Since 2013, Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has been running a large, long-term study to track the health and well-being of transgender children—those who identify as a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Since the study’s launch, Olson has also heard from the parents of gender-nonconforming kids, who consistently defy gender stereotypes but have not socially transitioned. They might include boys who like wearing dresses or girls who play with trucks, but who have not, for example, changed the pronouns they use. Those parents asked whether their children could participate in the study. Olson agreed.
After a while, she realized that she had inadvertently recruited a sizable group of 85 gender-nonconforming participants, ages 3 to 12. And as she kept in touch with the families over the years, she learned that some of those children eventually transitioned. “Enough of them were doing it that we had this unique opportunity to look back at our data to see whether the kids who went on to transition were different to those who didn’t,” Olson says.
By studying the 85 gender-nonconforming children she recruited, her team has now shown, in two separate ways, that those who go on to transition do so because they already have a strong sense of their identity.
This is a topic for which long-term data are scarce. And as transgender identities have gained more social acceptance, more parents are faced with questions about whether and how to support their young gender-nonconforming children.
To address shortcomings in the study, Olson did a multiverse analysis: She reran her analyses in many different ways to see whether she still got the same result. What if, instead of using all five tests of gender identity, she just looked at combinations of four? Or three? Two? The team ran all these what-if scenarios, and in almost all of them, the results were the same. “They went above and beyond the analyses typically conducted and presented in scientific journals,” says ays Russell Toomey from the University of Arizona, who studies LGBTQ youth and is himself transgender. “Their results were robust across these additional tests, suggesting that readers can have a high level of confidence in these findings.”
Predicting Early Childhood Gender Transitions, accepted for publication in Psychological Science
Abstract
Increasing numbers of gender nonconforming children are socially-transitioning—changing pronouns to live as their identified genders. We studied a cohort of gender nonconforming children (N=85). When re-contacted approximately 2 years later, 36 of the children had socially transitioned. We found that stronger cross-sex identification and preferences expressed by gender nonconforming children at initial testing predicted whether they later socially-transitioned. We then compared the gender nonconforming children to groups of transitioned transgender children (N=84) and gender conforming controls (N=85). Children from our longitudinal cohort who would later transition were highly similar to transgender children and control children of the gender to which they would eventually transition, while gender nonconforming children who would not go on to transition were different from these groups. These results suggest that (a) social transitions may be predictable from gender identification and preferences and (b) gender identification and preferences may not meaningfully differ before and after social transitions.
Keywords: transgender, gender nonconformity, social transitions, gender development