This is an intense cultural moment in America around what Singal calls “gender-identity awareness.” Whereas in decades past, parents would send gender-nonconforming children to psychologists to be “cured” of their deviance, now some (though certainly not all) families are doing a range of other things. They are allowing children greater latitude to violate gender norms, to assert identities that differ from those assigned at birth, and in some cases, they are allowing children to transition from one gender category to another. All of this cultural change has left many adults (journalists, psychologists, politicians, educators, and, of course, parents themselves) feeling anxious and uncertain.

How should adults respond to identity claims by children? How ought parents to interpret the things very young children—those who can’t yet make ardent identity claims­—say and do? In this uncertain context, it is tempting to make examples out of individual children. But the children whom journalists and academics like myself choose to highlight, and the ways we tell their stories, matter. By opening his article with Claire, and situating the complexities of parents’ experiences around the notion that a child’s gender nonconformity can simply resolve and is then over and settled, Singal is reading an ending on to a story that is far from over. Claire is 16 and still living with her parents. We have no idea where she will end up in time. And the relief Singal depicts at the resolution of her gender transgression belies both his and Claire’s parents’ investment in a cisgender future for Claire, not necessarily an authentic gender future.

It’s worth interrogating the origins and development of the idea of “desistence.” This is not a value-neutral term. As the trans writer Julia Serano has noted, citing academic research, in criminological contexts, “desistence” is used to denote the cessation of offensive or antisocial behavior. The term was adopted by conservative clinicians as a descriptor for gender-nonconforming children who grow into cisgender adulthoods (whether they were coerced into doing so through corrective therapies or simply changed their minds). It comes from an outmoded psychology organized around the assumption that there are only two forms of gender: normal and disordered. A person was once pathological or disordered, but now they are back on “normal” ground. The idea that some children desist functions to support efforts to socialize children out of gender deviance, and to interpret those who do desist or re-transition as victims of abuse or false consciousness. (They were “pushed too quickly into transition” or “too young to really understand who or what they were.”)

But now, there are increasing numbers of clinicians who reject all of these premises, who don’t think that trans identities are any less desirable than cisgender identities. And transitions can look many different ways. Many staunchly affirmative clinicians, like the psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, whom Singal includes in his piece, believe that there is a “constellation of a gendered self,” one that, rather than always moving in a linear transition from point to point, weaves, like all development does, through many stages of delight, joy, loss, and ambivalence.