The New York Times recently published an opinion piece that examined the current discussion surrounding trans children. If you’ve read the article, you might be excused for believing that some, if not all, of the children who undergo surgery for gender dysphoria regret their changes. One de-stransitioning youth told the Times, “I realized that I had been living a lie for more than five years.” The piece was deemed false by trans community members who monitor legislation and criticize media coverage, and some even suggested that it adhered to the “climate sceptic playbook.”
I do n’t really have a stake in this, though. I’m a cis man, not trans, and I don’t work in healthcare. However, as an entomologist, I spend a lot of time checking medical facts that are available online in an effort to better educate people about health, technology, and how those topics are covered in the media. What percentage of people who access medical care to change genders regret doing thus? was a key topic raised in this case by the New York Times article that writer Pamela Paul did never really address.
You could respond, “Why does anyone care?” which is, to be completely fair, reasonable. Any health process, from treatment to orthopedic surgery, causes some people to repent it. However, there are no advertisements for the terrible dangers associated with hip replacements. It’s obvious that some transitioning teenagers will regret it, but the real question is whether overall health care is beneficial, not whether the occasional person after regrets a health decision they made when they were young.
It’s also crucial to remember that the rate of people who regret change is what matters most to us, not the crude amount. If more individuals decide to move, a greater number of people will ultimately repent it. Even though the crude number has doubled, the rate has drastically decreased if the number of people making the transition decreases from (to use arbitrary numbers) 1,000 to 100,000 but the proportion of those who regret it declines to 50,100.
Consider the upper and lower bounds when examining the level of regret for individuals transitioning in contemporary clinical settings. This new study of individuals using the U.S. military health care system is the highest estimate I’ve come across. However, it doesn’t address regret head-on. The authors examined how many trans or gender-discriminate individuals stopped receiving these medications over a four-year time while using their mother’s or spouses ‘military health insurance to access hormones for gendered care. At the conclusion of the study, about 30% of those who had begun using this program to access hormone stopped doing so, with a lower rate for children and an increase for people.
(They might have looked elsewhere, though, for hormones.)
The lowest estimation I’ve seen for dread following gender-related treatment is generally based on individuals who have undergone surgery that affirms sex. An overall level of 1% for dread following procedure for both transmasculine and transfeminine clinics was discovered by a recent systematic review and meta-analysis—a type of study in which the writers combine numerous papers into one large estimate. This is consistent with other sizable groups that have discovered that only a small percentage of patients who undergo these clinics end up regretting it.
Both of these extremes are unreliable estimates of dread, which is the problem here. Evidently, the 30 cent number does not include regret. For reasons completely unrelated to transition regret (i .e., divorce), many people stop using their parent or partner’s health care. Additionally, with relatively high attrition rates, the majority of the surgical studies in the review involve surgeons caring for their own patients. It should come as no surprise that only 1% of patients who undergo surgery say they regret it.
Another issue with this definition of “regret” is how we identify it. On the Amsterdam female office, which included nearly 7,000 persons over 43 years, one of the largest studies on transition-related dread was conducted. A person who returned to the doctor following surgery to obtain hormones that would change their gender change (and who had this noted in their information) is referred to as a “regret,” according to these authors. Less than 1% of people, according to this classification, regretted having procedure. However, this definition is certainly not very helpful because it will ignore all of the patients who regretted their procedures but went abroad for follow-up care or just not returned to the original clinic to express their repent.
The percentage of people who stop changing and return to their original sex is perhaps the most helpful way to examine regret. According to a sizable regional research, 13.1% of transgender respondents to the U.S. TRANSGender Survey said they had experienced detransition at some point in their lives. That, in my opinion, is a very accurate measure of the proportion of people who have some level of regret regarding their change experience.
The authors of this study take care to point out that the 13.1% percentage is not a sign of regret, stating that “these experiences did not necessarily reflect regret regarding past gender affirmation.” The majority of them claimed that outside factors were to blame for their detransition—a common justification was “pressure from a family”—but they all continued to identify as trans when they participated in the study.
However, I believe that the number in that study is helpful for the very reasons that are covered in the investigation itself: neither regret nor detransition are straightforward ideas. Change is complicated, as are all cultural events. You can be transgender and stop taking hormone. Even though you wish your family may take you living the way you want to live, you may regret taking actions that make you distant from them. Even some aspects of a cure (any type of medical care) may be regrettable! while being appreciative of the information you learned from trying it out. Regret simply indicates that there are some aspects of the story that people long to change, not always implying that they wish they had n’t transitioned.
Paul responded to criticisms of her column in a brief follow-up article in the Times, claiming that we simply don’t know how many trans teens will seek medical attention before detransition. While it’s true that we don’t have reliable data from the United States on the number of people who detransition, other nations do have some that are fairly helpful, with recent papers demonstrating that deTransition is very uncommon. One of these was also mentioned by Paul in her essay, but she quickly dismissed it. Although it’s possible that we don’t yet have all the information, we can still take into account the available constellation of evidence. This information makes it abundantly clear that the vast majority of individuals do not dread changing genders in any way. Repent rates are actually significantly higher for many medical treatments. For instance, a nationwide British study looking at the use of antidepressants in children across the nation discovered that half of the children had stopped taking these drugs after just two weeks. In the U.S. military study mentioned above, 26% of children stopped receiving hormone through their parent’s insurance after four years.
In the end, only a limited group—those who want to move and their clinicians—care about the percentage of children or adults who regret their transition. Even at its worst, the rate of regret is still higher than that of other treatments that don’t necessitate national debates about their efficacy, which begs the question of why anyone who is not directly involved in the treatment of transgender people is even considering it. In fact, people from editors to activists to transgender people really trying to live their life has brought up a lot of what I’ve said in this part. However, if columnists continue to ask questions, I might be able to assist by providing the solutions.
