Trailblazing the gender revolution? Young people's understandings of gender diversity through generation and social change

Introduction

The last decade has witnessed a rapid discursive proliferation of gendered terms and identities across much of the Global North, with a dramatic rise in the cultural visibility of people who identify across, between or beyond the categories of male and female. Time Magazine declared a ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ in 2014, and the Financial Times summed up 2015 as ‘Year in a word: Trans: Gender discussion becomes a fluid, “non binary” affair’. Increasing social awareness of gender diversity has been accompanied by moves towards greater legal protection for the citizenship rights of gender diverse people in many national contexts,Footnote¹ and public bodies, including educational institutions, are increasingly implementing policies recognising gender diverse students (Martino and Cumming-Potvin Citation2018; National Education Union Citation2019). Counter-discourses resisting this so-called ‘gender ideology’ have also emerged (Butler Citation2019), related to the rise of the alt-right and virulent forms of anti-feminism and misogyny (Banet-Weiser Citation2018), but also to ‘gender critical’ feminism that argues that gender diversity is a threat to women's rights (Hines Citation2019) ). As Corredor (Citation2019, 618) argues, there is currently an intense and complex ‘tug-of-war [for] ontological and political control over the term “gender”’.

Young people have been especially implicated in these debates, interpellated within media and public discourse as trailblazers for ‘radical’ change in how gender is understood and lived. Western media outlets regularly pronounce that young people are rejecting traditional gender labels (The Guardian Citation2016) and leading a ‘Gender Revolution’ (National Geographic Citation2017), with the embrace of non-binary gender identities by celebrities such as Miley Cyrus and Sam Smith cited as evidence of greater openness among younger generations (Ritschel Citation2020). Such claims are not completely unfounded. Recent academic work suggests that traditional gender identities and expressions are being less rigidly experienced by young people in the West. In interviews with US college students aged 18–30, Risman (Citation2017, Citation2018) argues that what seems to be new about this generation is the significant amount of young people who ‘reject not only the cultural meanings of gendered selves at the individual level but the assumption that sex and gender need to be correlated at all’ (2017, 225). It is these ‘gender rebels’ that Risman calls a uniquely ‘Millennial phenomenon’, although she highlights that many young people also held more traditional views or had more pragmatic and ambivalent orientations, effectively ‘straddling’ different understandings of gender.

In England, research by Renold et al. (Citation2017) also indicate a shift in how young people think and talk about gender, including an expanded vocabulary and greater awareness of non-traditional gender identities. In their research with teenagers (aged 13–19), they note how a commitment to gender diversity and the rights of sexual minorities was an important part of young people's identities. However, they also found that despite expressing these ideals, young people's everyday experiences continued to be characterised by regulatory gender norms and a rigid gender binary. As such, their research ‘emphasise[s] both change and continuity of how gender mediates children and young people's lives and experiences’ (2017, 39). Indeed, scholarship has long demonstrated how young people's gendered subjectivities are constrained and shaped by power relations circulating within different spaces and communities, and the ways in which adherence to (and transgression of) gendered norms are actively policed (Hall Citation2020; Nayak and Kehily Citation2008; Renold Citation2005, Paechter Citation2012). This body of literature also identifies how factors such as class, ethnicity, religion and place mediate these processes (Archer Citation2003; Ward et al. Citation2017; Ingram Citation2018; Paechter Citation2007; Roberts Citation2018). Moreover, there is evidence demonstrating the continued prevalence of transphobia, including within schools (Stonewall Citation2017).

In complicating claims of a ‘liberation’ of young people from hegemonic gender norms, this scholarship echoes arguments made elsewhere in the field of youth studies that there is a tendency for young people to be romanticised within the wider social imagination as revolutionary ‘agents of change’ (Threadgold Citation2019, 7; see also Miles Citation2015). Whilst this is traditionally manifest in a preoccupation with young people's engagement with politics and protest, we can also see how the figuring of youth as vanguards of social change is present in current discussions in which young people are positioned as ‘trailblazers’ of changing – and more progressive – attitudes towards, and practices of, gender.

