Detransition and Gender Dysphoria
NEWS LINKS
Detransition and regret rates appear to be increasing. Most regretters appear to be biological females and lesbians. Below are several links to articles about desistance and detransition.
1) This research paper acknowledges the complications in treating gender dysphoria in minors. Cases of desistance are reviewed.
Abstract
As the number of young people referred to specialist gender identity clinics in the western world increases, there is a need to examine ways of making sense of the range and diversity of their developmental pathways and outcomes. This article presents a joint case review of the authors caseloads over an 18-month period, to identify and describe those young people who presented to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) with gender dysphoria (GD) emerging in adolescence, and who, during the course of assessment, ceased wishing to pursue medical (hormonal) interventions and/or who arrived at a different understanding of their embodied distress. From the 12 case‘Taking the lid off the box’: The value of extended clinical assessment for adolescents presenting with gender identity difficultiesTaking the lid off the box’: The value of extended clinical assessment for adolescents presenting with gender identity difficultiess identified, 2 case vignettes are presented. Implications for the development of clinical practice, service delivery and research are considered.
2) Finland plans to study transition regret and detransition.
“Study aims to chart transition regret in Finland:”
"I wish I'd never done it"
Twenty-seven year-old Nita said her mental health problems were not adequately addressed before she began a medical female to male transition.
Nita said she's not alone and that she knows several people who have transitioned back to their original gender.
Irreversible effects
Nita began transitioning to male in her 20s, saying she approached transitioning lightly, akin to getting a tattoo. To make her body more masculine, Nita took testosterone and had a mastectomy.Study aims to chart transition regret in Finland
“The whole trans process injected meaning into my life. There was a constant goal to work towards,” she explained. “Now it bothers me that I’m a 27-year-old woman who sounds like a teenage boy.”
3) Carey Callahan has been an outspoken detransitioned women who is part of a group for individuals who have, or want to seek, medical transition services called Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network. She addresses the libertarian transition environment under “informed consent.”
“Gender identity is hard but jumping to medical solutions is worse:”
The day I knew I should quit my job answering phones at the transgender health-care clinic in California was the day a caller (let’s use the name Betty) threatened her in-home caretaker with a knife during the call. As the caretaker begged our clinic’s nurse to track down Betty’s doctor and tell him that Betty was having a psychotic episode, Betty stood between her and the apartment’s front door with a kitchen knife. Betty had poorly controlled paranoid schizophrenia, and often called the clinic agitated, alternately whispering and screaming about government agents stalking her. Betty was also a trans woman whom most people regarded as male, the sex of her birth.
The clinic followed the “informed-consent” protocol: its mission was to provide transgender patients who otherwise lacked access to health care with injections, skin patches and pills of feminising or masculinising hormones without having to pass through a series of requirements and assessments—known as “gatekeeping”—that restricted access in the past.
In medicine broadly, informed-consent refers to the ethical requirement that a clinician administering a treatment communicate to the patient the anticipated risks and benefits, as well as reasonable alternatives to the treatment. Yet for transition medicine in America, informed-consent programmes do not require clinical documentation, beyond patient reports, of the patient’s gender dysphoria over time (ie, a feeling of mismatch between one’s biological sex and gender identity) and readiness for medical interventions.
Gatekeeping horror stories are notorious in the transgender community.
4) Lisa Marchiano is an LCSW who works with detransitioned people.
“The Ranks of Gender Detransitioners Are Growing. We Need to Understand Why:”
The young women with whom I have worked became trans identified during adolescence. They frequently did so in the context of significant family dysfunction or complex psycho-social issues. Sexual assault and sexual harassment were common precursors. A majority had an eating disorder at the time they became trans identified. Since detransitioning, most now understand themselves to be butch lesbians. In our work together, they traced complex histories of coming to terms with their homosexuality. Some faced vicious homophobic bullying before they announced their trans identification…
Dismissing detransition as a “panic” stirred up by biased media outlets does a grave disservice to the real men and women who are struggling through the difficult experience of detransition. It isn’t good science—or good journalism—to ignore a category of people simply because their pain is politically inconvenient.
5) The BBC has also recently covered the topic of detransition here and here.
6) Dr. Lisa Littman is doing a research study on desistance and detransition.
7) A video on “Detrantransition and Retransition” from National LGBT Health Information.
8) Several videos below cover individuals’ experiences with transition regret:
“A Woman's Place is marching on together (Leeds, 22nd November 2019) Thomasin Pick”
“Thoughts on butch erasure (FTM detransition)”
9) Storm Ryan, a well-known trans Youtuber, is very alarmed at the exploding numbers of trans-identified teens.