This post was written by David L. Lopez, M.D., a member of the LGBTQ Committee at the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.

An increasing number of young people are embracing gender-nonconforming (GNC) identities. A subset of these adolescents may be going through what psychologists call an adolescent identity crisis—a concept introduced by Erik Erikson in 1956. He defined it as a period of uncertainty and exploration that typically occurs during the teenage years concerning one's values, personal beliefs, career choices, roles within the peer group, cultural background, physical attributes, sexual orientation, and gender.

This process is a normal part of development, highlighting the teenage years as a key time for weaving these various aspects of identity into a clear and coherent sense of self.

Importantly, Erikson considered the rebellious nature of adolescents as normal for this stage of life, often exemplified by James Dean in his role as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, a “tale of tempestuous kids and their weird ways of conducting their social relations.”

Fast-forward to today, when adolescent rebellion is taking on new dimensions as young people experiment with gender in ways that were unthinkable to previous generations. Many of these gender-nonconforming teens are........

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