Taylor Silverman

TAYLOR SILVERMAN, then a graduate student at University of California, Irvine, California, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Engendering Adolescence: Identity, Care, & Pediatric Transgender Medicine in the United States,” supervised by Dr. Lilith Mahmud. Through clinic- and community-based fieldwork in the Northeastern United States, this project explored the emergent forms of adolescence, identity, and care that define the biomedical treatment of transgender youth. Since the first “gender affirming” clinics opened a decade ago, new policies and practices have made “transitioning” possible for teenagers as well as adults. Clinical narratives increasingly legitimize and normalize the development of “gender expansive” identities during puberty. Families and health care providers work to achieve teens’ goals for embodiment and expression, navigating politicized discourses around youth independence. And adolescence, already characterized by changing bodies and social transitions, has become central to an evolving politics of gender identity as fluid and self-determined. Taken together, the everyday practices of gender affirming care have begun to transform long-standing biosocial assumptions about gender and identity formation, introducing new ways of being trans and being a teenager in the contemporary US.