CLASS .
A Guide Through

the
American Status System

• PAUL FUSSELL
With illustrations by Martim de Avillez

SUMMIT BOOKS • NEW YORK

Copyright © 1983 by Paul Fu ssell
All rights reserved
including the right of reprodlution
in whole or in part in any form
Published by SUMMIT’BOOKS
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Simon & Schuster Building
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
SUMMIT BOOKS arid colophon are
trademarks of Simon & Schuster, inc.
Marlufaclured ill the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Bdiliorl

Library ofCorigress Cataloging in Data

Fussell, Paul, 1924-
Class: a guide through the American status system.

1. Social cla sses-United States . 2 . Social
status. I . Title .
HN90 .S6F87 1983 305.5’0973 83-12637
ISBN 0-671-44991-5

“Aberdarcy: The Main Squ are” from Collected
Poems, 1944-1979 by Kingsley Amis, copyright ©
1979 by Kirlgs/ey Amis . Reprinted by permission of
Viking Penguin, Inc. .
“Come with Me” from The Light Around the
Body by Rohert Bly, copyright © 1964 by Robert
Bly. Reprinted by permissiotl of Harper & Row, Pub-
lishers, Inc .

Acknowledgments

1 am grateful to ,the many people who have interested themselves
in this project or who have-sometimes inadvertently-supplied
me with data. Especially helpful have been James Anderson, Jack
Beatty, Jake Blumenthal, Henry E. Bradshaw, Alfred Bush, Ed-
ward T. Cone, Theodore and Mary Cross, Kit Davies, Ira and
Judy Davis, Eileen Fallon, Betty Fussell, Angeline Goreau, John
Hutchinson, DavidJohnson, PatrickJ. and Marian Kelleher, Mi-
chael Kinsley, Fletcher and Laura Berquist KnebeJ, Don Kowet,
A. Walton Litz, Donald and Fleury Mackie, Anthony Manousos,
Edgar Mayhew, Joyce Carol Oates, George Pitcher, Miles Rind,
James Silberman, Claude M. Spilman, Jr., Brian Stratton, Rod
Townley, and Alan Williams. During work on this book I have
enjoyed the friendship of Harriette Behringer and John Scanlan. I
want to thank both for their generosity .

Appearance Counts

How is it that if you’re sharp, you’re generally able to estimate a
person’s class at a glance? What marks do you look for?

Good looks, first of all, distributed around the classes pretty
freely, to be sure, but frequently a mark of high caste. Prudent
natural selection is the reason, asJilly Cooper perceives. She notes
that if upper-class people marry downward, they tend to choose
beauty only, and concludes: “In general, good-looking people
marry up . . . and the insecure and ugly tend to marry down. ”
Smiling is a class indicator-that is, not doing a lot of it. On the
street, you’ll notice that prole women smile more, and smile
wider, than those of the middle and upper classes. They like
showing off their pretty dentures, for one thing, and for another,
they’re enmeshed in the “have a nice day” culture and are busy
effusing a defensive optimism much of the time. And speaking of
dentures, I witnessed recently an amazing performance in which
a prole man in a public place dropped his top plate into a position
where he could thrust it forward with his tongue until, pink and
yellow, it protruded an inch or so from his mouth. The intent
.seemed to be to “air” it. Now one simply can’t imagine the
middle or upper-middle classes doing that sort of thing, although
you’d not be surprised to see an upper-class person, utterly care-
less of public opinion as he’d be, doing it.

Sheer height is a more trustworthy sign of class in England

51

52 PAUL FUSSELL

than everywhere, but classy people are seldom short and squat,
even here. Regardless of one’s height, having an ass that pro-
trudes is low, as is having, or appearing to have, very little neck.
The absence of neck is notable in Lawrence Welk, country-and-
Western singers like Johnny Cash, and similar proles. If you’re
skeptical that looks give off class messages, in your imagination
try conflating Roy Acuff with Averell Harriman, or Mayor Daley
with George Bush. Or, for that matter, Minnie Pearl with Jackie
Onassis.

Because 62 percent of Americans are overweight, a cheap way
to achieve a sort of distinction is to be thin. This is the , general
aim of the top four classes, although the middle, because its work
tends to be sedentary, has a terrible time abstaining from the
potatoes. Destitutes and bottom-out-of-sights usually don’t go
around flaunting a lot of extra flesh, but seldom from choice. It’s
the three prole classes that get fat: fast foods and beer are two of
the causes, but anxiety about slipping down a tung, resulting in
nervous overeating, plays its part too, especially among high
proles. Proles can rationalize their fat as an announcement of

“Your weight is an advertisement of your social standing. ”

CLASS 53

steady wages and the ability to eat out often: even “Going Out
for Breakfast” is a thinkable operation for proles, if we believe
they respond to the McDonald’s TV ads the way they’re condi-
tioned to.

A recent magazine ad for a diet book aimed at proles stigma-
tizes a number of erroneous assumptions about weight, proclaim-
ing with some inelegance that “They’re All a Crock . ” Among
vulgar errors thus rejected is the proposition that “All Social
Classes Are Equally Overweight.” The ad explains:

Your weight is an advertisement of your social standing. A
century ago, corpulence was a sign of success. But no more.
Today it is the badge of the lower-middle class, where obe-
sity is four times more prevalent than it is among the upper-
middle and middle classes.

And not just four times more prevalent. Four times more visible,
for flaunting obesity is a prole sign, as if the object were to offer
maximum aesthetic offense to the higher classes and thus exact a
form of revenge. Jonathan Raban, watching people at the Min-
nesota State Fair, was vouchsafed a spectacle suggesting calcu-
lated, vigo’rously intentional obesity:

These farming families . . . were the descendants of hungry
immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia . . .. Genera-
tion by generation, their families had eaten themselves into
Americans. Now they all had the same figure: same broad
bottom, same buddha belly, same neckless join between tur-
key-wattle chin and sperm-whale torso. The womeri had
poured themselves into pink elasticized pantsuits; the men
swelled against every seam and button of their plaid shirts
and Dacron slacks.

And lest they not be sufficiently noticed, Raban reports, many
of the men wore caps asking us to believe that, in opposition to
the wisdom of the ages, “Happiness Is Being a Grandparent.”
Raban found himself so fascinated by U. S.A. fat that he proposes
a Fatness Map, which would indicate that the fattest people live
in areas where the immigration has been the most recent and
“ancestral memories of hunger closest.” On the other hand,
“states … settled before 1776 would register least in the way of

. fatty tissue. Girth would. generally increase from east to west and
from south to north. The flab capital of the U.S.A. should be

54 PAUL FUSSELL

located somewhere in the triangle of Minnesota, Iowa, and the
Dakotas. ”

We don’t have to go all the way with Raban to perceive that
there is an elite look in this country. It requires women to be thin,
with a hairstyle dating back eighteen or twenty years or so. (The
classiest women wear their hair for a lifetime in exactly the style
they affected in college.) They wear superbly fitting dresses and
expensive but always understated shoes and handbags, with very
little jewelry . They wear scarves-these instantly betoken class,
because they are useless except as a caste mark. Men should be
thin. No jewelry at all. No cigarette case. Moderate-length hair,
never dyed or tinted, which is a middle-class or high-prole sign,
as the practice of President Reagan indicates . Never a hairpiece, a
prole usage. (High and mid-proles call them rugs, mats, or doilies.
Calling them toops is low-prole.) Both women’s and men’s elite
looks are achieved by a process of rejection-of the current, the
showy, the superfluous. Thus the rejection of fat by the elite.
Michael Korda in his book Success! gets the point. “It pays,” he
finds, “to be thin. ”

But the elite rejection of the superfluous in no way implies a
“minimal” look in clothes. Rather, “layering” is obligatory. As
Alison Lurie says in The Language oj Clothes (1981), “It has gen-
erally been true that the more clothes someone has on, the higher
his or her status.” And she goes on: “The recent fashion for
‘layered’ clothes may be related, as is sometimes claimed, to the
energy shortage; it is also a fine way of displaying a large ward-
robe. ”

The upper-middle-class woman will appear almost invariably
in a skirt of gray flannel, Stuart plaid, or khaki; a navy-blue
cardigan, which may be cable-stitched; a white blouse with Peter
Pan collar; hose with flat shoes; hair preferably in a barrette.
When it gets cold, she puts on a blue blazer, or, for business, a
gray flannel suit. But the color toward which everything aspires
is really navy. There will be lots of layering and a tendency to
understate. The indispensable accessory will be a glasses case dec-
orated with homemade needlepoint (an important caste mark: the
needlepoint suggests hours of aimless leisure during which some-
one has worked on it-unthinkable for proles). If a woman does
a lot of knitting for family and friends, chances are she’s upper-
middle-class. But if when she finishes a sweater she sews in a little
label reading

CLASS

Handmade by Gertrude Willis

she’s middle-class. If the label reads

Hand-crafted by Gertrude Willis

she’s high-prole.

