Transgender children as young as 5 years old respond to psychological gender-association tests just as consistently as children who do not identify as trans, according to a groundbreaking study released this week by researchers at the University of Washington.

“Our results support the notion that transgender children are not confused, delayed, showing gender-atypical responding, pretending, or oppositional,” says the study being published in Psychological Science. “These results provide evidence that, early in development, transgender youths are nearly indistinguishable from cisgender children of the same gender identity.”

Gender Cognition in Transgender Children, noteworthy as the first report from the Trans Youth Project, the country’s first large-scale longitudinal study of transgender kids, concludes, “The data reported in this paper should serve as further evidence that transgender children do indeed exist and that this identity is a deeply held one.”

The lead author, a professor at UW and director of the Trans Youth Project, Kristina Olson, told BuzzFeed News, “We think this matters, because a lot of the public discussion about transgender kids say these kids are pretending, these kids are being obstinate, or these kids don’t really think they are a girl, for example. These results suggest this isn’t something they are saying … This is who they are. This isn’t a phase that they are going through at the moment.”