Giving Compass' Take:

• An affirmative model of care for gender non-conforming and transgender children provides the space for physicians and parents to listen to the messages about gender and honor all gender variations as signs of health, not illness. 

• How prevalent is this model in the health care system? Why is important for parents to first support and listen to their kids rather than assume and determine a child's gender for them?

• Read about gender-diverse individuals coping with issues around the globe. 

For decades, transgender adults have written about how, when seeking gender reassignment, they needed to seem authentically trans – and report a total identification with the other gender – to physicians and psychologists. This could entail an exclusive preference for clothing and activities consistent with the other gender, a heterosexual sexual orientation and an ability to pass as a member of that gender. Absent those criteria, trans people would be turned away from medical care and disbelieved by friends and family.

As a result, many learned to cover up their ambivalences, struggles and self-doubts. They learned to present a version of trans that seemed foolproof to cisgender people: a narrative in which gender is certain, impervious to the vicissitudes of actual emotional life.

As more families grapple with the complexities of gender development, we see stories of children and parents being offered guidance and support by clinicians who work from “an affirmative model of care.”

This affirmative model doesn’t push kids toward a transgender outcome or even a linear narrative. Instead, clinicians teach parents to pause, absorb the messages their children are sending and then articulate what they are seeing back to their children. Parents and psychologists help children express their genders in authentic ways, and then work to understand the significance of the things they are saying and doing. It takes time and practice.

Affirmative clinical work treats all gender variations as signs of health – not illness – and supports the unhurried unfolding of a child’s emergent self. In this context, uncertainty and ambivalence are a part of transgender development, just as they are for all gender development.

Read the full article about gender non-conforming children by Tey Meadow at The Conversation