55

If navy is the upper-middle-class color, purple is the prole
equivalent, and it is scourged frequently by Barbara Blaes, ward-
robe adviser to the Departments of Labor and Commerce as well
as the CIA and the Food and Drug Administration . She gets $400

day forraoting out prole garments from among women work-
ing in government departments. What she wants women to look
like, as much as possible, is female men, in navy or gray tailored
suits. Not, not assuredly, the pantsuit, especially not in purple,
and especially not in purple polyester. That is the absolute bot-
tom, the classic prole costume. It’s right down there with another
favorite prole getup, this one favored by the slender the way the
pantsuit is by the obese. I refer to designer jeans worn with very
high heels. This is a common outfit among newcomers to the
suburbs who’ve not yet mastered the pseudo-prep, upper-middle
look.

The purple polyester pantstiit offends two principles that deter-
mine class in clothes: the color principle and the organic-materials
prinCiple. Navy blue aside, colors are classier the more pastel or
faded, and materials are classier the more they consist of anything
that was once alive. That means wool, leather, silk, cotton, and

. fur. Only. All synthetic fibers are prole, partly because they’re
cheaper than natural ones, partly because they’re not archaic, and
partly because they’re entirely uniform and hence boring-you’ll
never find a bit of straW or sheep excrement woven into an acrylic
sweater. Veblen got the point in 1899, speaking of mass-produced
goods in general: “Machine-made goods of daily use are often
admired and preferred precisely on account of their excessive per-
fection by the vulgar and the underbred, who have not given due
thought to the punctilios of elegant consumption.” (The organic
principle also determines that in kitchens wood is classier than
Formica, and on the kitchen table a cotton cloth “higher” than
plastic or oilcloth.) So important for genuine upper-middle-class
standing is the total renunciation of artificial fibers that the elite
eye becomes skilled in detecting even, as The Official Preppy
Handbook has it, “a small percentage of polyester in an Oxford-

56 PAUL FUSSELL

cloth shirt” -a sad middle-caste mark. The same invaluable book
praises young Caroline Kennedy unreservedly-“on technical
points Preppier than Mummy”-because “during four years at
Harvard Square, an unnatural fiber never went near her body. ”
It somehow seems very American and very late-twentieth-cen-
tury-that is, very prole-that we are now invited to buy bath
towels, whose only office is to absorb moisture, with their cot-
ton, the sole absorbing fiber they contain, carefully diluted by 12
percent Dacron polyester, to keep them from absorbing so well.

But no one talks that way without risking rebuke from Mr.
Fisher A. Rhymes, Director of Public Affairs of the Man-Made
Fiber Producers Association, with headquarters in Washington,
where it’s in a position to persuade the Army and Navy to intro-
duce the maximum number of man-made fibers not just into their
towels but into their mops and sponges as well. Mr. Rhymes
stands ready at all times to rebut calumnies, as he does in a recent
letter to the New York Times defending polyester against a fashion
writer’s strictures. “Polyester,” he says, “in its many luxurious
forms, is the most widely used fashion fiber today.” (Just what’s
wrong with it, of course, from the class point of view.)

If you can gauge people’s proximity to prole status by the color
and polyester content of their garments, legibility of their dress is
another sign. “Legible clothing” is Alison Lurie’s useful term to
designate things like T-shirts or caps with messages on them
you’re supposed to read and admire. The messages may be sim-
ple, like BUDWEISER or HEINEKEN’S, or they may be complex and
often lewd, like the one on the girl’s T-shirt: THE BEST PART IS
INSIDE. When proles assemble to enjoy leisure, they seldom ap-
pear in clothing without words on it. As you move up the classes
and the understatement principle begins to operate, the words
gradually disappear, to be replaced, in the middle and upper-
middle classes, by mere emblems, like the Lacoste alligator.
Once, ascending further, you’ve left all such trademarks behind,
you may correctly infer that you are entering the purlieus of the
upper class itself. The same reason a T-shirt reading COKE’S THE
REAL THING is prole determines that the necktie reading COUNTESS
MARA is vulgar and middle-class.

There are psychological reasons why proles feel a need to wear
legible clothing, and they are more touching than ridiculous. By
wearing a garment reading SPORTS ILLUSTRATED or GATORADE or
LESTER LANIN, the prole associates himself with an enterprise the

CLASS 57

Legibledothing, middle class (left) and prole

world judges successful, and thus, for the moment, he achieves
some importance. This is the reason why, at the Indianapolis
Motor Speedway each May, you can see grown men walking
around proud to wear silly-looking caps so long as they say
GOODYEAR or VALVOLINE. Brand names today possess a totemistic
power to ‘confer distinction on those who wear them. By donning

. legible clothing you fuse your private identity with external com-
mercial success, redeeming your insignificance and becoming, for
the inoment,somebody. For $27 you can send in to a post-office
box. in Holiday; Florida, and get a nylon jacket in blue, white,
and orange that says, on the front, UNION 76. There are sizes for
kids and ladies too. Just the thing for the picnic. And this need is
not the proles’ alone. Witness the T-shirts and carryalls stamped
with the logo of The New York Review of Books, which convey
. the point’ ‘I read hard books,” or printed with portraits of Mozart
and Haydn and Beethoven, which assure the world, “I am civi-

58 PAUL FUSSELL

lized.” The gold-plated blazer buttons displaying university seals
affected by the middle class likewise identify the wearer with
impressive brand names like the University ofIndiana and’Loui-
siana State.

The wearing of clothes either excessively new or excessively
neat and clean also suggests that your social circumstances are not
entirely secure. The upper and upper-middle classes like to appear
in old clothes, as if to advertise how much of conventional dignity
they can afford to throwaway, as the men of these classes do also
when they abjure socks while wearing loafers. Douglas Suther-
land, in The English Gentleman (1980). is sound on the old-clothes
principle. “Gentlemen,” he writes . “may wear their suits until
they are threadbare but they do so with considerable panache and
it is evident to the most uncritical eye that they have been buiit
by a good tailor.” On the other hand, the middle class and the
proles make much of new clothes, of course with the highest
possible polyester content. The question of the class meaning of
cleanliness is a tricky one, not as easy. perhaps, as Alison Lurie
thinks. She finds cleanliness “a sign of status, since to be clean
and neat always involves the expense of time and money.” But
laboring to present yourself scrupulously clean and neat suggests
that you’re worried about status slippage and that you care terri-
bly what your audience thinks, both low signs. The perfect shirt
coilar, the too neatly tied necktie knot, the anxious overattention
to dry cleaning-all betray the wimp. Or the nasty-nice. The
deployment of the male bowtie is an illustration. If neatly tied,
centered, and balanced, the effect is middle-class. When tied
askew, as if carelessly or incompetently, the effect is upper-:-mid-
dIe or even. if sufficiently inept, upper. The worst thing is being
neat when. socially. you’re supposed to be sloppy, or clean when
you’re supposed to be filthy. There’s an analogy here with the
excessively washed and polished automobile, almost infallibly a
sign of prole ownership. Class people can afford to drive dirty
cars. Just as, walking on the street, they’re more likely to carry
their business papers in tatty expanding files made of reddish-
brown fiber, now fuzzy and sweat-stained, rather than in neat-
looking attache cases displaying lots of leather and brass, items
that are a sad stigma of the middle class.

This principle of not-too-neat is crucial in men’s clothing. Too
careful means low-at least middle-class, perhaps prole. “Dear
boy, you’re almost too well dressed to be a gentleman,” Neil

CLASS 59

Mackwood, author of Debrett’s In and Out (1980), imagines an
upper-class person addressing someone in the middle class, as if
the speaker were implying that the . addressee is not a gent but a
model, a floorwalker, or an actor. “A now famous Hollywood
actor,” Vance Packard reports, “still reveals his lower …
origins every time he sits down. He pulls up his trousers to pre-
serve the crease.” And King George IV is said to have observed
of Robert Peel: “He’s not a gentleman: he divides his coattails
when he sits down.”

