A television show has introduced a character who is six years old and claims to be transsexual.
I spent many years in the human sexuality field and am given much undeserved credit in a documentary film on the subject. I was a minor figure in creating the field, but I do know the subject.
The idea that someone knows their own sexual orientation before the end of their teens is blithering nonsense. After the fact, say a 25 year old gay woman, can say she knew she was gay at age seven or eight, which may be true, but another person with the same experiences could have changed orientation at 12, 16 or 21. Looking backwards is not a meaningful measure.
It is simply necessary to look at how one ends up living, over a long period of time. It is very common for a married man or woman to become interested exclusively in their own sex late in life. Too common to say anything about pre-adult orientation.
None of this is much of a problem, except where surgery is used to change genitalia. In the early days of successful transgender surgery the doctors involved required the prospective surgical patient to live three years in their new gender category. Before surgery.
There are some cultures where androgyny is the highest state of sexuality. This is true in some parts of the Philippines. Many people in this culture aspire to androgyny and live that way. Surgery, at an earlier age, may be suitable in these cases with a fair degree of confidence that the change will be stable.
The issues of when transgender surgery (it has many names) is appropriate are being fought with great ferocity. I’ll stay out of that debate. I will say that surgery for ordinary Americans who have not lived as adults in their desired sexual category strikes me as a field fraught with pain, anger, misery, danger and lawsuits.