Tey Meadow Interviewed in a Recent Piece for The Atlantic

Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere working group faculty fellow Tey Meadow was quoted in a recent piece for The Atlantic on new research findings which demonstrate strong self-knowledge and identity sense of young trans children.

The study by Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, tracked the health and well-being of 85 gender-nonconforming participants, ages 3 to 12, showing, in two separate ways, that those who go on to transition do so because they already have a strong sense of their identity.

According to Professor Meadow, parents contribute greatly to developing this strong self-knowledge and identity in young trans children. Parents are the ultimate arbiters of a child’s access to transition, and they make decisions “in a culture that encourages parents to look for every possible alternative to transness,” says Meadow.

Click here to read the full article.

Tey Meadow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia. She is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century, and the coeditor of Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology.