“I feel like it’s quite shaky acceptance”

My preconceptions about trans people came from the media, and I certainly hadn’t heard of trans children. So it just flummoxed me having an assigned male child who didn’t have especially ‘feminine’ interests and yet was saying consistently: ‘I’m a girl.’”

Kate was telling me about her eldest daughter, Alex. (Names of all trans young people, and of their parents, have been changed for their privacy.) It was a warm July evening, and we were sitting in the kitchen of their family home, in a comfortable British suburb populated by middle-class couples with young families. Alex, still at primary school, is trans. A few years ago, her mum assumed she was a boy who was clumsily trying to ask for typically feminine things. “I remember I used to have conversations with her at a very young age in the car because she’d get really upset. I’d say: ‘But I don’t understand what would be different if you were a girl? What can’t you do that you could do if you were a girl?’ I’d ask: ‘Do you want a doll?’ She’d just reply: ‘I don’t like dolls!’”

Sitting next to me at her home, Alex seemed like a typical kid of her age, who accepted me casually as a stranger at the table. As Alex’s parents later pointed out, there wasn’t anything especially feminine about her dress sense; she wasn’t what people call a “girly girl”.

“She was very into books from a really young age, and still is,” Joe told me. “We have to tell her to stop reading to sleep.” He and Kate described their daughter proudly as “someone with a strong sense of herself and a sense of justice – what’s right and wrong. She thinks very deeply about things.”

Alex was about three years old when she began to correct her mother if she called her a boy. “I’d try to encourage her good behaviour, as any parent does, by saying things like ‘good boy’,” Kate explained. “She began to reply: ‘No. Good girl.’”

Joe and Kate soon felt a little out of their depth. “Like a lot of parents with young kids, I thought there was something I was meant to teach her that I had missed,” said Kate. “I just didn’t get it.” Joe told me how Alex soon started to tell other children and the staff at nursery