Represent!
And dear Goddess I miss San Francisco…
Gender
LGBT History Festival Comes to Bristol
This year the UK ran it’s first ever National Festival of LGBT History in Manchester. It was very successful, and there are plans afoot to hold one again in 2016. However, holding it in just one city limits the number of people who can attend. So in 2016 the Festival will be held over several weekends in several different cities. One of those cities will be Bristol. The Festival will be held at the M-Shed (the site of the very successful Revealing Stories exhibition) over the weekend of February 20/21. There will also be a film programme at the Watershed, and hopefully a theatre programme as well.
The Bristol weekend will be run by OutStories Bristol, and we hope that we’ll get a lot of interest in the event from all over the South West and South Wales. More details will follow in due course, but right now the important thing is that we need people to give presentations. Information as to how to apply to be a presenter are available here. The deadline for proposals is June 30th.
As you have probably guessed, a lot of this is my fault, and consequently I’ll be responsible for making a lot of it happen. I don’t have the final say on what presentations get accepted, but I do have some say. I’m very keen to see local history represented, and I want to see plenty of diversity. LGBT history isn’t just about cis white gay men. If you are interested in L, B or T history, or you are non-white, we’d love to hear from you.
By the way, you don’t have to be an academic historian to make a presentation. You could just be someone who has been part of LGBT history and have some memories you can relate. If you are an academic you may also be interested in the associated academic conference, which will take place in Manchester once again next year. The Call for Papers is here.
A Lesson in Crowdfunding
A couple of days ago I saw a tweet from Neil Gaiman promoting a crowdfunding campaign for a play about trans people. I went and had a look at the campaign page and sent back a concerned tweet to Neil. As it turned out, the project is indeed a good one, but the causes of my concern make for an interesting lesson, so I thought I’d blog about them.
The first thing is nothing to do with the campaign itself, but rather the Indiegogo website. These days I get most of my news from Twitter, and I normally access it via my phone and tablets, not via a PC. With the phone I am often doing that when I’m on a train, in a cafe, or otherwise away from my home network. Bandwidth is an issue. But when you click an Indiegogo link from Twitter on a phone you don’t get the website. You get an ad for their bloody app. When you have just spent several minutes waiting for the page to load (on a train, remember), this is enormously irritating. Companies should not do this.
However, eventually I got through to the campaign page, and I read the blurb. With crowdfunding all of the advice pages talk endlessly about the importance of the video, but if you are on a train with limited bandwidth you are not going to watch a video. You just read the text, and in this case it was problematic in two ways.
Firstly there was this:
People like actress Laverne Cox, model Andreja Pejic, celebrity Chaz Bono, director Lana Wachowski have led the charge, but it was Olympic legend Bruce Jenner whose declaration sparked a media frenzy and forever thrust transgender identity into the light of day.
That immediately sounds alarm bells for me. Laverne Cox has done a huge amount of work for the trans community (as has Janet Mock). It was Laverne appearing on the cover of Time that started everyone talking about a transgender tipping point. Jenner, in contrast, has spent most of the last few months in “no comment” land. A focus on Jenner suggests to me that this is a campaign aimed mainly at well-to-do cis white people, not something that will help the trans community.
Anyway, I read through the text, and what I saw was a lot of talk about using the stories of real trans people, but nothing about their involvement beyond that. What I was looking for was how trans people would be involved in the production and staging of this play. I saw nothing.
When I tweeted Neil he asked me about the video. Of course I hadn’t watched it. (On a train, remember.) When I got home I fired up a laptop and checked it out. Immediately I saw trans people, including some who were fairly obviously in the cast (Calpernia Addams, for example). There was much relief in my corner of the world.
So the lesson here is that if you are doing a crowdfunding campaign, don’t put important information in the video, and leave it off the text (or vice versa). You need people to get the whole message, no matter how they end up consuming it.
And now, if you’d like to back the Trans Scripts campaign, that would be a fine thing. If you happen to be very rich and a big Neil Gaiman fan you can get a personal Skype call from him. If you live in Edinburgh, or are going to this year’s Fringe, I’d love to hear a report of the play.
Hello Brighton, Coming Your Way
I’m delighted to report that I’ve been selected to present a paper at Trans Studies Now, an academic conference taking place at the University of Sussex on June 12th. Roz Kaveney and Lewis Hancox are keynote speakers, so I’m in excellent company. Plus I get to go to Brighton and talk about science fiction. Sounds fun.
Brighton folks, obviously not all of you will be able to make the conference, but I’ll need to stay over the night before so maybe we can catch up then.
