Keywords

Introduction

Over many years, friendship theory has been produced in quite particular ways in various disciplinary traditions. Deeper knowledge about the parameters of what constitutes friendship-bonding has been taken up time and again to demonstrate this abstract notion. From friendhip theory’s early philosophical understandings (see Walker,1979), to today’s psychosocial hypotheses and studies that deductively measure then find evidence to support or them, seem to suggest that at school friendship is based on hierarchized types of relationship (Berndt, 2002; Berndt & Keefe, 1995; Mathur & Berndt, 2006). For instance, “high-quality friendship” is often characterized by high levels of “prosocial behaviour” and “low levels of conflict” (Berndt, 2002, p. 7), without explaining what constitutes prosocial or the types of conflict and for whom. As such, to view friendship as a teleological thing—intentional, by design, or purposefulness—misses the complexity of relationships that people have with other bodies (both human and nonhuman) in global and local settings. Friendships, as we have seen in this collection, are produced through complex genealogies and diverse spatial and temporal locations. To try to universalize “friendship” without acknowledging the different choices and lived experiences through time and space, the roles, and the desires that are produced in an ongoing way within friendship relationships obscures the constant movements that we have as friends. Rather than choice, I utilize the concept of desire from Deleuze and Guattari (2004) that they suggest is not inherent, archetypal, or phylogenetic but produced in specific and ever-shifting (friendship) assemblages. Desires circulate in a multiplicity of ways in competition with each other. Human and nonhuman affects produce unconscious desires that motivate changes and inventions. For without the capacity to exceed the given, the subject is trapped in repetition in predetermined rather than co-produced friendships. This is especially observed when a friendship challenges the territorializing overcoding of the social field through deterritorializations and nomadic lines of flight that flourish, producing multiple rhizomic connections to our friends and beyond (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004).

Of concern to me is the mainstreaming of what are classified or represented as psychosocially “good” and psychosocially “bad” friendships as a moral code for good and bad social practices and particularly how it is related to forms of attachment. Examples of this can be found in the literature on peer pressure within friendship groups that lead to valued or devalued behaviour (Iwamoto & Smiler, 2013; Nelson & DeBacker, 2008). To abstract friendship in this way becomes too focused on “moral” characteristics that are constituted as good or bad practices within a friendship. Anti-moralists, such as Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Deleuze, with whom I agree, would suggest that while things can be objectively good or bad, they are not contingent upon a moralizing consciousness. They are good and bad because human and nonhuman bodies act upon another and produce good or bad affectations that either increase or decrease the power to act, or as Deleuze and Guattari (2004) would suggest, it is good when the affects open a line of flight that was previously blocked. So, for example, an act of prohibition may produce good affects for some and bad affects for others, which for Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Deleuze does not mean that they are inherently good or bad but can lead us to observe if our action affects positively or negatively, which then leads us to the question of relational ethics within that friendship. If a friend acts and that increases the capacity to act out our desires, then this is objectively good and supports a deterritorializing line of flight, but if that act decreases our power to act out our desire, this is bad and blocks us, as Deleuze and Guattari (2004, p. 284) say

(…) we know nothing of a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.

Prohibition at a different time and in a different space could in fact produce the opposite affect or a different affect altogether, which highlights the lack of any transcendental morality in the prohibitive act.

We have all heard the anecdote that goes something like: I am your friend, and I am doing/saying this for your own good. But is this a “moral” or an ethical act? Nietzsche (1997, p. 28) claims that the will to systematize life only through one’s own moral values shows a lack of integrity because

[o]ne would have to occupy a position outside life, and on the other hand to know [life] as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be allowed even to touch upon the problem of the value of life.

Therefore, the ethics behind the doing/saying is the important factor for Nietzsche insofar as whether it is done to dominate or done to open up potential possibilities. Moreover, much literature has tended to understand friendship as a constant type of relationship without any ebbs and flows of affectus. Deleuze (1988) describes affectus as “the passage from one state to another” (p. 49) in his practical empiricism, and this can account for subjective modulation and the materiality of change (Fox & Alldred, 2014).

