It found that for the vast majority, their gender identity was stable over a five-year follow up period.”ĭuring a time when policy rhetoric has veered in extreme transphobic directions - like that out of Texas in late February that declared the act of providing gender-affirming care to trans and nonbinary teens should be investigated along the lines of “child abuse” - medical experts say research like this is of vital importance. This new study is important because it only included kids who identified as transgender and followed them over time. Past studies didn’t actually follow transgender kids over time, they followed kids referred to gender clinics, many of whom were never transgender to begin with,” said Turban, who is not affiliated with this research out of Princeton. “This is a misinterpretation of the literature. Jack Turban, a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine where he researches the mental health of transgender youth, said that a common refrain is that “prepubertal transgender children will grow up to identify as cisgender.” Studies like this, prove that isn’t the case. “While some trans adults have been reporting these experiences for a long time, this is the first large cohort that we’ve tracked prospectively and the first large cohort who had the experience of socially transitioning early in development,” she added.ĭr. To me, this study provides further evidence that there are some trans youth who are clear about their gender identity early and they maintain that identity over time,” Olson said. On average, these kids were 6.5 years old when they socially transitioned. “This is a study of youth who came out as trans at very early ages - before age 12 and often at far younger ages. Given how little has been done to examine the gender identities of trans people at these young ages, Olson said this research occupies an important place in offering a more comprehensive understanding of trans children and youth. “We couldn’t predict that because at the beginning of the study that was not a commonly used term, nor were any of the study participants using they/them pronouns. “Perhaps one unexpected finding back when the study started in 2013, was that there would be a much more widely understood and used term ‘nonbinary’ and that a number of the youth in our study would come to use that label,” Olson explained. When asked if anything was particularly surprising about these results, lead study author Kristina Olson, PhD, a psychologist at Princeton, told Healthline that she and her team “didn’t have strong expectations” heading into the research “because there has been so little data reported about children who socially transition at early ages.” Retransition often occurred before 10 years old. They also found that cisgender identities were more commonly found in young people whose “initial social transition” took place before the age of 6.
The researchers report that 2.5 percent of the youth identified as cisgender, while 3.5 percent identified as nonbinary. That number includes 1.3 percent of participants “who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity,” according to the study. The researchers found that after an average five years following their initial social transition during childhood, 7.3 percent retransitioned at least once.Īt the end of that five-year period, 94 percent of these young people identified as binary transgender people. This included 208 transgender girls, 109 transgender boys, with the average age of 8.1 years old at the start of their participation in the TransYouth Project out of Princeton University. For this new paper, researchers looked at the current gender identities and rate of retransition - meaning retransitioning to another gender identity after their initial transition - among 317 youth who identified as transgender at the start of the study period.
0 kommentar(er)
