The Beyond Gender episode on the classification of gender identity opens up a more difficult question than whether the phrase “transgender child” is true or false. The deeper question is what happens when a society creates a category, gives it institutional support, and then applies it to children whose lives are still unfolding.
The discussion, hosted by Mia Hughes with Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin, centres on their argument that transgender children can exist without requiring us to believe that children possess an innate gender identity, or that some children are “born in the wrong body”. This is an important distinction. Byrne and Gorin are not defending the metaphysics of gender identity. They are asking whether a category can be socially made and still be real.
Their argument draws on Ian Hacking’s idea of “making up people”. Some classifications describe things that exist independently of being classified. Other classifications help bring into being the kinds of people they name. Once a category exists, institutions gather around it. Experts define it. Parents interpret children through it. Children may then come to understand themselves through it. The classification and the classified person begin to interact. Hacking called this a “looping effect”.
On this view, “transgender child” is not simply a timeless natural kind waiting to be discovered. It is a modern social, medical, political and familial category. It has become available as a way of interpreting certain children: children who may be gender nonconforming, distressed by their bodies, intensely imaginative, socially displaced, same-sex oriented, searching for recognition, or caught in family and institutional dynamics that adults do not yet fully understand.
The strongest point made by Byrne and Gorin is that social construction does not equal non-existence. Police officers, bishops, waiters, patients, refugees and school captains all exist because social practices make them possible. It would be absurd to say that because a role is made, it is therefore unreal. The category “transgender child” may be historically produced, but once it is used by parents, clinicians, campaigners, schools and children themselves, it becomes part of the social world.
Note: Michel Foucault made a related argument in his work on discourse, knowledge and power. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Foucault examined how systems of description do not merely name pre-existing realities, but help produce the objects, subjects and fields of knowledge they appear to describe. Categories such as “madness”, “delinquency”, “sexuality” or “normality” are not simply neutral labels. They emerge through institutions, expert vocabularies, administrative practices, clinical observation, moral regulation and forms of self-understanding. This does not mean that the experiences gathered under these descriptions are unreal. Rather, it suggests that discourse shapes the conditions under which they can be recognised, spoken about, governed and lived.
Mia Hughes accepts much of Hacking’s framework, but presses the more urgent question.
What does this category do when it is applied to a child?
This is where the discussion becomes ethically serious. A child is not merely being named. A developmental path may be redirected. A gender nonconforming boy may cease to be understood as a boy with atypical interests, or a boy likely to grow into a gay man, and instead be placed inside a transition narrative. A girl in distress may cease to be understood through trauma, puberty, sexual anxiety, social discomfort or family conflict, and instead be interpreted as evidence of an identity that must be affirmed.
The danger is not only that the category may be wrong. The danger is that it may become self-confirming.
Once adults name the child in this way, organise family life around it, involve schools, seek clinical support, and offer a medical pathway, the category begins to stabilise the very identity it claims merely to recognise.
This is why the discussion cannot be reduced to the sterile question of whether transgender children “exist”. A better question is:
What is being gathered under this category, and what is being lost when other descriptions are displaced?
John Dewey’s reflections in Art as Experience are useful here. Dewey warned against the fallacy of rigid classification and the related fallacy of definition. He was not hostile to concepts. He understood that concepts are necessary. But he argued that their proper role is to guide attention back into the moving complexity of experience. Concepts should help us approach life more carefully. They should not fasten living material into fixed essences.
Dewey’s point is particularly important when the object of classification is human experience. We may need names, terms and categories, but these should remain provisional instruments. They should help us ask better questions. They should not become substitutes for perception.
Applied to gender identity, Dewey would likely caution both sides. To say that a child simply “is transgender” risks turning a contested category into an essence. It treats a complex developmental, symbolic and emotional process as though it has already disclosed its final meaning. Yet to say that there are “no transgender children” can also become too rigid if it prevents us from attending to the real experiences that are being named, however inadequately, by the category.
The issue, then, is not whether classification can be avoided. It cannot. The issue is whether classification remains in contact with experience.
This is also where a Jungian and depth-psychological approach may help move the discussion forward. Much of the public debate about gender identity is conducted through a “thinking” orientation. It focuses on definitions, rights, categories, evidence, diagnosis, institutions, law and medical ethics. These are necessary questions. Without conceptual clarity, serious harms can be hidden behind compassionate language.
But Jung also insisted on the importance of the feeling function. Feeling, in this sense, does not mean emotional indulgence or sentimentality. It means the apprehension of value, meaning, symbolic charge and psychic significance. It asks what an image, identification or fantasy means in the life of the person who carries it.
Children do not first encounter the world as political theorists, clinicians or philosophers. They encounter it symbolically, bodily, imaginatively and relationally. A wish to become the other sex, a refusal of the body, an attraction to another social role, or a longing for transformation may be many things at once. It may be distress. It may be imitation. It may be trauma. It may be erotic development. It may be same-sex orientation struggling for form. It may be rebellion against sex stereotypes. It may be a symbolic drama that has not yet found language.
Depth psychology asks us to hold these possibilities open, rather than forcing them too quickly into a single administrative category.
The symbolic field around gender is ancient. It contains images of transformation, doubling, disguise, rebirth, exile, the mask, the mirror, the androgyne, the wounded child, the lost twin, the anima and animus, the trickster, and the soul seeking form. These images should not be treated as diagnoses. They do not “explain” a child. But they may help us recognise that gender distress and cross-sex identification often carry meanings that are not exhausted by politics, medicine or rights language.
A mythopoetic approach may therefore be worth exploring. Modern societies have few shared rites for puberty, embodiment, sexual maturation, loss, limitation or identity formation. Into this vacuum come powerful new myths: the authentic self trapped inside the wrong body, the heroic transition, the rescue of the suffering child, the rebirth into recognition, the body as error, the social role as salvation.
These stories have force because they speak to real psychic needs. That does not make them true. It makes them powerful.
A mythopoetic approach would not begin by asking how quickly a child can be affirmed into an identity category. Nor would it begin by dismissing the child’s experience as false consciousness. It would ask what story is being lived. Who is telling the story? What role has the child been given? What part is being played by parents, schools, clinicians, peer groups, media and campaigners? What alternative stories have been excluded? What would allow the child to remain in development rather than being fixed into a type?
This does not remove the need for ethical judgement. In fact, it sharpens it. Children need protection from adult projections, from institutional fashions, from medical overreach, and from categories that foreclose their future. But they also need adults who can listen to distress without panic, and who can respond to symbolic material without literalising it too quickly.
The most useful development of the Beyond Gender discussion would be to move beyond the binary of existence and non-existence. The better question is not simply “are there transgender children?” The better question is: what kinds of children, experiences, conflicts, desires and symbols are being gathered under this name, and what happens to them once they are gathered there?
A Deweyan approach reminds us that concepts should return us to experience rather than imprison experience in definition. A Jungian approach reminds us that experience is not only cognitive or behavioural, but symbolic, archetypal, affective and mythic. Together, they suggest a more demanding form of inquiry: one that is conceptually clear, ethically cautious, psychologically deep, and attentive to the symbolic life of the child.
That may be the real challenge for any serious discussion of gender identity. Not to win the argument by imposing the hardest category, but to keep perception alive long enough for meaning to emerge.
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