Figures Don’t Lie But...

Desisters

If you listen to Republicans or conservative you would think that it is around 80 or 90 percent of the trans children detransition. That lie goes back to studies in Netherlands and our friend Ken Zucker [That is sarcasm], in those studies they counted anyone who dropped out of the study (Because they moved or they just didn’t want to take part in it anymore.) as de-transitioning. The studies reported desistance rates as high as 60–90%!

It is those studies that get quoted in legislatures, not these.

Common claim that most transgender youth renounce that identity is not supported by statistics, VCU research finds

The argument that studies show transgender youth desist from that identity on average has been used to support anti-gender-affirming care legislation nationwide.

Virginia Commonwealth University

By Madeline Reinsel

April 27, 2026

The frequently cited claim that 60% to 90% of transgender and gender-diverse children and young adults ultimately identify as cisgender – or their gender assigned at birth – is not supported by statistical analyses of published scientific research, according to a new study from Virginia Commonwealth University. The study, which analyzed 11 studies compiled in a commonly referenced 2016 blog post as well as five more recent publications, instead found that almost any stance on gender-affirming care for minors could be supported by different statistical analyses of the same data.

“We should rely on accuracy with our science, and we should rely on accurate science to guide legislation,” said Catherine Wall, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Humanities and Sciences and the study’s lead author. Wall and her coauthors published their study in the journal APA PsycNet.

The quantitative meta-analysis found that “desistance” – or renouncement – of transgender identity by youth could be estimated to be as low as zero percent to as high as 100%, depending on how the studies’ data were interpreted. Meanwhile, rates of persistence of transgender identity could also range from zero percent to 100%, depending on how the studies – many of which were conducted pre-1990 on small sample sizes – were analyzed.

But many politicians don't care about the facts; they have an agenda to push.

When the first major longitudinal results from the Trans Youth Project came out in 2022, NBC News reported that transgender children are actually highly unlikely to "detransition" or return to identifying with their birth sex five years after a social transition.

The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics, come from a larger project called the Trans Youth Project. Researchers at Princeton University began in 2013 to track 317 kids between ages 3 and 12 who socially transitioned — the first and largest sample of its kind, according to Kristina Olsen, the study’s lead author and a professor of psychology at Princeton.

The results showed that five years after their initial social transition, 94 percent of the study participants were living as either trans girls or trans boys. The remaining youth had "retransitioned," as the study called it, and no longer identified as binary transgender. Of that group, 2.5 percent came to identify with their birth sex. 

The findings come as Republican lawmakers in more than two dozen states have tried, over the last two years, to restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

That last paragraph says it all: these lawmakers aren't acting in the best interest of children. They are willing to ignore scientific facts to push an agenda at the detriment of trans youth. They even go so far as to drag the same handful of individuals from state to state to testify, pretending a tiny minority represents the whole reality.