195 General discussion 10 4. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT The visibility of transgender minors and attention to their care has increased over the years. At the start of this study project, in 2013, professionals already mentioned the role of the social context in the way gender dysphoria is perceived. One of the issues regarding the role of the social context brought up by the informants of the 2015 study, was the increasing media attention (Vrouenraets et al., 2015). At the time that study was conducted, several professionals wondered in what way the increasing media attention affects the way minors’ gender incongruent experiences were perceived by the minors and by the society the minors live in (Vrouenraets et al., 2015). Since 2013, the media coverage of minors with gender incongruent experiences has continued to increase enormously. Newspapers, television programs, magazines, movies, and the internet pay increasing attention to transgender children and adolescents (Pang et al., 2020; Sadjadi, 2013; Zucker et al., 2008). Since the media have an increasingly important influence on the development of adolescents’ identity, especially in western communities, one could wonder what role the media plays in adolescents’ gender identity development (Alper et al., 2016; Henrich et al., 2010). Even though research shows an association between the increased media attention and the increase of minors referred to gender identity clinics, this study does not tell us anything about causation (Pang et al., 2020). On the one hand, the positive media attention may foster minors’ self-esteem, help them cope with discrimination, and medicate negative experiences (Craig, McInroy, McCready, & Alaggia, 2015). On the other hand, one could speculate whether the media attention might have a negative effect by, for example, leading to medicalization of gender incongruent experiences, or unintentionally causing more minors to reach out for care regarding their gender incongruent experiences which potentially might cause some of them to be wrongly diagnosed with gender dysphoria (Bechard et al., 2017; Littman, 2019). However, a study focusing on adolescents referred to one of our Dutch gender identity clinics during recent years does not provide any indications for evidence of this last hypothesis; the study shows that even though there is an exponential increase of referrals between 2000 and 2016, and more assigned females were referred, no time trends were observed regarding the intensity of dysphoria and in demographics (Arnoldussen et al., 2020; Arnoldussen et al., 2022b). Furthermore, the percentage of referred adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria after a diagnostic trajectory, remained the same (Arnoldussen et al., 2020; Arnoldussen et al., 2022b). Another study aimed to investigate whether positive and/or negative media attention regarding transgender and gender diverse matters is associated with the number of minors referred to gender identity clinics (Indremo, Jodensvi, Arinell, Isaksson, & Papadopoulos, 2022). These study results show that negative media attention was associated with a decrease of the number of referrals, while a positive media event was associated with no
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