ABSTRACT
The complexity of the conceptual, epistemological, empirical, and ethical issues raised by the psychological and medical care of gender-diverse children, alongside the range of conflicting stances taken on these issues and the often intemperate nature of the resulting public debate, have created in both the public and professional domains a unique contemporary crisis of meaning about childhood gender identity. Powerful oppositional dynamics operate in the field, knotted into bigger questions of knowledge and authorization that we are facing in contemporary society. These are questions about what can be known, and how knowledge can be grounded; about the value and relevance of different kinds of knowledge; about the capacity of young people to know themselves; and about the knowing of the expert versus the lay person. In this chapter the clinical assessments, explorations. and interventions carried out at the United Kingdom’s only specialist gender service for children and adolescents are briefly outlined, and the work is shown to be located at the heart of these contested and radically unresolved social and cultural issues of our time.
