This gender moment didn’t happen overnight
Think from KERA
KERA
4.7 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Even among adults who want to be open-minded and supportive of transgender and gender-diverse youth, the past few years can feel unsettling. |
| 0:18.8 | It is true that in the U.S. and a lot of countries around the world, |
| 0:22.3 | the number of children and adolescents seeking gender-affirming care has risen rapidly since the |
| 0:28.0 | early aughts. On top of that, a significant number of tweens and teens are presenting with what |
| 0:32.9 | is sometimes called rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which is to say they seemed to the adults |
| 0:39.2 | in their lives to be fine with the gender identity that aligned with their biological sex |
| 0:43.2 | until all of a sudden they weren't. And the response from the adults in their lives can range |
| 0:48.7 | from curious to alarmed. Like why is this happening all of a sudden? From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. |
| 0:56.7 | I'm Chris Boyd. Maybe the first thing adults need to do is take a deep breath, seek a little context, |
| 1:02.1 | because if we look at cultural and historical forces or even consider what it takes for kids to |
| 1:07.4 | come out to their families as gender diverse, changes that feel like they've |
| 1:11.8 | taken place overnight might start to look more gradual and less surprising. At least that is how |
| 1:17.6 | it looks to a professional who's worked in pediatric gender care for 35 years. Diane Aaron Saft is a |
| 1:24.3 | developmental and clinical psychologist, co-founder and director of mental health at the |
| 1:28.4 | Child and Adolescent Gender Center, and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of |
| 1:33.6 | California, San Francisco. Her new book is called Gender Explained, a new understanding of identity in a |
| 1:40.0 | gender creative world. Diane, welcome to think. Oh, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me. |
| 1:46.8 | I want to start with a very basic question. What does it mean to be gender diverse and is that |
| 1:52.3 | different from being transgender? I would think of transgender under the umbrella of gender diverse and think about gender diverse |
| 2:03.1 | as anybody who lives outside or thinks outside the binary boxes of boy, girl, man, woman. |
| 2:14.6 | And that may range from who they say they are to how they want to do gender in the |
| 2:22.3 | world, how they want to dress, things they want to do. Transgender would be a subcategory of a wonderful |
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