Gender-open grandparenting: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

More and more aging adults are becoming grandparents in an era of heightened LGBTQ+ awareness, especially of transgender and nonbinary identities. This era is marked by progressive forms of childhood gender socialization as well, including the relatively recent advent of ‘gender-open parenting’: gender-open parents do not assign a gender to their children, and use they/them pronouns for the children until they express their own sense of gender. However, little research addresses these developments in grandparenting and gender diversity. This exploratory study builds on the grandparenting literature and examines the experiences of 11 grandparents from a larger project on gender-open parenting. Grandparents within these families must learn the tenets of this new paradigm to interact with their grandchildren. Using interview data and thematic analysis, several dominant themes from grandparents’ experiences are examined, including: their initial apprehensions, their efforts with gender-neutral language, their mediating roles with others, the new perspectives they develop, and their lingering ambivalence. The discussion employs the conceptual frameworks of family systems, family ecology, and ambivalence to highlight the varying shades of agency and support the grandparents represent. Altogether, the findings raise important implications for research in grandparenting, gender, and LGBTQ+ family relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Grandparents
• transgender
• nonbinary
• gender-open parenting
• ambivalence

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my research participants for sharing their candid experiences with this new gender-open paradigm. Thank you to my wonderful undergraduate research assistant, Alexandria Caughman, and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their excellent comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While these are sex-based terms, these are the terms grandparents listed to identify their gender.

2 I transcribed one interview myself with the help of Otter.ai, which uses AI technology. The interview contained background noise, and I decided not to send it to a professional transcriptionist.

3 Using traditionally gendered terms like ‘son’ or ‘daughter,’ or ‘maternal’ or ‘paternal’ grandparent, can be problematic. I use these terms as the grandparents used them, but these do not necessarily fit the adult children’s identities today. Several adult children, for example, identify as genderqueer or nonbinary and use they/them pronouns, so ‘son,’ ‘daughter,’ or ‘maternal grandmother’ is not necessarily appropriate or reflective of their identifications.

4 Audrey and Arthur were the few grandparents who could discuss reading books with their grandchildren, as they had some of the oldest grandchildren represented. As such, this dimension of the data was limited but illuminating of grandparents’ gender-open efforts.

5 Several of the adult children I interviewed would disagree with this view, seeing the children’s looseness with traditionally gendered speech and pronouns as a benefit of the practice.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project was provided by Georgia Southern University’s Office of Research and Academic Affairs.