Doctors at Boston Children's Hospital's Gender Management Service clinic, where Nathan is a patient, began making the same connection a few years ago. They combed through patient records and found that 8.2 percent of the 184 young people seen in the clinic between 2007 and 2015 were raised in adoptive families. Overall, only 2.3 percent of children living in Massachusetts were adopted.
“Before I started seeing transgender kids, it would not have occurred to me that we might see more adopted kids,” said Dr. Daniel Shumer, a pediatric endocrinologist who treated transgender kids at the GeMS clinic for three years before moving to Ann Arbor, Mich., to work in a similar clinic. Shumer and three co-authors recently presented their adoption data at a conference and have submitted it for publication. Nathan and his doctors aren't the only members of the transgender community who've noticed this phenomenon.
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