Gender Essentialism in Transgender and Cisgender Children

• In Event: 2-081 - New Directions in Social Essentialism Research

Integrative Statement

Gender essentialism is an early-emerging bias that gender is innate, biologically-based, immutable, and informative of other properties (e.g., a child who essentializes gender might believe that Ashley was born a girl, will grow up to be a woman, and will likely prefer dolls over trucks). Research on gender essentialism has typically recruited cisgender children (children who identify with a gender aligned with their sex at birth). Because transgender children identify and present as a gender that is not aligned with their sex at birth (e.g., a natal male who identifies as a girl), they might not view one’s sex at birth as stable, predictive of gender identity, and inductively informative.
In two studies, we examined 3- to 11-year-old transgender children’s (Ntotal=188), their cisgender siblings’ (Ntotal=101), and cisgender controls’ (Ntotal=180) essentialism of gender. In Study 1, participants were given the Island Task (Taylor et al., 2009), where they were asked to predict a baby’s future gender-typed preferences when raised by adults of the same gender as the baby, or other-gender adults. Results showed that both transgender and cisgender participants made more gender-stereotypical attributions when the baby was raised by the child’s own-gender parents than other-gender parents, F(1,242) = 42.99, p < .001, ηp² = .15. Transgender and cisgender participants were all more likely than chance to use a child’s gender at birth to predict later preferences in both same-gender and other-gender parent conditions. Thus, transgender and cisgender children were likely to believe that a child’s gender at birth would determine later gender-typed preferences, regardless of the gender of parents.
Study 2 examined children’s reasoning about gender as inborn, biologically based, and immutable, when presented with a child that appears to be cisgender (the child was described as a boy but sex and gender were not specified) and a transgender child (natal boy who feels like a girl). When reasoning about the former, cisgender participants were more likely than transgender participants and cisgender siblings to believe that gender is inborn, biologically based and immutable, F(2,216)=25.63, p<.001, ηp²=.19. When asked if the child was born with the same gender, transgender participants and cisgender siblings were again less likely to think so than cisgender controls, F(2,216)=13.97, p<.001, ηp²=.12. Though participant groups did not differ overall when asked about the transgender target, F(2,216)=2.96, p=.054, ηp²=.03, transgender children were more likely to think that a male who feels like a girl was born feeling so, compared to cisgender controls and siblings, F(2,215)=17.23, p<.001, ηp²=.14. Thus, transgender children were less likely than cisgender controls to essentialize gender when the relation between sex at birth and gender was ambiguous, but more likely to essentialize gender when reasoning about a transgender target.
Consistent with the literature, in both studies essentialism decreased with age. Together, the results suggest that a child’s own gender experiences might shape their essentialist beliefs regarding sex and gender identity. Our ongoing research further sheds light on children’s reasoning about these distinctions, highlighting the importance of better specifying gender-related constructs studied in essentialism research.

Authors

• Selin Gülgöz, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Susan Gelman, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristina Olson, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author