The trans girl and the lesbian girl: who's afraid of a subversive child?

Abstract

This article aims to consider the tension and similarity between the categories “childhood subversion” and “adultcentrism” based on two experiments with children from different empirical research fields, based on a content analysis. Given the fear that adults demonstrate towards children (Gaitán, 2024), they surprise children by speaking and/or intervening in situations that are unusual for adults. They are also capable of destroying the adult representation based on an image characterized by the prefix “in”: incomplete, incapable, immature. The stories provoke us to reflect on how, instead of being subjects of rights, girls subvert adult expectations. To this end, the article is divided into three parts: 1) the intersection between gender and childhood; 2) the presentation and contextualization of the fields of participation; 3) intergenerational implications and reflections. Finally, it is concluded that there is a need for (de)hierarchization between generations, conditioned on the end of adult fear.