The Truth About Detransitioning

New York Times

2 days ago

In its campaign against transgender rights, the Trump administration has been spotlighting stories of people who have regretted transitioning. A recent Federal Trade Commission event, titled 'The Dangers of 'Gender-Affirming Care' for Minors,' included testimony from six people who had come to believe their gender transition hurt them more than it helped. The Department of Education marked 'Detrans Awareness Day' in March. The following month, the White House ordered the National Institutes of Health to conduct more research into transition regret (even though it has gutted $800 million in grant funding for L.G.B.T.Q. research).
I am a researcher who studies detransition — what happens when people who have undergone a gender transition decide to stop or reverse it, often halting medical treatments like hormones. I am also transgender, having begun my own medical transition with testosterone 15 years ago, when I was a 25-year-old graduate student. Under the guise of protecting children from medical harm, the Trump administration is oversimplifying detransition and using it as a political cudgel against transgender health care.
My personal experience, that of most trans people I know and a large body of research, show medical transition can help many resolve their gender dysphoria and improve their quality of life. (I live a fulfilling life as a trans man and am the proud father of a 5-year-old.) But it's also true that a subset of people reverse course after already changing their bodies with hormones or surgeries.
Early studies, from the 1970s until the 2000s, suggested detransition among adults was rare; about 1 percent to 6 percent reversed the process or expressed regret. But some recent studies among young people have suggested it could now be higher, 5 percent to 10 percent — an increase that has come amid a sharp rise in the number of young people seeking care at gender clinics.
The focus of my research is on why people detransition and what the field of trans health care can learn from these experiences. In conducting what I believe to be the largest study ever designed to understand detransition, surveying nearly 1,000 people about the factors that contributed to their decision, my research team heard from many people whose stories were not all that different from the speakers at the F.T.C. panel. They felt let down by treatments, sometimes terribly so. This fact should encourage medical providers to take detransition seriously, to learn more about how to support people with these experiences.
At the same time, the Trump administration's rhetoric on detransition is dangerously myopic. We found that many people detransition not out of regret, but because they feel forced by societal factors like negative attitudes toward transgender people, attitudes that are being amplified by the Trump administration. I believe that acknowledging the full complexity of detransition — that it can unfold with ambivalence, regrets, resilience and even satisfaction — is the best path toward better care.
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