The difference between high- versus low-caste effects in men’s
is partly the of the upper orders’ being used to

weanng SUIts, or at least Jackets. As Lurie perceives, the suit “not
only flatters the inactive, it deforms the laborious.” (And the
athlet.ic or muscular: Arnold Schwartzenegger looks
espe,:lalIy m a suit. For this reason the suit-preferably
the dark smt a weapon in the nineteenth-century
war of the. the proletariat. “The triumph of
the … SUlt, says Lune, meant that the blue-collar man in his
best clothes was at his worst in any formal confrontation with his
‘betters.’ ” We can think of blacksmith Joe Gargary in Dickens’s

dressed to the nines for an appear-
ance m the CIty, bemg patromzed by the comfortably dressed Pip .
. “This s.trategic disadvantage,” Lurie goes on, “can still be seen
m operation at local union-management confrontations, in the
offices of and loan companies, and whenever a working-
class man VISIts a government bureau.” That’s an illustration of

. John T. Molloy’.s general principle of the way men use clothing
, to convey class SIgnals. When two men meet, he perceives, “One

. man’s clothing is saying to the other man, ‘I am more important
than . you are, please show respect’; or, ‘I am your equal and
expect to be treated as such’; or, ‘1 am not your equal and do not
expect to be treated as such.’ ” For this reason, Molloy indicates,
proles who want to rise must be extremely careful to affect
“Northeastern establishment attire,” which will mean that
Brooks .Brothers and J. Press will be their guides: “Business suits
should be plain; no fancy or extra buttons’ no weird color stitch-
ing; flaps on the breast pocket; no on the sleeves; no
belts m the back of the jacket; no leather ornamentation; no cow-
boy yokes. Never.”
. It’s largely a matter of habit and practice, says C. Wright Mills
m The Power Elite (1956): no matter where you live, he insists,

60 PAUL fUSSELL

“anyone with the money and the inclination can learn to be un-
comfortable in anything but a Brooks Brothers suit.” And, I
would add, can learn to recoil from clothes with a glossy (middle-
class) as opposed to a matte (upper-middle-class) finish. Middle-
class clothes tend to err by excessive smoothness, to glitter a bit,
to shine even before they’re worn. Upper-middle clothes, on the
other hand, lean to the soft , textured, woolly, nubby. Ultimately,
the difference implies a difference between city and country, or
labor and leisure, where country betokens not decrepit dairy farms
and bad schools but estates and horse-leisure . Thus the popularity
among the upper-middle class (and the would-be upper-middle
class, like members of Ivy university faculties) of the tweed
jacket. Country leisure is what it implies, not daily wage slavery
in the city.

The tweed jacket is indispensable to the upper-middle-class
trick of layering. A man signals that he’s classy if, outdoors, he
comes on in a tweed jacket, with vest or sweater ( or two), shirt,
tie, long wool scarf, and overcoat or raincoat. An analogy is with
the upper-class house, which has lots of different rooms for dif-
ferent purposes. Wearing one shirt over another-axford-cloth
button-down over a turtleneck, for example-is upper-middle-
class, and the shirt WOrn underneath can even be a dress shirt
(solid color is best) with its own collar , a usage I’ve seen in warm
weather on Madison Avenue in the upper eighties. Since sweaters
are practically obligatory for layering, it’s important to know that
the classiest is the Shetland crew-neck pullover, and in ” Scottish”
colors-heather and the like, especially when a tieless Oxford-:-
cloth shirt (palpably without artificial fibers) just peeps over the
top. Add a costly tweed jacket without shoulder padding and no
one can tell you ‘re not upper-middle at least. The V-neck
sweater, designed to prove conclusively that you’re wearing a
necktie, is for that reason middle-class or even high prole. It’s
hard to believe that sometimes people tuck pullovers into the top
of their trousers, but I’m told they do . If this does happen, it’s a
very low sign .

The interpreter of men’s class appearances can hardly do better
than study the costumes of the Presidents as they come and go.
The general principle here is that the two-button suit is more.
prole than the three-hut ton Eastern-establishment model. Most
Presidents have worn the two-button kind before, and when they
assume the leadership of the Free World, they feel ob,liged to

CLASS 61

change, now affecting three-button suits and resembling the
Chairman ‘ of the Board of the Chase Manhattan Bank. This is
what made Richard Nixon look so awkward most of the time.
He was really comfortable in the sort of Klassy Kut two-button
suit you might wear if you were head of the Savings & Loan
Association of Whittier, California. His successor, Gerald Ford,
although brought up on the hick two-button model, managed to
wear the three-button job with some plausibility, being more
pliable and perhaps a faster study than Nixon. But he never really
pulled off the con, in features resembling as he did Joe Palooka
rather than any known type of American aristocrat. James Earl
Carter knew himself well enough to realize that he should reject
two- and three-button suits alike , sticking to blue jeans and thus
escaping criticism as one who aspires to the Establishment but

– fails.
Ronald Reagan, of course, doesn’t need to affect the establish-

ment style, sensing accurately that his lowbrow, God-fearing,
intellect-distrusting constituency regards it as an affront (which,
of course, to them it is). Reagan’s style can be designated Los
Angeles (or even Orange) County Wasp-Chutzpah. It registers
the sense that if you stubbornly believe you ‘ re as good as educated
and civilized people-i. e., those Eastern dudes-then you are.
He is the perfect representative of the mind and soul of the Sun
Belt. He favors , of course, the two-button suit with maximum
shoulder padding and with a Trumanesque squared white hand-
kerchief in the breast pocket, which makes him look, when he ‘s
dressed way up, like a prole setting off for church. Sometimes,
for leisure activities (as he might express it), he affects the cowboy
look, which, especially when one is aged, appeals mightily to the
Sun Belt seniles. One hesitates even to speculate about the poly-
ester levels of his outfits.

Indeed, Reagan violates virtually every canon of upper-class or
even upper-middle-class presentation. The dyed hair is, as we’ve
seen, an outrage, as is the rouge on the cheeks . (Will the President
soon proceed to eye shadow and liner?) So is the white broadcloth
shirt with its omnipresent hint of collar stays. (Anxiety about
neatness.) The suit materials are scandalously bucolic middle-
class: plaid, but never Glen plaid. The necktie is tied with a full
Windsor knot, the favorite of sophisticated high-school boys
everywhere. When after a press conference Dan Rather, not
everyone’s idea of a Preppy, comes on to “summarize” and try

62 PAUL FUSSELL

to make sense of the President’s vagaries, his light-blue Oxford-
cloth button-down and “regimental” tie make him, by contrast,
look upper-middle-class. The acute student of men’s class signals
could virtually infer Reagan’s politics of Midwestern small-town
meanness from his getups, just as one might deduce Roosevelt’s
politics of aristocratic magnanimity from such classy accessories
as his naval cape, pince-nez, and cigarette hol<:kr.

It’s not just Ronald Reagan who violates all canons of gentle-
manly attire. It’s the conspicuous members of his “team” as well,
like Al Haig . (Even though he’s no longer Secretary of State, he
wants so much to be President that he ‘s appropriately dealt with
here.) It’s cruel, of course, to demand that a soldier know any-
thing about taste on those occasions when he’s obliged to disguise
himself as an ordinary person. (Although there’s always ,the ex-
ample of General George C. Marshall, who, after a lifetime of
appearing in uniform, managed in mufti to wear the three-but-
ton, three-piece suit as if to the classy manner born.) Al Haig’s
class stigma is the gaping jacket collar, always a prole giveaway.
Here, the collar of the jacket separates itselffrom the collar of the
shirt and backs off and up an inch or so: the effect is that of a man
coming apart. That this caste mark is without specifically reac-
tionary political meaning is confirmed by a photograph of Rich-
ard Hoggart, the British radical critic and Labour Party
enthusiast, used to promote a recent book of his: his jacket collar
is gaping a full inch at the rear, ample indication that jacket gape
afflicts the far left as well as the far right. What it betrays, indeed,
is less the zealot than the stooge. Like the poor chap interviewed
on TV recently by William F. Buckley. He was from Texas and
wanted to censor school textbooks to repress, among other evils,
pro-mis-kitty. (As gently as possible, Buckley corrected this mis-
pronunciation of promiscuity so that the audience would know
what the poor ass was talking about.) But even if the Texan had
not , with complete confidence in his unaided powers, delivered
repeatedly this prole mispronunciation, his perceptiveness and
sensibility could have been inferred from the way his jacket collar
gaped open a foll two inches . Buckley’s collar, of course, clung
tightly to his neck and shoulders, turn and bow and bob as he
might. And here I will reject all accusations that I am favoring
the rich over the poor. The distinction I’m pointing.to is not one
between the tailored clothes of the fortunate and the store clothes
of the others, for if you try you can get a perfectly fitting suit

