As our understanding of gender evolves, it’s important for caretakers of young people to understand this new reality. Diane Ehrensaft is a developmental and clinical psychologist and the cofounder and director of mental health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, as well as professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how to support a child exploring gender and why expressing gender in new ways might signal a cultural zeitgeist. Her book, written with co-author Michelle Jurkiewicz, is “Gender Explained: A New Understanding of Identity in a Gender Creative World.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd Even among adults who want to be open minded and supportive of transgender and gender diverse youth, the past few years can feel unsettling. It is true that in the U.S. and a lot of countries around the world, the number of children and adolescents seeking gender affirming care has risen rapidly since the early aughts. On top of that, a significant number of tweens and teens are presenting with what is sometimes called rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is to say, they seemed to the adults in their lives to be fine with a gender identity that aligned with their biological sex, until all of a sudden they weren’t. And the response from the adults in their lives can range from curious to alarmed, like, why is this happening all of a sudden? From KERA in Dallas, this is think I’m Krys Boyd. Maybe the first thing adults need to do is take a deep breath, seek a little context. Because if we look at cultural and historical forces, or even consider what it takes for kids to come out to their families as gender diverse changes that feel like they’ve taken place overnight might start to look more gradual and less surprising. At least, that is how it looks to a professional who’s worked in pediatric gender care for 35 years. Diane Ehrensaft is a developmental and clinical psychologist, co-founder and director of mental health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. Her new book is called Gender Explained A New Understanding of Identity in a Gender Creative World. Diane, welcome to think.
Diane Ehrensaft Oh, I’m so glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Krys Boyd I want to start with a very basic question. What does it mean to be gender diverse? And is that different from being transgender?
Diane Ehrensaft I would think of transgender under the umbrella of gender diverse, and think about gender diverse as anybody who lives outside or thinks outside the binary boxes of boy or girl, man or woman. And that may range from who they say they are to how they want to do gender in the world, how they want to dress, things they want to do. Transgender would be a subcategory of, a wonderful population of gender diverse. Sometimes I call gender creative people. And I’d like to say that probably all of us have some gender diversity of creativity within us once we take a look.
Krys Boyd What can we know from the numbers of families seeking care for their gender diverse children and teenagers? About how many young people are identifying as something outside the sort of traditional Western gender binary?
Diane Ehrensaft What we know now is more children and adolescents are showing up saying, either I’m not the gender you think I am, or I want to do gender differently than what the norms are in the culture community where I live. Those numbers of kids showing up has grown astronomically in the last period of time. It looks like an evolution turning into a revolution. I am, involved in one of the first four pediatric gender programs in the United States since we started our program. The number has expanded well beyond 60 at this point, even with some efforts to, close down some of the programs. So we see more kids showing up. I believe that many of them always were there, but they didn’t have a name for it or didn’t feel safe enough to express it. And I think we’ve also had the culture having its effects on letting people know that gender can be infinite, infinite, not just binary and two boxes.
Krys Boyd Diane, just to be clear, professional gender care can include medical interventions, but it doesn’t always. Right? What other kinds of support might be appropriate?
Diane Ehrensaft To be clear, you are absolutely right. So pediatric gender care is developing a gender health plan unique to every child who comes in for care. That could include. Medical interventions, which could be puberty blockers, gender affirming hormones, and rarely for youth gender affirming surgeries. But it also could be include. Basically getting a child’s gender in focus, listening to them, finding out with them who they are and what would make them feel most comfortable living their gender, as we call it. And that’s what we call developing a gender health plan for every child and every child being a snowflake. And parents are always included as, the circle around the child as we think about that.
Krys Boyd Many people are aware that transgender and gender diverse young people face an increased risk of mental health problems, including suicidal behavior. Can you give us some context for this, though? Like like, to what extent are those risks linked to the mere fact of being gender diverse, and how much might be tied up in distress over how one is treated by their own family or community?
