Children essentialize gender from a young age, viewing it as inborn, biologically based, unchanging, and predictive of preferences and behaviors. Children's gender essentialism appears to be so pervasive that it is found within conservative and liberal communities, and among transgender and cisgender children. However, it remains unclear what aspect of gender the children participating in past studies essentialized. Such studies used labels such as “girl” or “boy” without clarifying how children (or researchers) interpreted them. Are they indicators of the target's biological categorization at birth (sex), the target's sense of their own gender (gender identity), or some third possible interpretation? This distinction becomes particularly relevant when transgender children are concerned, as their sex assigned at birth and gender identity are not aligned. In the present two studies, we discovered that 6- to 11-year-old transgender children, their cisgender siblings, and unrelated cisgender children, all essentialized both sex and gender identity. Moreover, transgender and cisgender children did not differ in their essentialism of sex (i.e., whether body parts would remain stable over time). Importantly, however, transgender children were less likely than unrelated cisgender children to essentialize when hearing an ambiguous gender/sex label (“girl” or “boy”). Finally, the two studies showed mixed findings on whether the participant groups differed in reasoning about the stability of a gender-nonconforming target's gender identity. These findings illustrate that a child's identity can relate to their conceptual development, as well as the importance of diversifying samples to enhance our understanding of social cognitive development.

中文翻译：

---

跨性别和顺性别儿童关于性别和性别认同的本质主义信念

儿童从小就将性别本质化，将其视为与生俱来的、基于生物学的、不变的以及对偏好和行为的预测。儿童的性别本质主义似乎如此普遍，以至于在保守和自由社区以及跨性别和顺性别儿童中都可以找到它。然而，目前尚不清楚参与过去研究的儿童所强调的性别的哪个方面。这些研究使用了诸如“女孩”或“男孩”之类的标签，而没有阐明儿童（或研究人员）如何解释它们。它们是目标在出生时的生物学分类（性别）、目标对自己的性别（性别认同）的感觉，还是第三种可能的解释？当涉及跨性别儿童时，这种区别变得特别重要，因为他们的出生性别和性别认同不一致。在目前的两项研究中，我们发现 6 至 11 岁的跨性别儿童、他们的顺性别兄弟姐妹和不相关的顺性别儿童都将性别和性别认同本质化。此外，跨性别和顺性别儿童在他们的性本质上没有差异（即身体部位是否会随着时间的推移保持稳定）。然而，重要的是，跨性别儿童在听到模棱两可的性别/性别标签（“女孩”或“男孩”）时，比无关的顺性别儿童更不可能本质化。最后，这两项研究显示了不同的结果，即参与者群体在推理性别不合格目标的性别认同稳定性方面是否存在差异。这些发现表明，孩子的身份认同与他们的概念发展有关，