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.<\/p>\n
This blog post is about a relatively minor claim in Jesse Singal’s latest article about trans issues<\/a>, concerning what critics of the desistance myth say.<\/p>\n Singal’s article has many second-person-removed claims. For example:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Which clinicians pushed them? Is there any verification of this?<\/p>\n Similarly:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Note that Singal isn’t making any of those claims himself<\/em>; he’s just reporting that others are saying that, without confirming if what they’re saying is true or not.<\/p>\n This seems, frankly, like shoddy reporting for a front-cover feature in The Atlantic<\/em>. <\/p>\n Who are the clinicians who echo these concerns? <\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Did Singal fact-check at all before publishing these claims? If he did fact-check, what did he find out?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n Within a subset of trans advocacy, however, desistance isn\u2019t viewed as a phenomenon we\u2019ve 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\u2014the liberal outlet ThinkProgress, for example, referred to desistance research as \u201cthe pernicious junk science stalking trans kids,\u201d and a subgenre of articles and blog posts attempts to debunk \u201cthe desistance myth.\u201d 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\u2019t speak with a single clinician who believes otherwise. \u201cI\u2019ve seen it clinically happen,\u201d Nate Sharon said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a myth.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Incidentally, many, possibly most, current critics of the desistance myth, are criticizing Jesse Singal’s own articles<\/em>. Singal should have disclosed this to his readers.)<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n Singal explicitly claims a “subset of trans advocacy” debunks “the desistance myth” by arguing that desistance never occurs<\/strong>. <\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s the actual desistance myth trans advocates are debunking. But Singal misreports their argument, replacing it with a much weaker argument.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em><\/a> – 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, as anyone could tell with a google search – but how many Stranger <\/em>readers will check? Like Singal, her tone seems so reasonable and trustworthy.<\/p>\n The fact that this claim of Singal’s is false, does not prove that Singal’s unverifiable claims are false. <\/p>\n But I don’t think they can be presumed to be truthful, either.<\/p>\n This is the end of this blog post; what follows is a description of the ten google results I examined.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n P.S. Just to be clear – the claim that 80% of gender dysphoric children “desist” is nonsense – especially when used to imply that a large portion of people who transition will eventually detransition. Several of the links below refute the desistance myth in detail.<\/p>\n I did a google search for “the desistance myth.” ((I first took steps to avoid<\/a> google’s personalized search results, since I wanted google’s unfiltered results.)) I then went through the results to find the first ten webpages criticizing the desistance myth. This involved going deeper than just the top ten results, since I eliminated duplicate results and webpages refuting the idea that there is a “desistance myth” (including one written by Jesse Singal himself). The ten pages I wound up with are listed at the bottom of this post.<\/p>\n My working assumption is that if the argument Segal debunks is so common among “a subset of trans advocacy” as to be worth addressing in The Atlantic, then it would be easy to find with a google search.<\/p>\n One of the top ten results was the ThinkProgress article<\/a> Singal cites.<\/p>\n Not a single one of these articles denies that desistance ever happens. In every single case, “the desistance myth” refers to the idea that research shows that a large majority of kids diagnosed with GID “desisted”; I did not find one example of the argument Singal claims to be criticizing.<\/p>\n For example, this is what the ThinkProgress article Singal cited says:<\/p>\n Dating back decades, there are about a dozen studies that prop up the desistance myth. Each claims to have studied a cohort of kids with GID and found that a significant percentage (around 60 to 90 percent) of those kids ended up \u201cdesisting\u201d in their gender dysphoria and embracing the gender that they were assigned at birth. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n There is no good-faith reading of this as the author denying that “desistance occurs” at all. Singal attributes a claim to this article that is not anywhere in the article.<\/p>\n What follows is a list of the top ten google results I located.<\/p>\n The End of the Desistance Myth – Huffington Post<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s time for the 80 percent desistance figure to be relegated to the same junk science bin as the utterly discredited link between vaccines and autism. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Desistance Myth – Transfigurations<\/a> There are numerous reasons why a person might detransition: some of them visceral and personal (e.g., perhaps transitioning didn\u2019t feel right for them), and others directly related to societal transphobia (e.g., the loss of jobs, housing, family, support system, safety). It could also be some combination thereof.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article critiques, not the idea that desistance ever happens, but the idea “that 80 percent of children who experience gender dysphoria (or \u201cgender identity disorder,\u201d as it was called in previous versions of the DSM) eventually grow up to be comfortable in their birth assigned gender.”<\/p>\n Dispelling the \u201cdesistance\u201d myth of youth gender non-conformity<\/a><\/p>\n Those of us familiar with this debate have heard the critics use discredited research which claims an 80% (or more) rate of \u201cdesistance\u201d in gender non-conforming (GNC) youth, sometime during puberty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article goes on to cite more recent, not yet published research which found a desistance rate of about 4%. Several of the articles on this list approvingly cited this 4% research. Whether or not this research holds up and is replicated over time, however, clearly no one approvingly citing the 4% figure is denying that desistance ever happens. 4% is not 0%.<\/p>\n The pernicious junk science stalking trans kids \u2013 ThinkProgress<\/a><\/p>\n Dating back decades, there are about a dozen studies that prop up the desistance myth. Each claims to have studied a cohort of kids with GID and found that a significant percentage (around 60 to 90 percent) of those kids ended up \u201cdesisting\u201d in their gender dysphoria and embracing the gender that they were assigned at birth. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n The end of the \u2018desistance\u2019 myth? | Growing Up Transgender<\/a><\/p>\n Anyone with even a cursory awareness of issues relating to transgender children will have heard the 85% \u2018desistance\u2019 myth. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n This article includes a more detailed discussion of the 4% figure.<\/p>\n Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows – Google Books<\/a><\/p>\n Flawed research statistics and the voices of disqualified doctors claim that about 80 percent of all trans kids desist being trans. This idea of the ‘desistance myth’ has been debunked by many already.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Everything you need to know about trans children, gender affirmative therapy and hormone blockers<\/a><\/p>\n A recent landmark court case in Australia showed that up to 96% of trans kids who sought services from the gender clinic at the Royal Children\u2019s Hospital of Melbourne between 2003-2017 continued to see themselves as transgender as they got older. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Emily G kmii on Twitter: “The desistance myth is an example of a failure to reconcile what could be considered Lagrangian vs Eulerian frames.”<\/a><\/p>\n In context, Emily is talking about the myth that “90% of trans kids desist.”<\/p>\n Fox Fisher on Twitter: “Detransition is 4% not 85%! The end of the desistance myth via this excellent blog <\/a>https:\/\/t.co\/wQxlLa3G1t<\/a> #transgender”<\/p>\n (Note: The link goes to the “growing up transgender” blog post which is included earlier on this list.)<\/em><\/p>\n Media Misinformation About Trans Youth: The Persistent 80% Desistance Myth | GID Reform Weblog by Kelley Winters<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading
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\nThe author, Julia Serano – possibly the most prominent critic of the desistance myth – explicitly acknowledges that desisters exist.<\/p>\n