Parental attention turns a passing remark into an identity
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“Couldn't it be that a boy saying to their parents, "I'm a girl, I'm a girl," and their parents just stop the world and everyone focuses on that? Couldn't that be enough motivation for them to stay with that and be persistent and consistent? And then you would medicalize that child because they would be able to report for the last two years they've been saying this. And all it is is their parents maybe were a little too busy, and that was their source of attention.”
Parental attention-seeking is a well-recognised behaviour in children, and the idea that a child might repeat a statement to get a reaction is intuitive to any parent. Framing persistence as a product of reinforcement rather than genuine identity sounds like a reasonable psychological concern.
Good clinical assessment of a child's gender identity does not rest on what a parent reports across the dinner table. Clinicians use structured psychological interviews, detailed developmental histories, and careful observation across multiple settings, precisely because they understand that children are complex and that context matters. What they are looking for is a pattern: distress that is consistent across home, school, and peer relationships, that persists when nobody is paying special attention to it, and that does not shift when circumstances change. The research following children over years does not find parental reinforcement at the root of persistent gender dysphoria; what it finds is that children whose distress endures across contexts, and is properly assessed, are the ones whose wellbeing depends on being taken seriously rather than sent home with a theory about attention-seeking.
What I said at the time:
“Well, luckily psychologists, counselors, and doctors are a bit cleverer than, than, than that.”
Children with genuine gender dysphoria whose families are told by this framing that clinical assessment is naive and that the child is simply seeking attention, delaying or preventing access to appropriate care.