We also learn from both Deleuze and Nietzsche that humans are incomplete, adapting in the face of their desires, and that life is in a constant state of struggle. Friendship for Nietzsche is in a constant state of struggle to find equilibrium between what Miner (2010) interprets as three qualities that place a hierarchy of friendships into higher and lower orders like Aristotle’s categorizations. These are finding a balance between loving the self and being dissatisfied with the self, openness towards the friend alongside being reserved at certain junctures within the relationship, and a need to understand when solitude and companionship should be pursued. It is when these are equilibrated that a higher-order friendship can be achieved. While perhaps within friendships Nietzsche did desire these factors, highlighted in Miner’s interpretation, others may want to produce their friendship upon different lines of flight, and he could not deny this if he was true to his perspectivalist theory. Miner’s (2010) conceptualization of friendship in this rigid way seems contrary to other aspects of Nietzsche’s writing as he acknowledges. Despite this, I would suggest that Nietzsche (2002) places much more emphasis on the will to truth in his writings and on the capacity to act, as key ethical grounds upon which friendship is produced.

I think my reading of Deleuze then returning to Nietzsche has affected my interpretation insofar as we ought not to categorize friendship in a hierarchical typology based on morality. This is because friendship is always in a process of becoming. Indeed, Nietzsche said to a friend that although they are on distinct voyages they lend a hand to each other to keep going on these journeys, not letting each other capsize, and because of this they are not suppressing alternative possibilities in their lives (Miner, 2010), and it is this that produces a friendship bond. Friendship-bonding will inevitably run into some struggles, love, questioning, warmth, antagonism, and opposition but with a view that the nomadic pursuit of truth, and the mutual capacity to act and choose (desire), produces their friendship bond. The intensities that co-constitute the bond can flee, elude, flow, leak, and disappear into the distance.

Life and friendship then have nomadic characters (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadism is framed as a resistance to micro-fascisms in everyday lives. Little “friendship” scholarship has highlighted this. I would suggest that what is required is the deployment of new reconfigurations of friendship desires and affect in order to avoid the common hierarchized forms found in much (philosophical and psychosocial) literature. I draw on the understanding that Nietzsche has about friendship between different people who affect through varying (oppositional) intensities a conduit to the truth of desire. Truth, however, is not a will to power that merely wants power over life—a self-determination at the expense of other possibilities or other people—but being true to our desires that move us towards new possibilities for the physis and psyche and their movement (Deleuze, 1988). I do this by looking at some empirical data that focuses on friendships derived from parents of trans and gender-exploring children. I attempt this affective/ing understanding of friendship through a Deleuzian framework, which emphasizes the multidimensionality of desire in the search for truths.

Friendship Bonds

Bonding has many meanings: to join to something else, especially by means of an adhesive substance, heat, or pressure. In relation to friendship bonds, it is widely understood as a process of attachment that develops between romantic or platonic partners or friends and manifests from emotions, such as affection, trust, or reciprocity, among other things. The latter type of bond(ing) evokes an Aristotelian unanimity that is produced because of particular sets of characteristics and/or virtues that help to form some key functions within a friendship until, I presume, we are no longer. Friendship bonds, however, do not end with death. The life led before death can and indeed does produce affective intensities after the organism dies (see Martin, 2019). Despite this, Aristotle divides friendships into utility friendships, pleasure friendships, and virtue friendships (Fortenbaugh, 1975). Virtue friendships, he suggests, are the best form of friendship; they take the longest to develop and, as he points out, are rare because good people are somewhat rare, compared to people we might find useful or pleasant. This is primarily an argument about the gradation of morality “inherent” in the primary function of each type of friendship and represents an order of rank among multiple drives or impulses which Aristotle does not (wish to) acknowledge in his friendship theorem. Nietzsche (2001) suggests in The Gay Science that our drives can barely be named by anyone nor can they be ranked because they are assembled continuously from the beginning in different people and in different spatial and temporal situations. As such, this unanimity in Aristotle’s hierarchy as an agreement between friends that they are virtuous, of use, or pleasurable reifies a hierarchy of good and bad people rather than based on varying intensities of nomadic human drives and desires. Moreover, in this axiom the friends would have to agree/think that the other friend in the relationship has the same quality. This forecloses any changes in the relationship or any ruptures, arguments, or oppositions along the path about the nature of the friendship or any new possibilities.

