[1] For my previous writings specifically about the “gay” and “queer” “child,” see Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson, “What is Queer Theory Doing with the Child?” Parallax 8:1 (2002), 35-46; and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “Childhood, Queer Theory, and Feminism,” Feminist Theory, 11.3 (December 2010), 309-21. I do not myself assume that “gay,” “queer,” “transgender,” “transsexual,” or “cross-dressing” “children” are necessarily the same or even similar, but I nevertheless address these issues together in my previous writings because, as I will argue in the current article, they are linked together in children’s literature criticism as well as more widely. Where I use a specific term in this article, I follow the particular usage of the text under discussion. The very issue of the terminology itself, however, is also intrinsically part of what I am considering throughout this article. [2] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1976; New York: Vintage, 1990), 6-7, 11. [3] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1990), viii-ix. [4] Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984; Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 3-4. See my further writings on the (ongoing) misreading of Rose’s arguments in children’s literature criticism, including Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); “Childhood and Textuality: Literature, Culture, History,” in Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood, ed. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (London: Macmillan; London and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 1-26; “The Psychopathology of Everyday Children’s Literature Criticism,” Cultural Critique, 45 (Spring 2000), 222-42; “Holiday House: Grist to The Mill on the Floss, or, Childhood as Text,” in The Yearbook of English Studies, “Special Section on ‘Children in Literature,’” ed. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, 32 (2002), 77-94; “Children’s Literature: New Approaches,” in Children’s Literature: New Approaches, ed. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (London: Palgrave; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 1-25; and “Voice, Agency and the Child,” in Children in Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood, ed. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 1-18. [5] For recent arguments, for instance, on how recent research in neuroscience cannot, in fact, any more “prove” childhood, let alone any other identity’s traits, see Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “Motherhood, Evolutionary Psychology and Mirror Neurons, or “Grammar is Politics by Other Means,” Feminist Theory 16.2 (2015), 171-187; Lesnik-Olberstein, “The Object of Neuroscience and Literary Studies,” Textual Practice (forthcoming); Neil Cocks and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “Back to Where We Came From: Evolutionary Psychology and Children’s Literature and Media” in Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys and Contemporary Media Culture (London: Taylor and Francis Group, forthcoming 2017); and Lesnik-Oberstein, “Children’s Literature, Cognitivism and Neuroscience, or, Capitalism and/as the Return to the Same” in Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood in Contemporary Britain, ed. Ralf Schneider and Sandra Dinter (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2017). [6] David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 27-8. [7] Pádraic Whyte, “Are We There Yet? Same-Sex Relationships and Children’s Literature,” Children’s Books Ireland, January 2015, http://www.childrensbooksireland.ie/features/are-we-there-yet-same-sex-relationships-and-childrens-literature. [8] Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), ix. [9] Jake Pyne, “Gender Independent Kids: A Paradigm Shift in Approaches to Gender Non-Conforming Children,” The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 23.1 (April 2014), 1; Pyne further notes that he uses the term “‘fabulous’ as it is used in queer communities, in appreciation of the vibrant side of life, and not to connote any type of superiority among gender independent kids.” See ibid., 5, 1n. [10] Bruhm and Hurley, “Curiouser,” ix. [11] Examples demonstrating shifts in historical and cultural views and interests are of course by their very nature debatable, and there are several (much) earlier examples of, especially, cross-dressing, but also gay and transgender identities, in children’s literature; but I am here selecting examples that both claim to be about a spontaneous desire to cross-dress or be gay or transgender on the part of the child, rather than a cross-dressing or sexual or gender identity imposed by others or by the environment, and where those desires are celebrated rather than condemned (although questions may be raised around these aspects in such works, as well). [12] David Walliams, The Boy in the Dress (London: HarperCollins, 2008). I here wish to thank my Center for International Research in Children’s Literature (CIRCL) M(Res) in Children’s Literature student Michaela Hedges: our discussions about her dissertation on Walliams’ novel and ideas of childhood and cross-dressing helped my thinking on these topics for this article. [13] David Walliams, Kevin Cecil, and Andy Riley, adapt., The Boy in the Dress, BBC One, broadcast December 26, 2014. [14] Louis Theroux, Transgender Kids, dir. Tom Barrow, BBC