Gender Essentialism and Trans Ideology (1)
Part 1: Reviewing a recently published study focusing on ways of teaching children non-essentialist beliefs about gender
Colin Wright (on “X”) recently discussed a study (published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology) whose goal was to change children’s views about gender — to change the children from “gender essentialists” who believe in the immutability of gender to individuals who, according to the researchers, understand that boys can become girls (and vice versa).
Wright has posted information abut the study’s methods and findings, and Keri Smith has also posted a fairly lengthy youtube video discussing the study. The reason for their interest in this study is because of its explicit goal of working toward the development of the most effective means of indoctrinating children in transgender ideology. Thus, the first of Wright’s tweets in his thread describing the study introduces the thread with the statement: “A new study explored the most effective way to brainwash children into accepting gender ideology” while Smith’s video is entitled ”They’re studying how to better brainwash kids”.
This is part 1 of a two-part posting related to issues raised by the study. In part 1 of the posting, I’ll be reviewing the study the way I might have done if it had been sent to me in draft form for “peer review comments”. In part 2 of the posting I’ll be discussing a couple of more general issues related to conceptualizations of gender identity. My guess is that most people reading this will find part 1 of less interest than part 2.
Rather than summarizing the study myself, I’ll simply post the abstract from the study below, and then offer my “reviewer comments” — explaining why I think the study was of questionable ethics to begin with, and why I would not have recommended the study for publication if I had been one of the peer reviewers.
Transformative tales: The role of story videos on children's reasoning about transgender identities. Rachel D. Fine, Solangel C. Troncoso, Susan A. Gelman British Journal of Developmental Psychology First published: 19 June 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12503
Abstract
The current study explored whether positive contact through stories could influence how young children think about transgender identities and gender in general. A total of 174 children ages 5–6 and 9–10 were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Jazz (participants watched a video regarding a transgender child named Jazz), Blue (participants watched a video regarding a marker that looked red on the outside but inside was really blue) and control (no video). Both videos described the main character as feeling different inside than outside, and their social transition to their preferred identity; researcher scaffolding supported the video messages. Children who viewed the Jazz video had: (a) greater understanding of transgender identities and (b) no overall differences in gender essentialism, but (c) lower gender essentialism on three specific measures (gender immutability, innate toy behaviours and innate preferences). Also, gender essentialism was lower in older versus younger children. In this study, a direct, realistic story was the only effective means of teaching children about transgender identities and reducing belief in gender immutability. Thus, stories can be a way to teach children about the social world and change essentialist beliefs, but the impact may be limited and greatly affected by features of the story.
What does it mean to hold “essentialist” views of “gender”?
In order to understand the study at all, and to understand some of my comments below, it is important to understand what the authors mean by “essentialist” beliefs about gender. According to the authors, there are four elements of an essentialist belief about gender:
1. Gender is biologically based. If one believes that everyone, at birth, has a gender based in their biology, and that their biologically-based gender affects their behaviors, that would be an essentialist belief about gender. On the other hand, if one believes that we all are born with equipotentiality to develop as a boy or a girl depending on one’s environment, that would be a non-essentialist belief about gender. The authors assessed this feature of essentialism by asking a child whether or not the child believes that girls (or boys) do girl things (or boy things) because they have girl bodies (or boy bodies), and by asking if they agree that they can know if a kid is a girl or boy because of what their body looks like.
2. Gender is discrete, that is, boys and girls are two different categories of human beings. To assess this feature of gender essentialism, children in the study were asked whether or not they agree that girls and boys are the same, whether or not they agree that girls and boys are opposites, and whether it is possible for a child to feel like both a girl and like a boy at the same time.
3. Gender is informative. This feature of essentialist beliefs relates to belief in gender stereotypes, and is assessed by asking if the child agrees that it's easy to tell if a kid is a girl or a boy by how they act and whether they agree that it's easy to tell if a kid is a girl or a boy by the toys they like.
4. Gender is immutable, meaning that it cannot change. Thus, the measure used to assess children’s belief in gender essentialism asked the children if they believed that a boy can change into a girl and asked if they believed that when boys grow up they become men and whether a human is a boy or a girl right from birth.
One quick comment here: I’m not claiming that the questions mentioned above are actually good or the best one’s to ask to assess these different aspects of gender essentialist beliefs – but they were the ones actually used by the researchers. The “scale” that the researchers used is one they had developed themselves for this purpose called the Gender Essentialism Scale for Children (GESC). For reasons that I’ll describe in another section of this posting – I have a number of real issues with the scale, but it’s what was used in this study — and hopefully by mentioning some of the specific questions that make up the scale, it will help clarify what the authors mean by gender essentialism.