Friendship may not always have a virtuous, pleasure-seeking, or utilitarian type of friendship bond and is an assemblage of each person’s drives and productive properties in any one situation. Therefore, a hierarchy cannot account for friendships that are situated within complex genealogies in different spatial and temporal locations. Thus, I would like to suggest that friendship ought not to be hierarchized within these simple axioms. Any friendship and the bond that is produced (in a nomadic way), I am sure, has and will have levels of discord, arguments, or even, at a minimal level, disagreements about politics, actions, and desires, and there will be laughter, tears, and fears, and some give and take, all of which produce different affective intensities and are affected by the varying, migrating bonds. In light of this then, I would argue that friendship bonds are produced differently through space and time, through ongoing interactions on multiple levels, some of which are abstract, such as in the naming of the constituent parts, and some of which are material through bodies (both human and nonhuman) at the molecular level that are not completely apprehensible.

A conjugated friendship bond is unquantifiable and unable to be known qualitatively in all its complexity and therefore is dissimilar to how Aristotle would like us to believe. Nonetheless, as human bodies we try to apprehend aspects that we imagine and experience as being intensely important to that bond. For instance, many would suggest that trust, loyalty, affection, honesty, support, acceptance, and connections with someone’s likes and dislikes could all contribute to forming a friendship bond. While not talking directly about friends or friendship (bonds), the beginning of a bond in Deleuzian-Guattarian terms would consolidate through many intercalary events rather than, for example, from a linear sequence (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). Bonds are not necessarily built up cumulatively but are produced rhizomatically; we cannot impose a form upon it, but we can enunciate an increasingly rich, consistent matter that produces (increasingly) intense forces. Any differences in (political) beliefs, choices, and desires do not necessarily mar the friendship bonds that, for example, hold together a group of young people, but they, alongside each friend, co-produce it differently at each event. Deleuze and Guattari (2004) write that “there must be an arrangement of intervals, a distribution of inequalities (…) there is a superposition of disparate rhythms, an articulation from within an interrythmicity” (p. 363) that materializes (momentarily) at the event, only then to move on to the next one. The matters in these heterogeneities produce a new bond together in a particular reconfiguration (for a time and in a space). They produce a bond that is affected and affects in ongoing, unanticipated, and unpredictable—rhizomatic—ways through time and through new events. Understanding friendship bonds in this way challenges the essentialism in earlier versions of friendship theory.

In spite of the potential for life to bring sorrow, anger, joy, and celebration, through these events producing material affects, it can also produce what Gadelha (2018, p. 19) calls “weirdo” recognition as a byproduct of a critical consciousness—an awareness of one’s own desire—that generates sympathy and support for other ways of life and the potential for making trouble. This in turn affects the reconfigured friendship bond and which can make trouble for perceived and actual limit-situations (Freire, 2000). The process by which this recognition is produced is through the notion of desire. Desire for Deleuze and Guattari (1984) is a productive force from the varying, vying, winning drive that desires, in our case, a type of friendship bond contingent on interrythmic intensities from bodies (human and nonhuman). In trans and gender-diverse people and their friends, bonding is a fleeing, eluding, flowing, leaking, and disappearing conjugation of interrythmic intensities that has a lot of potential for disrupting limit-situations (Freire, 2000) through their problem-posing, their generation of new ideas-desires in the classroom, for example, leading to new possibilities, based on a relational ethics rather than a moralizing hierarchy.

Trans and Sexual Minority Friendship Groups

Trans people’s friendship with other trans people illustrated by Hines (2007) functions as a supportive frame or network to discuss and work through temporal and spatial barriers or between those who are experiencing similar psychosocial issues derived from their gender (dis)identifications. Similarly, previous research about gay men and lesbians has argued that the sexual orientation aspect of their lives provides the opportunity for forming many of their friendships which affects the political, sexual, and familial aspects of society (Muraco, 2006; Nardi, 1992; Nardi & Sherrod, 1994; Stanley, 1996). Indeed, sexuality, gender, and community politics tend to be key factors in producing friendship-families in which people can demonstrate their true desires when they cannot or fear to do so within their family of origin or in previous friendship networks because of a fear of rejection or violence. Trans friendship groups have been shown to also act as “familial” support for those who are rejected by their families or because family members do not or will not understand aspects of their lives (Hines, 2007). These relationships serve as new friendship-family relations or as Weston (1991) has argued as a “family of choice” with these friends they can test their desires and where their “often inchoate, intuitive, unarticulated vision of the possibilities of a self-yet-to-become finds expression” (Rubin, 1985, p. 13). While this is important work, more families are supporting their young trans and gender-diverse children now (Davy & Cordoba, 2020; Kuvalanka et al., 2018); however we know little about these supportive environments and their effect on friendship. We can hypothesize nonetheless that the supportive interrythmic events that trans youth and their parents experience will be affected and affect their friendships.

