The desistance myth is the belief that “about 80 percent of kids with gender dysphoria end up feeling okay, in the long run, with the bodies they were born into.” This is not true. It is a pernicious and damaging myth, because it encourages parents to disbelieve their kids and even to refuse to allow their kids to get appropriate care and treatment.
This blog post is about a relatively minor claim in Jesse Singal’s latest article about trans issues, concerning what critics of the desistance myth say.
Singal’s article has many second-person-removed claims. For example:
Many of these so-called detransitioners… say they were nudged toward the physical interventions of hormones or surgery by peer pressure or by clinicians who overlooked other potential explanations for their distress.
Which clinicians pushed them? Is there any verification of this?
Similarly:
The concerns of the detransitioners are echoed by a number of clinicians who work in this field, most of whom are psychologists and psychiatrists. They very much support so-called affirming care, which entails accepting and exploring a child’s statements about their gender identity in a compassionate manner. But they worry that, in an otherwise laudable effort to get TGNC young people the care they need, some members of their field are ignoring the complexity, and fluidity, of gender-identity development in young people. These colleagues are approving teenagers for hormone therapy, or even top surgery, without fully examining their mental health or the social and family influences that could be shaping their nascent sense of their gender identity.
Note that Singal isn’t making any of those claims himself; he’s just reporting that others are saying that, without confirming if what they’re saying is true or not.
This seems, frankly, like shoddy reporting for a front-cover feature in The Atlantic.
Who are the clinicians who echo these concerns?
Which professionals are approving teens for top surgery without “fully examining” first? (What does “fully” examining mean, anyhow?) If these professionals are acting unethically, why not say who they are?
Did Singal fact-check at all before publishing these claims? If he did fact-check, what did he find out?
By putting all these claims in the anonymous second person, Singal inoculates himself from having to say if these claims are false or true (while strongly implying they are true). He’s made himself immune to fact-checking.
Which is why this relatively minor claim, about what critics of the desistance myth say, caught my eye. It’s one of the few places in this article where Singal makes a claim that I can actually check. Here’s Singal:
Within a subset of trans advocacy, however, desistance isn’t viewed as a phenomenon we’ve yet to fully understand and quantify but rather as a myth to be dispelled. Those who raise the subject of desistance are often believed to have nefarious motives—the liberal outlet ThinkProgress, for example, referred to desistance research as “the pernicious junk science stalking trans kids,” and a subgenre of articles and blog posts attempts to debunk “the desistance myth.” But the evidence that desistance occurs is overwhelming. The American Psychological Association, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Endocrine Society, and Wpath all recognize that desistance occurs. I didn’t speak with a single clinician who believes otherwise. “I’ve seen it clinically happen,” Nate Sharon said. “It’s not a myth.”
(Incidentally, many, possibly most, current critics of the desistance myth, are criticizing Jesse Singal’s own articles. Singal should have disclosed this to his readers.)
“Desistance,” depending on the writer, can refer to different things. In this article, Singal defines it like this: “desisters are people who stop experiencing gender dysphoria without having fully transitioned socially or physically.” The term has also been used to refer to people who are diagnosed as trans, but eventually identify with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Singal explicitly claims a “subset of trans advocacy” debunks “the desistance myth” by arguing that desistance never occurs.
That would be an incredibly unreasonable thing to argue. Which explains why no one of any note argues it. ((I have seen people argue that the definition of “desister” is too unspecific to be meaningful, and therefore they won’t say if desistance happens or not. But that’s a different argument than Singal’s strawman.)) Rather, when debunkers refer to the desistance myth, in virtually every case they are referring to something like this claim:
While the actual percentages vary from study to study, overall, it appears that about 80 percent of kids with gender dysphoria end up feeling okay, in the long run, with the bodies they were born into.
That’s the actual desistance myth trans advocates are debunking. But Singal misreports their argument, replacing it with a much weaker argument.
It’s possible that Singal is not purposely deceiving, but is simply not objective enough to correctly parse the argument against the desistance myth. But it doesn’t actually matter. Singal is being purposely deceptive about what critics of the desistance myth argue, or he’s so biased that he can’t correctly discern what they are arguing. Either way, he’s not a reliable reporter.
I think this is typical of the (possibly unintentional) dishonesty practiced by Singal and many of his defenders. They refuse to address the arguments against their views in good faith, preferring to attack strawman and marginal arguments, while diminishing or ignoring more substantial arguments. Another example is Singal’s colleague Katie Herzog, who – in the pages of The Stranger – claimed critics pegged her and Singal as transphobic, not because of what they wrote, but because they are cis. ((Here’s the exact quote from Herzog: “I was quickly pegged as transphobic, not because of the content of my piece but because I, a cis woman, had the audacity to write it. This, apparently, was many people’s problem with Singal, and they took to Twitter to argue that this article should have been written by a trans person instead.”)) This claim is utterly false, as anyone could tell with a google search – but how many Stranger readers will check? Like Singal, her tone seems so reasonable and trustworthy.
The fact that this claim of Singal’s is false, does not prove that Singal’s unverifiable claims are false.
But I don’t think they can be presumed to be truthful, either.
This is the end of this blog post; what follows is a description of the ten google results I examined.
Continue reading →
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