In April 2021, the current Conservative government in the UK, led by Boris Johnson, disbanded the LGBT Advisory Panel. That happened after successively delays in gender recognition and sexual orientation rights. The government justifies their position with public consultations on those topics, although ignoring their results claiming for immediate change.

Drawing from such a conflictive context, this paper seeks to understand how ideas of childhood and development can regulate LGBT+ rights in the UK. This research focuses on two specific pieces of legislation decades apart, Section 28 of the Local Authority Act (1988) and Gender Recognition Act or GRA (2004). As I will show, despite huge differences regarding content, topic, and practice, both have in common ideas of development and protection. Furthermore, they are informed by discourses around childhood, however, marked by an absence of chronological children as subjects.

Section 28 is a well-known British piece of legislation passed in 1988 and repealed in 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in the rest of the UK. It was part of a strategy to promote moral panic and reinforce the central government’s authority, responding to equality practices and positive discriminatory policies enforced by local authorities following demands from race, feminist, lesbian, and gay movements. Also, it was aligned with PM Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal politics combining minimum State with law-and-order social policies (Stacey, 1991; Moran, 2001; Ellis, 2007; Wise, 2000). The law change for the Local Authority Act, Section 28, passed after some failed attempts in 1988. For our interest here, it prohibited public authorities to “promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” and “teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. In other words, censorship of funding and practices towards sexual equality and lesbian and gay rights, as called at the time (Stacey, 1991; Rahman, 2004). The discursive frame presents some adults (teachers and activists) promoting dangerous discourses (homosexual rights) which would be a threat against children (allegedly asexual or, perhaps, naturally heterosexual). Rather than targeting people chronologically identified as children (Burman, 2019; 2020; Canella & Viruru, 2004), discourses of childhood as pure and innocent inform Section 28. Even more, scholarly research shows the alleged concern of legislators with protecting children and childhood in passing and enforcing Section 28 (Moran, 2001; Ellis, 2007; Lee, 2019; Epstein, 2000) and later in its repeal as part of a New Labour’s project for a ‘modernised Britain’ (Rahman, 2004; Taylor, 2005). Protecting children from themselves is on the agenda. 

The Gender Recognition Act (GRA), on the other hand, was passed in 2004 and it is the first piece of legislation to regulate legal gender recognition in the UK so far. When the law came to force, it was one of the most advanced regulations in the world, since it does not require genital surgery, hormones and/or sterilisation of trans applicants (Whittle, 2006; Sharpe, 2007a; 2009; Stryker, 2006; McQueen, 2016). Now, 18 years later, the GRA appears outdated when compared with neighbouring countries in the EU or across the world. Rather than the effects of linear progress of trans rights, these may be new strategies for essentialising sex. If the GRA does not demand compulsory medical body changes, it nonetheless requests medical procedures (Sandland, 2005; Sharpe, 2009; Whittle, 2006; Hines, 2020; Hines & Santos, 2017). The GRA has been impacting different contexts in British society. 

This research combines a Foucauldian approach for Discourse Analysis (Foucault, 1979; 1981; 1990; Burman, 1991; Parker, 2005) and the innovative ‘Child as Method’ proposed by Burman (2019). Therefore, this paper contributes to discussions on LGBT+ rights in the European context, but particularly on methodological challenges and limits for discourse analysis. ‘Child as Method’ was proposed by Erica Burman (2019) for understanding social discourses of childhood and their effects on social relations, politics, imagination, pedagogies, therapies, and knowledge. Queer, feminist, decolonial, and critical childhood studies inform such an approach, intending to show how coherent categories of childhood are used to govern and organise society, although also showing unexpected and creative disruptions. 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; 2010; 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). Rather than concurrent, those approaches can be collaborative – not by chance, Burman has been discussing Discourse Analysis for years now (i.e. Burman 1991; 2018). However, I feel particularly interested in the conditions of possibilities for silences in discourses. If ‘Child as Method’ brings discourse of childhood for the stage, a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis reveals its interest also by its absence, rarity, and disappearance. Combined, those approaches show us how childhood, despite being absent in certain pieces of legislation regarding gender and sexuality, an idea of childhood based on protection and development, justifies fears, anxieties, restrictions, and regulations of both adults and children.

The GRA establishes different requirements for accessing legal gender recognition, some related to chronological time and development: 1. minimum age limit (18 years old); 2. proof of two years of lived experience; 3. a declaration of intention to live in the acquired gender until death (Grabham, 2020). We can see here an idea of development in action – trans people should not only achieve legal adulthood but also prove current stability and intention to keep it until death. On the other hand, if childhood is seen as a period of instability and transformation, then requirements 2 and 3 will prevent any proposal for reducing minimal age. Children cannot apply for Legal Gender Recognition but expectations about not being them (therefore being adults) haunt trans applicants. We can see that legal gender recognition is submitted to State’s interests, instead of being defended as a personal and collective right just organised by the State. Once again, despite being absent, discourses of childhood inform LGBT+ legal rights. Section 28 regulated dissident adults (either teacher, local policymaker, or activist) who could not discuss homosexuality in public services, including schools. The law did not act on children, neither did it have them as their subjects. However, discourse about protecting childhood informed and justified it. Absent from the text, children are nevertheless fundamental in regulating both adults and LGBT+ rights. Finally, ‘Child as Method’ (Burman, 2019) can show how discourses of childhoods are produced and reproduced in name of certain regulatory projects.

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