James Kirkup James Kirkup

What explains the rising number of children with gender issues?

I have recently read a fascinating new paper, via a Mail on Sunday report, about the growing number of children presenting as transgender to gender clinics. It raises all sorts of questions, and deserves to be read widely and carefully. The paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, can be found – unlike a lot of similar work, for free – here.

Among its seven authors are two staff from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London, the main NHS clinic for children with gender identity issues, including the service’s head, Polly Carmichael. The other authors include clinicians in Australia and the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

The paper is titled ‘Association of Media Coverage of Transgender and Gender Diverse Issues With Rates of Referral of Transgender Children and Adolescents to Specialist Gender Clinics in the UK and Australia’ and largely – but not entirely – considers the possible relationship between rising referral numbers and increased media coverage of transgender issues.

It concludes that the rise in child referrals to gender clinics has taken place at the same time as a rise in media coverage of gender issues. It doesn’t claim to have identified causation, but the authors do offer anecdotal ratification, noting that their own experience with transgender and gender diverse (TGD) children suggests that at least some of them have been prompted to come forward after seeing or hearing trans issues raised in the media:

In this study, we observed evidence of an association between TGD-related media stories and referrals to 2 independent pediatric gender services on opposite sides of the world. Although our data do not provide evidence of causation, the results are nonetheless consistent with our own clinical experiences in which TGD patients commonly identify the media as a precipitant for them to seek clinical assistance.

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