CLASS 63

Prole jacket-gape

collar off the rack, or at least have it altered to fit snugly . The
. difference is in recognizing this as a class signal and not being

awa.re of it as …

•• • D1st1nct10n
A Social Critique of tbe
JuJgement of Taste

Pierre BourJieu
Translated by Richard Nice

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

2 ‘Tbe Social Space ana
Its Transformations

If the research had stopped at this point it would probably not raise great
objections, so self-evident is rhe idea of the irreducibiliry of arristic rasre.
However, as has already been shown by rhe analysis of rhe social condi-
tions of the aesthetic disposition, rhe disposirions which govern choices
between the goods of legitimate culture cannot be fully understood un-
less rhey are reintegrated into the system of dispositions, unless ‘culture’,
in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is reinserted into
‘culrure’ in the broad, anthropological sense and the elaborated taste for
the most refined objects is brought back into relation with the elemen-
tary taste for the flavours of food. 1 The dual meaning of the word ‘taste’,
which usually serves to justify the illusion of spontaneous generation
which this cultivated disposition tends to produce by presenting itself in
the guise of an innate disposition, must serve, for once, to remind us that
taste in the sense of the ‘faculty of immediately and intuitively judging
aesthetic values’ is inseparable from taste in the sense of the capacity to
discern the flavours of foods which implies a preference for some of
them . The abstraction which isolates dispositions towards legitimate culc
ture leads to a further abstraction at the level of the system of explana-
tory factors, which, though always present and active, only offers itself
for observation through those elements (cultural capital and trajectory in
the case analysed below) which are the principles of its efficacy in the
field in question .

The consumption of the most legitimate cultural goods is a particular
case of competition for rare goods and practices, whose particularity no
doubt owes more to the logic of supply, i.e., the specific form of compe-

100 / The Economy of Practim

tition between the producers, than to the log ic of demand and tastes, i.e. ,
the logic of compe titi o n between the consumers. One only has to re-
move the magical barrier which makes legitimate culrure into a separate
universe, in order to see intelligible relationships between choices as
seemingly incommensurable as preferences in musi c o r cooking, SpOrt Or
politics, literature or hairstyle. This barbarous reinteg ration of aesthetic
consumption into the wo rld of ordinary consumption (against which it
endlessly defines itself) has, inter alia, the virtue of reminding us that the
consumption of goods no doubt always presupposes a labour of appro-
priation, to different degrees depending on the goods and the consumers.
or, more precisely, that the consumer helps to produce the product
consumes, by a labour of identification and decoding which, in the case
of a work of art, may constitute the whole of the consumption and grati-
fication , and which requires time and dispositions acquired over time.

Economists, who never jib at an abstraction, can ignore what happens
to products in the relationship with the consumers, that is, with the dis-
positions which define their useful properties and real uses. To hypothe-
size, as one of them does, that consumers perceive the same decisive
attributes, which amounts to assuming that produc ts possess objective
or, as they are known , ‘rechnical’ characteristics which can impress them –
selves as such on all perceiving subjects, is to proceed as if perception
only seized on the characteristics designated by the manufacturers’ bro-
chures (and so-called ‘informative’ publicity) and as if social uses could
be derived from the operating instructions. Objects, even industrial prod-
ucts, are not objecti ve in the o rdin ary sense of the word, i.e., independent
of the interest and tastes of th ose who perceive them , and they do not
impose the self-evidence of a universal , unanimousl y approved meaning.
The sociologist’S task would be much easier if, when faced with each rela-
tionship between an ‘independent variable’ and a ‘dependent variable’, he
did not have to determine how the percepti on and appreciation of what
is designated by the ‘dependent variable’ vary according to the classes de-
termined by the ‘ independent va ri able’, or, in other words, identify the
system of pertinent features on the basis of which each o f th e classes of
agents was really determined l What sc ien ce has to establish is the objec-
tivity of the object which is established in the relationship between an
object defined by the possibilities and impossibilities it o ffers, which are
only revealed in the world o f socia:! uses (including, in the case of a tech-
nical object, the use or function fo r which it was designed ) and the di s-
positions of an agent or cl ass of agents, that is, the schemes of perception ,
appreciation and action which constitute its objective utility in a practi-
cal usage. 3 The aim is no t, of course, to reintroduce any fo rm o f what is
called ‘lived experience’ , whic h is most often merely a thinly disg uised
projection of the researcher’s ‘ li ved experience,;4 but to move beyond the
abstraCt relationship between co nsumers with interch angeab le tastes and
products with uniformly perceived and appreci ated properties to the rela-
tionship between tastes which vary in a necessary way according co their

The Social Space and ItJ Tramformatiom / 101

social and ‘economic conditions of production, and the products on
which they confer their different social identities. One only has to ask the
question, which ignore, of the economic
of the production of the dlsposltlons demanded by the economy, l.e., In
this the question of the economic and social determinants of tastes,
to see the necessity of including in the complete definition of the prod-
uct the differential experiences which the consumers have of it as a func-
tion o( the dispositions they derive from their position in · economic
space. These experie.nces not have to be in to be
with an understanding which may owe nothing to Itved expenence, stlll
less to sympathy. The habitus, an objective relationship between two ob-
jectivities, enables an intelligible and necessary relation to be established
between practices and a situation, the meaning of which is produced by
the habitus through categories of perception and appreciation that are
themselves produced by an observable social condition.

Class Condition and Social Conditioning
Because it can only account for practices by bringing to light successively
the series of effects which underlie them, analysis initially conceals the
structure of the life-style characteristic of an agent or class of agents, that
is, the unity hidden under the diversity and multiplicity of the set of
practices performed in fields governed by different logics and therefore
inducing different forms of realization, in accordance with the formula :
[(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice. It also conceals the structure of
the symbolic space marked out by the whole set of these structured prac-
tices, all the distinct and distinctive life-styles which are always defined
objectively and sometimes subjectively in and through their mutual rela-
tionships. So it is necessary to reconstruCt what has been taken apart, first
by way of verification but also in order to rediscover the kernel of truth
in the approach characteristic of common-sense knowled..ge, namely , the
intuition of the systematic nature of life-styles and of the whole set which
they constitute. To do this, one must rerurn to the practice-unifying
and practice-generating principle, i.e., class habitus, the internali zed form
of class condition and of the conditionings it entails. One must therefore
construct the objective ciaJJ, the set of agents who are placed in homogene-
ous conditions of existence imposing homogeneous conditionings and
producing homogeneous systems of dispositions capable of generating
similar practices; and who possess a set of common properties, objectified
properties, sometimes legally guaranteed (as possession of goods and
power) or properties embodied as class habitus (and, in particular, sys-
tems of classificatory schemes) . 6

VARIABLES AND SYSTEMS OF VARIABLES In designating these classes
(classes of agents or, which amounts to the same thing in this contex t,
classes of conditions of existence) by the name of an occupation, one is

102 / The Economy of Practim

merely indicating that the position in the relations of production gov-
erns practices, in particular through the mechanisms which control access
to positions and produce or select a particular class of habitus. But this
is not a way of reverting to a pre-constructed variable such as ‘socia-
occupational category’. The individuals grouped in a class that is con-
structed in a particular respect (that is, in a particularly determinant re-
spect) always bring with them, in addition to the pertinent properties by
which they are classified, secondary ptoperties which are thus smuggled
into the explanatory modeL 7 This means that a class or class fraction is
defined not only by its position in the relations of production, as identi-
fied through indices such as occupation, income or even educational
level, but also by a certain sex-ratio, a certain distribution in geographical
space (which is never socially neutral) and by a whole set of subsidiary
characteristics which may function, in the form of tacit requirements, as
real principles of selection or exclusion without ever being formally
stated (this is the case with ethnic origin and sex) . A number of official

in ser:e as a mask for hidden criteria: for example, the requir-
mg of a given diploma can be a way of demanding a particular social
origin .

