Conversation analytic (CA) and ethnomethodological (EM) techniques are employed in this study to explore the ways speakers within and between interactional turns build and resist gender category by resisting its activities/predicates. It aims to reveal how a sex-reassigned child’s identity is pertinent to the construction of membership categorization and the doing of resistance towards category-bound activities/predicates.  The study attempts to explain how the child tries to design her answers in a way that - both explicitly and implicitly - resist both the gender membership categorization she is being assigned to be and its ties (predicates/activities) she is being asked to accomplish. Membership categorization analysis (MCA), formulated by Sacks (1979), is employed here to show that the identity categories used in talk are tools by which participants organize and perform activities/predicates to establish their categories. The human subject that this project concentrates on is an immigrant family having a sex-reassigned child called Aidan. The data, which is analyzed, was collected during a dispute around the haircut and clothing style for the sex-reassigned child between the child and the parents. During the interaction the parents try to generate the category predicates for building up a set of activities around what might be considered ‘normal’ within a community that enables them to define and validate the child particular membership category. The main resistance strategies adopted by the child are dispreferred actions such as refusals mainly through accounting (e.g., justification and explanation) and disagreement.

Scholars in the field are of the opinion that the early simultaneous bilingual and bicultural exposure not only does not harm the bilinguals, but also strengthens their social and cultural foundations and keeps them from getting vulnerable to external environment (Deuchar and Quay 1999, 2000; Genesee 1989; Genesee, Nicoladis, and Paradis 1995; Holowka, Brosseau-Lapre ́, and Petitto 2002; Lanza 1992; Meisel 1989; Petitto et al. 2001). Also it has been demonstrated that bilingual children have differentiated systems to provide them with the ability to distinguish between their two input languages from the beginning of language acquisition (Petitto & Holowka, 2002). However, the driver of the children’s language preference patterns at home needs to be further explored. The present study is indeed an attempt to answer the question of why it is that some children regularly exposed to their heritage language from a very young age actually continue to actively use it, and other children involving in similar parental policy about bilingualism do not? It aims to examine the impacts of parental language strategies during the childhood on children language preference at home after they achieve the key competences in each of the two languages. The foci are parental attitudes towards the patterns of language choice and their influence on child language preference. Data are collected from two Iranian immigrant families; one has been experiencing additive bilingualism, while the other has been involved in the process of subtractive phenomenon. Some implications for parent-child closeness, heritage language and the risk of language contamination are touched on briefly.