Diane Ehrensaft Both can happen that a person may feel internal distress simply because, for example, somebody got it wrong and they weren’t born in the body that would represent the gender they know themselves to be. And that’s an internal feeling. The majority of time, the kinds of problems that kids are suffering from because they are gender diverse has to do with what I call social gender dysphoria. And that is not an internal phenomenon, but it’s the reaction of people around them to their gender that makes them feel anxious, not safe, perhaps depressed, scared, and simply inhibited from being able to express themselves and live comfortably in their own gender.
Krys Boyd So if family acceptance of a young person’s gender identity is a protective factor, what does that look like and how is it distinguished from simply doing whatever a child wants?
Diane Ehrensaft I’m so glad to hear that, Krys, because a lot of people hear about the kind of pediatric gender care I do and say, oh, because you say, if you want to know a child’s gender, listen, don’t tell. That means before they even get the first sentence out of their mouth, you say, okay, that’s who you are. We’ll do everything you ask of us, and we’re going to ask parents to do the same. Absolutely not. It is not how it works. What we’re saying is, yes, children can know their own gender. We have to listen for parents. That’s a really tough job. When you expected one thing and find something else about your child when it comes to gender. Because we’ve always thought that was bedrock. But we take it from there. And our model, for example, at my clinic is called a family based model, where we weave together what a child is saying, what they need from their parents, family, schools and the communities, like concentric circles one after the other. And how we can put that together. Many parents will say, I do support my child. I want them to never feel unsafe. I want them to conform to what’s expected of them, and that is a form of support. But it’s not one that’s necessarily healthy for a gender diverse or transgender child. The latter category being children who talk about their identity. I am not the gender identity you thought I was. You thought I was a boy. I actually experienced myself as a girl. You thought I was a girl. I’m actually non-binary. Meaning I’m all all in any rather than either or. So we talk about acceptance as a certain subset of support, and that means accepting what our child is telling us, accepting who they are, and not operating on the basis of what our dreams are for our children, but the dreams they have for themselves.
Krys Boyd So there are our dreams as parents for our children, especially parents who are raised, you know, to believe there were sort of two choices and everybody fit into one or the other. But not all parents of gender diverse youth who struggle to fully accept their identity are just angry at their kids for breaking norms, right? Some are worried about how their children’s identity will affect the rest of their lives. In a world that may not be willing to embrace them for whoever they are. What do you say to parents in that situation?
Diane Ehrensaft What I said. Appearances, of course, are worried and there are many people who don’t have what we call gender literacy, which is to understand the gender in healthy ways happens beyond two boxes and that we should celebrate gender in all its infinity. So there is a world out there that may not be accepting of your child, but the best protection you can give your child is your acceptance, and that will give them the resilience. And in the meantime, we adults have a responsibility and not just the parents, but all of us, to be ambassadors and advocates for children and adults of all genders so that they can feel that they can have a safe and what I call gender healthy life, defined as living in the gender that is most authentic to you, filled with acceptance and absence, aspersion on you.
Krys Boyd The term gender literacy is interesting in light of the fact that around the country, a lot of states are racing to pass laws that prohibit the discussion of people outside the gender binary, even existing. I mean, to what extent have schools always sort of taught about gender, but taught us in a very traditional way without necessarily including it in the curriculum?
Diane Ehrensaft To a large extent, depending on what year we pinpoint, we have all grown up and be socialized in a curriculum that talked about boys will be boys and girls will be girls. That is part of a curriculum. And that has shifted dramatically in recent times, at least in our culture, to be much more expansive and include children of all races, ethnicities and now all genders, all sexual identities. So we have expanded, and I believe that’s the new Zeit Geist of gender and diversity in general that has trickled down to the lowest grades, including preschools. And that makes a lot of people very nervous because it challenges the bedrock that we all grew up with. At least I did. I’m, in my late 70s, and I went to school in Chicago, Illinois, where part of the rules, not the curriculum, that every girl had to wear a skirt to school, rain or shine. Subzero weather is because girls wore skirts to school, and that was simply accepted. It’s no longer accepted, and I just use that as an example of change in school policy. And I think it reflects also, there’s been a lot of changes in school curricula, which is why some people get really nervous because we get nervous when there’s changes in the culture of something, and in this case, as profound as gender.
