Exclusive: Trump White House directs NIH to study ‘regret’ after transgender people transition

Detransitioners exist, but they are such a tiny minority of people who receive gender-affirming care. IIRC, more people regret having knee surgery than any surgery associated with a gender transition. Should we ban knee surgery?!
- Even the regret rate for having children is higher. Lol
- My friend's parent detransitioned because they were not accepted socially in their preferred gender and found it less painful to just live with the dysphoria than to bear the brunt of the hatred that came their way. By my understanding, the vast majority of people who do detransition do so because they did not find acceptance in society or socially.
  Unreal that the biggest cure for trans regret is to stop giving them things to regret.

The only "regret" is not starting sooner.
- If only I could go back in time 25 years and start on puberty blockers.
- God, I would give anything to have started this all 10 years sooner. When I see what beautiful women these transfemmes who started young are growing to be, I feel so much joy for them with a tinge of jealousy that I can't shake.

I mean, you could study the same thing about a marriage ending in divorce, so long as you exclude happily married people from the sample set. Or literally anything where some subset of people will have a negative outcome. Which is everything.
Is this going to be a new Smithsonian exhibit?
- I remember seeing a study once which showed regret about gender transition at about 1%. I thought that was pretty high. Then I saw that surgery for cancer had a regret rate that was much higher. Memory is fuzzy but maybe 6%. There are always negative outcomes for surgery. If you're happily living as a trans person who hasn't had bottom surgery, and when you do, you end up damaging a nerve, which means constant pain, you might regret the surgery. That doesn't change that you're trans, nor does it change your gender. Many people with negative outcomes or side effects still don't regret it, as they would for other surgeries.
  People are complex animals. I agreed that this is likely to be seen in the future as a state sanctioned invasion of people medical rights and sense of identity that in years to come will look petty and antiquated. I wonder how they made the study possible without using banned words like gender, trans etc. Could it be that even they found their ridiculous censorship of scientific knowledge was stupid and unhelpful.
  Edited: more accurate figures from other user
  
  I remember seeing a study once which showed regret about gender transition at about 6%.
  Meta-analyses almost always put the figure at closer to 1%. It is one of the least regretted things that humans do. To provide a comparison figure, education regret tends to hover closer to 40% and parenting at 10%.
  
  There is this study from Louisiana - https://ldh.la.gov/assets/docs/LegisReports/HR158_2022RS_LDHReport.pdf

They’re going to announce they found that a huge percentage of trans people regret transitioning, either by outright falsifying data or by defining “regret” as “has any negative experience in any capacity related to transition.”
I don’t hold a great amount of hope for the likelihood of the average cis person to do anything other than nod to themselves and go “I knew it”, but I would love to be surprised.
- "has any negative experience in any capacity related to transition.”
  While also being the cause of said experiences

I guess it's somewhat plausible that more and more people regret their coming out or transition if you constantly bully and villainize them like Trump is doing.
- This is essentially what the existing research shows, that transition regret is quite low as compared to regret for other things like medical or cosmetic surgeries, and that most regret concerns how they're perceived and treated in society.

The type of people who relish regret in others, are people with regrets themselves seeking to pull themselves up by bringing others down. It's always been my theory that these bitter hateful conservatives are just jealous and sad. They don't want there to be a world with choices, because they've chosen a world without them. The conservative world is a world of poor work life balance, of loveless marriages, of secret shame, of judgement, of superficial happiness. The idea of a life free of these yokes calls their whole construct of reality into question. They'd rather snuff it out than admit they've chosen the wrong door. In short, they want everyone to be as cynical and bitter as they are. If they can't have cake, they don't want anyone else to have any either.
- ...all because so many of them chose to believe a fictional book is reality.
  
