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Debate: Different strokes for different folks
Kenneth J. Zucker
Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
A gender social transition in prepubertal children is a form of psychosocial treatment that aims to reduce gen-
der dysphoria, but with the likely consequence of subsequent (lifelong) biomedical treatments as well (gen-
der-affirming hormonal treatment and surgery). Gender social transition of prepubertal children will increase
dramatically the rate of gender dysphoria persistence when compared to follow-up studies of children with
gender dysphoria who did not receive this type of psychosocial intervention and, oddly enough, might be char-
acterized as iatrogenic. Parents who bring their children for clinical care hold different philosophical views on
what is the best way to help reduce the gender dysphoria, which require both respect and understanding.
Keywords: Gender identity; gender dysphoria; psychosocial treatment
The proverbial saying ‘Different strokes for different
folks’(The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 2006)
reflects well the contemporary clinical debate on best-
practice therapeutics for children with gender dyspho-
ria. It reflects not only the variation in the philosophical
and theoretical perspectives of front-line clinicians, but
also variation in the philosophical belief systems of par-
ents who bring their children to mental health profes-
sionals for clinical advice and care.
For prepubertal children with gender dysphoria, I
would argue that there are three main approaches to
therapeutics, which I list here in chronological/histori-
cal order: (a) active psychosocial treatment to reduce
gender dysphoria so that the child’s eventual gender
identity is more congruent with her or his biological sex
(thus obviating the necessity for what some now call
‘gender-affirming’hormonal and surgical treatment); (b)
‘wait-and-see’or ‘watchful waiting’, which makes the
assumption that it is difficult to predict what the long-
term outcome will be and so, well, the clinician should
not recommend very much one way or the other; and (c)
gender social transition, in which the child’s‘social’
gender identity is shifted from the gender assigned at
birth to the putative desired gender (e.g., change in
name, change in pronoun usage, and change in other
phenotypic social attributes, such as hair-style and
clothing-style that mark one’s gender to significant
others). Dreger (2009) characterized the first approach
the ‘therapeutic’model and the third approach the
‘accommodation’model.
These rather marked variations in the type of psy-
chosocial treatment considered to be in the best interest
of the child reflect deep structure variations in theoreti-
cal perspectives on the nature and nurture of psychosex-
ual differentiation (see the edited volume by Drescher &
Byne, 2012). On the one hand, the first approach
assumes that, for young children with gender dysphoria,
gender identity is not fixed or ‘locked in’at an early age
and that there is a much greater degree of malleability
and plasticity than might be the case for both adoles-
cents and adults with gender dysphoria. On the other
hand, the third approach assumes that gender identity
is fixed and locked in at a very early age because of
underlying biological mechanisms. One of the most well-
known children with gender dysphoria, ‘Jazz Jennings’,
has promulgated this view in her book, written for chil-
dren, ‘I Am Jazz’(Herthel & Jennings, 2014) where Jazz
writes ‘I have a girl brain but a boy body....I was born
this way!’
As noted in several guideline reviews on clinical prac-
tice for the treatment of children with gender dysphoria
(AACAP Practice Parameter on Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual
Sexual Orientation, Gender Nonconformity, and Gender
Discordance in Children and Adolescents, 2012; Ameri-
can Psychological Association, 2015; Byne et al., 2012),
the field suffers from a vexing problem: There are no ran-
domized controlled trials (RCT) of different treatment
approaches, so the front-line clinician has to rely on
lower-order levels of evidence in deciding on what the
optimal approach to treatment might be. One quote is
sufficient to document this point: ‘Different clinical
approaches have been advocated for childhood gender
discordance.... There have been no randomized con-
trolled trials of any treatment....the proposed benefits of
treatment to eliminate gender discordance...must be
carefully weighed against... possible deleterious effects’
(AACAP Practice Parameter on Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual
Sexual Orientation, Gender Nonconformity, and Gender
Discordance in Children and Adolescents, 2012, pp.
968–969). Given the cautious conclusions that these
types of reviews have reached, it is of interest how, in
recent years, so many clinicians have embraced the
treatment approach that recommends an early gender
social transition. Chen, Edwards-Leeper, Stancin, and
Tishelman (2018) observed that ‘Over the last decade, we
have seen a sea change in approach to pediatric trans-
gender care, with the gender affirmative model now
widely adopted as preferred practice’(p. 74).
In my view, there are reasons to be skeptical about the
merit in recommending an early gender social transition
as a first-line treatment. One should recognize that if
one peruses carefully the follow-up studies of young chil-
dren with gender dysphoria (or traits of gender dyspho-
ria), the majority of such children do not have gender
©2019 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Volume **, No. *, 2019, pp. **–** doi:10.1111/camh.12330
dysphoria when followed up in adolescence or adulthood
(Zucker, 2018). In these studies, one can say with rea-
sonable confidence that when these children had treat-
ment (and not all did), the one type of treatment they
did not receive was in the form of a prepubertal gender
social transition. As I argued elsewhere (Zucker, 2018),
if one conceptualizes gender social transition as a type
of psychosocial treatment, it should come as no sur-
prise that the rate of gender dysphoria persistence will
be much higher as these children are followed into their
adolescence and young adulthood (see Rae et al.,
2019). If this is, in fact, the case, one might ask why
would one recommend a first-line treatment that is, in
effect, iatrogenic.
Even if there was a team of researchers motivated to
design an RCT, the implementation of such a study
would be formidable. For example, some parents would
decline to place their child into a psychosocial treatment
arm that would attempt to reduce the child’s gender dys-
phoria so as to be more congruent with the gender
assigned at birth; other parents would decline to place
their child into a psychosocial treatment arm that would
attempt to reduce the child’s gender dysphoria by ‘af-
firming’their felt gender vis-a-vis a social transition. Per-
haps parents who prefer one of these two approaches
would agree to ‘wait-and-see’at least for a while, before
deciding on a more intensive therapeutic approach. This
variation in parental preferences reflects, as noted ear-
lier, differences in underlying theoretical and philosophi-
cal perspectives which need to be respected. As the field
moves forward and more follow-up data become avail-
able, we will learn more about the developmental course
of gender dysphoria in particular and well-being and
mental health in general.
Acknowledgements
The author has declared that he has no competing or potential
conflict of interest.
Ethical information
No ethical approval was required for this article.
Correspondence
Kenneth J. Zucker, Department of Psychiatry, Univer-
sity of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5T 1R8, Canada; Email:
ken.zucker@utoronto.ca
References
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Accepted for publication: 18 March 2019
©2019 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health
2Kenneth J. Zucker Child Adolesc Ment Health 2019; *(*): **–**
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