Transgender children have become in less than a decade a much-discussed phenomenon, as well as the source of widespread anxiety. In Northern America and Western Europe, a considerable amount of literature is produced on a monthly basis, in forms of informative articles, videos and movie documentaries, ranging from community-based activism to mainstream voyeurism, from biopics to political statements. These productions might be autobiographical, psychological, medical, poetic, fictional, religious, journalistic, and so on; they might be addressed to parents, to children, to educators, to therapists; but mostly they seem to address a larger population. Transgender children, real or fictional, are branded as everybody's concern.

Perceived by some as a contaminating phenomenon able to disrupt the entire educating system, transgender children have become a symbol, be it the symbol of a just cause or the symbol of all that is evil, be it a cause for concern, worries, tears or outrage. A commentary published in July 2017 by the Daily Signal, an American online news publication dedicated to offering ‘a trusted alternative to biased mainstream media’, claims: ‘But transgender ideology is not just infecting our laws. It is intruding into the life of the most innocent among us – children – and with the apparent growing support of the professional medical community’ (Cretella 2017b).

Two words, here, are particularly significant: ‘infecting’ and ‘innocent’. The author of the commentary, Michelle Cretella, the President of the American College of Pediatricians, uses a well-known metaphor: moral decadence is considered as a sickness attacking the social body. The social apparatus of laws has already been destroyed by the so-called ‘ideology’, and a growing group of corrupted professionals is about to inject the metaphorical disease into the real bodies of innocent children. Tacit here is the implication that the innocence of children is at least as important as their bodies. Following Cretella's rhetorical construction, if ideology has infected the social body, leaving the door open for real bodies (that is, those of the evil doctors) to enter the lives of real children and introduce the evil germs into their bodies, then the next step in this epidemic logic is that the children themselves will become the contaminating agents.

This anxiety surrounding transgender children is caught in a double bind, as old as Cretella's sickness-decadence metaphor. On the one hand, children represent an investment in the future, and transgender children seem to threaten their own reproductive future.