  I've spent some time trying to read the bible. No one compelled me to, I wasn't desperate for answers, I just wanted to be better acquainted with something seemingly so influential to the world around me.
  Just how perfectly contradictory the behavior of the most vehement devotees is to the actual teachings of the book is absolutely mind boggling.
  Take for example global warming. How someone dedicated to the bible could read about Moses and the Pharoah, and not draw a parallel between scientists (Moses), the Pharoah (climate deniers/big oil/the wealthy), and the plagues (ruined water, crop death, livestock death, illness, unusual and extreme weather events), is beyond me. Pharoah just continues to arrogantly ignore the warnings of Moses, periodically acquiescing, but ultimately returning to his previous state of obstinacy once he thinks he's in the clear. Only once Pharoah's own life is effected, only once it'stoo late, does he finally listen. Hell on earth was not bad enough to persuade him, only personal hardship. Like...how do you not see that we are the rabble getting pummeled by hail and having our land wiped out, how do you not see that our leaders are the insulated, out of touch Pharoahs, who ultimately view us as expendable. And if you believe in god and all that, how do you not believe that unprecedented weather and pandemics and shit are meant to be course corrections from on high? It seems to be a pretty ear cut cautionary tale about ignoring warnings and explaining away inconvenient evidence. Like, how are the bible people the least humble, least patient, least tolerant, most materialistic, worst idolaters? They latch onto and obsess about all the ticky tacky window dressing shit about not casting your seed onto the ground and dick mutilation, but miss the main fucking point of judge not, and love thy neighbour, and welcome strangers, and forgiveness, and generally just mind your own damn business. It's infuriating.

I feel for the remaining members of the NIH who have been told in no uncertain terms "Find or fabricate evidence that aligns with our anti-trans stance or start looking elsewhere for employment."
- That's really not how NIH grants work
  
  I mean this isn't how government is supposed to work, but, here we are, with an unelected idiot handing pink slips to every government agency under the sun that doesn't stroke his ego.
- I mean... they COULD just use the 2022/2023 study that the Louisiana department of health was forced to do... Mainly , the reasoning behind it was to find incidence of under 18 surgeries... of which Louisiana found none... but had "regret" and "social re-transition" as metrics they studied. One COULD argue that the degree of social or societal pressure could vary from state to state which could inform "regret" models.
  https://ldh.la.gov/assets/docs/LegisReports/HR158_2022RS_LDHReport.pdf
  Subsection 11.3 - Regret After Surgery: "Individuals 18 and under constituted 1,360 (20.0%) of the cohort. Regret after gonadectomy (only eligible to individuals over 18 and after one and a half years of CSHs) was rare (0.6% in AMAB, 0.3% in AFAB). All individuals who later expressed regret started CSHs after the age of 25."
  "In a cohort of 209 youth (median age 16) post-mastectomy for GD, two later reported regret (0.95%), and none underwent reversal. In a cohort of 136 AFAB in the U.S., comparing post-mastectomy to pre- surgical patients, all 68 individuals undergoing mastectomy reported it was a good decision, and nearly all (67 of the 68) denied any regret about the procedure."
  Subsection 11.4—Retransitions in Socially Transitioned Children "An ongoing cohort study in the U.S. enrolled socially transitioned children at ages 3 to 12, notably without a requirement for formal GD diagnosis but based on self-reported transgender or gender-diverse identity. At an average of five years since their social transition, 7.3% (23 of 317) reported they re-transitioned their gender identity. In the 23 individuals, the majority reported being cisgender (eight) or nonbinary (11). The remainder (four individuals) transitioned to cisgender, then back to transgender within the five years. Just under a third of the cohort initiated puberty suppression (29%) or hormone treatment (30.9%), with more than 95% of each group continuing to report transgender identities. This cohort will continue to be followed through adolescence and adulthood."

This is probably a good thing to study, but somehow I don't expect this administration to use anything they discover to improve the way we handle everything around the transitioning. I get the distinct impression that they will use the existence of the study to make things worse for everyone.
- It has already extensively been studied and it has always shown that it has the least amount of regret of any surgeries, and that transgender people regret transitioning at rates often literal magnitudes lower than just about anything else people regret in their lives - children, tattoos, marriage, education, romance, leisure.
  
  If there was a good-faith desire to study it again, I couldn't see any reason not to.
  But we aren't gonna get that effort from this government.