This paper reports on the psychometric properties of a 16-item parent-report Gender Identity Questionnaire, originally developed by P. H. Elizabeth and R. Green (1984), to aid in the assessment of children with potential problems in their gender identity development. The questionnaire, which covered aspects of the core phenomenology of gender identity disorder (GID), was completed by parents of gender-referred children (N = 325) and controls (siblings, clinic-referred, and nonreferred; N = 504), who ranged in age from 2.5-12 years (mean age, 7.6 years). Factor-analysis indicated that a one-factor solution, containing 14 of the 16 items with factor loadings > or =.30, best fit the data, accounting for 43.7% of the variance. The gender-referred children had a significantly more deviant total score than did the controls, with a large effect size of 3.70. The GIQ total score had negligible age effects, indicating that the questionnaire has utility for assessing change over time. The gender-referred children who met the complete DSM criteria for GID had a significantly more deviant total score than did the children who were subthreshold for GID, although the latter group had a mean score that was closer to the threshold cases than to the controls. With a specificity rate set at 95% for the controls, the sensitivity rate for the probands was 86.8%. It is concluded that this parent-report gender identity questionnaire has excellent psychometric properties and can serve as a useful screening device for front-line clinicians, for whom more extensive, expensive, and time-consuming assessment procedures may be precluded.

A 12-item gender identity interview schedule was administered to 85 children referred for concerns regarding their gender identity development and 98 clinical and normal control children. Factor analysis identified two factors, which were labeled Affective Gender Confusion and Cognitive Gender Confusion. The gender-referred group gave significantly more deviant responses than did the controls on both factors. Results were discussed with regard to several diagnostic and assessment issues pertaining to children with gender identity disorder.

Gender constancy judgments in children referred for problems in their gender identity development (N = 206) and controls (N = 95) were compared. On Slaby and Frey's (1975) gender constancy interview, the gender-referred children performed more poorly than the controls at three stage levels: gender identity, gender stability, and gender consistency. On the Boy-Girl Identity Task, a second measure of gender constancy (Emmerich et al., 1977), the gender-referred children also performed more poorly. Gender-referred children who had not attained gender consistency engaged in significantly less same-sex-typed play on a free-play task than the gender-referred children who had, but there were no gender consistency effects for the controls. Two other measures of sex-typed behavior were unrelated to gender consistency. In the gender-referred group alone, children who "failed" the gender identity or gender stability stages were more likely to draw an opposite-sex person first on the Draw-a-Person test and to evince more affective gender confusion on the Gender Identity Interview (Zucker et al., 1993) than children who had "passed." It is concluded that children referred for problems in their gender identity development have a developmental lag in gender constancy acquisition. Possible reasons for the lag are discussed.

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