“You're a kid, you don't know where you are”: The voiced experiences of nonbinary youth navigating discursive realms of legitimacy

Nonbinary youth’s gender identities are easily dismissed in dominant psy narratives as ‘identity confusion’ and continue to be marginalised due to growing transphobic discourse. How youth navigate these developmental and gendered positionings calls for exploration. This article examines forms of regulation that nonbinary youth experience and how they navigate these. A qualitative methodology and individual interviews were used with 10 nonbinary youth aged between 16-21 years old, living in the United Kingdom. Participants had a range of ethnicities, sexualities, and disabilities. We used Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis, a two-phased analytical approach, combining discourse analysis and I poems. In the discursive formation “legitimacy”, we consider how participants described feeling required to prove themselves as legitimately nonbinary, whilst also feeling undermined by other aspects of their identity. Participants described how developmental discourses and other expert knowledge produced these challenges to legitimacy and drew on a sense of a collective voice to resist this construction of their gender as a ‘phase’. This sense of challenge around legitimacy is highlighted in the constructed I poems, which show a sense of struggle, exhaustion, and vulnerability. The findings have implications for professionals working with nonbinary youth and contribute to nonbinary and trans-theory.