Krys Boyd Why does change in gender and the boundaries around gender make us nervous? Like, what did we think we knew about the world when we could automatically put people in either one box or the other?
Diane Ehrensaft It had order to it. And if you are a parent, you would already know one thing that you thought you could count on. Which is why people will ask, are you having a boy or a girl? It situates your child and lets you know how to start your dreams for your child. And if we take that away, it feels chaotic because gender has been bedrock in our culture. I did an anthropological search. I couldn’t find any culture that didn’t organize somehow by gender, but not like we do. There’s a lot of variation, but gender is a thing and every culture. And when we do a shake up that I think has happened, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, at least in our country, it makes people really nervous and it will settle again to a new bedrock. But I think we’re in that in-between stage right now, which is why it makes people anxious. It makes parents worried, makes people confused. Does all this controversial talk about gender and pediatric gender care, is making front pages of newspapers and entering into legislations?
Krys Boyd Diane, how does any one of us cisgender or gender creative form a gender identity in the first place?
Diane Ehrensaft I’ll tell you what I learned when I was in school, and then we’ll amend it a little bit. What I learned in school and and my area of study in both undergraduate and graduate school was gender. And what I learned is, when you’re born, somebody says it’s a boy. It’s a girl. Usually based on looking at what’s between your legs. Sometimes there’s some ambiguity about that and it becomes more complicated. But we’ll keep it simple for a moment. So you learn. Your parents learn. I have a boy. I have a girl. In the first two years of life that’s communicated to the child. So they learn I am boy or I am girl. They have no idea what that means. They just know it’s a self label that fits. Then between 2 and 6 years old, they learn what it means to be boy or girl. And what I learned in school is that if during those 2 to 6 year period, you are still in an age of magical thinking, if a frog can turn into a prince, a girl can turn into a boy or a boy into a girl. But by the time you’re six years old, you give that up and you realize, nope, there’s no back seas. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls. And then you spend the rest of your life learning all the nuances of that. What we’ve learned more recently as well, it doesn’t quite work like that the way your gender identity has some core to it. When you’re born. And for most people, that designation on your birth certificate is a match for the gender you know yourself to be. But for some people. It’s not a match. What it says about your sex, male or female. And your birth certificate, for example, does not match what your brain and your mind is telling you about who you are. And that’s your gender identity, and that belongs to you. And it it’s certainly shaped by the world around you. But essentially it’s an internal thing of yours. And what we’ve seen now is more and more people have a freedom to express that. Whereas in the past, at least in our culture, in the last couple centuries, we didn’t give people that choice and basically said, there’s no such thing, or if there’s such a thing, we’re going to, fix it for you because that’s either a disease or male adaptation or confusion. And now we have what I call the circular loop between parent and child and school and child, where the child has a sense of who they are. And if they’re lucky, they will get it mirrored back to them. Somebody will hold a mirror about their gender and say, okay, we see it, we have it. We always thought you were a boy, but now you’re saying you’re a girl. So tell me more about that. And through that it’s not. That’s how somebodies gender identity happens, but how they can claim it for themselves and let other people know about it.
Krys Boyd What you do in this book is offer context for what feels to many adults, like an overnight phenomenon. You look back in history and you find, even in Western cultures, a fair amount of malleability in how people embody gender norms. In the 18th century, wealthy men might wear lace and and wigs and make up. The 20th century, though, saw enormous shifts right in acceptable gender norms. Tell us about some of those that we don’t even notice anymore because they have become so acceptable.
