By John Mack Freeman
In a recent study that will doubtlessly not shock any of our consistent readers, Lead researcher Nicholas Eaton, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University and colleagues at the TransYouth Project found that trans youth had a clear understanding of what gender meant and a well-established idea of how their gender fit into their personal sense of self. Via Psychological Science:
To get a comprehensive sense of the children’s gender identity, Olson and colleagues used self-report measures that asked children to reflect on aspects of their gender in combination with implicit measures designed to gauge the strength of the children’s more automatic gender associations.
For example, one of the implicit measures, based on the commonly used Implicit Association Test (IAT), assessed the speed with which they associated gender — male and female — with descriptors related to the concepts of “me” and “not me.” The test is based on the theory that people are faster to respond to pairings that are more strongly associated in memory. The IAT has been used in many studies to investigate implicit attitudes related to various attributes, including gender and race, and brief versions of the IAT that use pictures instead of words have been validated for use with children.
Overall, data from the various measures indicated that transgender children’s responses were indistinguishable from those of two groups of cisgender children
