A new study has shown that transgender youth experience their gender identities just as strongly and clearly as their cisgender peers. Published this November by a team of University of Washington researchers, the paper is one of the largest scientific inquiries to date into the social construction and experience of gender in youth.
“Gender is one of the central categories organizing children’s social world,” the authors explain, continuing to describe their findings, which include that “transgender children strongly identify as members of their current gender group and show gender-typed preferences and behaviors that are strongly associated with their current gender, not the gender typically associated with their sex assigned at birth.”
Researchers followed a total of 822 children (aged 3-12) from the United States and Canada, 317 of whom were trans and 189 of their cisgender siblings, along with 316 other cisgender children (as a control). Their results point to a simple, though undeniably significant, conclusion: Believe trans kids.
Trans participants in the study had each transitioned socially, not medically, and many had begun using new pronouns, new first names, or had started dressing and playing in ways that aligned with their newly found sense of self. Researchers met with the children and their parents to discuss and observe aspects of subjects’ transitions, including their evolving preferences when it came to things like clothing and toys. Through these meetings and interviews, researchers ultimately found that, on the whole, trans children showed equally strong preferences and behaviors associated with their current gender to their cisgender peers.
“These findings illustrate that children develop a sense of identity at an early age,” the authors conclude, adding that “this identity is not necessarily determined by sex assigned at birth, and that children may hold on to this identity even when it conflicts with others’ expectations.”
To a trans or gender-nonconforming reader, these points might appear self-explanatory, even self-evident. Yet as a scientific antidote to the frighteningly prevalent discourse that questions parents’ decisions to support their trans kids’ identities, studies such as these prove invaluable.
Just this summer, the celebrity Mario Lopez drew controversy for comments regarding his own parenting opinions. “I’m never one to tell anyone how to parent their kids,” the television personality said on Extra, the entertainment news show he hosts. “But at the same time, my god, if you’re 3 years old and you’re saying…you think you’re a boy or a girl…I just think it’s dangerous as a parent to make that determination.”
More recently, discussion of parenting trans kids has attracted national attention through the ongoing custody battle around Luna Younger, the trans daughter of a now-divorced Texan couple. Despite court hearings in which physicians, school staff, and family members all testified that Luna, now 7, has consistently identified as a girl since she was just 5 years old, many in the state and around the country believe Luna shouldn’t be allowed to live with her mother, who supports her transition. More concerning still, top Texan lawmakers, backed by Republican governor, Greg Abott, have called for the state’s child welfare agency to investigate what they’ve deemed a situation that places Luna in “immediate and irrevocable danger.”
What’s actually dangerous is rejecting or subverting a child’s own sense of their gender identity. Families who reject their trans kids’ identities have been shown to dramatically raise their likelihood of contemplating, planning, and attempting suicide. Conversely, familial acceptance and support has been shown to dramatically decrease trans folks’ likelihood of a host of psychological issues, including suicidality. These points underscore the fundamental significance of the recent University of Washington paper, which is a product of the TransYouth Project, a recently established lab devoted to contributing new scholarship to the currently understudied trans and gender-nonconforming community.
Though significant, the University of Washington paper was not without its blindspots. For one, the study did not research trans youth who identify outside the gender binary. Additionally, the majority of children studied came from supportive, financially stable households. Perhaps most glaringly, roughly 68% of the study’s subjects were white, with the next-largest group being “other/multiracial,” at 9%. As the authors noted in the paper, more research must be done to understand how their results differ when observed across a greater range of gender and racial identities, as well as households of varying incomes, political leanings, and levels of education among caregivers.
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