What Lies Beneath the Detrans Movement
Definitions, Data, and Double Standards
Detransition, desistance, persistence, retransition—a lot of labels are floating around. We can’t establish how rare or common something is if we don’t have a clear, standard definition.
And we don’t.
Definitions
One scholar, B Karrington, checked the scientific literature on the concepts and found 30 different definitions of “desistance” but grouped them into four main categories:
Disappearance of gender dysphoria after puberty
Change in gender identity from trans/gender diverse to cisgender
Disappearance of distress (related to dysphoria)
Disappearance of desire for medical intervention
After reading all the literature on desistance, Karrington concluded that it should not be used in clinical work or research because 1) it doesn’t have a clear definition and 2) there’s just not enough quality, scientifically rigorous work on it. Of all the publications Karrington found, 77% were editorials or commentaries (that is, not based on data).
The main word used now is detransition.
What is Detransition?
Detransition has multiple definitions. The general idea of detransition is reversing the process of transition. But if you’ve read my series on transition (psychological, social, legal, hormonal, and surgical), you know that gender transition is complicated, has no specific order, and has multiple parts and layers. And people do some but not all elements.
That’s part of what makes biomedical research on transgender and nonbinary people so complicated. It also leaves open the question of how to define and measure detransition. What would detransition look like?
I’ve seen studies define it in multiple ways (as have others):
Stop living as the trans/nonbinary identity and live again as the gender assigned at birth
I’ll call this social detransition
Stop identifying with the trans/nonbinary identity and identify again as the gender assigned at birth (cisgender)
I’ll call this psychological detransition
Go from identifying as a trans man or trans woman to identifying as nonbinary
I don’t count this as detransition at all, but some studies do
Stop taking hormones, for whatever reason
I don’t count this as detransition at all, but some studies do
This is also called discontinuation
Seek out reversal of a transition-related surgery
I’ll call this surgical detransition
As I’ve said before, in my book, if you’ve psychologically transitioned—you think of yourself as trans/nonbinary—you are. That’s all it takes.
To detransition, then, is to re-identify with the gender assigned at birth.
In my case, that would be if I went back to thinking of myself as a woman.
Now, the number of people who do that is tiny.
For example, one study randomly pulled 303 patient records at the gender clinic in the UK, and found none. They did find 1 person who had detransitioned because of pressure from their spouse, but they retransitioned years later. Two others cycled between transition, detransition, and retransition because of a lack of family support. In other words, they socially detransitioned. But they persisted in their psychological transition.
Like those three in that UK study, most people who go back to living as the gender assigned at birth (socially detransition) do so because of stigma and discrimination: pressure from family, partners, employment, and other discrimination. Because of transphobia.
Not because they aren’t trans.
That study was in adults, though. What about kids?
In a US study, the Trans Youth Project, scientists started following over 300 kids ages 5 to 12 who identified as trans girls or trans boys. They followed these kids for 5 years, so up when they were 10 to 17 years old, and tracked any changes in gender identity. At the end of the 5 years, 97.5% of the kids still identified as trans (94%) or nonbinary (3.5%).
Only 2.5% (8 kids) re-identified as cisgender at the end of the 5 years.
One of the big concerns about detransition is that people will do something medically permanent and then want to detransition and regret having transitioned. But this study had only 1 kid who had done any medical intervention and then changed their mind about being trans—and they used puberty blockers. Puberty blockers pause puberty, and when you stop, puberty resumes as normal. Puberty blockers buy kids time to figure out their gender identities; so, in this case, they worked exactly as hoped.
A note on regret: Looking at all the published studies that reported regret, the surgical regret rates for trans surgeries are <1%. This compares to other surgeries, where regret rates are 14-21%, 19.5% for gastric binding, 28% for tubal ligation. regret rates is 7-8% for having kids! The double standards here are obvious.
In a study of 150 trans young people,
3 expressed any regret
2 didn’t identify as trans anymore
1 wished they had not medically transitioned
That is, the numbers are tiny.
Detransition happens. Detransitioners exist. I know one personally. Only one.
They are extremely rare.
Reasons people medically or socially detransition: medical contraindications; social pressure; stigma; discrimination; they are forced to; re-identifying with SAAB; binary trans to nonbinary; financial barriers; insurance barriers; other access barriers (bans, distance).
But have you heard the statistic 85%? Where does that number come from?
Inflating numbers
Vastly different rates of desistance and detransition are being thrown about—from <1% to 85%!—and part of that is which definition you use. Some definitions include more people, so anti-trans people tend to use them to make the numbers look higher.
If you count everyone who ever stopped taking hormones as “detransitioners,” that number is higher than 1% (but still a minority). In a study that interviewed 28 people about their “detrans” experiences, 22 of them still identified as trans or nonbinary! In another study, of 599 trans people who had accessed hormones
90% of them had continued on hormones without ever stopping
Of the 10% who did discontinue at some point, 37% wished they had not discontinued
Only 3 psychologically detransitioned
Trans scholars tend to use something closer to my definition—it only counts as detransition if you psychologically detransition.
A Politifact article explains the 1% vs 85% well, and I found the same studies that the author, Grace Abels, examined for that article. I wanted to check them out myself.
To achieve the very highest numbers that anti-trans rhetoric uses (85%), you have to go so wide that you’re capturing a study published in 1979 of 11 boys who had “gender identity/role discordance.” That is, their parents said they did “girly” things, like playing with dolls, “walking like a girl,” or expressing a wish to be a girl.1
The point of the study was to see if they turned out to be gay in young adulthood. Out of the 11, they could find 9 of them years later, and all 9 did, in fact, turn out to be gay or bisexual. One had tried living as a woman (social transition) and decided it wasn’t for him after 6 weeks.
So this study wasn’t about transness or gender dysphoria. It was about
gender expression (mannerisms like “walking like a girl”)
gender roles (behaviors like playing with dolls)
sexual orientation (being gay)
gender identity (wishing to be a girl)
At the time of the study, scholars were still working out all those nuanced differences. Even granting that grace, it’s a real stretch to say this study contributes to calculating a desistance or detransition rate. The 11 boys didn’t have gender dysphoria or identify as trans in the first place. Check out Abels’ article for a further breakdown of the 85%.
As I wrote before, the arguments to ban gender-affirming care come from hate groups. They are funded by the same conservative, libertarian, and evangelical donors and think tanks that fund denial and conspiracy theories about climate change, COVID-19, and fossil fuels. This includes the detransition rhetoric and the poster girl of that movement.
Using this movement to argue against care for others is problematic and inappropriate. Data do not support the arguments, either.
Underlying all of this are transphobia’s ever-moving goalposts of burden of proof. No amount of data will satisfy people who want to hate.
Money, J., & Russo, A. J. (1979). Homosexual Outcome of Discordant Gender Identity/Role in Childhood: Longitudinal Follow-Up. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 4(1), 29-41. (not available online)