Kristina Olson, PhD, was meeting with one of her students when her phone rang—one of several calls she’d gotten that morning from the same unfamiliar number. Worried it might be bad news, she apologized to her student and answered the phone, only to learn she’d been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. The MacArthur Foundation presents the $625,000, no-strings-attached award to 20 to 30 “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals” each year.
Shocked, she asked the caller, “Are you sure you have the right Kristina?” It was no mistake.
Olson, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Washington, studies the emergence and development of social identities. The MacArthur Foundation awarded her the 2018 prize for her pioneering research on the social and cognitive development of transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. The news came on the heels of another honor: In April, Olson was the first psychologist to win the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award, which recognizes an outstanding scientist under the age of 40 or within 10 years of receiving a PhD. That prize carries a $1 million research grant.
The Monitor talked to Olson about her work and what the awards mean for her research—and her field.
How did you begin studying transgender and gender-nonconforming youth?
In the broadest strokes, I’m interested in how kids think about themselves and the people around them—how kids carve the world into social categories.
The case of transgender kids is interesting because it’s a case where a kid is saying that they’re a member of a social category that the people around them are saying that they’re not in. It’s a unique way to think about social categories. What does it mean to be a member of a group? Who gets to decide what group you’re in?
So, it was in the back of my mind as something I was interested in. But then I had a friend whose family was considering whether their young child who was assigned male at birth but identified as a girl should socially transition to present as a girl in everyday life. This family had a lot of questions and I thought, “Well, I’m a psychologist. I can read the literature and figure out if it’s better to transition to one’s identified gender or not.” When I read the literature, I realized there actually hadn’t been any studies of kids who had socially transitioned at these early ages. At first, I said, “I cannot believe this, when is someone going to do that work?” Eventually, I thought, “You know what? Why not me?”
Can you describe your TransYouth Project?
It’s the first large-scale, national longitudinal study of about 300 socially transitioned transgender children. The study started in 2013, when the children were ages 3 to 12, and we will be following them for 20 years. We’re interested in gender development and the mental health and well-being of transgender children. We’re done recruiting for that study, but we continue to recruit new families with gender—nonconforming and transgender youth for other projects.
What have you learned from the first few years of the project?
We have two main findings so far. The first is that the gender development of socially transitioned trans kids seems to look a lot like that of cisgender kids [kids who are not transgender]. They show similar gender preferences and similar gender identities as their gender-matched peers and gender-typical siblings. These are kids that are saying, “I’m a girl,” and on all the traditional measures of gender development in the literature they look like the average cisgender girl (Child Development Perspectivesopens in new window, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2018).
Our second finding is that these kids, who are living as their gender identity in everyday life and supported by their families in that identity, seem to have pretty good mental health (Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatryopens in new window, Vol. 56, No. 2, 2017). They have slightly higher anxiety compared with cisgender kids but similar rates of depression—nowhere near the kind of clinical levels that we often see in prior studies of transgender teens and transgender adults.
Other research has found significant mental health challenges among transgender populations, correct?
Right. Previous studies that look at transgender teens and adults have often found very high rates of anxiety, depression and suicidality. But the majority of people who are transgender adults today didn’t have the kinds of experiences that the kids I’m following did. Namely, they didn’t live as their identified gender early in their development. They didn’t necessarily have family support for their identity. It was a different time in history. What we’re trying to do now is to understand which of those differences might explain why these kids are doing so well. And we want to follow these kids to understand whether this good mental health we’re seeing at early ages continues as they move into adolescence.
What does the MacArthur award mean for your research—and this field?
I’m honored to have the award, and I hope that the spotlight will be bigger than just me and my lab. There are lots of people doing interesting work in this area, and I hope people in the field more broadly will take this as recognition that our work is important. I also hope it will get the general public—and maybe other funders—interested in these kinds of important questions.
As for my own research, one of the goals of the award is to get people to think about new, creative, interesting avenues. One thing that’s a real challenge as a researcher is that it can be really hard to get funding when you want to move into something new and different. This award is an opportunity to ask new and different questions and do something a little riskier. For example, we’ve become interested in thinking about people who are intersex [a term used to describe a variety of conditions in which a person’s chromosomes, hormones or reproductive organs don’t fit the typical definition of “male” or “female”].
I also hope that people, especially students and early career researchers, will see this as an example of how you can make a different career choice. I had established myself in a particular line of work, but I knew in the back of my head that I really wanted to try out this line of research—even though I had no idea where it would end up. I had people in the field say, “Why are you doing this? This seems so hard.” And there were definitely many, many days where I did not think it would pan out. I hope this shows that sometimes it’s worth taking that risk to try something new because you care about the answer, even if, at the time, it appears others do not.