Flying the Trans Flag
This morning I was up early and off into Bristol again. I’m not good in the mornings, but this was important. I’d been invited to a meeting of social support agencies in Bristol — people who work with the homeless, with victims of domestic violence, with those struggling with addiction and so on. The event was organized by LGBT Bristol, because they have found that they end up dealing with a lot of people with complex, intersecting needs.
Why? Well it goes like this. Many people who suffer social problems know that there are agencies that they can go to for help. However, if they are from an ethnic minority background they might be afraid to go to an agency that appears to be run by and for white people. They might instead go to an agency that specializes in helping ethnic minorities. LGBT people are afraid to go to regular agencies as well, but may go to an LGBT-specific agency like LGBT Bristol. Trans people, in general, are afraid to go to anyone for help. We only find out about them when they end up in hospital, in trouble with the police, or as victims of hate crime.
Around 90% of the people that LGBT Bristol ends up supporting have complex needs, suggesting that they were afraid to ask for help. More than half are trans.
So my colleague, Sarah Minter, called this meeting to let these agencies know about the sort of problems we are sweeping up, and to encourage them to do more to make themselves welcoming to LGB, and in particular T, clients. I went along as a token trans person prepared to stick her head above the parapet.
Actually I felt a bit of a fraud, because I haven’t suffered any of the serious problems that were being discussed. Obviously I have been discriminated against, but it has mostly been very middle class discrimination, not homelessness, addiction or physical violence. I’m very grateful to a very brave trans lady whose work with the St. Mungo’s charity sparked the event. After coming out she had been fired from her job and unlawfully evicted from her home, and had suffered multiple hate crimes. That’s real life for far too many trans people, even today.
My role in all this is to stand up and talk, because shooting my mouth off is something I’m good at. Hopefully the end result will be more trans awareness training for various agencies, probably in collaboration with the fine folks at Diversity Trust who know far more about social work than I do. Even if it doesn’t, at least a whole lot of people sat there and listened to my Trans 101 talk. Progress is made of small steps.
Thank You, Exeter Pride
Well that was a lovely day out. This year’s Exeter Pride took place in Rougemont Gardens, which is a lovely little venue right in the center of the city, and once the inside of a Norman castle. The weather was beautiful, and I met lots of great people, including a few good pals from Brighton. My talk went OK. The audience was a little thin at the start because of an overlap with a panel discussion on religion, and because the weather was so good, but we got a decent number in the end.
Thanks in particular to the Exeter Pride team for inviting me, and to Emily and her colleagues at Exeter Library for providing me with a venue.
Trans Rights In Europe
Transgender Europe has just issued this map showing the state of trans rights across Europe. The color key is brown for no legal recognition, red for sterilization required for legal recognition, and blue for it not being required.
A full copy of the map, and detailed index of various rights which gives a much clearer picture of where each country is, can be found here.
Ireland’s Gender Recognition Bill has passed through the Seanad but is not yet law. Hopefully some of my Irish readers can update me on what the remaining steps are. If they are not too busy campaigning for a Yes vote in the same-sex marriage referendum. Good luck, folks!
The Council of Europe’s position on trans rights is very clear. This resolution is in advance of just about every country in the EU, except possibly Malta. Which is doubtless one of many reasons that the Conservatives want to leave the EU.
I Interview Roz Kaveney for Lambda Literary
You all know that Roz Kaveney has a new novel out, right? Tiny Pieces of Skull is not fantasy. It is a fictionalized memoir based on Roz’s time as a young trans sex worker in Chicago in the 1970s. It is very good indeed, and has what might be my favorite last line of a book ever. Of course you do have to have a certain amount of interest in trans issues and feminism to appreciate it the way I do, but hopefully lots of people will like it.
Anyway, I was asked to do an interview with Roz for the Lambda Literary website. That’s now online, and it also links to a review of the book written by someone else (so you don’t need to take my word for it). Mostly Roz and I talk about how life has changed for trans folk between when the book was written and now. We also talk about why the book is dedicated to some chap called Neil Gaiman, of whom you might have heard.
Read. Enjoy. Go buy Roz’s book.
Trans History Goes To Exeter Pride
I’m delighted to announce that I am taking my trans history talk on the road again. Exeter Pride takes place on Saturday, May 16th. As part of it I will be giving my talk at Exeter Library between 15:30 and 17:00. Further details of the day’s programme are available here. I’m not sure which room in the Library I will be in yet, but presumably there will be signage on the day.
