Desistors

Are people who detransitions or were not really trans to begin with, there has been much talk in the trans community about them and the “fake” news reporting 80% of trans people detransition. Well now there is research that debunks the myth.

Teach your parents and providers well
Call for refocus on the health of trans and gender-diverse children
Canadian Family Physician – The College of Family Physicians of Canada
By Julia Temple Newhook, Kelley Winters, Jake Pyne, Ally Jamieson, Cindy Holmes, Stephen Feder, Sarah Pickett and Mari-Lynne Sinnott
May 2018

Beyond the desistance myth
Directives regarding the care of gender-diverse children have derived primarily from a small body of research based on children in clinical settings in Toronto, Ont, [All footnote reference have been removed by me] and in the Netherlands. These studies have been interpreted to suggest that about 80% of children who we might think of as transgender will not identify as transgender as adults. It has become common to see these studies cited as a reason to discourage children’s assertion of a non–birth-assigned gender, framing transgender children as “confused.” Yet recent reviews suggest the utility of the concept of desistance is limited, and have raised the following 7 critiques.

Many children never asserted a transgender identity.
Many children in these desistance studies never asserted a transgender identity and thus would not have been expected to seek transition. The outdated tools from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition, revised, and 4th edition used in these studies conflated gender identity and gender expression. This means that a small subset of children who asserted a non–birth-assigned gender identity (and thus might be termed transgender) were mixed in with a much larger superset of children (who might be termed gender non-conforming) who behaved in ways that resisted gender-stereotyped expectations, but who might have continued to identify with their birth-assigned gender.

The paper also said…

Assumptions were made about loss to follow-up.Youth who refused or neglected to participate in follow-up should not be assumed to be cisgender.16–19 These studies tended to count participants lost to follow-up—more than 30% in one study—as desisters. This risks a substantial overestimation of the number of young adults assumed to be cisgender.

The paper ends with…

Conclusion

And so, become yourself,
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Teach Your Children Well”

Every child is unique. To thrive, every child needs to be seen, valued, and loved for who they are—not for who we expect them to be. Rather than attempting to “fix” gender-diverse children,3 medical providers have a key leadership role to play in the acceptance of the gender spectrum as a fundamental element of our human diversity. Through affirmation in the present, and celebration of whatever the future might hold, our goal is for all children to reach their full potential in all aspects of their lives.

The right like to quote or pick and choose data from research papers that support their biases and the authors of the papers also deny the inferences the conservatives draw the research papers. So this article goes a long way to debunk the myths that the right wing conservatives are pushing.

I also believe that many trans people who de-transition are still trans, that many detransition because of family, religious, or social pressure. For them being trans is too hard, they cannot find a job, or they are being harassed at work, or they are facing pressure from family, or they are facing pressure from their religious leaders.

I know two trans people who detransitioned; one was because she couldn’t find a job and moved back in with her in-laws. The other trans woman detransitioned because of family and employment pressures and then retransitioned and is now having GCS.