Gender Identity Five Years After Social Transition
publications.aap.orgThe sample group...isn't great. Only for participants who had completely socially transitioned between ages 3-12, and enrolled in the Trans Youth Project.
I'm very surprised Princeton and UW professors would generalize from this group to anyone who socially transitions...
Anti-trans activists like to use an old, discredited study that found 80% of trans kids retransitioned back to their gender assigned at birth to argue that minors shouldn't be allowed to take puberty blockers or hormones, because it'll ruin their body and it's a phase they'll just grow out of and regret.
They also like to use better studies on the subject like this one, which finds that 2.5% of trans kids retransitioned, to argue that social transition is a harmful gateway into a lifelong pipeline of medicalization with puberty blockers and hormones that will ruin their body and that they'll one day regret.
I imagine it must be convenient to have an unfalsifiable belief system.
Tyler Cowen said of the study, "I was surprised to see 6.5 as the average age for the transition to start." https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/05/th... .
I don't think 6-year-olds are capable of making informed decisions on such matters.
I've seen quite a few currently-transgender people say they knew they were trans when they were five, or that they likely would have realized if the vocabulary was available to them. Perception of one's own gender seems to come pretty early.
404