Diane Ehrensaft I’m going to start from the mid 20th century and. I was at that time a child growing up. And from that little girl who wore a skirt to school, for which my granddaughter in the 21st century said, grandma, why didn’t you protest? I mean, that was, she knew me as a feminist and made no sense to her. It’s it just wasn’t even on her mind then. So come the 1950s, 1960s, we have the beginning of a feminist movement. We have Betty for dance book, that just, hit the bookshelves. And women after women began reading The Feminine Mystique. And we had I, we talk about it in the book, and I should mention that this book, wasn’t written just by me alone, but my my coauthor, Michelle Drinkwitz, as well, who is a psychologist of a younger generation than me. And we thought we should have two generations writing together about this. But if you remember, To Kill a mockingbird, one of the main characters is Scout. And Scout was a girl whose gender expressions not necessarily her identity, but how she did it at her gender, which is called your gender expressions did not fit the cultural norms norms of a 19, and that case would have been 1930s 1940s little girl and everybody love Scout for that, and everybody loves Scout in the book and in the movie. Then we see in the 1960s and explosion, there is a youth movement. There is a women’s movement, which was called the second wave women’s movement, where we were all and I say weak because I was part of that movement. We were challenging gender norms. We were asking, why men? Why can’t men have long hair? And they did. Why can’t men wear beads? And they did. Why do women have to wear makeup? Why do what about family roles? What about women in the workforce? What about men taking care of children? All of this was around gender roles and gender expressions from there. We certainly had. That was embedded in a civil rights movement that started before. Then we went to, a gay and lesbian movement very much around sexual identities and the right for people to live in their authentic sexual identity, again, with acceptance and without aspersion. And in there always interwoven, was what became a very strong and present transgender community and movement. So we have seen this bubbling up for now, almost three quarters of a century, and it was an evolution to where we are now. So we’ll just tell you a story. I’ve been doing clinical work since 1968, and what used and I work with children, and what used to happen is parents would come to me and say, oh my God, I think my child may be gay. And I would say, let’s take a deep breath and sit back and let’s just ask the question, well, might your child be gay? And what does that mean if your child is gay? And that went along and then we moved to another decade, and that would be the 1990s. I noticed people would come in and start to say, you know what? I’m okay if my kid is gay. And I think that was a result of a really positive, gay and lesbian activist community, that seeped into the culture. And so I’m okay if my child is gay, but I cannot live with trans. And now, in 2024, we have yet another iteration in the gender evolution, which is, I think I get the trans thing a boy can become a girl and a girl become a boy. But my child just said they’re non-binary. That makes no sense to me. How could you be both? So we see this change over time and what feels acceptable and what feels new and different. And I think what is new and different again, particularly when we were all raised with gender, as bedrock is a shake up and I hope we can get beyond that shake up to really recognize there’s a two. There is now a new cycle of gender, which is gender in all its permutations and combinations, and that all of it is healthy.
Krys Boyd Is there some reason it has long been easier for women and girls to challenge feminine gender norms than for men and boys to push back on masculine ones?
Diane Ehrensaft I would say the reason for that is patriarchy and sexism. The there’s always been a bit more wiggle room. Even though women were supposed to stay in their place for women to step out of the gender norms. Not that they didn’t take flak for it because they did and still do. But that in contrast to men stepping out of their gender roles to be more quote unquote, feminine. So tomboy, that’s often, a badge of resilience and, you know, kind of, feistiness. Sissy. Not so much. And this is often what’s ascribed to men. It’s still scattered about men who step out of traditional gender roles, because it is a real place and a patriarchy. And we can see in our country now that there are some who would like to go back to the good old days where, we would have that kind of order. And for the and this feels like disorder. And I would say, no, it’s just a new order.
Krys Boyd I mean, there are also now ways to explore gender that are more subtle than what you call in the book binary box jumping, which is to say, ways of thinking around gender that don’t automatically assume everybody ultimately fits best into either the male or the female side of things.
