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Article History

Received: 18 February 2025

Accepted: 16 December 2025

First Online: 27 February 2026

Compliance with Ethical Standards

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: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. IRB protocol: STUDY00008441.

: None.

: The data reported in this manuscript have been previously published and/or were collected as part of a larger data collection (at one or more points in time). Findings from the data collection have been reported in separate manuscripts (see Table in Supplement A for full data transparency in the online supplement). In the table, we bolded the constructs that are the same as the current study, and these are all in MS 6. Specifically, the current study shares the following variables with MS 6: Fall (Time 1) felt gender similarity, interaction quality and frequency, gender-based relationship efficacy, and inclusion expectancies. The current study differs from MS6 by investigating how peer interactions and cognitions predict children’s gender identity development with felt gender similarity as the primary outcome of interest longitudinally, whereas MS6 focused on understanding children with different patterns of gender identity (assessed by felt gender similarity) and how these different types of children differed in their inclusion expectations and gender-based relationship efficacy using cross-sectional data.