Galupo and colleagues (Galupo et al., 2014a, b) have more recently suggested that trans and sexuality minority research about friendship has tended to focus on the benefits of in-group relationships and the barriers between heterosexual and trans, gender-diverse, and sexual minority people. They go on to suggest that there has generally been a lack of focus on the complexity of friends’ relationships and an intersectionality framework is suited to consider trans and gender-diverse friendships more deeply (Galupo et al., 2014a). Intersectionality theory was developed by Crenshaw (1989, 2017), who argued that there were multiple social forces, identifications, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. The dimensions of inequality and power in the gendered lives of Black and minority ethnic people from various socio-economic backgrounds were particularly focused on in intersectionality research because research was generally whitewashed. Several other researchers have called for intersectionality to be employed in explorations of the cultural meanings surrounding trans and gender-diverse people’s friendships (Hines, 2010; Monro & Richardson, 2010). For example, they demonstrate how trans and gender-diverse people with different socio-economic, racial, sexual, and gendered experiences can be explored considering the power that is produced through privileging cisgender, White, economically buoyant lives, and their standardized notions of friendship.

Galupo et al.’s (2014a) intersectionality work on friendship provides interesting data, illustrating the complexity of friendship bonds and what they mean for trans and gender-diverse people. The findings add to our understanding about friendship in “in-groups” and “out-groups”, but I would suggest that organizing them arbitrarily as benefits and barriers, in the end, does not support the claims of intersectional complexity that they were aiming for. We may better understand friendship in its complex reconfigurations through a Deleuzian framework that does not place too much emphasis on minoritarian and majoritarian identity markers of difference that are ranked and rated by the researcher as an important and powerful constant homogenous majority system versus a set of minority subsystems. Deleuze and Guattari allow us to think through this and perhaps understand the “translocational positionalities” and “situated accomplishments” (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1983, p. 62) and other ways of existing as friends, such as becoming-minoritarian-friends, which I will explore more in the section on becoming minoritarian below. My intention in this chapter is to introduce considerations of circulating and embodied affect. Not as an a priori theoretical positioning about children’s friendship but to show what has come to matter in the lives of parents of trans and gender-diverse children and their friendships.

Methodology

The studyFootnote 1 on which this chapter is based addresses the following research theme: What do parents who support their trans and gender-diverse children within school cultures say about friendships? Friendship was a key theme that seemed to have much force within a wider project that was looking at parents’ involvement in changing school cultures for their children whose gender identification was different to that assigned at birth (Davy & Cordoba, 2020). The interview tool was developed with a range of open questions that would help us understand the relationships between parents, schools, and the structuration of sexes/genders. We asked about the experiences of parents in relation to school staff members, the advocacy work they did within the school, and their perceptions about how the school was supportive, or not, while supporting their trans and gender-diverse children within a range of school cultures. The research tool also enabled us to explore parents’ perceptions of the limit-situations imposed/allowed in schools; the school culture in relation to gender roles, identities, and expressions; and the school systems in place affecting them and their children’s freedom to determine their own gender roles, expressions, and identities.

Sampling

We decided to recruit from social networks and support groups due to the relatively small cohort size of supportive parents of trans and gender-diverse children in the UK.Footnote 2 We sent posters and participant information sheets to virtual and support networks in the UK: Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, Transgender Alliance, and smaller support groups in Hull, Leeds, and Leicester, in the UK, who pledged their support to disseminate the recruitment materials. The materials requested that parents of trans and gender-diverse children contact the author if they were supporting their children and would like to tell us their experiences of providing this support within school cultures.

