Part 1
“In a context where many transgender kids pass through queer youth groups, queer and trans adults can sometimes be cast as the enemy.” The most exciting aspect of this quote comes from the understanding that society’s significant discrimination and stigma make it challenging or impossible for transgender people and queer to be accepted. Therefore, it becomes easy to cast away queer and trans adults as enemies since society holds a complicated notion of intergenerational relations and the family subculture related to such individuals. People have always been afraid to deal with the unknown. Queer and transgender issues challenge the existing networks of family and relationships. Due to the fear, the most straightforward approach to take when addressing such is to sideline it and point fingers.
Part 2
What remains unclear from the reading is the notion that before the 1990s, people from the middle class expressed abiding and strong desires to be acknowledged as “the other sex.” How society treats individuals belonging to the LGBTQ community raises a lot of questions about accepting such differences. The confusion level, and the consternation of parents of children that stood out as LGBTQ members, resulted in psychological disturbances. So, it remains unclear why people, especially parents, desire to be linked to such confusion while raising their children. The misconception about LGBTQ members in that era might have been why no one, regardless of social class, would want to conform to gender identities that were at odds with society. The trajectories that individuals from the LGBTQ community experience profoundly differ from life chances that society has accepted and embraced throughout humanity. However, it remains unclear why crossing paths with gender-nonconforming identities made middle-class individuals have that desire to be connected with such, knowing they would be cast out as the enemy.