For those of you not familiar with the talk, it is titled “A Potted History of Gender Variance”, and it covers 2000 years of history and five continents. If you don’t mind a few spoilers, Katie Herring has a lovely write-up of the talk here.
I look forward to seeing some of you there, and if you know anyone in the Exeter area that you think might be interested please pass the wold on.
A Little Hero Worship
Yeah, that’s Janet Mock, talking to Oprah. Janet is an amazing advocate for trans people. I particularly like the way she acknowledges the privilege that her looks, and her binary identification, give her, and then comes back for everyone else. I hope I can manage just a tiny bit of her eloquence and grace.
And while I’m on the subject of amazing trans people, Laverne Cox recently won an Emmy for a documentary called The T Word. She got that for making the show. The stars are the seven young trans people that she features in it. You can find it online here, but it isn’t available everywhere so you may want to consider something like TunnelBear.
In Which I Am A Responsible Adult
I guess that in most people’s lives there aren’t many opportunities to do something important. Some of us have serious platforms from which to effect change, others have jobs that involve saving lives, but for most of us the things we do aren’t that vital. That’s certainly the case with me. Wittering on about books is great fun, but mostly not life-changing. This week was different. This week I got to do something that I hope will make a real difference to people’s lives in years to come.
Some of you may remember that back in January I had a little rant about how things won’t get better from women, and trans women in particular, without education. I particularly noted that when training on trans issues was done, trans people were often excluded from the process. I honestly didn’t expect things to get any better in the near future.
But in February I did the trans history talk at the M-Shed. In the audience was Dr. Rachel Hogg, who works with Bristol University Medical School. She and some colleagues were in the process of putting together some LGBT+ training materials for the medical students. They’d done this in previous years for LGB issues, but this year they were keen to include trans and they wanted to know if I would be willing to help.
This was all part of something called Disability, Disadvantage & Diversity Week (3D Week for short). During this week, second year medical students get a range of lectures from people who are liable to be excluded from the health service in some way. There were sessions on disabilities, on cultural diversity, on homelessness, on world health and so on. Rachel is a former co-chair of the Gay & Lesbian Association of Doctors & Dentists, so she is well placed to talk about LGB issues. She wanted me to talk about trans issues.
Time Out. Let’s think about that for a minute. I was being asked to give two days of lectures to a group of young people who, in a few years time, will become doctors. Many of them will become GPs. These days the chances are that some of them will have trans friends. But for some I might be the first trans person they would knowingly meet. Can you say, “responsibility”?
In the past most GPs have had no training at all on gender medicine. If they touched on issues of sexuality it may well have been only with regard to mental health or HIV. Rachel said yesterday that when she was a student being gay was still being taught as a mental illness, even though it was officially declassified in 1973. UCL’s medical school now has some good resources on LGB issues (we showed some of their videos), but as far as we know no other medical school in the country has training on trans issues. If they do, I very much doubt that they have actual trans people involved. If that’s true, well done Bristol for leading the way.
Part of the point of 3D Week, however, is to get people from the community to talk to the students about the issues that affect them. I think that’s a wonderful idea.
Hopefully I did a decent job. I’m confident that I know what I’m talking about, and while I clearly can’t represent all trans people I did refer the students to the fabulous My Genderation films, and to GIRES where there is a lot of good scientific information.
I was a little worried going in as to what sort of a reaction I would get. I wasn’t just lecturing either. There were tutorial sessions in which it was going to be necessary for me to be very open and accept the sort of intrusive questioning that I’d normally tell people is very rude. As it turns out, the students were wonderful. They were really nice young people, culturally quite diverse, and all wanting to learn about helping LGBT+ patients. Some of the comments that Rachel and I had after the sessions were very heartwarming.
I’d like to thank Rachel for involving me in this, and also huge props to Anna Taylor, the medical student whose idea the whole 3D Week project is. Thanks also to Dr. Hannah Condry from the Medical School for making the whole thing happen, and to Lea and Chrissie in the admin team for their support. Most of all, however, I’d like to thank the students for attending, and for being so receptive to the ideas we were putting forward. Having GPs who are trained in trans issues will make a huge difference to the lives of trans people in the coming years. I can’t begin to express how happy and proud I am to have had a part in making that happen.
April Gets a Birthday Present
As I reported on Wednesday, trans icon April Ashley has just turned 80. A splendid innings, my dear, if I might say so.