One needs to examine what the list of the criteria used by the analyst de-
rives from the state of the struggle between the groups separated by these
criteria, or more precisely from the capacity of groups defined by these cri-
teria, to get themselves recognized as such. There would be less likelihood
of forgetting that unskilled workers are to a large extent women and immi-
grants if groups based on sex or nationality of origin had constitU(ed them-
selves as such within the working class. Furthermore, the fallacy of the
apparent factor would not be so frequent if it were not the simple retransla-
tion onto the terrain of science of the legitimating strategies whereby
groups to put forward this or that legitimate property , the overt prin-
CIple of theIr constltutlon, to camouflage the real basis of their existence.
Thus the most seleccive groups (a concert audience or the students of a
grande ecole) may doubly conceal the real principle of their selection: by
dech.nmg to announce the real principles of their existence and their repro-
ductIOn, they are obhged to rely on mechanisms which lack the specific, sys-
tematic ngour of an explicit condition of entry and therefore allow
exceptions (unlike clubs and all ‘elites’ based on co-option, they cannot vet
the whole set of properties of the ‘elect’, i.e., the toral person) .

The members of groups based on co-option, as are most of the corps pro-
tect.ed by an overt or covert numerus clausus (doctors, architeccs, professors,
engmeers etc.) always have something else in common beyond the charac-

explicitly demanded. The common image of the professions, which
IS no doubt one of the real determinants of ‘vocations’, is less abstract and
unreal than that presented by statisticians; it takes into account not only
the. nature of the job and the income, but those secondary characteristics
WhICh are often the basis of their social value (prestige or discredit) and

The Social Space and lis Transformations / 103
..(1j- ”

which, though absent from the official job description, function as tacit re-
quirements, such as age, sex, social or ethnic origin, overtly or implicitly
guiding co-option choices, from entry into the profession and right through
a career, so that members of the corps who lack these traits are excluded or
marginalized (women doctors and lawyers tending to be restricted to a fe-
male clientele and black doctors and lawyers to black clients or research) .
In short, the property emphasized by the name used to designate a cate-
gory, usually occupation, is liable to mask the effect of all the secondary
properties which, although constitutive of the category, are not expressly
indicated.

Similarly, when one is trying to assess the evolution of a social category
(identified by occupation), crude errors are inevitable if, by considering
only one of the pertinent properties, one ignores all the substitution effects
in which the evolution is also expressed. The collective trajectory of a social
class may be manifested in the fact that it is becoming ‘feminized’ or ‘mas-
culinized’, growing older or young, getting poorer or richer. (The decline
of a position may be manifested either in ‘feminization’-which may be ac-
companied by arise in social in ‘democratization’ or in ‘ageing’.)
The same would be true of any group defined by reference to a position in
a field-e.g., a university discipline in the hierarchy of disciplines, a title of
nobility in the aristocratic hierarchy, an educational qualification in the aca-
demic hierarchy.

The particular relations between a dependent variable (such as political
opinion) and so-called independent variables such as sex, age and reli-
gion, or even educational level, income and occupation tend to mask the
complete system of relationships which constitutes the true principle of
the specific strength and form of the effects registered in any particular
correlation. The most independent of ‘independent’ variables conceals a
whole network of statistical relations which are present, implicitly , in its
relationship with any given opinion or practice. Here too, instead of ask-
ing statistical technology to solve a problem which it can only displace, it
is necessary to analyse the divisions and variations which the different sec-
ondary variables (sex, age etc.) bring into the class defined by the main
variable, and consider everything which, though present in the real defi-
nition of the class, is not consciously taken into account in the nominal
definition, the one summed up in the name used to designate it, or
therefore in interpreting the relationship in which it is placed.

Typical of the false independence betwccn so-called independent variables is
the relationship between educational qualification and occupation. This is
not only because, at least in some areas of social space (to which educa-
tional qualifications give some degree of access) , occupation depends on
qualification, but also because the cultural capital which the qualification is
supposed to guarantee depends on the holder’s occupation, which may pre-
suppose maintenance or increase of the capital acquired within the family
or at school (by and for promotion) or a diminishing of this capital (by

104 / The Economy of Practices

‘de-skilling’ or ‘de-qualification’). To this effect of occupational condition-
in which one has to distinguish the specific effect of the work which, by its
very nature, may demand a more or less great, more or less invest-
ment of cultural capital, and therefore more or less continUOUS maintenance
of this capital, and the effect of the possible which encou.rages or ex-
cludes cultural investments ltkely to assist or legltlmate promotlon-must
be added the effect of occupational milieu, i.e., the reinforcement of disposi-
tions (especially cultural, religious or political dispositions) by a group that
is homogeneous in most of the respects whICh define. It. -Thus would
have to examine in each case to what extent occupatlonal condltlons of ex-
istence assist or hinder this effect, which would mean taking into account
the characteristics of the work (unpleasantness etc.), the conditions in
which it is performed-noise, or silence permitting conversation etc.-the
temporal rhythms it imposes, the spare time it allows, and especially the
form of the horizontal or vertical relations it encourages at the workplace–
during work or in rest periods–or outside .

This effect no doubt explains a number of differences between office
workers (ledger clerks, bank clerks, agency clerks, typists) and commercial
employees (mainly shop assistants), which are not entirely accounted for
either by differences linked to class fraction of origin (office workers are
rather more often the children of farmers ; commercial employees the chil-
dren of small employers) or by differences in educational capital (the first
more often have the BEPC, the second a CAP).

The commercial employees and the office workers, who are distributed in
much the same way as regards sex, age and income, are separated by impor-
tant differences in dispositions and practices. Office workers are more as-
cetic-they more often expect their friends to be conscientious or well
brought up, more often prefer a neat, clean and tidy interior and like Brel,
Guetary, Mariano, the Hungarian Rhapsody, L’Arlisienne, Raphael,Watteau
and Leonardo . By contrast, commercial employees more often look for
friends who are sociable, bons vivants, amusing and stylish, for a comfort-
able, cosy interior, and prefer Brassens, Ferre, Franc;oise Hardy, the Twilight
of the Gods, the Four Seasons, Rhapsody in Blue, Uerillo or Van Gogh .

Among the effects which the relationship between class fraction and prac-
tices simultaneously reveals and conceals, there is also the effect of the posi-
tion in the distribution of the secondary properries attached to a class.
Thus, members of the class who do not possess all the modal properties-
e.g., men in a serongly feminized occupation or a worker’s son at ENA-
have their social identity deeply marked by this membership and the social
image which it imposes and which they have to situate themselves in rela-
tion to, whether by acceptance or rejection .

Similarly, relationships such as those between educational capital, or age,
and income mask the relationship linking the two apparently independent
variables. Age determines income to an extent which varies according (0
educational capital and occupation, which is itself partly determined by edu-
ca tional capital and also by other, more hidden factors such as sex and in-
herited cultural or social capital. In another case, one of the variables is to a
degree merely a transformed form of the o ther. Thus, scholastic age (i.e.,
age at a given educational level) is a transformed form of inherited cultural

The Social Space and Its Transformations / 105

capital, and lost years are a step towards relegation or elimination . More
generally, the educational capital held at a given moment expresses, among
other things, the economic and social level of the family of origin . (This
results from a long process which is no way a mechanical relationship, since
initial cultural capital may be only parrially converted into educational capi-
tal or may produce effects irreducible to those of educational qualification,
as one finds whenever social origin distinguishes individuals whose qualifi-
cations are identical.)

likewise, in every relationship between educational capital and a given
practice, one sees the effect of the dispositions associated with gender which
help to determine the logic of the reconversion of inherited capital into
educational capital, that is, the ‘choice’ of the type of educational capital
which will be obtained from the same initial capital, more often literary for
girls, more often scientific for boys. Again, the relationship of a given prac-
tice (0 age may conceal a relationship to educational capital when age is in
fact the key to different modes of access to the position-by qualification or
internal promotion–and different school generations and different chances
of access to the educational system (the oldest agents have lower educa-
tional capital than the youngest), or to social class, by virtue of the differ-
ent social definitions of precociousness or backwardness in the various areas,
particularly in schooling.

In fact, the change in chances of access is only one aspect of a more sys-
tematic change which also involves the very definition of competence, and
tends to make comparisons between the generations increasingly difficult _
The conflicts between holders of competences of different ages and different
educational levels–old school-certificate holder versus new bache!ier (bacca-
laureat-holder)–centre precisely on the definition of competence, with the
old generation complaining that the new generation does not possess the
competences formerly defined as elementary and basic: ‘They can’t spell
nowadays’, ‘They can’t even add up’.

