In previous generations, families with significantly gender-transgressive children would almost uniformly bring their child for corrective psychiatric treatment, if they had sufficient financial means. Today they are doing something different. This chapter follows families through the arduous process of medical decision making for transgender-identified adolescents. The anxiety generated by the gravity of social and medical decisions underwrites a rapidly expanding research agenda by clinicians seeking stable predictors for adult transgenderism. Chief among its architects is Dr. Ken Zucker, who once ran the world’s most respected clinic treating transgender youth. We enter the clinic and meet some of the families who utilized its services, and then we accompany Dr. Zucker as he faces his dismissal and the subsequent closure of his clinic. The complexity of these medical decisions and the rapid reinterpretation of Zuckert’s clinic from the very vanguard childhood gender to a relic of an outmoded and largely abandoned clinical practice tell the story of larger cultural shifts in the psychology of gender.
Assessing Medical Decision-Making Competence in Transgender Youth
