Identity in Gender-Nonconforming Children

Joel Yager, MD reviewing Olson KR et al. Psychol Sci 2015 Apr.

Before puberty, such children show implicit and explicit preferences consistent with their expressed gender.

Little is known about how much transgender individuals identify early in life with their expressed gender, and some clinicians and laypersons have been skeptical about the authenticity of such identifications. Through support groups, conferences, the Internet, and word of mouth, investigators recruited 32 gender-nonconforming children aged 5 to 12 years who lived as the gender opposite to their natal sex (12 natal females/transgender boys, 20 natal males/transgender girls; 23 white participants). Controls included two cis-gendered (i.e., nontransgendered) groups: 18 siblings of the nonconforming children and 32 unrelated controls matched for age and expressed gender. Mean age in all groups was 9 years.

Participants completed a gender-preference Implicit Association Test (IAT); a gender-identity IAT; and measures of explicit gender peer preferences, object preferences, and gender identity. The gender-preference IAT timed participants as they classified pictures, each paired with pictures of boys or girls, as “good” or “bad” and “male” or “female”; the gender-identity IAT replaced “good” and “bad” with “me” and “not me.” Compared with the cis-gender groups, the transgender group differed significantly on every measure. On no measure did the transgender children differ from comparison children with the same expressed gender.

CITATION(S):

Olson KR et al. Gender cognition in transgender children. Psychol Sci 2015 Apr ; 26:467.