Six

When I've written about parental overshare, my focus has been on published articles and memoirs written by the parents themselves. It's only there that you get the mix of writerly ambition and irreproachability. A parent cares, and has his kid's best interests at heart. So if he's written a memoir about his kid's most private moments, this is not the airing of dirty laundry. It's an act of courage. And so on. I've made this argument enough times (since 2008! this post gets a "persistent motifs" tag) that I'm not going to repeat it any further.

What I haven't looked at so much (some, but not much) is the question of articles written about real-life children, articles that name names, but where the author is a journalist not related to the subject. My feeling is, was, that these are a different animal. We don't assume the journalist has the same intimate knowledge of the child's worst moments, nor that the journalist is trying to show off her own parenting skills. No preexisting trust has been violated, and if, years down the line, the kid resents the journalist, this does not also destroy the kid's relationship with his parents. There's something really specific, as I see it, about what happens when the "journalist" is the parent.

But it's still bad form to forever lock a child's identity with information in an article the child can't have possibly consented to, and if there's any way to use pseudonyms and leave photos of the child out of it, why not? This came up recently, when a NYT story on a transgender six-year-old inspired controversy enough to get the paper's public and national editors involved. And... the case for making the child super-identifiable wasn't so strong. That this kid's story had appeared elsewhere doesn't mean the paper doesn't get to make its own decision whether or not to further publicize, or to what degree. According to the public editor, Margaret Sullivan, "parental approval, along with the child’s own willingness, should rule the day." I've emphasized, because the child in question here is for goodness sake six years old. What, in the world at large, can a child that young consent to? What can a child that young possibly have thought through in terms of repercussions of an article in the New York Times? How is this even a question? Six!

Sullivan adds that she "can envision other situations in which parents advocating for a child in this way – those with autism or Down syndrome, for example – would not raise these kinds of questions." The difference there, though, depending on the severity of the autism or Down syndrome, is not just one of stigma (although arguably there's stigma there as well). It's also that a child who could never conceivably read an article about herself in a newspaper is arguably different from one of average intelligence who will one day Google herself.

But re: stigma, precisely because being transgender is stigmatized, this is the sort of thing individuals should get to reveal about themselves in due time, and not have revealed for them to a national/global audience. (Shall we also shed the stigma around rape by providing names of individual victims without their consent?) And with six-year-olds, there's the distinct possibility that they will not identify as transgender as adolescents or adults, and are in fact showing early signs of being gay, or not showing signs of anything in particular. This doesn't mean families and communities shouldn't allow a child to cross-dress, or otherwise be open to the possibility that the kid will be transgender. They should do all of that. But it does mean that an article in the NYT about "a Transgender 6-Year-Old" (from the headline of the post about the controversy) raises extra flags. As would, I suppose, an article about a heterosexual, cisgender six-year-old.

Anyway, in the NYT comments of all places, I found a link to this excellent post by Zeynep Tufekci in response to the controversy. Seems she and I (and a whole bunch of NYT commenters - perhaps a tide has turned?) agree.