Interview data were collected by the author from 23 parents of trans and gender-diverse children across the UK. Parents identified as men (n = 4), women (n = 17), and trans (n = 2), six of whom were interviewed as couples. One adolescent trans child sat in on one interview and, within it, clarified some points raised. Ethnically, parents interviewed were White British (n = 19), Afro-Caribbean British (n = 1), Anglo-Asian British (n = 1), and White Polish (n = 2). Parents came from rural and urban villages, towns, and cities in England, Scotland, Wales, and an Island territory. The schools that their children attend(ed) range(d) from reception/nursery school to high school. One participant was home-schooling their adolescent child due to concerns about mental ill health. This parent said that this was not connected to their child’s trans identity; however, in retrospect home-schooling may have been beneficial.

Analytical Process

While this research was conducted in the UK, the Deleuzian analysis I offer has relevance for southern European contexts and beyond. I suggest that Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) work emphasizes that, in our case, friendship bonds are produced differently through space and time, through ongoing interactions on multiple levels providing more complexity to personal and political assemblages that are produced in diverse geographical spaces. Additionally, each researcher must acknowledge the way they co-produce friendship bonds, by exploring the development of the research assemblage. In light of this, each recorded interview took place either in the parents’ home or via Skype and was conducted by the author. The interviews lasted between 60 and 120 min. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interview data were managed using NVivo 11 (QSR International Pty Ltd). Descriptive codes were developed, and then I looked for what seemed to me to be “affectus”—the passage from one state to another—in their narratives. These analytical steps were thought through by looking at the notes taken immediately after the interviews, which recorded times that participants showed heightened emotions, such as hurt, laughter, anger, and bewilderment, and the responses offered.

Two themes emerged about friendship: (1) Friendship affects and lines of flight, which shows how friendships advance ways of existing through producing lines of flight. These lines of flights are something “sticky” and something vital to “how we are touched by what we are near” (Ahmed, 2010, pp. 29–30) and are involved in the organizing of parents’ and their children’s capacity to act. (2) Becoming minoritarian, which demonstrates how friendship groups are moving constituting fuzzy, nondenumerable, non-axiomizable series and are multiplicities of resistance, escape and flux. In the next section, I turn to the analysis where we can observe multiple movements within friendship groups, which sometimes block and sometimes open up lines of flight.

Friendship Affects and (Blocking) Lines of Flight

Friends, peer pressure, and social prohibitions against sex/gender metamorphosis affect each person in different ways. I have demonstrated this before in relation to bodily aesthetics (Davy, 2011), trans politics (Davy, 2019), and trans sexualities (Davy, 2020; Davy & Steinbock, 2012). Similarly, for trans and gender-diverse children within school cultures, affects are produced in different ways in relation to friendship. Social interactions create resonances that cannot be adequately represented by a single structural formula because they all differ in the distribution of affects. Deleuze and Guattari (2004) suggest that fear can, however, (re)territorialize us to well-scripted social norms of the standard measure, such as the instrumental forces from the binary sex/gender system, despite it being a kind of fiction that represents no one in particular.

Well it was as if I had a different child. When we look back there were some problems, but now realize that it was at the time when his body was developing into something he didn’t understand because all his male friends were developing one way and unfortunately he was developing in a different way and he couldn’t work that out. And then he started to lose his, well everything really, his confidence and we couldn’t work out what it was. (Leticia, parent of an adolescent boy)

Leticia’s child had a particularly difficult time at school due to his body developing characteristics that seemed alien to him, and it later transpired in the interview because of people beyond his friendship group policing his gender identification at school. Nonetheless, it seems also that the bodies of his friends were unintentionally affecting his body at the molecular level, blocking his movements. In a more intentional manner, Carole’s daughter experienced a disjuncture with some of her friends who stepped back from her, motivating the drive/desire to understand their reasons:

Some of the [friends who are] boys have taken a step back, so [name] is just understanding where they are coming from and has found that a bit difficult, because she doesn’t just want to be with just the girls. And at the start of the summer holidays [name] started off at a bit of a low mood, because she felt that she didn’t have any close friends. So, she was in between the two really, they have been very good at accepting it, but she has not really felt that she could get close to them. [She] had a lot of support from [friend’s name] and [friend’s name], they have been very supportive. (Carole, parent of an adolescent girl)

The affects of her stepped-back friends seemed to have marred her embodied actions rather than exchanging actions and passions and composing a more powerful series of bodies. Following Anna-Marie’s daughter coming out as a different gender to that assigned to her, she said

