A child saying they are a girl is play
Konstantin Kisin said:
“But we're all parents, and I've watched my son. I mean, he's a little younger than the age that we're talk- I mean, he's been identifying as everything from a train to a dolphin to a whatever, right? Children have imaginations that are somewhat detached from reality, don't they?”
Every parent has watched a young child insist they are a dinosaur or a superhero, so the comparison between imaginative play and gender identity feels immediately relatable and raises a genuine question about how clinicians distinguish the two.
The distinction Helen drew is the one clinicians use too: play is something a child knows is play, and it shifts with the afternoon. Gender identity is not play, and children experiencing a mismatch between their experienced gender and the one they were assigned don't move in and out of it between breakfast and lunch. What the comparison misses is persistence, consistency, and distress: the three things that characterise a clinical presentation and that are entirely absent from a child who has decided they are a locomotive for twenty minutes. There is also a category difference, which Helen named precisely: you cannot have a gender identity as a train because trains have no gender identity to speak of, whereas gender is a real dimension of human experience that all of us, including Konstantine's son, actually has. When this comparison is used to dismiss a family who has watched their child struggle, not play, for months or years, the cost is that the family internalises the idea that what they are witnessing isn't real, and the child loses the one thing they needed: to be taken seriously.
What I said at the time:
“But the- but I think probably. I mean, I don't know your son, but I think he's not identifying as a train. He's maybe pretending to be a train. But a train is a, is a, a vehicle, a motorized vehicle. You can't identify as a train. A dolphin is a different species of animal. You can't identify as a dolphin. But gender identity is, is, is an identity. You can identify as a gender. It's called gender identity.”
Trans children and their families, who face the dismissal of a real and assessed clinical presentation as equivalent to imaginative play.