Altogether this scholarship suggests that celebratory pronouncements of young people's gender radicalism demand both caution and further exploration. Taking this as its starting point, this paper draws on focus group data with young people in the UK to explore how participants understand and negotiate wider discourses of gender diversity and social change. In doing so it extends recent research exploring young people's engagement with wider debates around gender diversity conducted in different national contexts and using different methods (Risman Citation2018) and with a much younger cohort (Renold et al Citation2017). Whilst our findings demonstrate the central presence of discourse of generational change in young people's accounts, we also identify contradictions and tensions which are obscured by romanticised notions of youth's radicalism, a key contribution of this paper. We also argue for the importance of situating young people's gender talk within multiple discursive constellations through which struggles around the meanings of ‘gender’ are currently playing out. Before presenting our analysis, we introduce the study.

Methods

This paper emerges from the ESRC-funded project 'Living Gender in Diverse Times'. The project explores how young people (aged 16–24) across the UK experience, express and understand ‘gender’ amidst the rapid discursive proliferation of gendered terms and identities. We draw upon data collected through 19 focus groups (total participants n = 136) during 2018–2019. Focus groups were deployed as a way of exploring how meanings around ‘gender’ come to be formed in and through group interaction (rather than solely through individual accounts) (Morgan Citation1997; Allen et al. Citation2015).

Focus groups were held in five locations throughout the UK: South-East England (n = 3), North-West England (n = 5), Yorkshire and the Humber (n = 3), Scotland (n = 4) and Wales (n = 4). Recruiting through a range of institutional settings, focus groups were comprised of a mix of university groups (n = 3), youth groups (n = 6), sixth form groups (n = 3) and further education college groups (n = 6). These encompassed young people in both rural and urban locations, young people from across the socioeconomic spectrum, disabled young people, and black and ethnic minority youth.

The focus groups varied in size, with an average of seven participants per group, and all lasted for around one hour. In most cases, participants were already known to each other. The focus groups loosely followed a topic guide of general questions and discussion topics. In addition, we used question cards (Figure 1) as prompts for further discussion which included questions relating to current debates around gender diversity. All participants chose their own pseudonyms.

Figure 1. Question cards.

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Focus groups were audio recorded, transcribed and coded thematically. Drawing on a critical feminist, poststructuralist approach to discourse concerned the operation of power in everyday sense-making (Gill Citation1996), our analysis sought to identify key patterns within and across focus groups. Broad themes were identified and then subject to a much more fine-grained analysis, including identifying common interpretive repertoires (Potter and Weatherall Citation1987). These can be understood as ‘a recognisable routine of arguments, descriptions and evaluations distinguished by familiar clichés, common places, tropes and characterisations of actors and situations’ (Edley and Wetherell Citation2001, 443) that are repeated across the data.

The theme of ‘generations’ emerged strongly across the data set. Within this, we identified four interpretive repertoires (IR) in young people's talk through which assertions of generational difference in regard to gender diversity were reproduced, complicated or resisted. These structure the remainder of this paper. We begin by exploring how generational difference and social change emerged as a key locus for young people making sense of gender diversity. This manifest in the IR of young people as progressive and accepting. We then examine three IRs in young people's talk that express different kinds of ambiguity or resistance to gender diversity, and discuss how these complicated narratives of generational progress. The IRs discussed here were found across the diversity of focus groups – so, for example, we found similar discourses in a private all-boys sixth form college as in a youth group for socio-economically ‘disadvantaged’ youth. Therefore, in this paper, our analysis does not extend to ‘race’, gender, class, geographical or age differences between participants, although we do of course see value in this as a site for future exploration. We also acknowledge that the specific research context of the focus group setting likely played a part in muting these differences, shaping what was deemed permissible to say amongst peers (Allen et al. Citation2015).

Epistemologically, we have tried to retain a sense of the interactivity of the focus groups in our analysis and presentation of the data, (Morgan Citation1997). We view young people's ‘talk’ not simply as straightforward ‘facts’ about how they understand and experience gender diversity, but as actively shaped by the discursive environments in which they are located. This includes not only families, peer groups, institutions and the media, but an increasingly politicised climate of discussions around gender and identity, where, as discussed above, there is both cultural visibility and seeming permissibility of gender diversity and simultaneous resistance to this.

