Do "Most Gender Confused Children Grow Out Of It"?

Despite the headlines, the answer is probably not.

Photo by Katie Rainbow 🏳️‍🌈 on Unsplash

A new study has come out looking at transgender identification in children. This has, of course, resulted in a swathe of headlines, because the world is never more focused on children’s lives than when they do something that is steps out of the well-understood bounds of social norms. It’s a bit like the time that people were angry at the new rock music all the young people were listening to so they invented the belief that songs were playing secret subliminal messages to convert children to Satanism.

Frankly, we should probably all find something better to care about.

That being said, the headlines are pretty remarkable. The Daily Mail in particular believes that this study is strong evidence: “Most gender-confused children grow out of it, landmark 15-year study concludes - as critics say it shows being trans is usually just a phase for kids”. Among other things, this has led to a swathe of outrage on social media:

Pictured: The owner of Twitter.

This is problematic, because the study definitely does not show that “being trans is usually just a phase for kids”. If anything, it seems to show that transgender children maintain their identity long-term, while kids who feel mildly dysphoric often change their minds.

Let’s look at the data.

The Study

The paper itself is a new survey study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The authors asked children a bunch of questions in the year 2000 when they were 10-12 years old, and then followed them up for about two decades in six different rounds. The children were drawn from either a selected group of schools in the north of the Netherlands or a psychiatric clinic in the same country. In total, the sample consisted of 2,229 children drawn from schools and 543 from the psychiatric clinic, of whom about 60% were still responding at the final survey when they were age 24-26.

One of the items that the survey gathered was to rate the statement “I wish to be of the opposite sex”. Children could answer “never”, “sometimes”, or “often” to this question. The study that we’re discussing here focused on how the answers changed to this question over the course of the six study waves.

From this question, the authors created a classification of what they called “gender non-contentedness” (GNC). The study considered kids as having GNC if they answered “sometimes” or “often” to this survey item. The results were fairly simple - firstly, the rate of GNC was quite high, with 19% of the sample meeting the definition at some point in the study. In addition, the big finding was that at timepoint 1, 13% of “female” and 11% of “male” children had GNC, which fell to just 4% each at timepoint 6.

Pictured: Proportion of children classified as GNC at each age in the study. Source.

The headlines have mostly interpreted this as showing that children stopped being trans by the time they became adults. Only 1/3 of the kids who started out as GNC still defined themselves that way years later!

But does the data really show that? As the authors themselves note, answering “sometimes” to the statement “I wish to be of the opposite sex” is, at best, a very weak proxy for transgender identification. I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that most children who “sometimes” want to be a different sex at age 10 change their minds by age 24 - that’s just how growing up works. This is a problem for the rapacious media stories about the paper, because the children who answered “sometimes” made up the vast majority of the GNC sample. At baseline, about 85% of the children with GNC were “sometimes” responders, with only 15% of the GNC respondents saying that they “often” wished to be of the opposite sex.

The dynamics of these two groups were very different. While the proportion of kids in the “sometimes” group dropped substantially at each stage of the survey, falling by nearly 2/3 overall, the proportion in the “often” group was much more stable between rounds. Indeed, after a fairly large fall between the first (10-12yo) and second (12-14yo) round, the proportion of kids in the “often” group basically didn’t change.

Transgender Identification

It’s actually quite hard to know what to make of these results. You could argue - as the breathless headlines have done - that this shows that many transgender children stop identifying as trans as the years go by. It’s possible. But I don’t think that anyone would reasonably argue that answering “sometimes” to the question “I wish to be the opposite sex” is a reasonable measure of being trans. Frankly, even answering “often” isn’t a particularly useful measure of whether children believe themselves to be transgender, which is the thing that the study is mainly concerned with.

That being said, the “often” group is at least a reasonable proxy for transgender identification. Overall, the proportion of children at age 10-12 who said they “often” wanted to be the opposite sex fell from 2% down to 1% at age 12-14, and then stayed the same. So we could reasonably argue that, based on this study, transgender identification is largely fixed at age 12.

Of course, the data isn’t really strong enough for any of this. Without a detailed questionnaire about gender identity, we’re really just reading into what kids put as their response to one question in a fairly lengthy survey. There are many reasons kids might very occasionally “wish to be of the opposite sex” that have very little to do with gender identity.

Ultimately, despite the media furore, these results tell us very little about transgender children. At best, it seems likely that children who have a strong trans identity at ages 10-14 probably don’t change that much, while those who only sometimes think about being another gender may change their minds a bit more - how this relates to the proportion of kids who no longer identify as another gender when they grow up is anyone’s guess.