A name, pronouns, clothes, a haircut. Social transition —the set of outward changes through which a person affirms their gender identity— is usually imagined as a switch: you flip it once and that is that. Seven years of follow-up with more than two hundred trans young people in Australia suggests something quite different: hardly anyone moves in a straight line, and most keep adjusting their goals along the way.
The study, published in The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, is a longitudinal descriptive study carried out at a specialist paediatric gender service in the Australian state of Victoria. Its authors —Will Conabere, Pip Buckingham, Sarah Martin, Ken C. Pang and Michelle A. Tollit— followed 234 trans young people aged 8 to 17 across two or three annual waves of data collected between 2017 and 2024.
What exactly was measured
To reconstruct the process, the researchers chose three concrete practices —name, pronouns and appearance— and recorded them in five different contexts: home, school, online, with friends and with extended family. At each wave they noted whether the change had already been enacted or was desired for the future. From those answers they built trajectories: each young person’s story over time, context by context, instead of a single snapshot.
Four paths, not one
The result is four clearly differentiated patterns. The most frequent was consistent goal attainment, where goals were met at every wave: 56.4% (132 young people). Another 22.2% (52) achieved their goals progressively and had them met by the end of follow-up. A small group, 6.0% (14), started with their goals met and no longer had them met at the final wave.
The fourth group, 15.4% (36 young people), never met their goals consistently. But even here the nuance matters: most of them were still actively moving towards what they wanted, not stalled.
One figure sums up the whole picture: almost two out of three participants —60.7%, 142 young people— changed their goals during the study. What they wanted at the start was not exactly what they wanted three or four years later, which fits a life stage in which identity is still being built.
A dynamic process, not a checkbox
The authors’ conclusion is explicit: social transition is a dynamic, non-linear process driven by evolving personal goals, rather than a uniform all-or-nothing milestone. Hence their recommendation that clinical frameworks, policies and research itself move away from rigid definitions and capture both what has been enacted and what is still desired.
The distinction has practical consequences. In a clinic, a young person who steps back in one context —at school, say, but not at home— is not necessarily failing or regretting anything: they may simply be reordering priorities. And in public debate, measuring social transition as a switch that is flipped abruptly misdescribes most of the cases observed.
Family, identity and differences between groups
The study also looked at what is associated with having met one’s goals. Two factors appeared statistically significant: better family functioning (p = 0.00075) and gender identity (p = 0.0034). Specifically, trans boys were significantly more likely than trans girls to have met their social transition goals. The paper describes that difference but does not explain it with the available data; the authors do not attribute it to any single cause.
What this study cannot say
It is a descriptive, single-centre study with no comparison group, drawing on data collected at a specialist service that families attend voluntarily. It does not measure mental health outcomes or treatment effects, and its participants do not represent the entire trans population around them. Its figures describe trajectories, not causation: they cannot show that family functioning produces progress, only that the two appear together.
With those caveats, the central finding holds and is easy to summarise: gender identity is built over time, and social transition looks more like a road with detours and stops than like a switch.
Source: Trajectories of social transition among trans children and adolescents in Victoria, Australia: a longitudinal descriptive study. Conabere W, Buckingham P, Martin S, Pang KC, Tollit MA. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific 2026;73:101933. DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101933.
Read the publication: The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific.
Article published on dosier.es. Image generated with artificial intelligence (marta ai → marta.syf.es).