Two, broadcast April 5, 2015. [15] See, for example, Juliet Linley, “Why One Mom Had to Create America’s First-Ever Summer Day Camp for Trans Kids,” The Blog, Huffington Post, May 18, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/juliet-linley/why-i-had-to-create-americas-first-ever-summer-day-camp-for-trans-kids_b_7291718.html. [16] See the same-day interview with the Collins family by journalist Ken Miguel, “Bruce Jenner Story Resonates with Bay Area Transgender Family,” ABC 7 News, April 24, 2015, http://abc7news.com/family/bruce-jenner-story-resonates-with-bay-area-family/680550/; for more on the Diane Sawyer interview, see “Bruce Jenner’s Biggest Question: “Are You Gonna Be OK?” ABC 7 News, April 24, 2015, http://abc7news.com/news/watch-bruce-jenner-the-interview-tonight-on-20-20/679581/. [17] Victoria Flanagan, Into the Closet: Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature and Film, Children’s Literature and Culture series, ed. Jack Zipes (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2007). [18] Flanagan, Into the Closet, 1; she refers in her comment to Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 9. [19] I wish to stress that in my analysis I am not referring to Victoria Flanagan’s (or any author’s) known intentions, which I do not and cannot know, but only to the formulations in the text as I read them. [20] For an extensive consideration of claims about “symbols” that I am drawing upon in my analysis here, see Sue Walsh, “Bikini Fur and Fur Bikinis” in The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair, ed. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 166-81. [21] In thinking about the implications of such claims around “gender” and “sexuality,” David Valentine also argues that “the primary categories […]—“transgender” and “homosexuality”—are only available in their contemporary meanings as discrete categories because of a central distinction that developed in the United States in the twentieth century between gender and sexuality (or, remember, ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’)”; see Imagining Transgender, 57. [22] Flanagan, Into the Closet, 9. [23] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40.4 (Dec. 1988), 524. [24] Flanagan, Into the Closet, 13, citing Butler, Gender Trouble, 6. As I will continue to argue, this misunderstanding of Butler’s arguments is pervasive throughout children’s literature, but, remarkably, there is even the same misreading of exactly the same quote in Michelle Anne Abate’s article on “Trans/Forming Girlhood: Transgenderism, the Tomboy Formula, and Gender Identity Disorder in Sharon Dennis Wyeth’s Tomboy Trouble,” The Lion and the Unicorn 32.1 (Jan. 2008), 49. [25] Flanagan, Into the Closet, 14. [26] Ibid., 4. For a critique of the ways anthropological accounts have been invoked in relation to ideas of a “third gender” see, David Valentine, “The ‘Berdache’ and Third Gender Debates,” in Imagining Transgender, 153-7. [27] Butler, Gender Trouble, 6-7. [28] Flanagan, Into the Closet, 5. [29] Butler, Gender Trouble, 6 (original emphasis). [30] Jody Norton, “Transchildren and the Discipline of Children’s Literature,” The Lion and the Unicorn 23.3 (1999), 415-436. [31] Ibid., 415. [32] Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 3-4. [33] Norton, “Transchildren,” 415-16. [34] Ibid., 419; in her comment, she refers to Donna E. Norton, Through the Eyes of a Child: An Introduction to Children’s Literature, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), 1995. [35] Norton, “Transchildren,” 420 (original emphasis). [36] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 6-7. [37] Norton, “Transchildren,” 420. [38] Kate Drabinski, “Incarnate Possibilities: Female to Male Transgender Narratives and the Making of Self,” Journal of Narrative Theory 44.2 (Summer 2014), 320 (Drabinski’s emphasis); she quotes from Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 152. [39] Norton, “Transchildren,” 428. [40] Ibid. [41] Abate, “Trans/Forming Girlhood, 44. [42] Drabinski, “Incarnate Possibilities,” 327, 4n. [43] Susan Honeyman, “Trans(cending) Gender Through Childhood,” in The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, ed. Anna Mae Duane, (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2013, 167-83. [44] Anna Mae Duane, “Introduction,” in The Children’s Table, 1. [45] Honeyman, “Trans(cending) Gender Through Childhood,” 169, 170. [46] Ibid., 167. [47] Ibid., 168. [48] Ibid., 167. For my extensive analyses of how claims to “idealization” always rely on an opposition to a known “real” (the “not idealized”), see especially Lesnik-Oberstein, “Childhood and Textuality”; “The Psychopathology of Everyday Children’s Literature Criticism”; and “Voice, Agency, and the Child.” [49] Susan Honeyman, Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 14. [50] Honeyman, “Trans(cending) Gender Through Childhood,” 168-9. [51] Ibid., 175. [52] Ibid., 170. [53] David Valentine, “Sue E. Generous: Toward a Theory of Non-Transexuality,” Feminist Studies 38.1 (Spring 2012), 187. I wish to thank David Valentine for referring me to this article and making it available to me. [54] Butler, Gender Trouble, 8. [55] Flanagan, Into the Closet, 14. [56] Ibid. [57] Ibid., 14-5. [58] Ibid., 29. [59] Ibid., 14-5. [60] Ibid., 14. [61] Honeyman, “Trans(cending) Gender Through Childhood,” 174, quoting from Shari Thurer, The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), 6, 126.