What is a Transgender Child? with Alex Byrne & Moti Gorin
2 July 2026
With Alex Byrne
Global
Philosophers Alex Byrne of MIT and Moti Gorin of Colorado State join Beyond Gender to interrogate a deceptively simple question: what is a transgender child? Drawing on Ian Hacking's concept of 'making up people,' their published paper argues that social classification shapes the very identities it claims to describe. For the UK, where the Cass Review and NHS England have already begun questioning the diagnostic frameworks underpinning paediatric gender services, this philosophical scrutiny offers rigorous conceptual grounding for an urgent policy debate.
Philosophers Alex Byrne of MIT and Moti Gorin of Colorado State join Mia Hughes to discuss their co-authored paper "Trans Kids and 'Making Up People'," published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. The central question sounds straightforward: what, precisely, is a transgender child? As the paper argues, the answer is far from settled, and which definition is adopted carries significant consequences for medicine, law and education. The analysis draws on the philosopher Ian Hacking's concept of making up people and what he called the looping effect. Hacking observed that human classifications are interactive: the people being classified are aware of the category and respond to it, which in turn reshapes the category itself. A geological stratum does not respond to being named Jurassic; a child told they may be transgender, and who then encounters clinics, schools and online communities built around that identity, is affected in ways that alter the very phenomenon the label was meant to capture. Byrne and Gorin ask whether the rapid rise in children presenting with gender distress is partly a product of the category's own proliferation. The episode sets out three positions on what a transgender child is: an essentialist view, in which gender identity is innate and simply requires affirmation; a social-constructionist account; and an interactive-kind analysis informed by Hacking. Each carries different clinical and policy implications. If the essentialist account is correct, social and medical affirmation is the logical response. If the looping effect is at work, then institutional responses — from school policies to NHS protocols — are not merely recognising a pre-existing identity but actively shaping it. The argument connects directly to the Cass Review, published in April 2024 and commissioned by NHS England. Hilary Cass found the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine to be weak, the effects of social affirmation inadequately studied, and clinical pathways insufficiently rigorous. NHS England subsequently restricted puberty blockers to research settings only. The looping-effect framework offers a philosophical explanation for the diagnostic difficulties Cass identified: when a clinical category actively shapes the population it describes, separating a child's underlying distress from the institutional environment surrounding it becomes exceptionally difficult — precisely the problem the review struggled to resolve. A discussion of a definitional clash at a Canadian tribunal illustrates that how transgender child is defined is not merely academic. In the UK, the stakes are equally high. Parliament is revisiting legal frameworks following the Supreme Court's April 2025 ruling that woman in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, and policymakers are grappling with how gender-identity claims by children interact with parental rights, educational duties and clinical oversight. The philosophical precision Byrne and Gorin bring to bear is exactly the kind of rigour that UK courts, NHS commissioners and parliamentarians are still working towards.