And finally, the variations in cultural practice by size of town of resi-
dence cannot be ascribed to the direct effect of spatial distance and the
variations in the supply of culture, until it is confirmed that the differences
persist after discounting the effect of the inequalities in educational capital
concealed (even in the occupational category) by geographical distribution .
The opposition between Paris and the provinces needs to be analysed in a
way similar to that used for the notion of ‘educational level ‘. Relationships
involving the variable ‘place of residence’ manifest not only the effect of
cultural supply, linked to the density of objectified cultural capital and so
to the objective opportunities for cultural consumption and the related re-
inforcement of the aspiration to consume, but also all the effects of the un-
equal spatial distribution of properties and their owners (e.g., possessors of
high educational capital), in particular the circular reinforcement each
group performs on itself, for example, intensifying cultural practice if it is
culcivated, discouraging it by indifference or hostility if it is not.

When , as often happens, the analysis is conducted variable by variable,
there is a danger of attributing to one of the variables (such as sex or age,
each of which may express in its own way the whole situation or trend of

106 I The Economy of Practices

a class) the effect of the set of variables (an error which is encouraged by
the conscious or unconscious tendency to substitute generic alienations,
e.g., those linked to sex or age, for specific alienations, linked to class).
Economic and social condition, as identified by occupation, gives a spe-
cific form to all the properties of sex and age, so that it is the efficacy of
the whole structure of factors associated with a position in social space
which is manifested in the correlations between age or sex and practices.
The naivety of the inclination to attribute the differences recorded in re-
lation to age to a generic effect of biological ageing becomes self-evident
when one sees, for example, that the ageing which, in the privileged
classes, is associated with a move to the right, is accompanied, among
manual workers, by a move to the left. Similarly, in the relative precocity
of executives, measured for example by the age at which they reach a
given position, one sees in fact the expression of everything which di-
vides them, despite the apparent identity of condition at a given mo-
ment, namely their whole previous and subsequent trajectory, and the
capital volume and structure which govern it.

CONSTRUCTED CLASS Social class is not defined by a property (not even
the most determinant one, such as the volume and composition of capi-
tal) nor by a collection of properties (of sex, age, social origin, ethnic
origin–proportion of blacks and whites, for example, or natives and im-
migrants-income, educational level etc,), nor even by a chain of proper-
ties strung out from a fundamental property (position in the relations of
production) in a relation of cause and effect, conditioner and condi-
tioned; but by the structure of relations between all the pertinent proper-
ties which gives its specific value to each of them and to the effects they
exert on practices 8 Constructing, as we have here, classes as homo-
geneous as possible with respect to the fundamental determinants of the
material conditions of existence and the conditionings they impose,
therefore means that even in constructing the classes and in interpreting
the variations of the distribution of properties and practices in relation to
these classes, one consciously takes into account the network of second-
ary characteristics which are more or less unconsciously manipulated
whenever the classes are defined in terms of a single criterion, even one as
pertinent as occupation. It also means grasping the principle of the ob-
jective divisions, i.e., divisions internalized or objectified in distinctive
properties, on the basis of which the agents are most likely to divide and
come together in reality in their ordinary practices, and also to mobilize
themselves or be mobilized (in accordance with the specific logic, linked
to a specific history, of the mobilizing organizations) by and for individ-
ual or collective political action.

The principles of logical division which are used to produce the classes are
of course very unequally constituted socially in pre-existing social classifica-

The Social Space and Its Transformations I 107
dons. At one extreme, there is the simple existence of the name of a trade
or ‘social category’, the product of classification by a governmental agency,
such as INSEE (Institut national de la statistique et des etudes economi-
ques), or of the social bargaining which leads to industrial ‘collective agree-
ments’; and at the other extreme, there are groups possessing a real social
identity, recognized spokesmen and institutionalized channels for expressing
and defending their interests etc, The secondary principles of division (such
as country of origin or sex), which are likely to be ignored by an ordinary
analysis until they serve as a basis for some form of mobilization, indicate
potential lines of division along which a group socially perceived as unitary
may split, more or less deeply and permanently. Because the differenc factors
in the system Qf determinations constituting a class condition (which can
function as real principles of division between objectively separate or ac-
tually mobilized groups) vary greatly in their functional weights and there-
fore in their structuring force, these principles of division are themselves set
in a hierarchy; groups mobilized on the basis of a secondary criterion (such
as sex or age) are likely to be bound together less permanently and less
deeply than those mobilized on the basis of the fundamental determinants
of their condition.

To account for the infinite diversity of practices in a way that is both
unitary and specific, one has to break with linear thinking, which only rec-
ognizes the simple ordinal structures of direct determination, and endea-
vour to reconstruct the networks of interrelated relationships which are
present in each of the factors .9 The structural causality of a network of
factors is quite irreducible to the cumulated effects of the set of linear re-
lations, of different explanatory force, which the necessities of analysis
oblige one to isolate, those which are established between the different
factors, taken one by one, and the practice in question; through each of
the factors is exerted the efficacy of all the others, and the multiplicity of
determinations leads not to indeterminacy but to over-determination.
Thus the superimposition of biological, psychological and social determi-
nations in the formation of socially defined sexual identity (a basic di-
mension of social personality) is only a particular, but very important,
case of a logic that is also at work in other biological determinations,
such as ageing.

It goes without saying that the factors constituting the constructed
class do not all depend on one another to the same extent, and that the
structure of the system they constitute is determined by those which
have the greatest functional weight. Thus, the volume and composition
of capital give specific form and value to the determinations which the
other factors (age, sex, place of residence etc.) impose on practices. Sex-
ual properties are as inseparable from class properties as the yellowness of
a lemon is from its acidity: a class is defined in an essential respect by the
place and value it gives to the two sexes and to their socially constituted
dispositions. This is why there are as many ways of realizing femininity as

108 / The Economy of Practices

there are classes and class fractions, and the division of labour between
the sexes takes quite different forms, both in practices and in representa-
tions, in the different social classes. So the true nature of a class or class
fraction is expressed in its distribVtion by sex or age, and perhaps even
more, since its future is then at stake, by the trend of this distribution
over time. The lowest positions are designated by the fact that they in-
clude a large-and growing–proportion of …

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 1/35

C

Maciek Jasik

HEALTH

WHEN CHILDREN SAY THEY ’RE TRANS

Hormones? Surgery? e choices are fraught—and there are no easy answers.

By Jesse Singal

JULY/AUGUST 2018 ISSUE

   ��--  with short auburn hair and a broad smile. She

lives outside Philadelphia with her mother and father, both professional

scientists. Claire can come across as an introvert, but she quickly opens up,

and what seemed like shyness reveals itself to be quiet self-assuredness. Like many kids

her age, she is a bit overscheduled. During the course of the evening I spent with

Claire and her mother, Heather—these aren’t their real names—theater, guitar, and

track tryouts all came up. We also discussed the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t

certain she was a girl.

Subscribe

SHARE

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 2/35

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

Sixth grade had been difficult for her. She’d struggled to make friends and experienced

both anxiety and depression. “I didn’t have any self-con�dence at all,” she told me. “I

thought there was something wrong with me.” Claire, who was 12 at the time, also

felt uncomfortable in her body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She

acknowledged that part of it had to do with puberty, but she felt it was more than the

usual preteen woes. “At �rst, I started eating less,” she said, “but that didn’t really

help.”

Around this time, Claire started watching YouTube videos made by transgender

young people. She was particularly fascinated by MilesChronicles, the channel of

Miles McKenna, a charismatic 22-year-old. His 1 million subscribers have followed

along as he came out as a trans boy, went on testosterone, got a double mastectomy,

and transformed into a happy, healthy young man. Claire had discovered the videos

by accident, or rather by algorithm: ey’d showed up in her “recommended” stream.

ey gave a name to Claire’s discomfort. She began to wonder whether she was

transgender, meaning her internal gender identity didn’t match the sex she had been

assigned at birth. “Maybe the reason I’m uncomfortable with my body is I’m supposed to

be a guy,” she thought at the time.

Claire found in MilesChronicles and similar YouTube videos a clear solution to her

unhappiness. “I just wanted to stop feeling bad, so I was like, I should just transition,”

she said. In Claire’s case, the �rst step would be gaining access to drugs that would

halt puberty; next, she would start taking testosterone to develop male secondary sex

characteristics. “I thought that that was what made you feel better,” she told me.