Diane Ehrensaft I think that’s absolutely right. And we in the beginning of the 20th century, those thinking about this resonates to the term gender spectrum, where you could slide along a line and, you know, any place along that line, you think like a color spectrum, that there’s just an infinite number of combinations of, color you can make. And we thought about that around gender, but then I thought, that’s great, but it’s also very two dimensional boy on one end girl and the other male and one female and the other. So I got this idea. Well, how about if we did something was more three dimensional, and I came up with something that I, called the gender web because like a spider web, it has lots of different threads and it spreads in different directions. And for the gender web, it’s made of nature, nurture and culture. And all of those account for every single one of our gender webs. And everybody listening today has their own gender web. Nobody’s is like anybody else’s. So that’s like fingerprints that you’re all weaving together your unique gender web where it isn’t like fingerprints is fingerprints. The ones we’re born with are the ones you’ll die with. Your gender word will change over time. So that if I right now heard about, girls having to wear skirts in the middle of a blizzard in Chicago, I definitely would protest. So I’ve changed in my gender thinking, and I’ve certainly changed. For example, my gender expressions that you wear rarely find me in a skirt today. So I think the idea is. If we switch metaphors. If you think of your own gender as a canvas that you will paint with your paintbrush the way that feels most authentic and fitting to you, and then think about, does it feel safe to express that in the world? Or, you know, maybe I should be a little more subtle here and there. You come up with another kind of subtlety. It’s just the subtlety of gender that it’s not one or the other. It can have lots of different shadings. You have three different things you’re putting together your body, your gender identity, and that’s in your mind and your brain. And it can very well relates to your body. And then you also have how you’re going to do your gender in the world. So that gives you a lot more than two boxes if you think of that. And a paintbrush and a variety of colors you can mix together.
Krys Boyd Diane, as we’ve noted, for some people, this, apparent change is making them anxious. Why are we drawn to worst case scenario information about some evolving phenomenon when we feel anxious?
Diane Ehrensaft Will be anything we don’t know. And haven’t counted on. Can create anxiety. I wish I had the answer completely as to why people have such fantastical notions of what’s going on here, about gender and how dangerous it is. And I know that’s been particularly true recently around. Medical gender affirming options for people under the age of 18. And I think if we go back to history, there are many changes that have made people anxious. Until we get used to them. And I’ll give you an example, because one of the other areas I’ve worked with worked in is reproductive technology and all the different ways that you can make a baby. And when that first occurred, which is well over a century ago, it made people really anxious because that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. And when you count on something to be the way it’s supposed to be and you find out it’s no longer that way. Those are moments in history where we see a lot of anxiety. For example, when people first said, discovered, hey, the world is round, it’s not flat. There was an absolutely an uproar against that. That couldn’t possibly be. You look out, you see flat no round can’t be round. I think we have that around gender that it does raise anxiety and bring up these concerns. And I think what we have to find is a way to be able to talk about that and to find out what the facts are, not what the fantasies are. For example, all the research I know and I’ve been part of this research, has been demonstrating that children who are good candidates for either, switching from one gender to another, that’s called a social transition. Nothing medical involved or receiving either puberty blockers to put a temporary pause on puberty, puberty, or gender affirming hormones to allow your body to develop in a way that matches your gender rather than your designated sex at birth. That all the research is saying showing positive results for the kids that have any of these options. Yet. The information is, dangerous. It’s new and different. We don’t always have these options. Certainly the medical options were not always there. So we have to get used to them planned.
Krys Boyd A moment ago, you said something about children who are good candidates for these kinds of professional gender. Interventions tend to do very well. When you say good candidates, it makes it sound like maybe there are bad candidates like you don’t automatically kind of rubberstamp every child’s request for these interventions. Tell us about that.