There were times when she didn’t want to go to school. Her attendance was quite low, she was worried about her friends, not the rest of the world, but her friends, and they supported her so well that she improved. Children nowadays are much more open. I was quite worried that they would not be so positive [. ...] The change was enormous. She was so relieved and stopped not going to school, a huge difference. For her it was whether her friends were fine and once they accepted it she could cope much better. So that was great. (Anna-Marie, parent of a preadolescent girl)

The anxiety was channelled through the affect of the real possibility of losing her friends rather than how her transition may be perceived by wider society. According to this parent, this led her daughter to retreat from this line of flight with her friends for a time, whereas the line of flight that carries her from her birth-assigned sex was still open to multiple possibilities beyond school. Nonetheless, Anna-Marie added that when her daughter did manage to go to school and her friendship group signalled to her that they were going to be supportive, her desire to return to school increased. The friends who were in solidarity with her affectively played their part in producing a new assemblage. The (memories of) the previous friendships were disassembled only to be reassembled when the friends met, through all their desires for creating new lines of flight. Friendship I am assuming in this instance, however, took on an unknowable new form with each friend.

Rosalind also illustrated that her child’s emotional state was impacted through the intensities of friendship:

She has so many friendships and things. I think that she feels very happy and fortunate and pleased that she can be who she really is, and people are ok with that. As I say, she has some really lovely friends and I am hoping that they will last the distance with her. (Rosalind, parent of a preadolescent girl)

Friends lasting the distance with her daughter was understood by Rosalind in a similar way to how Nietzsche described lending a hand to each other on these journeys, not letting each other capsize, not suppressing alternative possibilities in their lives. Rosalind added:

So, we supported her with that, and transition and she has been fantastic since. In terms of ups and downs at home, but in terms of going to school, she loves going, she loves going to see her friends, very, very happy there. (Rosalind, parent of a preadolescent girl)

There was one incredible friend though who knew about all this before we did and [name] came out to this pupil beforehand and they have been exceptional. (Perry, parent of an adolescent boy)

The friends on these journeys are becoming desensitized to the generalized sense of shame and guilt circulating through the social field imposed on, and when you connect with, non-normative bodies. While we do not know how this ontological shift has occurred, when I asked Carole: do you think that pupils are much more knowledgeable about sex/gender diversity nowadays? She responded:

Yes, I think they are partly more knowledgeable but partly it is what it is. They are so much more open to difference, whether it is gender or ability or sexuality and this kind of stuff for young people it is kind of “whatever,” it is not an issue. (Carole, parent of an adolescent girl)

Friendship then, according to these parents, emerges or retreats from the desire of each friend participating in (solidarity) movements with their trans and gender-diverse children. Nonetheless, these movements also imply often in this research that there are ongoing metamorphoses of the sex/gender system and wider social field that they are producing. The formations of new act(ivist)s that challenge with their enunciation “whatever” are attempts at the elimination of state- and peer-imposed territorializations of normed sexed/gendered bodies. These lines of flight are both destructive of overcoded systems of sex/gender and productive, enabling new ideas, ideals, and discourses to permeate the social space and social hierarchies at school, at least in these specific space/time configurations. In the next section, I demonstrate how becoming minoritarian affects these new ideas, ideals, and discourses.

Becoming Minoritarian

The biological, material, affective, social, semiotic, political, and pedagogical forces, which affect these children and their parents and that they affect, highlight that the events that the human and nonhuman bodies instantiate are affective becomings. The affective becoming that these encounters produce momentarily apprehends the body but does not determine it for all time. Braidotti (2006, p. 79) calls this “becoming minoritarian”. Becoming minoritarian, she suggests, is a desire through and upon which undervalued people are re-conceptualizing their subjectivities through processes of becoming that are embodied, relational, and on the move. They are becoming un-undervalued within school cultures while also “using” the enforced shame as a productive desire for human connection and effectively writing “a minoritarian memory experience into existence” (Stafford, 2012, p. 311).

