Transgender children’s essentialist beliefs
In two recent articles, Gülgöz and Gelman examine essentialist beliefs about gender in young children. The first, published in PLoS One is “Gender essentialism in transgender and cisgender children” by Gülgöz, DeMeules, Gelman, & Olson (2019)
The PLoS One piece is available as full text; as a result, I am not providing the parenthetic research citations by name here but they are available in the article itself. They review the research on essentialist beliefs about gender as follows:
Previous research has documented strong gender essentialism among cisgender children, especially in early childhood. For example, by 3 to 5 years of age, children expect that gender will stay the same throughout the lifespan (e.g., a girl will grow up to be a mom) even when reasoning about a child who is raised solely among other-gender individuals (e.g., believing that a girl who is raised entirely among boys and men will still grow up to show properties stereotypically associated with girls). Additionally, by four years old, cisgender children believe that even if a girl looks like a boy, as long as she is categorized as a girl, she will share more properties (e.g., preferences in novel activities) with other girls than boys. By age five, cisgender children reject the possibility that a girl and a boy might be the same kind of person, viewing these categories as discrete, natural, and not determined by convention. And when six-year-olds are asked why a girl might want to play dress-up rather than baseball, they give the essentialist explanation that girls were born this way.
Among previous research examining cisgender children’s gender essentialism, at least one study has examined cisgender children’s essentialism when they are asked to reason about transgender targets. When they heard descriptions of a child who identified and presented as a gender different from what they were assigned at birth, about half of 5- to 11-year-old cisgender participants consistently believed that the target child should be categorized as the gender associated with their sex at birth. Thus, from a young age, children might view gender as inborn, biologically based, stable, and predictive of other nonobvious properties, even in cases where outward environmental influences might provide contradictory information.
In this study, they find:
When asked to make inferences about a baby’s future gender-typed preferences, transgender participants, their cisgender siblings, and cisgender controls all reliably used the target’s sex at birth to predict whether that target character would show feminine-typed or masculine-typed preferences in the future. Importantly, this was true both when targets were raised by parents of the same sex as the child and when targets were raised by parents of a different sex than the child—though across groups, participants also believed that children raised by parents who shared their sex would have stronger gender-typed preferences than children raised by parents who did not share their sex.
Part of what I find interesting about this study is the finding that, as cisgender children became older, they made more stereotypical judgments when vignettes presented to them involved a child and a sex-matched parent than one with an other-sex parent, which is interpreted to mean that older cisgender children believe that socialization plays a role as well as sex at birth. Interestingly, the transgender children did not exhibit this pattern of increasingly assuming socialization plays a role in gender. However, while the transgender children seem to know that their identity is not consistent with their sex assigned at birth, they believe that others are likely to adhere to stereotypes about the sex assigned at birth. The authors suggest that this may mean either that transgender children know their circumstance is rare or that they know that gender is different from sex.
Gülgöz, Alonso, Olson, & Gelman (2021) in Developmental Science examine “Transgender and cisgender children's essentialist beliefs about sex and gender identity.” They add a study to the one described above and find, “Moreover, transgender and cisgender children did not differ in their essentialism of sex (i.e., whether body parts would remain stable over time). Importantly, however, transgender children were less likely than unrelated cisgender children to essentialize when hearing an ambiguous gender/sex label (‘girl’ or ‘boy’).”
This is an area where more research is needed but it may be helpful to those who work with transgender children, their siblings, and their families.