Diane Ehrensaft So glad you asked that because as I think I referred, to this phenomenon earlier, there is a belief that that is what we do as practitioners. So I will mention that in our clinic at, UCSF, as in many of the clinics around the country, we are an interdisciplinary team. So we have psychologists, social workers, medical providers, both in pediatric endocrinology and adolescent medicine. We have a director of education, we have a director of advocacy, and we also have legal counsel. And so that is a team around which we organize the care of one particular child, and one particular family comes with that child. So when I say good candidate, it’s not like we’re putting people up for election to see if they’re a good candidate. It’s basically developing a gender health plan for every child, and some of them may come in. To a clinic visit saying, I would I would like to have gender affirming hormones. And by the way, could you write me the prescription today? Or maybe even, you know, if you could have started it yesterday, that would have been great, too. So we listen to that because we hear a child is very, usually that’s an adolescent, a teenager very anxious to get going on their gender journey from wherever it was to wherever they want it to go. So that’s the beginning of a conversation of getting to know them, getting to know their family, getting to know exactly what it is they have in mind that makes them want to have testosterone, and getting to know their history and making sure there’s no barriers where someone says, you can’t have that. Because we don’t think you should. So we use the child as the nucleus and expert of their own experience, but with experts teaming up with them, their parents are experts of them, but they may have blind spots. We like to think of ourselves as having had training to be able to indeed start with listening to a child, listening to the core circle around them, which is their family, and being able to. Come around that circle and ask a lot of questions and learn more to get that particular child in focus. If it looks like that child has is really clear and has been clear for a while about what their gender identity is, that they’re really clear about what we call their body embodiment goals, their gender and body weight and goals of how they would like to coordinate their body to be in sync with the gender they know themselves to be. If there isn’t something else driving that, other than the core gender identity and desire to be able to live authentically in a gender and feel like a match as they’re painting their own canvas for the inside of the outside. And we look for anything else that might not be getting in the way. We have therefore been then involved in what we call a gender health assessment, where everybody weighs in, and then we come up with a plan. And so that child may be a very good candidate for gender affirming care medically. And what we always talk to parents about who are nervous sometimes about medical intervention because they’ll be the ones who are signing off on it legally is let’s talk about all the risks and benefits of going forward. But let’s also talk about the risks and benefits, and particularly think about risks of not going forward. Because what we’re finding is that why many of the kids are suffering is because they’re being held back from being able to live confidently, proudly and safely and the gender they know themselves to be. And we want to make sure that as much as we can, we don’t prevent a child from being able to do that because we think that’s everybody’s human right to live in a gender that’s most authentic. And we certainly always understand as we do this work, that children are not short adults. And whereas we believe that the experts are themselves. We wouldn’t put them out independently to get their own apartments aged ten. And we would. And the same around gender is we put together our own expertise as adults as well, to work with them as their health mates in that.
Krys Boyd I want to talk about this phenomenon that has a lot of adults confused, in some cases alarmed the apparent rapid rise in what is called rapid onset gender dysphoria. First of all, what does that term refer to?
Diane Ehrensaft What it refers to. And it was a made up diagnosis. It’s not a real diagnosis is, of an increasing number of teens. Typically, girls are designated female at birth who are suddenly erupting with an announcement to their parents often that they’re not the gender that their parents think they are. They’re another gender. And it looks like in this situations, there was nothing to suggest something from the early childhood that they would be at this moment in their adolescence, and those fear that it’s part of a fad, a craze, and that some of these kids are being groomed or influenced by wanting to be accepted by others. So they hop on the gender ban bandwagon. And that is what’s under the umbrella of rapid onset gender dysphoria. That. Phenomenon for a particular person. It could happen and we’re always paying attention to that. But as the typical trajectory. Absolutely not for the, couple of reasons. Number one, what what’s been found is that many youth have known for years and years what their gender identity is, or that they’ve been exploring it or questioning it, and they keep it under wraps, or they tell anybody but their parents. So they’ve known for a long time, but it hasn’t been evident to the outside world. The other side of that is parents are experts of their children, but they also have blind spots, so they may miss it when it’s there to be seen. So this again, is not a real diagnosis, but I’d say more helpful instead of rapid onset gender dysphoria, to think instead of rapid onset parental discovery. And that’s not easy for parents. And parents need a lot of support and recognition for what this moment and the journey might be for them. And I would encourage us to think more about that than rapid onset gender dysphoria.
