ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at current discourses of care which fall back on various forms of biologism in responses to adolescent sexuality. The discussion explores why these discourses have recourse to a state of response that manifests as a collapse in the differentiation between the adolescent “having a body” and “being a body.” Nowhere does the discourse of care grounded in the polarizing formulation of the adolescent as being a body come to a head more strikingly than when we look at the situation of the young trans high school student, Gavin Grimm, and the series of events precipitated by his request to access the boys’ washroom at school. This chapterfollows two lines of inquiry. I first look at various responses to Gavin Grimm’s request and the arguments about his access to the restroom. This chapter then turns to revisions of the diagnostic category of gender dysphoria. This section explores the dilemma of how adolescent sexuality came to be an externally observed, treated, and measured object in clinical settings, schools, and courts in conversation with the counter-arguments that have increasingly proven these approaches to be based in statistically poor and recurrently failing constructions.
