Youth assigned female at birth no more likely to identify as transgender, study finds
Youth assigned female at birth are no more likely to identify as transgender or gender diverse than those assigned male at birth, according to study findings reported in Pediatrics.
Study co-author Jack L. Turban, MD, MHS, incoming assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, explained the idea behind the study.
“Recently, some have suggested that trans youth identify as trans due to ‘social contagion,’” Turban said. “One of the assumptions underlying the social contagion hypothesis is that adolescents assigned female at birth are supposedly more susceptible to social contagion, and thus would be more likely to start identifying as trans in increasing numbers relative to adolescents assigned male at birth. We did not find this to be the case.”
The study included 91,937 adolescents in 2017 and 105,437 adolescents in 2019 from 16 states that participated in the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
In 2017, 2.4% of participants identified as transgender or gender diverse, with a ratio of those assigned male at birth compared with those assigned female at birth of 1.5 to 1, the study found. In 2019, 1.6% of participants identified as transgender or gender diverse, with a ratio of those assigned male at birth compared with those assigned female at birth of 1.2 to 1.
“In contrast to past reports from individual gender clinics, we found that the ratio actually favored adolescents assigned male at birth in both 2017 and 2019,” Turban said.
“This finding further undermines the rapid-onset gender dysphoria hypothesis,” co-author Alex S. Keuroghlian, MD, MPH, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center at the Fenway Institute, and chair of the division of public and community psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Healio.
The study also provided evidence against the notion that gay or lesbian teens “come out as trans in order to flee the stigma of being a sexual minority person,” which has been suggested by some politicians, Turban said.
“To study this, we looked at rates of bullying victimization and found that trans youth are more likely to be victims of bullying than cisgender sexual minority youth, arguing against the notion that young people come out as trans to flee sexual minority stigma,” Turban said.
The authors found that rates of bullying, victimization and suicidality were higher among transgender and gender-diverse youth (TGD) when compared with their cisgender peers, including their cisgender sexual minority peers, arguing against the notion that some youth openly identify as transgender or gender diverse to flee the stigma of being a sexual minority.
Ultimately the researchers concluded that the sex assigned at birth ratio of TGD adolescents in the U.S. “does not appear to favor [assigned female at birth] adolescents and should not be used to argue against the provision of gender-affirming medical care for TGD adolescents.”
“During this time of coordinated political attacks on the basic health rights of transgender and gender-diverse youth, it is critical to question unsubstantiated and harmful notions like the rapid-onset gender dysphoria hypothesis by conducting rigorous research and drawing empirically supported conclusions as the basis for intelligent health and social policies,” Keuroghlian said.