Childhood Gender Research Is Increasingly Meaningless Because No One Knows What 'Gender' Means Anymore

Last week, The Economist published an article I wrote about an important new study on a cohort of kids whose parents socially transitioned their genders at a young age. I love writing for The Economist, but it is a publication with pretty tight space and tone constraints, so 1) some quotes got cut that I want to publish; and 2) I wasn’t allowed to do my default level of blathering and editorializing.

This post will have two parts: First, I’ll give you guys the “director’s cut” version, as I submitted it to The Economist, with all the quotes and other material I hoped to include. Then the paywall, then some blathering. Oh, and right below the paywall I’ll also include an unlocked link to the version that ran in The Economist.

Me, Uncut and Less Edited Than I Ever Should Be

When the researcher Dr. Kristina Olson began studying kids who had transitioned genders at a young age in the early 2010s, there weren’t a lot of them. The idea of the “trans kid” was fairly new, and experts didn’t generally recommend full-blown social transition for most minors. In the States, the few youth gender clinics mostly followed a version of the so-called Dutch Protocol, based out of a clinic founded in Utrecht and later moved to Amsterdam.

The Dutch discouraged social transition, because their research showed that most kids with gender dysphoria would grow out of it in time, with no medical intervention necessary. A Toronto clinic had published similar results from its own sample, and embraced a similarly cautious approach.

As the decade progressed, though, a new understanding took hold: that trans kids “know who they are” and that there’s therefore little reason to delay social transition. With the cultural tides shifting, an increasing number of parents followed suit and transitioned young kids — in some cases, as young as age 3. This is generally known as the “affirming” approach.

Between 2013 and 2017, Dr. Olson and her colleagues recruited a group of hundreds of these early transitioners, as well as their families, with the goal of following up with them for many years to come. They also recruited two comparison groups: a group of siblings of the trans-identifying kids who themselves identified as cisgender at the start of the study, and an unrelated group of cisgender kids, mostly recruited from Washington State (where Dr.