Fox News Misrepresents Age of Child Profiled by ABC

Many with gender dysphoria say they knew at a young age that they were different. Fox News wants to turn that against trans youth and their families.

by Evan Urquhart

Among the most compelling facts about transgender identity is that, for many people, their gender difference first becomes clear to them at a young age, and is subsequently very stable. This fact is one of the fundamental components of the medical consensus that transition is the best and only known effective way of treating gender dysphoria. Now conservatives are suggesting that the early age of onset for this condition somehow makes it suspect.

First, the facts. A representative survey of transgender adults in the U. S. conducted by the Washington Post found that about a third of trans adults say that they knew their gender identity before the age of 10. A five-year longitudinal study of over 300 trans youth found that only 2.5 percent ceased to identify as trans over that period, and only one of the 300 ceased to identify as trans after starting puberty blockers or hormone therapy. The remarkable consistency of trans identity and the unusually low rate of regret is the reason despite widespread social paranoia, ignorance, and discrimination against transgender people it is not controversial in the field of medicine, drawing only a tiny fringe of religiously-motvated detractors in the medical profession.

These inconvenient facts are what conservatives hope to obscure, and one fairly new line of attack make seek to turn the very strength and consistency of trans identities into a weakness by emphasizing the young age of onset for gender dysphoria and hand waving the many years of consistency that must follow before any medical treatment is on the table. That’s what’s happening in two Fox News articles where a child who first expressed that she was a girl at 3, but is now 7, is repeatedly referred to as a 3-year-old. Elsa, a 7-year-old trans girl whose family was interviewed by ABC in a story about families fleeing their home states to escape discriinatory laws targeting trans youth, is first described as being 3 in Fox’s headline:

screenshot from Fox News

Fox’s story goes on to refer to the child as 3 two additional times before admitting, finally, that the child they’re referring to is now 7.

In any normal reckoning, this family’s story is a model of cautious treatment for gender dysphoria. A child who consistently identified herself as a girl from the age of 3 goes by a girl’s name and wears the clothing she likes, which is girls’ clothing. She will not need any medical interventions for several more years, and even then the interventions agreed on by the medical establishment will be safe, long trusted medications used for a variety of conditions with either no irreversible effects or only purely cosmetic ones. To say that it is unreasonable to treat such a longstanding condition with such a mild intervention would be absurd, and it is absurd, which is why Fox feels the need to play games with the age of the child and pretend that something as harmless as a name or clothing-style change is an irreversible, parent-led intervention.

In the follow-up to their own misleading article Fox quotes conservative activists who go along with the pretense that the child under discussion is 3, not 7. In one passage an activist from the conservative Media Research Center, perhaps not having got the memo that the child’s gender has been the same for four years, leans on the idea that children can change quickly to object to parents suppoting a child’s consistently expressed, stable gender identity, calling it sickening:

screenshot from Fox News

Not every young person with gender dysphoria will have clear and consistent symptoms at young age, and those whose onset of gender dysphoria happens at puberty have long been subject to scaremongering stories that insist it is illegitmate and socially-driven. Stories like this one from Fox are useful because they show there’s no right age for conservatives to take gender dysphoria seriously. Whether a trans person is 3 or 13 or 33 when they come out, those who oppose the existence of trans people will find some pretense for objection.