Allowing the child to make up their own mind is almost exactly <i>not</i> the approach offered by Dr Zucker. His approach involved telling parents to prevent their kids from playing with toys of the &quot;wrong&quot; gender and making friends with other kids of the &quot;wrong&quot; gender in an attempt to make sure they grow up the right gender. That&#x27;s why activists call it conversion therapy.<p>This is what the article means when it says that: &quot;That’s because the authors believe that messages from family, peers, and society do a huge amount of the work of helping form, reinforce, and solidify gender identities, and that at young ages these identities tend to be quite malleable. There’s great potential for confusion. A young boy might notice his new baby sister getting more attention than he is, and start dressing like a girl in a bid to be noticed. His parents, not knowing what to do, might go along with this, inadvertently reinforcing the notion that he’s a girl — a notion which, according to the GIC model, probably doesn’t come from a deep-seated kernel of gender identity, but rather mostly from social reinforcement and family dynamics.&quot;<p>His position - what he told parents coming to his clinic for help - is that if parents don&#x27;t do everything they can to dissuade young kids from acting in gender-inappropriate ways, to make sure they wear the right clothes and play with the right toys and socialise with the right gender of other kids, they&#x27;ll turn their kids trans. This is the point of dispute, and he&#x27;s way outside of the scientific consensus here. All the stuff about the adolescent he may or may not have mocked is a red herring - I&#x27;ve followed this issue, and literally the only place I&#x27;ve heard it mentioned is articles defending Zucker.