Well actually I did send her a message. More of that in a little while. First up that photo above, which shows April receiving a Citizen of Honour award from Liverpool City Council. The photo is courtesy of the lovely people at Liverpool Trans, who also came up with the idea of creating a book of birthday wishes for April. I’m in it, because I wanted to tell April about the really exciting thing I have been doing this week — something that would not have been possible without trailblazers like her.
What have I been up to? That will be in the next post.
Happy Birthday, April! #April80
80 years old today and still as glamorous as ever. Thank you so much for everything you have done for us, and congratulations on being made a Citizen of Honour of Liverpool.
Queer Vision Launch
Bristol’s new year-round LGBT film festival, Queer Vision, launched yesterday with a bunch of great short films from the Iris Prize archives. I really enjoyed the whole hour’s program, which ranged from the deeply tragic to the delightfully comic.
The trailer above was for the Kickstarter campaign for Black is Blue, a film about a young trans man from Oakland and the fraught relationship between trans men and the lesbian community. It made me very homesick for the Bay Area, but did a great job of examining the issues and had an almost entirely black cast.
In stark contrast there was this hilarious animation from Germany, Zebra, which I guess is about how you can be accepted no matter how queer you are.
Thanks also due to the awesome Jayne Graham-Cummings whose brainchild this all is, to Daryn Carter as ever for making things happen, to Bramley & Gage for sponsoring the cocktails at the afterparty, and to the (Conservative) Lord Mayor, Alastair Watson, for turning up to give the event his civic blessing.
Trans Kids Wrap-Up
The media onslaught on the trans kids issue continued for a few days after my last post on the subject. I had intended to say more about it at the time, but other things got in the way. I’m coming back to it now because there are a couple of important points I wanted to make.
First up, when you are reading any of these “debate” articles in which a journalist presents what appears to be two sides of the argument, always look for who gets the last word, because that is almost certainly the side that the journalist wants you to think “won” the “debate”. The article will probably be structured to lead you to that conclusion.
As an example, check out this piece from the Telegraph which purports to give advice to parents whose kids exhibit gender-variant behavior. The articles talks to Mermaids and a gender specialist, but gives a lot of space, and the last word, to one Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist, who encourages parents not to “overreact” — the journalist’s word, not hers.
As I noted in my post on the Victoria Derbyshire program, around 75% of the kids who see doctors for gender variance issues do indeed “grow out of it”. However, that leaves 25% who do not. Slowly but surely, the gender specialists are learning to tell who needs more help and who doesn’t, but the kids’ own testimony is found to be a strong indicator of behavior. The more insistent a child is that they are the “wrong” gender, the more likely they are to need to transition later in life.
The article states (without quote marks so I am assuming these are the words of the journalist, Radhika Sanghani):
However, the most important thing for parents to remember is that there are no real ‘warning signs’ their child will become transgender or transsexual.
This is flat out wrong.
Furthermore, consider this scenario: suppose your child exhibited possible signs of a dangerous disease. There’s a 75% chance that it is a false alarm, but a 25% chance that there is something seriously wrong which, if it is not treated in time, could lead to death, and at best lifelong disfigurement. What would you think of someone who advised you not to overreact, and to wait and see if the child recovered on their own?
The other piece of coverage I wanted to point you at is an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. It is probably gone from iPlayer by now, but there is a transcript available here.
Before reading that, however, you might want to check out this blog post by CN Lester which explains how the Woman’s Hour staff tried to recruit CN to be the anti-trans person in a debate on the validity of treating trans kids. There’s little doubt that Woman’s Hour intended to run a “debate” show, and that they wanted the anti-trans side to win.
And if you need further evidence, go and read the transcript and pay close attention to the questions that Jenni Murray poses.
The eventual show had the anti side taken by Finn MacKay, who happens to have just written a book on radical feminism. Because there’s nothing quite like arguing against someone’s right to exist when you have a book to promote, right? Finn is a lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Doubtless our paths will cross at some point.
Actually, almost everything that Finn says on the program is stuff I agree with. Jenni Murray is much more obviously anti-trans. However, the program is presented in such a way as to suggest that parents who take their kids to a gender clinic are obsessed with a need for those kids to conform to the gender binary. Michelle Bridgman of Gendered Intelligence does her best to counter this idea, but she isn’t allowed much space to explain.
The truth of the matter is that trans people have waged a long and exhausting campaign against the medical establishment to try to prevent them from forcing gender-normative behavior upon us. Being trans isn’t about sexuality, and it isn’t about gender performance either. If all someone wants to do is wear pretty dresses, that person will be happy to go through life as a cross-dresser. They don’t need medical transition, and they should not be encouraged to seek it. Nor is someone who does transition medically required to be gender-stereotypical in their behavior afterwards. Presenting trans people as being obsessed with being gender conformant is just one of the lies that radical feminists tell about us.
