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This study builds on existing research to explore how transgender and non-binary people navigate complex terrain when it comes to strained and ambiguous relationships with families of origin. This chapter draws on 23 in-depth interviews with trans and non-binary adults (ages 19–41) to examine the ways that respondents navigated ambiguous and complex family relationships marked by mixed messages and contradictory behaviors from parents regarding their sexual and gender identities. I find that respondents engage in a range of strategies – correcting, conforming, and concealing – to bargain for belonging within families of origin through their work to preserve family ties. Beyond experiencing the emotional costs of ambiguous parental support, I find that some respondents also experience financial strain and inadequate housing, stemming from unstable, distressing relationships with their parents. This chapter demonstrates that ambiguous support from family and complex familial relationships may contribute to a cycle of precarity for trans and non-binary adults. Finally, I show that for respondents, connections to local queer and trans communities and supportive partnerships buffered the negative impacts of familial ambiguity. However, not all respondents had access to community support, intensifying their experiences of marginalization. This chapter contributes to the literature working to destabilize the support versus rejection binary used to characterize LGBTQ experiences and has implications for better understanding the pathways into poverty that trans and non-binary people experience.

In this paper, I look at one of the most archetypal of children’s stories, that of Noah and the flood, to understand the classificatory schema it presents.

Drawing on an analysis of 47 children’s picture books based on the biblical story, including those held in the historical archive of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton, I show that the single most consistent frame for the story is the trope of “two by two”, referencing both the animals and people in the story. The books in the sample, intended for children aged 4–10 years, were published between 1905 and 2006, and are between 14 and 60 pages long.

The repeated emphasis on mated pairs, one male and one female, serves to reproduce the twinned categories of gender and heterosexuality in an overtly “natural” fashion that ties the animal bodies to human social divisions. These constitutive categories of social division – gender and heterosexuality – then become central schemas for organizing people and experience. I draw on Martin (2000) arguing that children encounter picture books before they have had experience in actual social life. Therefore, the books help instill these primary categorization schemas in children, creating the social groupings and relations among them that order their worlds.

The argument makes a strongly causal role for culture and argues that the impact/importance of the content of children’s books may be subordinate to the role they play in helping establish classificatory schema that help construct children’s understandings of the social world.