In Claire’s mind, the plan was concrete, though neither Heather nor her husband,

Mike, knew about any of it. Claire initially kept her feelings from her parents,

researching steps she could take toward transitioning that wouldn’t require medical

interventions, or her parents’ approval. She looked into ways to make her voice sound

deeper and into binders to hide her breasts. But one day in August 2016, Mike asked

her why she’d seemed so sad lately. She explained to him that she thought she was a

boy.

is began what Heather recalls as a complicated time in her and her husband’s

relationship with their daughter. ey told Claire that they loved and supported her;

they thanked her for telling them what she was feeling. But they stopped short of

encouraging her to transition. “We let her completely explore this on her own,”

Heather told me.

TheAtlantic – Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13. …

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 3/35

A

To Claire’s parents, her anguish seemed to come out of nowhere. Her childhood had

been free of gender dysphoria—the clinical term for experiencing a powerful sense of

disconnection from your assigned sex. ey were concerned that what their daughter

had self-diagnosed as dysphoria was simply the travails of puberty.

As Claire passed into her teen years, she continued to struggle with mental-health

problems. Her parents found her a therapist, and while that therapist worked on

Claire’s depression and anxiety—she was waking up several times a night to make sure

her alarm clock was set correctly—she didn’t feel quali�ed to help her patient with

gender dysphoria. e therapist referred the family to some nearby gender-identity

clinics that offered transition services for young people.

Claire’s parents were wary of starting that process. Heather, who has a doctorate in

pharmacology, had begun researching youth gender dysphoria for herself. She hoped

to better understand why Claire was feeling this way and what she and Mike could do

to help. Heather concluded that Claire met the clinical criteria for gender dysphoria

in the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual. Among

other indications, her daughter clearly didn’t feel like a girl, clearly wanted a boy’s

body, and was deeply distressed by these feelings. But Heather questioned whether

these criteria, or much of the information she found online, told the whole story.

“Psychologists know that adolescence is fraught with uncertainty and identity

searching, and this isn’t even acknowledged,” she told me.

Heather said most of the resources she found for parents of a gender-dysphoric child

told her that if her daughter said she was trans, she was trans. If her daughter said she

needed hormones, Heather’s responsibility was to help her get on hormones. e

most important thing she could do was affirm her daughter, which Heather and Mike

interpreted as meaning they should agree with her declarations that she was

transgender. Even if they weren’t so certain.

     , Claire’s belief that she should

transition was growing stronger. For months, she had been insistent that she

wanted both testosterone and “top surgery”—a double mastectomy. She

repeatedly asked her parents to �nd her doctors who could get her started on a path to

physical transition. Heather and Mike bought time by telling her they were looking

but hadn’t been able to �nd anyone yet. “We also took her kayaking, played more

board games with her and watched more TV with her, and took other short family

trips,” Heather recalled. “We also took away her ability to search online but gave her

Instagram as a consolation.” ey told her they realized that she was in pain, but they

also felt, based on what they’d learned in their research, that it was possible her

feelings about her gender would change over time. ey asked her to start keeping a

journal, hoping it would help her explore those feelings.

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 4/35

T

Claire humored her parents, even as her frustration with them mounted. Eventually,

though, something shifted. In a journal entry Claire wrote last November, she traced

her realization that she wasn’t a boy to one key moment. Looking in the mirror at a

time when she was trying to present in a very male way—at “my baggy,

uncomfortable clothes; my damaged, short hair; and my depressed-looking face”—she

found that “it didn’t make me feel any better. I was still miserable, and I still hated

myself.” From there, her distress gradually began to lift. “It was kind of sudden when I

thought: You know, maybe this isn’t the right answer—maybe it’s something else,” Claire

told me. “But it took a while to actually set in that yes, I was de�nitely a girl.”

FROM OUR JULY/AUGUST 2018 ISSUE
Check out the full table of contents and �ind your next story to read.

See More

Claire believes that her feeling that she was a boy stemmed from rigid views of gender

roles that she had internalized. “I think I really had it set in stone what a guy was

supposed to be like and what a girl was supposed to be like. I thought that if you

didn’t follow the stereotypes of a girl, you were a guy, and if you didn’t follow the

stereotypes of a guy, you were a girl.” She hadn’t seen herself in the other girls in her

middle-school class, who were breaking into cliques and growing more gossipy. As she

got a bit older, she found girls who shared her interests, and started to feel at home in

her body.

Heather thinks that if she and Mike had heeded the information they found online,

Claire would have started a physical transition and regretted it later. ese days, Claire

is a generally happy teenager whose mental-health issues have improved markedly. She

still admires people, like Miles McKenna, who bene�ted from transitioning. But she’s

come to realize that’s just not who she happens to be.

   -   in the United States is

on the rise. In June 2016, the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law

estimated that 1.4 million adults in the U.S. identify as transgender, a near-

doubling of an estimate from about a decade earlier. As of 2017, according to the

institute, about 150,000 teenagers ages 13 to 17 identi�ed as trans. e number of

young people seeking clinical services appears to be growing as well. A major clinic in

the United Kingdom saw a more than 300 percent increase in new referrals over the

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 5/35

past three years. In the U.S., where youth gender clinics are somewhat newer—40 or

so are scattered across the country—solid numbers are harder to come by.

Anecdotally, though, clinicians are reporting large upticks in new referrals, and

waiting lists can stretch to �ve months or longer.

How can parents get children the support they might
need while keeping in mind that adolescence is, by

de�nition, a time of identity exploration?

e current era of gender-identity awareness has undoubtedly made life easier for

many young people who feel constricted by the sometimes-oppressive nature of

gender expectations. A rich new language has taken root, granting kids who might

have felt alone or excluded the words they need to describe their experiences. And the

advent of the internet has allowed teenagers, even ones in parts of the country where

acceptance of gender nonconformity continues to come far too slowly, to �nd others

like them.

But when it comes to the question of physical interventions, this era has also brought

fraught new challenges to many parents. Where is the line between not “feeling like” a

girl because society makes it difficult to be a girl and needing hormones to alleviate

dysphoria that otherwise won’t go away? How can parents tell? How can they help

their children gain access to the support and medical help they might need, while also

keeping in mind that adolescence is, by de�nition, a time of fevered identity

exploration?

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 6/35

Maciek Jasik

ere is no shortage of information available for parents trying to navigate this

difficult terrain. If you read the bible of medical and psychiatric care for transgender

people—the Standards of Care issued by the World Professional Association for

Transgender Health (W)—you’ll �nd an 11-page section called “Assessment and

Treatment of Children and Adolescents With Gender Dysphoria.” It states that while

some teenagers should go on hormones, that decision should be made with

deliberation: “Before any physical interventions are considered for adolescents,

extensive exploration of psychological, family, and social issues should be

undertaken.” e American Psychological Association’s guidelines sound a similar

note, explaining the bene�ts of hormones but also noting that “adolescents can

become intensely focused on their immediate desires.” It goes on: “is intense focus

on immediate needs may create challenges in assuring that adolescents are cognitively

and emotionally able to make life-altering decisions.”

e leading professional organizations offer this guidance. But some clinicians are

moving toward a faster process. And other resources, including those produced by

major LGBTQ organizations, place the emphasis on acceptance rather than inquiry.

e Human Rights Campaign’s “Transgender Children & Youth: Understanding the

Basics” web page, for example, encourages parents to seek the guidance of a gender

specialist. It also asserts that “being transgender is not a phase, and trying to dismiss it

as such can be harmful during a time when your child most needs support and

validation.” Similarly, parents who consult the pages tagged “transgender youth” on

’s site will �nd many articles about supporting young people who come out as

trans but little about the complicated diagnostic and developmental questions faced

by the parents of a gender-exploring child.

HRC, , and like-minded advocacy groups emphasize the acceptance of trans

kids for understandable reasons: For far too long, parents, as well as clinicians, denied

the possibility that trans kids and teens even existed, let alone that they should be

allowed to transition. Many such organizations are primarily concerned with raising

awareness and correcting still-common misconceptions.

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 7/35

A similar motive seems to animate much of the media coverage of transgender young

people. Two genres of coverage have emerged. Dating back at least to the 1993

murder of the Nebraska 21-year-old Brandon Teena, which inspired a documentary as

well as the �lm Boys Don’t Cry, a steady stream of horror stories has centered on

bullying, physical assault, and suicide—real risks that transgender and gender-

nonconforming (TGNC) young people still face.

