Revisiting 13: Are brilliant people more likely trans?
Sasha and Stella dive into one of the more counter-intuitive questions circulating today: are exceptional kids more likely to identify as trans?
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We begin with the research: Dr. Lisa Littman’s observations—that gifted and intellectually intense children appear disproportionately represented among adolescents reporting rapid-onset gender dysphoria. This isn’t a flippant correlation, but a pattern worth exploring.
What links brilliance and gender questioning? Enter overexcitability: a psychological term meaning an emotional, intellectual, sensory amplification of experience—more velocity, more volume, more complexity. Think of these kids as the emotional equivalent of a finely tuned sports car: responses are faster, feelings are louder, disappointments are sharper.
We talked about how gifted teens often feel isolated; they’re the ones reading philosophy while peers scroll TikTok. They crave depth but often find superficiality suffocating. That disconnect, that fragile fragility, can steer them toward identity labels that feel like something authentic to hold on to.
From “I’m just sensitive” to “I must be trans”, the mind makes sense out of chaos however it can—and labels or movements can offer the tightest, most reassuring narrative at that moment.
Quick Overview
0:00 – Intro
1:15 – The puzzle: giftedness & gender incongruence
10:30 – Overexcitability and emotional intensity explained
22:50 – ROGD teens and lived experience
33:00 – Parenting intensity—when support becomes pressure
42:20 – Mindset, failure, and the terror of disappointing potential
52:00 – The loneliness of brilliance—and the search for identity
If your child is intellectually intense, parenting becomes its own art form. You want to push them—but not too hard. Support them—but not suffocate them. In Episode 13 we explore how the pressure to help a child realize their potential can ironically become the pressure to be that potential—and if that fails, identity becomes a fallback.
That’s why you’ll hear us say: gifted doesn’t mean “fine.” Calling highly-sensitive children “resilient geniuses” without recognising their existential loneliness is a recipe for confusion.
One moment that stood out in this episode is the link between growth mindset and handling failure. Gifted kids often fear not just failure—but failing to be brilliant. How do you reassure someone who expects greatness of themselves—and fears that not being trans is failure to discover themselves? It’s brutal. Yet failure, or ordinary imperfection, might just be the most liberating reframing available.
This question is not about pathologising trans identity. It’s about noticing patterns—emotional, cognitive, cultural—and helping families and teens find grounding in their experience, not in frameworks or ideologies.
Gifted kids deserve understanding, not autopilot routing toward labels that feel initially comforting, but may be inadequate long-term anchors. And parents, educators, clinicians: we owe them tools, not blind affirmations or dismissals.
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Let us know your thoughts! Have your views this issue evolved in recent years? Have you seen shifts in your perspective?
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