Child Development & 'Trans' Children

A compilation of X posts by EBSWA member @prof_curiosity1 giving a taste of the handbook the prof is producing along with Transgender Trend.

Child Development Theory

I have examined all the major (and most of the minor) child development theorists, in the writing of my handbook around child development and gender identity. And not one of these empirical theories supports the "transchild" construct. Indeed, all of them, individually, provide strong evidence against this construct. In addition, they explain why gender identity is attractive to vulnerable children, and why detransition is inevitable for most "transchildren." There is no empirical or theoretical basis for the "transchild." - a fabricated construct. One created by adults to be the public face of transgender ideology.

"The young child's hunger for his mother's presence is as great as his hunger for food, and her absence generates a powerful sense of loss and anger." John Bowlby, 1973 I often think about this quote in relation to "transchildren". How many of those children who take on a trans identity have endured unbearable feelings of loss at a young age? Feelings that unconsciously lead to self hatred and self harm.

Here is a chapter conclusion from the soon to be published Handbook. Let me know what you think... "Chapter 2 has reviewed the major empirical frameworks of twentieth century developmental psychology and assessed what they collectively establish about cognitive development, identity formation, and psychological maturation in childhood. These frameworks were developed independently, from incompatible theoretical starting points, by researchers who disagreed about fundamental questions of method, mechanism, and the relative contributions of biology and environment.

That they converge on the same conclusion is not an accident of selection. It is the most important evidential feature of this chapter's argument. That conclusion is this: there is no developmental mechanism by which a pre pubertal child could possess a fixed, innate, abstract gender identity independent of their biological sex. The concept is not merely unsupported by developmental science. Across the full breadth of the frameworks examined, it is contradicted by it."

Social Affirmation/ Transition

In the handbook there will be short takeaway summaries at the end of each discrete section. Here is the one on social affirmation/transition.

"Social affirmation reliably produces short term distress relief through well established psychological mechanisms - conflict reduction, social reinforcement, narrative containment, attachment security, and cognitive concreteness - none of which require the child's identity claim to be innately accurate.

The developmental costs of social affirmation are real and significant even in the absence of any medical intervention. It promotes identity foreclosure by converting developmental uncertainty into a social commitment that the child's environment reinforces and resists reversing. It misaligns with young children's cognitive capacities by presenting a conditional social arrangement as biological reality. It reinforces False Self compliance through conditional approval. It substantially increases the probability of subsequent medical intervention. And it embeds a child in a social ecology that makes genuine exploratory re-examination progressively more difficult.

The claim that social affirmation is reversible does not withstand developmental scrutiny. Its social components may be technically undoable. Its developmental consequences are not. The evidence based alternative is not rejection or indifference. It is support without premature identity commitment, the creation of a relational environment in which distress is taken seriously, explored carefully, and addressed through psychological support that preserves developmental flexibility rather than foreclosing it. Childhood is not a problem to be resolved. It is a process to be protected."