More recently, a wave of success stories has appeared. In many of these accounts, kids

are lost, confused, and frustrated right up until the moment they are allowed to grow

their hair out and adopt a new name, at which point they �nally become their true

self. Take, for example, a Parents.com article in which a mother, writing

pseudonymously, explains that she struggled with her child’s gender-identity issues for

years, until �nally turning to a therapist, who, after a 20-minute evaluation,

pronounced the child trans. Suddenly, everything clicked into place. e mother

writes: “I looked at the child sitting between my husband and me, the child who was

smiling, who appeared so happy, who looked as if someone �nally saw him or her the

way she or he saw him or herself.” In a National Geographic special issue on gender,

the writer Robin Marantz Henig recounts the story of a mother who let her 4-year-

old, assigned male at birth, choose a girl’s name, start using female pronouns, and

attend preschool as a girl. “Almost instantly the gloom lifted,” Henig writes.

For many young people in early studies, transitioning
appears to have greatly alleviated their dysphoria. But

it’s not the answer for everyone.

Accounts of successful transitions can help families envision a happy outcome for a

suffering child. And some young people clearly experience something like what these

caterpillar-to-butter�y narratives depict. ey have persistent, intense gender

dysphoria from a very young age, and transitioning alleviates it. “Some kids don’t

waver” in their gender identity, Nate Sharon, a psychiatrist who oversaw a gender

clinic in New Mexico for two and a half years, and who is himself trans, told me when

we spoke in 2016. “I’m seeing an 11-year-old who at age 2 went up to his mom and

said, ‘When am I going to start growing my penis? Where’s my penis?’ At 2.”

But these stories tend to elide the complexities of being a TGNC young person, or

the parent of one. Some families will �nd a series of forking paths, and won’t always

know which direction is best. Like Claire’s parents, they may be convinced that their

child is in pain, but also concerned that physical transition is not the solution, at least

not for a young person still in the throes of adolescence.

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 8/35

W
       of understanding how physical

transitioning affects dysphoric young people. While the speci�cs depend

on your child’s age, and can vary from case to case, the transition process

for a persistently dysphoric child typically looks something like the following. First,

allow your child to transition socially: to adopt the pronouns and style of dress of

their authentic gender, and to change their name if they wish. As your child

approaches adolescence, get them puberty-blocking drugs, because developing the

secondary sex characteristics of their assigned sex could exacerbate their gender

dysphoria. When they reach their teen years, help them gain access to the cross-sex

hormones that will allow them to develop secondary sex characteristics in line with

their gender identity. (Until recently, hormones were typically not prescribed until age

16; it’s now more common for 15- and 14-year-olds, and sometimes even younger

kids, to begin hormone therapy.)

In the United States, avoiding puberty became an option only a little more than a

decade ago, so researchers have just begun tracking the kids engaged in this process,

and we don’t yet have comprehensive data about their long-term outcomes. Most of

the data we do have involve kids who socially transitioned at an early age, but who

hadn’t yet physically transitioned. e information comes from a University of

Washington researcher named Kristina Olson. Olson is the founder of the TransYouth

Project, which is following a cohort of about 300 children for 20 years—the longest

such longitudinal study based in the U.S. e kids she is tracking appear to be doing

well—they don’t seem all that different, in terms of their mental health and general

happiness, from a control group of cisgender kids (that is, kids who identify with the

sex they were assigned at birth).

At the prestigious Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria, at Vrije Universiteit

University Medical Center, in Amsterdam—often referred to simply as “the Dutch

clinic”—an older cohort of kids who went through the puberty-blockers-and-cross-

sex-hormones protocol was also found to be doing well: “Gender dysphoria had

resolved,” according to a study of the group published in 2014 in Pediatrics.

“Psychological functioning had steadily improved, and well-being was comparable to

same-age peers.”

ese early results, while promising, can tell us only so much. Olson’s �ndings come

from a group of trans kids whose parents are relatively wealthy and are active in trans-

support communities; they volunteered their children for the study. ere are limits

to how much we can extrapolate from the Dutch study as well: at group went

through a comprehensive diagnostic process prior to transitioning, which included

continuous access to mental-health care at a top-tier gender clinic—a process

unfortunately not available to every young person who transitions.

Among the issues yet to be addressed by long-term studies are the effects of

medications on young people. As omas Steensma, a psychologist and researcher at

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 9/35

the Dutch clinic and a co-author of that study, explained to me, data about the

potential risks of putting young people on puberty blockers are scarce. He would like

to see further research into the possible effects of blockers on bone and brain

development. (e potential long-term risks of cross-sex hormones aren’t well known,

but are likely modest, according to Joshua Safer, one of the authors of the Endocrine

Society’s “Clinical Practice Guideline” for treatment of gender dysphoria.)

Meanwhile, fundamental questions about gender dysphoria remain unanswered.

Researchers still don’t know what causes it—gender identity is generally viewed as a

complicated weave of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. In some

cases, gender dysphoria may interact with mental-health conditions such as depression

and anxiety, but there’s little agreement about how or why. Trauma, particularly sexual

trauma, can contribute to or exacerbate dysphoria in some patients, but again, no one

yet knows exactly why.

To reiterate: For many of the young people in the early studies, transitioning—socially

for children, physically for adolescents and young adults—appears to have greatly

alleviated their dysphoria. But it’s not the answer for everyone. Some kids are

dysphoric from a very young age, but in time become comfortable with their body.

Some develop dysphoria around the same time they enter puberty, but their suffering

is temporary. Others end up identifying as nonbinary—that is, neither male nor

female.

Ignoring the diversity of these experiences and focusing only on those who were

effectively “born in the wrong body” could cause harm. at is the argument of a

small but vocal group of men and women who have transitioned, only to return to

their assigned sex. Many of these so-called detransitioners argue that their dysphoria

was caused not by a deep-seated mismatch between their gender identity and their

body but rather by mental-health problems, trauma, societal misogyny, or some

combination of these and other factors. ey say they were nudged toward the

physical interventions of hormones or surgery by peer pressure or by clinicians who

overlooked other potential explanations for their distress.

Some of these interventions are irreversible. People respond differently to cross-sex

hormones, but changes in vocal pitch, body hair, and other physical characteristics,

such as the development of breast tissue, can become permanent. Kids who go on

puberty blockers and then on cross-sex hormones may not be able to have biological

children. Surgical interventions can sometimes be reversed with further surgeries, but

often with disappointing results.

e concerns of the detransitioners are echoed by a number of clinicians who work in

this �eld, most of whom are psychologists and psychiatrists. ey very much support

so-called affirming care, which entails accepting and exploring a child’s statements

about their gender identity in a compassionate manner. But they worry that, in an

2022/1/27 上午12:39 When Children Say They’re Transgender – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/ 10/35

F

otherwise laudable effort to get TGNC young people the care they need, some

members of their �eld are ignoring the complexity, and �uidity, of gender-identity

development in young people. ese colleagues are approving teenagers for hormone

therapy, or even top surgery, without fully examining their mental health or the social

and family in�uences that could be shaping their nascent sense of their gender

identity.

at’s too narrow a de�nition of affirming care, in the view of many leading

clinicians. “Affirming care does not privilege any one outcome when it comes to

gender identity, but instead aims to allow exploration of gender without judgment

and with a clear understanding of the risks, bene�ts, and alternatives to any choice

along the way,” Aron Janssen, the clinical director of the Gender and Sexuality Service

at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital, in New York, told me. “Many people misinterpret

affirming care as proceeding to social and medical transition in all cases without delay,

but the reality is much more complex.”

To make sense of this complex reality—and ensure the best outcome for all gender-

exploring kids—parents need accurate, nuanced information about what gender

dysphoria is and about the many blank spots in our current knowledge. ey don’t

always get it.

 - , physical transition can be life enhancing,

even lifesaving. While representative long-term data on the well-being of trans

adults have yet to emerge, the evidence that does exist—as well as the sheer

heft of personal accounts from trans people and from the clinicians who help them

transition—is overwhelming. For many if not most unwaveringly gender-dysphoric

people, hormones work. Surgery works. at’s re�ected in studies that consistently

show low regret rates for the least-reversible physical procedures to address gender

dysphoria. One 2012 review of past studies, for example, found that sex-reassignment

surgery “is an effective treatment for [gender …

Describe some of the cultural attributes of gender (use of earrings,
make-up, clothing styles, posture and movement, speech patterns, etc.?)
How does culture shape gender, and even sex (consider the Cate Jenner
example)? Describe and discuss your reactions to Jesse Singal’s article.