Was it ethical for the authors to have conducted the study?
The findings from this study were actually of only modest interest (as I focus on somewhat more in the next section of this posting). Why then did Colin Wright post about the study on X and why did Keri Smith post her hour-long youtube video discussing the study? Although they do not explicitly state that they think the study is unethical, it was the goals, rather than the findings, from the study that led them to discuss it. Those goals were, as noted above, to work toward discovering the best ways to indoctrinate children in the tenants of gender ideology.
The researchers themselves, of course, would argue that their goals were laudable ones; that they were not focusing on “indoctrinating” children in an ideology – they were assessing different methods of teaching children the truth about gender. In other words, I assume that from the authors’ perspective, this was not a matter of trying to teach children to believe in something that might, but might not, be true; rather, this was a study designed to work toward assessing the best methods of teaching children a feature of the world (like the fact that the earth is round) that is true (but that most young children do not fully understand).
The problem, of course, is that the idea that boys can become girls does not have the same “truth” status as the claim that the earth is round rather than flat. Thus, the “ethics” question becomes whether it is ethical to conduct a study of the best way to convince children of a belief that is, at least to some degree, contentious? Clearly, the authors themselves were aware that some parents might not approve of their child being in a study like this, and therefore (and to the authors’ credit) when parents gave their “informed consent” for their child to participate in the study, parents were told that the study was explicitly about how reading a story about a transgender character might influence children's beliefs about gender.
Given that parents did know what the purpose of the study was before they granted permission for their children to participate — does that eliminate any concerns one might have about the ethics of the study? Honestly, I think reasonable people may differ on this question. I can fully understand an IRB panel (Institutional Review Board – the university committee that must give its approval to any research that will be conducted by faculty at the university) approving the study, with the proviso that parents be fully informed of the goals and methods of the study. On the other hand, I wonder if an IRB panel would approve of a study designed to work toward convincing children that it is dangerous and harmful for a boy to try to live as a girl (even if the parents of all participants are fully informed about the purpose of the study). A more extreme example might be a study designed to convince children of white supremacist beliefs. Would such a study be ethical as long as all parents of children participating gave their fully informed consent? I don’t think so – and I’m not convinced that the belief that boys can become girls or that girls can become boys are so clearly and incontrovertibly harmless that this study can be considered ethical.
Should the study have been recommended for publication by the peer reviewers?
This was a peer reviewed study, which means that it was submitted to a journal for publication, but before the editor of the journal decided whether or not to publish it, the paper was sent out to two or three “expert” reviewers for commentary. Although it is ultimately up to a journal’s editor whether or not to accept an article for publication, the comments of reviewers typically are dispositive (thus, if all reviewers approve of the article for publication, it is very likely to be published, whereas if they raise serious questions about one or more features of the study, it is much less likely to be published).
If I had been sent this article to review, I would NOT have recommended publication. I should note that the British Journal of Developmental Psychology is not a top tier journal for the publication of this kind of research; accordingly, my strong suspicion is that the paper was submitted to one (or more) higher status journals first but was rejected for publication in those and therefore was then submitted to BJDP – where the standards for publication are not as rigorous as they are for publication in a better journal.
As a reviewer, my criticisms of the study would have included:
1. As was noted above, it was necessary, for ethical reasons, for parents to be informed of the purpose of the study. Accordingly, the sample of children who participated in the study was clearly not very representative of all children their age, or even of children their age in the city where the study was conducted. To their credit, the authors acknowledge this problem; they note in their discussion section (probably because reviewers demanded some attention be paid to this issue) that “Another important consideration is that these parents volunteered their children to participate in a study that they were told was explicitly about how reading a story about a transgender character may influence children's beliefs about gender. Because this study focused on gender diversity, a topic that has been surrounded by debate and controversy in the media and politics, this likely led to bias in who was interested in having their children participate. In fact, almost half of the parents who were asked reported having heard of the books that inspired our study.” I would rate this as a “fatal flaw” of the study — a limitation of the study that so complicates the interpretation of the findings and so limits the generalizability of the findings as to make publication of the study of almost no real value in furthering our knowledge in this area.
