What is a Transgender Child? with Alex Byrne & Moti Gorin
2 July 2026
With Alex Byrne
Global
Philosophers Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin apply Ian Hacking's 'making up people' framework to the category of the transgender child, arguing that naming and institutionalising this type changes who comes to identify as one. Their analysis bears directly on how European medical bodies define patient populations, how courts adjudicate competing definitions, and why the surge in referrals documented by every major national review should be understood not just empirically but philosophically. The episode offers a conceptual vocabulary for the most contested question in paediatric gender medicine.
When European health authorities draft clinical pathways for gender-distressed children, they rely on a prior definition: what, precisely, is a "transgender child"? That question sounds administrative, but philosophers Alex Byrne of MIT and Moti Gorin of Colorado State University argue it is one of the deepest and most consequential problems in contemporary public debate. Their paper, "Trans Kids and 'Making Up People'," published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, forms the basis of this conversation with host Mia Hughes. The conceptual anchor is philosopher of science Ian Hacking, whose notion of "making up people" describes how scientific and administrative classifications do not merely describe pre-existing human kinds but help bring them into being. His associated looping effect captures a feedback dynamic: once a category is named and institutionalised, individuals come to understand themselves through it, which in turn reshapes the category itself. Byrne and Gorin apply this framework to the emergence of "the trans child" as a recognised type, examining how medical protocols, diagnostic categories and advocacy organisations together created conditions in which this identity became available — and increasingly prevalent. The episode maps three distinct philosophical positions on what it means to be a trans child and the weight each assigns to a child's self-report. This is not an abstract exercise. When Sweden's Socialstyrelsen, Finland's COHERE or England's independent Cass Review assessed the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine, they were implicitly adjudicating between competing accounts of who the patient population actually is. Definitions shape study inclusion criteria, treatment eligibility and, ultimately, which children receive medical interventions. The discussion also traces the transgender category through history and examines the role of parents, institutions and political movements in stabilising or contesting it. A section on a British Columbia tribunal illustrates how competing definitions collide in legal settings — a tension European courts are increasingly confronting as families, clinicians and regulators dispute the boundaries of parental authority, children's autonomy and medical best practice. For those engaged with European evidence debates, the philosophical dimension Byrne and Gorin bring is not a detour from empirical concerns but a foundation for them. If the underlying category is unstable in the way Hacking described, the evidence base itself becomes harder to interpret than it appears. The rapid increase in referrals to gender clinics across European countries over the past two decades — documented by every major national review — is precisely the kind of phenomenon the looping effect would predict, and understanding the mechanism matters as much as counting the cases.
