Stability and Change in Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Across Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

As increasing numbers of transgender, gender diverse, and queer youths come out, and their identities become the subject of intense debate, research on their identity development has remained scarce. This monograph describes gender identity and sexual orientation in a sample of over 900 North American youths in the Trans Youth Project (Mage=8.1 years at first visit; Mage = 14.3 at latest visit; 99% living in the United States, 1% in Canada; 69% non-Hispanic white; 73% household income > $75,000). Youths are in one of three groups: (1) early identifying transgender youths supported in a social gender transition by age 12 (Mage at transition = 6.5; N = 317; all initially transgender); (2) a group of their (all initially cisgender) siblings (N = 218); and (3) an unrelated community sample of (all initially cisgender) youths (N = 377). We describe stability or change in youths’ gender identities (Chapter 4) and sexual orientations (Chapter 6) and examine whether measures of gender development in childhood were related to youths’ later gender identity (Chapter 5) or sexual orientation (Chapter 6) trajectories into adolescence. Over 80% of youths have shown gender stability throughout the study, with no significant group differences. However, 11.9% of youths who started as cisgender were not so at their most recent report – higher than one would predict from classic developmental psychology research. When gender change did occur in all three groups, it overwhelmingly involved change to and from a nonbinary identity. Youths showed diverse sexual orientations, with 60% of binary transgender and 33% of cisgender adolescents expressing queer romantic or sexual interest; 37% overall indicated interest in both boys and girls. Over a third of youths have shown sexual orientation change, and childhood gender nonconformity was associated with whether teenagers most recently reported queer identity. Our results accord with recent evidence indicating that today’s youths increasingly consider gender to be a flexible social identity that is not confined to two categories. Chapter 7 discusses how our findings speak to this unique historical moment and past work about gender nonconforming children, and how future research can better understand diverse gender development trajectories.