What is a Transgender Child? with Alex Byrne & Moti Gorin
Two philosophers from leading American universities join Mia to examine one of the most contested questions in the gender debate: what exactly is a transgender child? Drawing on Ian Hacking's concept of 'making up people,' Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin argue that how we label children shapes who those children become. For Irish parents, schools, and healthcare professionals navigating this landscape, the philosophical stakes are anything but abstract.
What does it actually mean to call a child transgender? That question sits at the heart of this episode, in which Mia sits down with philosophers Alex Byrne of MIT and Moti Gorin of Colorado State University to discuss their co-authored paper "Trans Kids and 'Making Up People.'" The conversation draws on the work of philosopher Ian Hacking, whose ideas about how human categories interact with the people placed inside them have rarely felt more relevant than they do today. Hacking introduced the concept of "making up people" to describe something distinctive about human classification: unlike rocks or electrons, people placed into a category can become aware of that classification and change how they think and behave in response. This feedback loop — which Hacking called the looping effect — means that the act of naming a kind of person can help bring that kind of person into being. Byrne and Gorin apply this lens directly to the category of the transgender child, asking whether institutional and cultural labelling is doing more work than is generally acknowledged. The episode walks through three distinct views of what a transgender child actually is, with careful attention to distinctions that often get flattened in public debate: the age of the child, the source of the label, the motivations of parents and institutions, and the treatment commitments that follow from any given definition. These are not merely academic concerns. Every school policy, every clinical referral pathway, and every legal protection rests, implicitly or explicitly, on an answer to that foundational question. For Irish listeners this carries immediate weight. Ireland has been revising guidance for schools, debating the role of the HSE in youth gender services, and watching neighbouring jurisdictions — Britain most recently, through the Cass Review — begin to pull back from practices that became embedded with remarkable speed. The looping effect Hacking described is not a distant theoretical abstraction; it may already be at work in Irish classrooms and GP surgeries, wherever a child first encounters an institutional framework built around gender identity. Stella O'Malley has long argued, from her practice as a psychotherapist working with young people and families in Ireland, that the rush to affirm and label can bypass the careful, exploratory work that children with complex presentations actually need. The philosophical framework offered by Byrne and Gorin gives that clinical concern a rigorous grounding. If how we classify children shapes who they become, then the question of when, by whom, and on what basis a child is called transgender matters enormously — not just in theory, but in every school corridor, family kitchen, and consulting room across this country.
