Transgender kids clear about their identity.

• Position: Cognition

A visible and growing number of transgender children in North America live in alignment with their gender identity rather than their natal sex, yet scientific research largely has ignored them. No longer, declares Nicholas Eaton, assistant professor of psychology at Stony Brook (N.Y.) University. Eaton and his colleagues at the TransYouth Project have started the first large-scale, national study of socially-supported transgender kids.

"We found that gender cognition in the transgender kids was indistinguishable from their nontransgender peers and siblings. They appear exactly like their nontransgender peers/siblings but, in the direction of their gender identity, not their sex. For example, in the case of a child who was assigned male sex at birth but now lives life fully as a girl, the responses on all the study's tasks were indistinguishable from nontransgender girls."

That runs counter to assumptions that transgender kids are pretending or confused about their gender, or that no child knows what gender even means at that age. The study indicates, rather, that transgender kids are reporting authentic, deep-rooted gender variance. They really are experiencing a gender identity similar to that of their peers --they do not seem to be pretending or confused, and they do seem to have a clear understanding of what that gender identity means.

"Transgender...