LGBT lessons in schools, puberty blockers, worries of ‘gender ideology’ and compulsory gender transition. Children’s bodies have been at the centre of polemic disputes involving trans rights, gender recognition, autonomy, and body changes. Despite conservative attacks and rollbacks (Prado & Correa, 2018), there have been improvements regarding trans rights in Europe. Portuguese Gender Self-Determination law, published in 2018, is an exemplary example, guaranteeing those rights for Portuguese citizens aged 16 years old or over, regardless of medical or judicial approval. Meanwhile, Scottish and British governments announced proposals and intentions for updating the UK’s Gender Recognition Act (2004), sparking intense debates on minimum age, self-determination, and proof of lived experience. Both the UK and Portugal have been discussing and struggling with chronological age as a requirement for gender transition and legal recognition, promoting conditioned citizenship (Hines & Santos, 2017). This process draws in ideas of development and maturity (Burman, 2016; Canella & Viruru, 2004), establishing a line between binary categories such as adults and children, developed and underdeveloped, autonomous and dependent subjects.

As I seek to discuss in this paper, complex discourses entangle childhood, protection, gender, and sexuality promoting what I choose to call a ‘dispositive of waiting’ for Legal Gender Recognition (LGR) in two Western European countries – Portugal and the United Kingdom. Although this might seem like a worry for gender minoritarian groups (such as trans, intersex, and non-binary people), I stress how childhood concerns organise and regulate norms for adulthoods, as their apparent opposite. Therefore, this paper might inform the field of gender and education on normative expectations for age, gender, and development in a changing world.

Gender is not an exhaustive, coherent, or completed category, neither does it exist without considering complex contexts. Rather, continuous series of unfinished performative acts produce material and discursive realities we name as gender. These speech acts establish sex as a pre-discursive and naturalised category, referring to an allegedly natural (cis)heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990; Preciado, 2013; 2018; 2020). Because of discursive constraints (or frames – Butler, 2002; 2010), bodies are situated in a binary division, naming which characteristics should be recognised as male or female (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) with material effects, or an ‘embodied political fiction’ (Preciado, 2013; 2018). As part of political projects, modern gender relations were created and have been living as part of colonial invasion and domination in the past centuries (Lugones, 2016). Gender’s stability and continuity are fundamental criteria for recognition as human, or a life hegemonically seeing as deserved to be lived (Butler, 2010; Roséllo-Peñaloza, 2018). Children, however, “are dense figures of social anxiety and aspiration both” (Halberstam, 2018, pp. 55). Children’s normalisation, indeed, is dependent on the notion of gender as something stable and definitive (Castañeda, 2014) while images of childhood inhabit subjective structures of colonialism (Fanon, 2008; Burman, 2019). Following such references, I argue that ‘Child as Method’ shows how discourses of normative and developmental childhood inform and address Legal Gender Recognition in Portugal and the UK.

Discourses are considered as aleatory material events, although produced and regulated by power relations (Foucault, 1979; 1981; 1990). They act as a frame for our emergence as subjects, performing genders, and being recognised (or not) as humans, with social, political, and subjective consequences (Butler, 1990; 2002; 2005; 2010; 2020; Butler & Spivak, 2007; Preciado, 2013). Following this perspective, a Discourse Analysis would be concerned about contexts, power relations, institutions, and conditions of possibilities for not only enunciations as well as silences (Burman, 1991; Parker, 2005). Child, or perhaps discourses of childhood, is an important resource for understanding social relations, expectations, and anxieties of politics, citizenship, imagination, and the future. For that reason, Erica Burman’s (2019) proposes ‘Child as Method’, an approach based on queer, feminist, decolonial, and critical childhood studies for understanding social discourses of childhood. As argued by her, discourses of childhood in specific contexts show us the efforts and strategies for keeping childhood as a coherent category, but also the use of childhood for the broader governing of lives and deaths – although open to failures and recreations. Combining Child as Method with a Foucauldian reading of discourse analysis, this paper discusses how childhood can become a nexus for regulating not only chronological children’s lives but also chronological adults, promoting an expectation of waiting and a faith in better futures. I chose to work on two pieces of legislation: the Portuguese Gender Self-Determination and Sexual Characteristics Protection Act (or Law 38/2018) and 2004’s British Gender Recognition Act (or GRA). For the former, I analysed legislative proposals and discussions undertaken in 2016 and 2017, until its passing in 2018. For the latter, I studied the government’s consultations and published proposals from 2018 to 2020. All documents are available online for open access.

In Portugal, the law 38/2018 passed after a presidential veto, including a specific requirement for adolescents – a mental health report assessing their ability for autonomous decisions. The passed law sets children under the age of sixteen in a position of waiting and those aged 16 or 17 under suspicion about their autonomy. As seen in public audiences and Assembly sessions, not only adults are seen as autonomous subjects but also gender recognition would be a matter of allegedly maturity and stability. In the UK, at the top of the minimum age (18), applicants for gender recognition must prove at least two years of ‘lived experience’ and declare their intention to keep the acquired gender until death. Even if proposed reforms discuss reducing the length of ‘lived experience’ and, in Scotland, reducing the minimum age to 16. However, the declaration of intention means associating gender to a definitive and stable decision, justifying children’s exclusion from legal gender recognition. Excluding children from that right reinforces adults as superior and idealised subjects, or the goal for human development, including gender. Children are submitted to regulation even if partially or completely excluded from the right of legal gender recognition as if trans experiences would be just postponed. On the other hand, children’s waiting would also be a test of endurance, by which they would have either time for changing their minds, or enough suffering to justify their decision. The praise of progress in pieces of legislation, especially associated with Western Europe, supports developmental ideas of childhood. This ‘dispositive of waiting’ establishes children as subjects waiting for better futures, even if gender dissidents, avoiding or rejecting their queerness. There is a challenge for education and policies in trans rights to break this narrative, discussing existences and experiences which cannot and should not wait.

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