Wednesday, March 29, 2023

On detransition (tweets)

I'm updating this post with a 2024 study:

A study on detransition was published in JAMA Pediatrics. Based in Perth, Australia, it found that "only 1% of transgender youth receiving gender-affirming care at a clinic reidentified with their sex assigned at birth," as Erin Reed explained, while another 4% "reidentified during the mental health assessment period or earlier and did not proceed with receiving gender-affirming care." The youth came to a clinic 2014–2020. The follow-up with their transition status was done in 2022. The study followed up with 548 of the 552 participants; the remaining 4 did not respond to contact. Among the minority who did not wish to continue with gender-affirming care, researchers "could not always determine a reason for detransition, desistance, or reidentification," nor whether the young people regretted having tried it. This was not what the researchers were studying.

Reed points out:

"The study contributes to a substantial body of literature indicating low detransition rates. A study of 317 transgender youth in the United States reported similar findings of low detransition or desistance rates, with only 2.5% of transgender youth identifying as cisgender after five years of follow-up. A Dutch study also reported comparably low rates. According to a review of literature by Cornell University, the regret rate for gender-affirming care ranges from 0.3% to 3.8%, depending on the study's methodology. However, this [new Perth] study stands out due to its very large sample size, data spanning eight years of transgender care, and an exceptionally low "loss to follow-up" rate."

She asks, incidentally: "if regret and detransition rates are so high, why are the same few always featured?"

Read more: Groundbreaking Study Shows Extremely Low Detransition Rates With No Loss To Follow-up: A groundbreaking study out of Perth Children's Hospital using innovative methodology determined only 1% of patients receiving care detransitioned or desisted, with virtually no loss to follow up. Erin Reed, March 6, 2024

"Dr. Ira Dushoff, head of a private gender clinic in Florida, [said] to the Boston Globe in 1977" that to allow anyone to transition merely because they say they want to would be "equivalent to manslaughter." Of this, Jules Gill-Peterson comments:

A field in which the helping professions see their role as tantamount to killing someone because transition is so reprehensible is the same field that we are told today by pundits is too naïve, too liberal, and too freewheeling, letting trans people do nearly whatever they wish with no guardrails. As Pamela Paul would have it, in a recent column, there is not enough attention given to the problem of “detransition,” the person who would regret undergoing this grueling process after realizing, belatedly, that they never really wanted to alter their body. The problem is that this was precisely the central preoccupation of the founding clinicians in trans medicine, constituting its core mission. Preventing detransition was the entire point of the Gender Identity Clinic of New England’s cruel process: the “irreversibility” of exactly the things people wanted to be irreversible meant that only those who could endure years of psychiatric interference, peer pressure, and afford thousands of dollars of bills would be granted minimal dominion over their own bodies.

— Detransition is a Mythology, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 6, 2024

Gill-Peterson goes on to say: "At the origin of trans medicalization lies what remains a fatal flaw: there was, and is, no way to objectively diagnose someone as trans, except if you accept that they want to transition. The problem of detransition is therefore a mythology, the accumulated effect of decades of storytelling to justify why doctors and psychiatrists had to reject trans people without being able to say it was because they aren’t objectively trans."

In other words, wanting to transition is itself what it means to want to transition. That's just it; there's no more "there" there. There is no hidden objective transness that justifies and demonstrates the desire to transition. If someone says they want to transition, the rejoinder cannot be well, what if you're deluded about what you want, or what if you change your mind? Wanting to transition is the desire you're looking for. It's right there. Yes, anyone's desire can change over time, but then you've made an argument for not letting anyone transition. (It's also an argument for not letting anyone choose anything ever, about which capitalism and neoliberalism ought to be unhappy.)

"The idea that trans people should decide for themselves whether or not to physically transition — what some have disdainfully referred to as 'sex change on demand' — has been opposed by the gatekeeper establishment from the beginning. The most common argument is that the system as it stands acts as a safeguard to prevent people who are not transsexual (e.g., cissexuals who are merely embarrassed or confused about their atypical sexuality or who exhibit 'delusional' or 'antisocial' behavior) from undergoing potentially irreversible medical procedures. Once again, such pratices reveal the cissexist biases of the gatekeepers: Trans people are denied immediate treatment of their gender dissonance in order to protect the well-being of a rather small minority of cissexuals. One can only imagine how furious and frustrated most cissexuals would feel if they had to undergo psychotherapy for three to six months (so that a psychiatrist could rule out the possibility that they were transsexual) before obtaining permission to undergo hormone replacement therapy or gender-related surgeries they required."

— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, "Chapter 7: Pathological Science," first published 2007, 3rd edition published 2024

Some people transition to a new gender and then detransition. These are choices people can make. They may not be upset about it.

Anti-transgender people are upset about the possibility of detransition, though. They use it for scaremongering.

By the way, you can regret all kinds of things

tree

Look here:

An “Ex-Detransitioner” Disavows the Anti-Trans Movement She Helped Spark
“It’s very similar to ex-gay communities,” she now says. “No one really changes.”
Evan Urquhart, Slate, February 1, 2021

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