“For the Girl Who Wished to be a Boy”: Revolutionary Children and the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising

This essay reflects on how children’s participation at the forefront of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran reshapes the longstanding notion of the child as innocent and “the state of nature.” It shows how the mainstream liberal conceptualization of childhood gender variance as biomedical innate difference hinders perceiving gender dissident children as political subjects. At a time when right-wing political movements are globally mobilizing around protecting children against “gender ideology,” Iranian children’s revolt for gender justice offers a different horizon of childhood gender politics with a temporality neither of origins nor of development but of transition and transformation.

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