Monograph Matters

Identity trajectories among LGBTQ+ youth are frequently invoked in high-stakes court cases and political discourse despite a lack of empirical evidence. We present the most comprehensive longitudinal description to date of gender identity and sexual orientation in North American youth who underwent a social gender transition by age 12 (N = 317); we also present gender and sexual orientation outcomes among their siblings (N = 218) and an unrelated comparison sample (N = 377) who were cisgender at recruitment. On average, youth were 8 years old at recruitment and 14 at their most recent report. Stability in gender identity was the most common trajectory (over 80% in all three groups showed stability), and youth who were cisgender at recruitment showed no more or less gender stability than early-identifying transgender youth. Between 6 and 12 percent of youth in each group are currently nonbinary. Among early-identifying transgender youths, 3.8% are currently cisgender, mirroring the percentage of youth in the initially cisgender groups who are currently binary transgender (3.7%). Queer sexual orientation was high among both binary transgender (60%) and cisgender (33%) adolescents, who did not differ in levels of sexual orientation change over time (38.5% across groups). Current sexual orientation, and to a lesser extent gender, was related to gender-typed preferences and gender self-identification on a continuous spectrum earlier in development. We discuss how these results inform broader discussions about a potential generational shift in gender identity and sexual orientation among youth in the U.S. and Canada.