As for kids, it can be hard to tell which way they will go, but gender specialists are getting better at recognizing who needs help. In the meantime treatment is carefully staged so as to give the kids every opportunity to back out. For those that don’t, there is increasing clinical evidence that the use of hormone blockers provides significant benefits.
The medical evidence is very clear. And yet journalists persist in scare-mongering and arguing that trans people should be denied treatment. What’s worse is that they do this for “entertainment”.
Blade Runner – Flash Fiction
In the future, in a world not unlike The Culture, gender transitions are absolute. Biological science has advanced to the point at which they can re-program your entire body, even editing your chromosomes. Of course you do still want to be the same person, so the brain structure is not changed. Only the cell internals are edited, not the connections. Your skills and memories will still be intact.
On a planet called Greer they have invented a psychometric test designed to detect memories of having lived in a gender other than that which your body currently manifests. It is the only known way of telling if someone is trans or not. It is known as the Raymond-Bindel test. The people of Greer employ an elite cadre of assassins whose job it is to use this test to hunt down trans people and kill them.
They do not call this execution.
They call it, “a cure”.
Exploring Gender Fluidity through Science Fiction and Fantasy
This talk is full of spoilers for the various books that are discussed.
The audio track is a bit quiet, but I’m playing it through speakers and it is clear enough.
My thanks again to the University of Liverpool, Professor Beer, the Flagship Group, the Liverpool University Library, and the SF Foundation for making this talk possible. The official page for the talk on the University website is here, and they may prefer you to leave any comments there.
A Report On My Trans History Talk
Many thanks to Katie Herring for this lovely write-up of my “Potted History of Gender Variance” talk. It is always heartwarming when people enjoy something you have done.
Chupchikoni the trans-male penguin is probably my favorite character from the talk as well. However, I have a soft spot for the Quariwarmi, who were trans Inca priests, and I really want to know more about their trans god, Chuqui Chinchay, who was apparently known as The Rainbow Jaguar. I also want to know a lot more about Tuwais, the non-binary singer who founded Early Arabic Classical music.
And Now Radio 4 Does Trans Kids
Yesterday afternoon BBC Radio 4’s PM program ran a short segment on trans kids. It is available on iPlayer, and the trans coverage is about 22 minutes in.
Once again the program seems fairly positive on the surface, but is let down by careless (or possibly deliberate) framing. Helen Belcher’s son is utterly charming in his brief interview on life as the child of a trans parent, and the head teacher of the school interviewed is clearly trying hard to do the right thing. The young trans girl they are talking about appears to have had a positive experience of transitioning at school (at least thus far).
But look at this tweet from the journalist who did the interview.
https://twitter.com/Helena_J_Lee/status/585521908252278784
The key phrase there is “boy who wants to be a girl”. As with Victoria Derbyshire’s show, this is framing the narrative as someone who is “really” a boy and who is making some sort of lifestyle choice to live a fantasy.
Things go pear-shaped at the end of the segment as well when Helena Lee talks about government guidance. I guess she’s probably just quoting the Department of Education, but if you use the term “sexuality” in the context of trans kids you are either pushing the idea that being trans is somehow a sexual preference (and therefore not an appropriate matter for pre-pubescent children to learn about), or you are saying that your LGBT policy is in fact an LGB policy and nothing will actually be done for trans people. In the case of the Department of Education it probably means both.
I know I’m harping on a lot about this, but it is really important. It is great that trans folk and their allies are getting to speak for themselves rather the being judged by experts, but if the presenters of this programs insist on always putting forward an anti-trans line, either for “balance” or “controversy” then most cis listeners will still come away thinking that the anti-trans line is correct.
And that whole thing about trans people being “really” their assigned-at-birth gender, and therefore people who are living a lie; we know what that leads to, don’t we. It leads to murder.
How Not To Do Trans Kids on TV
This morning BBC2’s brand new daytime magazine show, hosted by Victoria Derbyshire, led off with a feature on trans kids. There were some very good things about it, but also some really bad stuff. I’m not entirely sure who to blame for this. In the article that she did for the BBC website Derbyshire is much more sympathetic towards trans kids than she was in the show. Also Lewis Hancox, who was on the show, commented afterwards that she’d been very nice. I suspect editorial interference. Here’s what happened.
The segment got off to a really bad start with Derbyshire stating that the two kids she would be interviewing were “boys who were living as girls”. She didn’t actually say that they were “really boys, and pretending to be girls”, but the implication was there. What’s more she repeated this phrase at least twice during the show, to make sure that the message got through. There would be no acceptance of the kids as girls.
Then we got to the interviews, which were pretty relentless. Almost every question that Derbyshire asked the two girls was designed to get them to say that they were just going through a phase and would change their minds later. The interviews with the parents focused on the idea that they were harming their kids by allowing them to transition, and that the kids’ gender-variant behavior was somehow the parents’ fault. Normally I’d be pleased to see a lesbian couple on TV, but it was pretty clear from the questioning that little Jesscia’s parents were only on the show to allow Derbyshire to insinuate that their lesbianness had somehow caused Jessica’s transness, and by extension that lesbians were unfit to bring up children.
Later in the show there was a panel discussion involving Lewis Hancox; Loretta, one of the vloggers from My Genderation; Jackson, a young trans man; and Susie, the current Chair of Mermaids. This was much better in that we had a bunch of adult trans people able to assert that transition had benefited them. Even so, Derbyshire’s questions were again largely antagonistic in content if not in tone. And there was the inevitable question about what each person had between their legs. I rather wish someone had asked the same question of Derbyshire.
To give you a better idea of how this all came over to me I’m going to pick up an example that Christine Burns used on Twitter. Suppose the show was about left-handed kids. Would you expect all of the questions to them be about whether they would grow out of it and learn to write properly? Would you expect the questions to the parents to be whether they were ruining their kids lives by allowing them to choose to be left-handed instead of insisting that they behave properly? Well of course not. And yet it wasn’t that long ago that such questions would have been asked. When I was at school there were still teachers who would punish pupils for writing left-handed.
That’s basically where we are with trans kids today. Most of society thinks that they are somehow unnatural, and that the right thing to do is bully them until they conform. It wasn’t until we got to the panel that Susie was able to raise the question of how harmful that might be. (Paris Lees makes the same point very well in this article about the Louis Theroux show.)
One thing that both Theroux and Derbyshire harped on about endlessly is the idea that kids might change their minds about gender transition when they got older, and that as a result they were making a dreadful mistake by transitioning young. During the panel discussion Derbyshire brought in a specialist from New York, Dr. Aron Janssen who is (amongst an impressive list of titles) Clinical Director of the Gender and Sexuality Service at the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center. He was asked how likely it was that kids would change their minds, and his response was that current research suggests that around 75% of them would.
As you can imagine, my ears pricked up at that. After the show, Susie linked to him on Twitter so I was able to introduce myself and ask for more information. (I do have a very good excuse: I’m helping write some trans awareness training for Bristol University Medical School.) Dr. Janssen kindly replied, attaching a couple of papers by a Dutch team that has been working with trans kids for many years. Having looked through the papers, what I’m seeing is as follows.
Yes, a substantial majority of kids who are treated for gender variant behavior will eventually grow out of it.
However, a significant minority (around 25% according to Dr. Janssen) do not, and those kids are highly likely to benefit from medical transition.
The growing out of it generally occurs in an age range of 10 to 13 as puberty starts to kick in. This is also the point when puberty blockers would begin to be prescribed. Prior to that there is no medical intervention, so the kids who do stop their gender variant behavior will probably not have had any medication.
The data is for all kids who present for treatment due to having gender variant behavior. By no means all of them wish to transition socially. However, a desire to transition socially is a strong indicator that the gender variant behavior will persist through puberty.
What we are seeing here, then, is doctors learning how to distinguish between, on the one hand, those kids whose behavior isn’t stereotypical for their birth gender, and on the other those who really need full gender transition. As it turns out, the kids themselves generally understand their feelings pretty well, and those who need to transition will opt to do so socially before there is any need to do so medically.
Of course there is a lot more detail than I’ve presented here. The Dutch doctors looked at many different factors including the language the kids use when self-identifying, and their observed behavior. Interestingly they found parental reports of behavior of girls to be less reliable as an indicator than was the case with boys, suggesting that parental expectations of gender performance are more rigid for girls than for boys. Nevertheless, the point remains that the “making a mistake” issue can and should be challenged with evidence rather than being left hanging there as bait for haters.
It is still good that trans people are being allowed to speak for themselves, but on the basis of this show the media still has a very long way to go before it will treat us with respect, rather than as an excuse for artificial controversy and a target for their own prejudices.
Update: edited as per Jackson’s comment below. Profuse apologies for the error.