Our culture is undeniably uneducated about transgender individuals. At worst, this ignorance results in violent hate crimes and murders. In its most benevolent form, transgenderism is viewed as a "phase" or transgender individuals are regarded as "confused." A new study, however, pushes back on these misconceptions by finding that transgender children identify with their gender identity as consistently as their cisgender peers.
"Our study addressed concerns we often hear the lay public and even scientific audiences express: concerns that transgender children are pretending or being difficult or that they don't 'really' believe they are a boy (or girl)," lead researcher and University of Washington psychology professor Kristina Olson told Mic. "We wanted to know what happened if we used measures other than traditional self-report measures — would these stereotypes be upheld?"
The study, which will run in Psychological Science, recruited pre-pubescent transgender-identifying children who were age-matched with their cisgender siblings, as well as another group of cisgender children. The trans and cisgender children's gender identities were determined through measures of gender development such as the Implicit Association Test, which is a device developed to scientifically explore "the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling," according to its website. Olson and her team decided to use such measures because "implicit gender identity and a strong implicit preference for their own gender" is evident in other children at this age and, hopefully, the same measures could be used to assess identity and preferences in transgender kids as well.
The study's findings support what trans advocates have been saying for years: Being transgender is not a phase or a choice, but a consistent gender identity. The study indicated that transgender children's responses were indistinguishable from the two groups of cisgender children, suggesting that trans and cisgender children identify with their gender in the same consistent ways.
Science Just Proved What Trans Kids Have Always Known