Krys Boyd What do you recommend to parents and other family members who really do wish to support their children’s gender diverse identities, but find themselves reeling for a while if those identities come as a shock to them?
Diane Ehrensaft And here’s what I would recommend. And what we often do routinely in our program is to make sure the parents have a room of their own, to be able to go through their own gender journey while their kids have a room of their own to go through theirs, and then you can also bring them together. But there are some things parents need that support. They need to have an understanding that there are phases here, and the first 1st May be shock and fear, anxiety, confusion, understandably so. You know, I always thought I had a daughter and now my child is saying they’re my son. That’s a lot to take in. If it feels sudden, and even if it doesn’t. So I would say it’s what I call the firewall. Approach a room of your own to be able to talk about all that is going through you and how it feels. And so that’s the beginning, not the end of the journey. And always in that journey, I think, is the goal is to work through whatever sadness some people grief, some people call it mourning that you have and then be able to get beyond it to what does my child need from me? And what is it about my dreams that’s clashing with their articulations of who they are? And so to work on that as well, and what supports the parents need to, for example, I’ve done a lot of grandparents groups and they too can be the best of friends, are not such good friends to their children who are reeling or not reeling at all in raising a gender creative child. And I remind the grandparents, your children need your support right now, and how can you help them with that? And they’ve really often been the shakers and the movers and recognizing because they’re one step removed from their grandchildren so they sometimes can move more easily. But everybody I think needs to move. And by doing the following, we all have. Every one of us has what I call gender angels, and gender goes our gender angels may be dormant or we have to, you know, kind of either fortify or germinate them are the parts of us that can support gender in all its colors and hues, our gender goals, our messages from our own childhood or the culture around us from our adulthood that say, this is all weird. This makes no sense. This makes me feel uncomfortable. If God wanted it to be that way, God would have made it that way. And really, I think of it is. Somewhere between a dialog and a war between the gender angels and the gender ghosts. And my hope is the gender angels will have the stronger voices and win out over the gender ghosts that each of us has. And you can all check ourselves for. Like, how do we feel when we see somebody who we think is a man and has full makeup on? Is that okay or not okay? And if not, okay, what does it bring up for us and just be able to do that kind of reflective thinking? It’s what we call in the book full spectrum thinking about gender, both our own. And I’d also invite us all to think back to your question, Krys, before, how do we get a gender identity? How did you get your gender identity? What exactly happened that you know who you are today? How did that happen? Because it happened for each one of us. So that would be part of it as well.
Krys Boyd Diane, do you think the sort of temporary phenomenon, maybe it’s not temporary of the last decade or so of the gender reveal party during pregnancy is not long for this world?
Diane Ehrensaft I’m so glad you asked that question, because it’s definitely there, still happening. But the very person who did the first gender reveal party has basically stepped back and said, I’m sorry I ever introduced that, and I do not recommend them because that particular mom ended up with a gender diverse child who identified as non-binary. We can’t really know our child’s gender. We can know the sex that was designated for them, but it is a mistake to celebrate something that you actually don’t know yet. And so she put out a call to stop the gender reveal parties. However, I they didn’t all stop and I guess people have maybe they could change it to a sex related party. And just even if you have one to know, you may have a different party later. And, maybe with a different announcement about your child’s, identity.
Krys Boyd Diane Ehrensaft is a developmental and clinical psychologist, co-founder and director of mental health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. Her book, written with Michelle Jacoby, is called Gender Explained A New Understanding of Identity in a Gender Creative World. Diane, thank you for this conversation.
Diane Ehrensaft Thank you so much for having me and asking all the questions that, made me think. And I do hope will help other people just to be able to think about this.
Krys Boyd You can find us on Facebook and Instagram by searching for Cobra. Think you can use the same search term? Wherever you get your podcast is, subscribe to ours, or you can always find back episodes of the show and the podcast available at our website. Thanks for your time. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
