This article was first published as a Twitter thread by @prof_curiosity1 (Read some Piaget please!)
If you use the term “transchild,” you have become part of the process required to normalise that abusive construct.
This is not a neutral descriptive term. It is a term designed to drive forward an ideological agenda around adult trans rights.
This construct creates a “special” category of child, one exempt from usual childhood protections and safeguarding.
It creates a category of child who can be experimented on with drugs/surgery without consent being given. No child can consent to their own sterilisation.
A suggested alternative term is child. A child who is going through what Erikson defines as “role confusion”. This is an entirely natural process and happens to all of us as we hit adolescence and try and work out who we are and our role in life.
Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development
It is really simple.
We must let children go through the process of role confusion so they can turn into the adult they wish to be.
Labelling a child “trans” immediately interferes with that process, as this is an external adult label hung around their neck.
Because agency is removed from the child by this label, they will struggle to move out of this state of role confusion. Gender affirmative “care” ensures that the trans identity becomes more embedded, and resolution of this stage becomes extremely difficult.
In summary.
The use of the term “transchild” is deeply unhelpful for the child stuck under this label. It makes the term more real and concrete and less transient.
It also normalises the word and the medical experimentation that goes with it.
It turns, what should be a short lived painful phase of psychosocial development, into a long-term chronic condition that stretches way into adulthood.
Please just use the term child or adolescent. Add role or gender confused, if necessary.