Gender Identity Health Within a Sample of Transmasculine Youth

Personal identity is a multidimensional, universal, and ever-developing construct that forms primarily during youth. One domain of identity—gender—manifests quite clearly in terms of developmental course and psychosocial components in the lives of transgender individuals. Members of this population often initiate various social and medical transitions to rework their gendered characteristics to align more authentically with their internal selves. Consequently, healthcare and social service professionals express growing interest in facilitating and fostering the psychological health of transgender youth. Rather than focus on adversity (e.g., depression, suicidality, mental illness), the current study addresses this concern by describing positive components of the gender identity of 120 transmasculine youth participants. To this end, we operationalized gender identity health through three overarching constructs: developmental process, psychological functioning, and the positive outcomes of being a transgender person. Further, we investigate how these components interrelate, plus compare responses by age and gender identity cohorts. For age, we compared adolescent responses to the identity measures to those of transgender emerging adults (n = 166; 20–29 years) and adults (n = 53; 30–39 years). For gender, we partitioned the adolescent participants into binary (n = 91) versus non-binary (n = 29) identities. The descriptive results demonstrated that identity is reasonably developed, functional, and positive in this adolescent sample. Moreover, the three hypothetical components of transgender identity demonstrated modest overlap with each other. The youth did not differ in identity development, functionality, or positivity compared to older cohorts. Binary transmen scored slightly higher on gender authenticity and commitment than their non-binary transmasculine counterparts, but the two gender groups were the same on the other identity components. We discuss some practical implications of these findings as focus areas for healthcare providers and support systems to continue to foster healthy identity development.