An 11-year-old cannot know their gender identity
Andrew Gold said:
“When I was 11, I thought I could be a girl, I could be a dinosaur. Yeah, all sorts of things. Every day I had a very active imagination. So I was able to convince myself of all sorts of things.”
Drawing on personal childhood experience is relatable and disarming. The comparison to imagining being a dinosaur sounds like common sense: children fantasise, and treating those fantasies as fixed identity seems disproportionate.
A child who has said, every single day for years, stop calling me a girl, I am a boy, is not the same as a child who spent an afternoon convinced they could fly. Developmental psychology has been clear on this for decades: children have a stable, settled sense of gender identity from around four to six years old, and what clinicians see is persistent, consistent, insistent distress across years and contexts, not a passing fancy that arrived one morning and left after lunch. The dinosaur comparison works as a rhetorical move precisely because it sounds like common sense, but it collapses the distinction between imaginative play and a years-long experience of being recognised as the wrong person. When families hear that framing and believe it, the child who has been telling them who they are for as long as anyone can remember is told, once again, that nobody is listening.
What I said at the time:
“That kid who is we'll talk about the 11 year old. That kid is doesn't wake up 1 day and go downstairs and say, mama, I think I'm a boy. They they, for many years, as long as as many years as you can remember, have said, stop calling me a girl. I'm a boy. And it's very different from just saying, I'm gonna be a cat or I can fly or I can”
Trans children and their families, who are told that a child's long-standing and distressing experience of gender incongruence is equivalent to a childhood fantasy about being a dinosaur.