Like 99% of the time when I see a researcher describing what they believe to be typical trans developmental trajectories I fail to fit the proposed models.

I'm definitely not unique in that, but I do feel like a lot of researchers spend more time counting trans people on the head of a pin than exploring what we need and advocating for it, such as health care, housing, and ending discrimination against us.

Obviously one can do both - Julia Serano has spent more time than anyone should have ever had to spend debunking Blanchard's garbage theories along with Bailey's, Lawrence's, Dreger's, etc. elaborations, but she's also focused on trans people's material needs.

Trans kids exist, help them. Gay, lesbian, bi, pan, queer kids exist. Help them. People can be both trans and gay, lesbian, bi, pan, and otherwise queer, for that matter.

But if you insist on calling trans girls and nonbinary amab trans kids "gender variant boys" you've entirely missed the point and need to go back and look at these kids as properly members of their stated genders, not as boys who deviate from the norm.

These research papers aren't about us, not really. They're about cis people trying to systematize our identities in a way that is legible to cis people, and I think we'd all be better if you didn't misgender your research subjects and focused on how to meet trans kids' needs.

It's good to note the limitations these papers have, but how do they help trans people in general or trans kids in specific? Why is the simple fact that kids in general know their genders at age 3-4 almost never applied to trans kids who assert their genders at a young age?

Why do we need a complicated hypothesis to explain why trans women come out at different ages and have different orientations when the truth is already out there?

Cis people are never questioned as to how they know they're the gender they are. They just know. Trans people know too, but because being trans is outside the cis experience, we must be rationalized in a way that labels us as a deviation from the cis norm, and this doesn't help.

Trans people, like cis people, know what our gender is. That's all there is to it. Some trans people come out later than other trans people. There are multiple reasons for this but a big one is institutionalized transphobia and transmisogyny. Oppression steals our lives.

Instead of trying to explain how a trans kid ends up being trans, why not find out how many trans adults feel like they missed out on a proper childhood. We have the ability to ensure this doesn't happen, but instead we get navel-gazing treatises on how trans kids develop.

Smash the gender binary. It does no one any good.