Your Kid Could Be Trans

You might have heard about trans kids in the news. If you work with children, you might have met a trans kid, whether you realized it or not. Your kid or your relative’s kids could one day come out as trans.

Kids Deserve Healthy Childhoods

Every child deserves a healthy and happy childhood that sets them up for success as adults. No matter their race, class, or gender, children should be safe and free to explore who they are and could become.

The Manufactured Moral Panic

Do right-wing politicians govern like they care about children? Of course not—they deny children food, healthcare, housing, education, and refuse to protect children from bullying, gun violence, and pedophiles.

What they do instead is sow fear of a misunderstood minority, an ancient and cynical tool of political power. Lies that the minority harms children are especially potent. After ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars, right-wing political operators have turned this weapon on transgender people, including with lies about transgender children.

The Facts

For decades, endocrinologists have treated children who develop outside the norms for their gender. E.g. precocious puberty, PCOS (which causes facial hair) in girls, gynecomastia (“man boobs”) in boys. The list is extensive. These treatments are safe, effective, widely deployed, and not remotely controversial.

Except when treating gender dysphoria.

If a mad scientist kidnapped you and changed your sex, would you want doctors to change you back? Whether you are an adult or an adolescent, that villain would have given you gender dysphoria.

Gender dysphoria is the mental anguish of inhabiting a body that does not match an internal sense of sex. It is the clinical diagnosis that makes somebody transgender and gender-affirming care medically necessary.

Some facts:

1. Gender dysphoria is diagnosed and treated following standards of care refined over almost a century of practice for adults and decades for children. (Version 8 now) An important criteria is persistence—transgender children are emphatic about their gender identities for years.

2. Gender-affirming treatments have a very low regret rate. (Only <1% of patients stop treatment because they conclude they are not actually trans.) For children, parental consent and diagnosis by multiple medical professionals are required.

3. Gender nonconformity is different from gender dysphoria. Gender nonconforming kids behave differently from stereotypical boys and girls—tomboyish girls, for example. Most GNC children do not transition. Standards of care specifically instruct medical professionals to diagnose the difference.

4. Transgender people are born that way. They can realize it as children, during puberty, or in adulthood. Trans representation in the media does not make anybody trans, but it can give them concepts and role models to make sense of their discomfort.

5. Puberty is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for transgender kids to live ordinary lives. Forcing kids through puberty until age 18 is not safe and neutral – it causes permanent changes to their bodies that devastate mental health, require expensive and painful procedures to undo, and for the unlucky ones, forever mark them as transgender, exposing them to a lifetime of prejudice. Puberty blockers are far better than nothing, but they are a compromise to satisfy adults who don’t trust that adolescents can know their own genders and that medical professionals can accurately diagnose them.

6. Gender-affirming care lets trans children blossom. It lowers the transgender child suicide risk (see Appendix A). Transgender adults are happier and safer if they transitioned during adolescence. Most trans kids prefer to keep their medical history to themselves and live unremarkable lives as their identified gender.

The Politics

“We are not pawns in your games! We are kings and queens!”
– Rosie, Trans Teen Activist, Rainbow Families Action

Transgender children are under attack. Doctors were quietly, safely, and successfully treating them when Republicans started a culture war about their medical care. Right-wing anti-trans policies literally kill children.

Indivisible cares about children, no matter their race, class, or gender. Due to these values and the facts, Indivisible SF endorses gender-affirming care for children, including hormone treatment and surgeries.

We treat an attack on any minority as a danger to everybody, because we are Indivisible. Indivisible SF will continue to defend the rights of transgender children to equitable healthcare.

So how can you help? 

Spread the following message

Imagine a situation where your kid, or a loved one, could be trans. You would want to do the same as what you would with a cis child: give them a happy childhood, set them up for a healthy adulthood, and defend them from those who would harm them for who they are. 

1. Listen to and believe your child when they talk to you about their gender, and become informed on gender dysphoria and gender nonconformity

2. Understand that working with a doctor to medically address your child’s dysphoria is necessary and important for your child’s health

3. In your local government, defend the right of families to choose the necessary gender-affirming care with their doctor, without government interference.

Take Action for Trans Rights

Indivisible SF regularly publishes calls to action defending trans people. Such as the one published this week!

Appendix A: Resources

This Trans Youth 101 simplifies a complex topic.

Graphics that explain the facets of gender nonconformity:

• The Genderbread Person is simple

• The Gender Unicorn is accurate

Further reading on trans children:

• Wendler, Z. 2024. "Oh, s#!t, my child just told me they're trans".

• PFLAG. 2022. Our Trans Loved Ones.

• Human Rights Campaign. Transgender Children & Youth: Understanding the Basics.

Appendix B: the Science of Trans Youth

Transgender science has always been messy. Identities, definitions, and criteria are inconsistent, making it difficult to compare apples to apples. Much of the trans population hides for their safety, before and after transition—including from their parents. Today's anti-trans regimes, notably the US and UK, are poisoning the well—suppressing data and publications, pressuring scientists and institutions, and spreading pseudo-science. Since their elections, they have made the credibility of medical institutions unreliable.

Some large studies (over 1000 people) that examine health outcomes for trans people given care as children:

• Stanley-Becker, I. 2018. More than half of transgender male adolescents attempt suicide, study says. Washington Post. Archived.

• D'hoore, T'Sjoen. 2022. Gender-affirming hormone therapy: An updated literature review with an eye on the future. Journal of Internal Medicine. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.13441

• Green, DeChants, et al. 2022. Association of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy With Depression, Thoughts of Suicide, and Attempted Suicide Among Transgender and Nonbinary Youth. Journal of Adolescent Health.