton emphasised that she did not believe in biological sex, ergo there was no such thing as homosexuality, so she’s not really a lesbian, innit? All of us are queer because all of us are strange in some way. Kissing was the key to how sexuality in childhood was formed. Gender norms were white supremacy, etc.

On her same sex relationship, Stockton rationalised it wasn’t actually a lesbian one since her and her partner had different genitals (I suppose having sex with someone who had exactly the same genitals might be slightly freaky, or incest). As a child Stockton had wanted a kiss from her mother to affirm her boyishness, ‘blushing inside’ at the thought. She had been a trans child, who had never transitioned (and sounded like she had no plans of doing so). Aged six she had fallen in love with a boy called Peter and thoughts about him including imaging she was him so she could kiss a girl she liked.

‘White men in the US are less afraid of their pants,’ one of my notes reads. Did she really say that? I’m not rewatching to find out but you get the drift of the inanity. Frankly I can’t believe I, and a whole room of students, sat through it. I became sleepy at one point and then shouted abuse at her (online obviously, though I would have loved to do that in person).

When she was a child, children were not allowed to be sexual, this particularly affected ‘gay children’. Today’s framing of the ‘trans child’ was similar to that of the ‘gay child’ in the past. Even supportive parents mourn having a ‘trans child’. The surface was very deep. Stockton made it clear several times that she often talks to such parents and children. No further context of these conversations was given.

There were five layers to biological sex, these layers might ‘disagree’ with each other. She recommended Julian Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child. Could reading also be kissing? Well, yes, because it enters through an orifice (the eyes 👀). Stockton was never a lesbian but a boy learning to be a fox. She also had a crush on Jesus.

In 1982 she moved away from her hickey Christian backwater to study at Yale. There she met feminists and got a haircut. The talk, according to my notes, ended there, her as an adult studying at university.

The host from UCL’s IoE told Stockton that there were some lovely comments about the talk made on Slido, but I couldn’t see a single one. A whole hour had passed.

Above: Stockton’s mocked the definitions apparently given in dictionaries of yesteryear, but didn’t have the guts to provide citations

Q&A

The Q&A was similarly abstruse with proclamations such as: ‘We can’t just say there are men and women’ in response to questions which were really more like fawning agreements. Stockton had bigged herself up front that she was ready to take on all comers, literally puffing herself up, but as per usual literally no one dared say anything remotely contradictory. Naturally the focus was on the ‘trans child’ but nil mention of the reason why people opposed the use of puberty blockers. Stockton was set to read Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, so would know in a few days the answers to all questions.

Stockton wasn’t a parent but she imagined that a parent of a 14 year old ‘missed’ the body of the previously 3 year old. Parents must understand the body of their child, i.e. the one which says that his/her body is wrong and must be changed. In the US there were many feminists teaching transsexuality and had been told off for doing so.

She correctly observed that no one had ever talked about or made programmes about ‘the gay child’, however Barbara Walters had broadcast My Secret Self in 2002 (it was actually 2007) featuring ‘trans girl’ Jazz Jennings, whereas as Oprah Winfrey had broadcast I Knew I Was Gay (no video found) in 2003/4 but it had only included gay adults reflecting on their youths.

One of the students in the audience, who came from Taiwan, where same sex sex is legal but still culturally taboo, announced that his parents were much happier with his homosexuality once he announced he was really a woman instead. Mum likes going out for spa days with him and dad felt that his masculinity was less threatened. Mum was also relieved that he wouldn’t be ‘entering’ into another woman, so essentially also relieved he wasn’t heterosexual either. Zero reaction from Stockton on hearing these disturbing revelations. Actually that’s not true, she did have a reflection, her own mother had found Stockton’s homosexuality difficult to deal with because she felt threatened by the idea that a woman might replace her. All very Freudian, don’t you think?

Previously people were worried about gay people having children, now people were worried about trans people having children. Trans people should not have to seek permission to get hormones and surgeries – why should they present a rationale? ‘Cisgender’ women were allowed to get ‘gender affirming care’ without such restrictions.

Stockton went off on her ‘reading is like a kiss’ bilge again, – sometimes reading is like kissing your uncle (i.e. horrible). You can also penetrate someone with words. Were such thoughts offensive to asex(ual) people though? When I say ‘cat’ to you, your mind has to ‘birth’ the idea of a cat, what is left over is mystical. Roland Barthes eat your heart out.

A few days previously Stockton had been in the audience when fellow gender studies academic, Davina ‘Thickie’ Cooper, argued that sports did not need to be segregated by sex. Stockton felt that any criticism of ‘trans women’ in female sports was transphobic. Terfs would only accept such ‘trans women’ if they didn’t win. She then misrepresented the story of Renée Richards and mentioned Michael Phelps’ supposed flipper feet. She was so sad that there were boys missing out on playing in girls’ sports, something something PCOS and testosterone levels. TRA bingo in other words.

Her final anecdote was interesting though (relatively speaking), in that she had been taunted by a bar room bore and instead of ignoring him, she spent a considerable amount of time persuading him that she was a genderqueer non-binary, to the point that he warmed up and they finally connected (in other words, she out-bored him).

Conclusion

There really are no words which adequately describe how bizarre a woman Stockton is. An intervention is probably needed. I can’t imagine a responsible parent being comfortable leaving a child with her.

---

Thank you for reading! Sign up to my blog by going to the bottom of the page.

Please share on other forums if you liked it, as I only do Twitter.