2. The GESC (the scale used to assess gender essentialist beliefs) has some real problems. In fact – it’s a messy goulash of sex and gender identity statements, and I can’t imagine how a 5-year-old would interpret much of what is being asked (and I’m not sure how I would interpret many of the statements). For example – the statement “A kid can feel like a girl and a boy at the same time.” Respondents are supposed to indicate whether they think this statement is true or false. But what does it mean to “feel like a girl”? There is no way a young child can make sense of that question. Or how about the statement “Girls and boys are opposites.” Huh? Who talks like that when talking about males and females? “In” and “out” are opposites. Boys and girls, on average, are DIFFERENT in some ways, but not “opposites”. And if I can’t figure out how to respond to that statement, what hope does a young child have. And then there’s “Girls all act very different from one another.” OK – “yes”. They’re all individuals. But wait – “no” because, on average, they are more similar to each than to boys. But then again “yes”, because SOME girls act boyish and some don’t. What a mess.
3. The procedure included the following:
The experimenter asked three questions at different points through the story video, in order to encourage children to attend to the video and to scaffold their understanding, including: ‘What is different about Jazz/Blue?’, ‘Why is Jazz/Blue sad?’ and ‘Why is Jazz/Blue happy?’ Regardless of the child's answer, the researcher responded to these questions with (respectively), ‘Jazz has the body of a boy but is a girl on the inside’/‘Blue has the body of a red marker but is a blue marker on the inside’; ‘Jazz is sad because people treat her like a boy’/‘Blue is sad because people treat him like a red marker’; and ‘Jazz is happy because people treat her like a girl’/‘Blue is happy because people treat him like a blue marker’.
What does it mean for Jazz to have the body of a boy while being a girl “on the inside”? Isn’t the inside of our bodies – still part of our bodies? I really don’t know what the phrase “on the inside” means here, and I’m confident that most 5-year-olds would be baffled by a statement like that.
4. The study was poorly designed. Given that it was ostensibly focused on a CHANGE in the children’s beliefs about gender (or sex – I’m not sure which), it would have been better if the researchers had more directly measured change by measuring beliefs both before and after presenting the stories. More importantly, the assessments of transgender understanding and gender essentialism took place only once, immediately after the children were presented the stories. There was no follow-up a week or a month later to find out if any changes in beliefs and understanding were maintained. Moreover, some of the questions basically paralleled some of the “scaffolding” support statements made by the researchers. How do the researchers know whether the children’s answers really reflected some kind of deeply held belief vs reflected something close to a parroting of what the experimenter had said?
5. The entire study is premised on the claim that “gender essentialism” is a coherent set of beliefs, and that believing in gender essentialism is not compatible with a proper understanding of transgender individuals. Thus, for example, the authors state directly in the paper’s introduction (by way of justifying the need for the study) that “to our knowledge, prior research has not investigated the role of contact in children's essentialist beliefs about gender diversity.”
They also included a measure (the GESC) that provides a general “essentialist belief” score, and they were interested in whether children’s overall “essentialism” score would change after having being presented the story about a transgender child. However, the authors provide no evidence that the different components of an essentialist belief necessarily cohere into a single conceptual belief about gender, and their own results are not consistent with that view.
6. The authors’ predictions and findings don’t make a lot of sense in some cases. In particular, they predicted that children presented the “I Am Jazz” story would score higher than other children on the “gender mutability” subscale of the GESC. That IS what was found, but the problem is that the real lesson of “I am Jazz” is supposed to be that Jazz really was a girl all along (albeit a girl with a boy’s body – which presumably the children understood to mean a body with a penis) and that gender identity is NOT mutable. I would have thought that the authors of the study would have a better understanding than they apparently did of the lesson of the “I Am Jazz” story.
Similarly, the authors predicted that children presented the “I Am Jazz” story would score lower on some of the measures of gender essentialist stereotypes, and they DID find that; when children were asked about the behaviors of a boy raised on an island where there were no other males, children presented with the “I Am Jazz” story were more likely than other children to judge that the boy on the island would like to play with tea sets instead of trucks and would like to put on make-up rather than going fishing. Again, the problem here is that although Jazz DID exhibit very stereotypically female behavior preferences, there was no hint in the Jazz story that that was because of anything non-gender-essentialist. On the contrary, it was in part because of the fact that Jazz liked what are typically thought of as girl’s activities that Jazz’s mother decided that Jazz was really a girl. In other words, the Jazz story presents evidence supporting a belief in gender-identity-essentialist stereotypes. Apparently, the children who participated in the study did not understand this, and neither did the authors of the study.