According to the advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, half of the states in America

have passed laws or policies restricting treatment for young people diagnosed with

gender dysphoria. That's the discomfort or distress that might occur

when someone's gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. Some of

those laws are on hold while court challenges work their way through the system.

The legislative debate on these measures has often been long on emotion but short on science and

medicine.

A new book seeks to use science and research to explain gender identity and treatments for transgender youth.

It's called Free to Be Understanding Kids and Gender Identity.

The author is Dr. Jack Turbine.

He's the founding director of the Gender Psychiatry Program at the University of California,

San Francisco.

Dr. Turbine, thanks for joining us.

Let's begin with sort of the basics.

Gender identity, sex assigned at birth.

What do they mean and how can they be different?

So gender identity is your psychological sense of yourself

in terms of masculinity and femininity.

It's extraordinarily complicated, right?

We know from research that there is a biological basis

of how we think about ourselves in terms of gender,

but then we interact with society and culture

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