Conclusion

As other youth scholars have argued, young people are often positioned within media and public discourse (and sometimes within Youth Studies) as revolutionary figures and progressive agents of social change (Miles Citation2015; Threadgold Citation2019). Whilst this often manifests in relation to protest and social movements, more recently such framings of youth have emerged in wider conversations about gender diversity. Youth are increasingly interpellated as radical ‘trailblazers’ for an apparently new and expansive gender order. Analysing data from focus groups with 136 young people in the UK, this paper provides original insights that empirically ground and interrogate such claims. In analysing young people's talk, we have called attention to the tensions and contradictions that emerge as young people both construct and complicate narratives of generational progress and social change in how gender is practiced and understood.

We have shown that young people do, in many ways, express tolerant and open attitudes towards gender diversity and commitments to autonomy and self-determination. This is expressed through assertions of generational difference and progressive temporality, as young people see themselves as distinct from older generations in their beliefs about, and attitudes towards, gender. However, we have also demonstrated how young people's talk is threaded through with confusion and misunderstanding, as the veneer of ‘acceptance’ does not always translate into confidence about what new terms and identities mean or how they work in practice. Further, our findings show that particular expressions of diversity – namely binary, medicalised, and ‘stable’ trans subjectivities – garner more acceptability than those that are more fluid and which trouble the man/woman dichotomy. A small proportion of young people had some ‘ideological’ resistance to gender diversity in that it was informed by politicised sentiment – although notably, their objections were not necessarily to gender diversity in and of itself, but to the suggestion that it be prioritised over things perceived as more pressing. We also highlighted that such resistance does not only come from the Right, but can be moored in the seemingly ‘socially progressive’ discourses of the Left.

By locating the repertories drawn on by participants in a broader context, our analysis emphasises how young people's talk about gender must be viewed as both reflecting and constituting a proliferation of discourses around gender diversity, some of which may be diametrically opposed. Young people's gender talk should also be seen as shaped by (and shaping) wider discourses, particularly those embedded in neoliberal and consumerist constructions of the individual. The participants in our study held a deep commitment to self-actualisation as a fundamental right, and whilst this reflects a laudable principle of liberal humanism, the imperative to ‘be who you are’ cannot be divorced from the need to produce and account for an ‘authentic’ individual self under neoliberal governmentality, and to ‘self-responsibilise’ accordingly (Anderson Citation2018). We have also seen how ‘progressive’ ideas have proven co-optable by capital and incorporated into the status quo (Banet-Wesier Citation2018).

We stress the need to reject positivist interpretations of our data not least because, currently, the stakes are high: whilst much progress has been made with regards to citizenship rights around gender and sexual diversity, we are mindful of backlashes and retreats on both a global and national level, as conservative forces coalesce and mobilise against gender justice. As Threadgold (Citation2019) has argued, the ‘figure of youth’ can easily be ‘invoked as an affective proxy for the future, a figure of hope’ as ‘there is a moral imperative that if young people are ‘good’, then the future will be ‘good’’ (2019: 8). We are conscious of the ways in which research with young people such as this may be mobilised in particular directions by actors with very different conceptions of what a ‘good future’ may be; either to argue that young people are not drinking the ‘kool aid’ of ‘gender ideology’, as often suggested by those arguing from a gender critical feminist perspective or conversely, that the ‘kids are alright’ and that we are moving to a future in which gender non-conformity becomes not only acceptable but unremarkable.

We ourselves are not neutral actors in these debates: as youth scholars we have an explicit political commitments to gender equality and trans rights. As a team, we have struggled with how to present the data in a way that is ethical and with integrity, but ultimately must stress that young people, like us all, are situated in a historical epoch in which established ideas about gender and personhood are rubbing against not new but newly-visible subjectivities and ways of knowing and being. It is perhaps thus no surprise that young people conceive of their generation as unique with regards to gender diversity – but also that tensions and sticking points characterise their narratives, as they find themselves having to navigate the confluence of diverse, contradictory and highly-politicised gender currents.