While among their peers some children were still finding it difficult to express themselves within school cultures, their relatively isolated attempts at producing new ways of thinking about sex/gender have not stopped them from trying. Paul’s two children questioned teachers and peers about their utterances concerning the possibilities of gender diversity. This did, however, lead to affects that made them

feel quite lonely. It’s not that they cannot make friends but the people they are surrounded by, their beliefs and views that they are holding are really not nice. (Paul, parent of two gender expansive children)

The attempt to fit into groups of friends was similarly difficult sometimes, when the group’s production of friendship, in this instance, did not fit the desire of Audrey’s son:

He has a little group of friends, but they are all girls and he tried to mix in with the boys, he was in a school band, but they were going down the park, smoking a bit of weed and [name] thought that he had to do that to be one of the boys, but doesn’t do that anymore. (Audrey, parent of an adolescent boy)

Audrey’s child’s friendships are not grounded in a rigid and binary structure of gender, with determinative pressures from peers. There is no conflict but movements of deterritorialization and lines of flight within a given social field that provide him the desire and direction for change. His preference for minoritarian movements was a form of contemporaneous resistance to the present situation defined in opposition to majoritarian forms of subjectification in the boys’ friendship group. Friendship groups then “operate through series, through an evaluation of the ‘last’ term” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 310).

Contemporary school cultures in the UK are shifting with visible signs of becoming minoritarian where groups are forming series of “weirdos” (Gadelha, 2018, p. 19). Nicola’s child was at school a few years before the interview, and it seems like their becoming minoritarian was more difficult at least at their school. Nonetheless, the freedom affects when going to college produced the power to disrupt and transform normed systems. The transformation produced new desires about what is fair and just:

It was going into the first year at college and it was during that first couple of months there and meeting lots of new people and talking to different people and different ideas they then started to have conversations about defining yourself like non-binary and very much talking about sexuality and gender at the same time. And then they said that they are non-binary sexuality and non-binary gender and they like the fact when people do not know whether they are a boy or a girl. It was much more accepting at college that it ever was at school. I don’t think that they were confident to tell people at school but at college they were and willing to stand up for friends as well. (Nicola, parent of a genderqueer adolescent)

It seems from most of the parents that their children at school however were developing new social logics about sex/gender and sexuality:

There are other kids there who are an alternative bunch of queer friends both in the school and outside. (Simone, parent of adolescent genderqueer child)

Whilst he was at school with his peers and his friends, he has got a really good friendship group which he had since he was a small child, I think he felt able to express himself at school before he expressed himself to us […] his closest friend at school is gender fluid and identifies as “they” pronouns [. ...] Some of his friendship group are gay and I think they are just a nice friendship group and I think he felt comfortable with them. (Hilary and Colin, parents of an adolescent boy)

The friendships embedded in this series accord a systematic priority to minoritarian becomings over majoritarian being (see Patton, 2008). Each friend in the series desires lines of flight over forms of majoritarian subjectivication. These friends’ deterritorializations, while pursuing practical (political) orientations, are not however teleological. They are nonetheless making themselves felt within the majority system through their proximity amounting to a new people (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004).

Concluding Remarks

Savin-Williams (2005) argued that collecting data from sexual and gender minorities can prompt those who have had particularly troubled experiences to respond to research calls, resulting in a skewed idea about the situation of sexual and gender minority people. Hartman (2011) also argued that there is selection bias in locating research participants using networks and support groups, because respondents tend to be those who have experienced discrimination. I have attempted to emphasize neither positive nor negative experiences but highlight how friendships are produced through complex genealogies in diverse spatial and temporal locations. This analysis does not universalize “friendship” but acknowledges different friendship desires through time and in different geographic and political spaces. I also suggest that friendship roles and the desires that are produced are ongoing and always becoming friendship relationships.

The friendships that are co-produced by trans and gender-diverse children and their friends, I argued, affect social logics, according to their parents. However, I am in full agreement with critics, such as Brandelli Costa (2019), who have argued that the reliance on parental observations to assess the experiences of trans and gender-diverse youth distorts the realities of their experiences. Nonetheless, I wanted to observe the affects that these friendships have on parents and their ability to support their children. I looked at these affects through a Deleuzian lens to enunciate how these friendships are, according to the parents, affective and becoming minoritarian and thus producing new ways to think about friends and friendship bonds. Some groups of friends at school are desensitizing the negativity surrounding trans and gender-diverse bodies in the classroom producing new friendships in new space/time. We do however still need to understand how friendship is being produced beyond the identitarian markers of difference in more depth and complexity with the children themselves. We need to do this with the caveat that friendship is non-axiomizable and non-ontologically hierarchical beyond our own personal desires; they are ontologically good, bad, and other because of their ability to (dis)allow bodies to act, through the production of the never-ending processes of becoming friends.