Yes, a very good point.
A recent study made the rounds in the left-leaning literature, with most articles claiming "only" about 3% of transgender children change their minds within five years.
But the study, which began in 2013, may not fully reflect what’s happening today, when many more children are identifying as trans.
www.nytimes.com
The vast majority of the group still identified with their new gender five years later, according to the study, and many had begun hormonal medications in adolescence to prompt biological changes to align with their gender identities. The study found that 2.5 percent of the group had reverted to identifying as the gender they were assigned at birth.
There are problems with both the study and the interpretation of it by transgender activists, including the New York Times. Here is the study NYT linked:
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES. Concerns about early childhood social transitions among transgender youth include that these youth may later change their gender identification (ie, retransition), a process that could be distressing. The current study aimed to provide the first estimate of...
publications.aap.org
RESULTS
We found that an average of 5 years after their initial social transition, 7.3% of youth had retransitioned at least once. At the end of this period, most youth identified as binary transgender youth (94%), including 1.3% who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity. A total of 2.5% of youth identified as cisgender and 3.5% as nonbinary.
So, where to begin? Clearly it was 7.3% of youths in that study who change their minds, not 3%. The fact that some of them "retrasition "at least once," should tell a thinking person that some of them are wishy-washy about their identify. What a shock it must have been to those researchers to learn that identity confusion is common among kids. I guess they were too busy studying kids to have them.
The popular magazines (all copying each other, of course) are relying on the 2.5 percent who said at the end of the five years that they were at that moment identifying as the same gender as their biological sex. I guess they didn't want to count those who identified as non-binary at the end of five years.
But that is changing one's mind if the original claim was that they identified as the opposite gender from their biological sex, and now they say non-binary. For policy purposes, that is important, because a non-binary person has no benefit at all from puberty blockers and surgeries. Besides which, if a kid who claimed to be trans changes their mind, announcing as non-binary would be a good way to avoid having counselors freak out and call them liars.
This:
Later cisgender identities were more common among youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6 years; their retransitions often occurred before age 10 years.
So the kids who are being led by parents and other adults to claim that they are transgender commonly identify as cisgender shortly after. No kidding. Little kids don't understand transgender, or anything else about genger except waht they are told and shown. If a boy grew up in a society in which everyone wore the same coveralls (dream on Democrats!), they would have no urge to "dress like a girl," because there would be no societal convention for dressing like a boy or girl.
Catch a six year old envying his sister's easy-bake oven and an agendized adult can easily convince him to start dressing like a girl. Then when he he grows up, he gets what is happening to him and rebels.
It would be a shame if he had been poisoned with hormone treatments in the meantime, and tragic if he had been mutilated.
Research has suggested that ages 10 to 13 years may be particularly key times for retransition and that identity may be more stable after this period for youth who show early gender nonconformity.3
For. Sure. We should be waiting until well after thirteen to start any kind of hormonal or surgical treatment. Any Democrat care to dispute that?
This study did not assess whether participants met criteria for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth edition, diagnosis of gender dysphoria in children. Many parents in this study did not believe that such diagnoses were either ethical or useful, even if they had been diagnosed, and some children did not experience the required distress criterion after transitioning.
That is interesting. So they did not distinguish between children with a clinical diagnosis of Gender Dyphoria (GD) and those without. Because
the parents did not believe that they were ethical and useful.
Wait, what?
The parents? The parents?
I thought parents were the ones who are ignorant and must rely on the professionals in the educational counseling field and the transgender treatment industry? If they ignore a school counselor who tells them that their child is trans and needs to start treatment at once, call CPS on them. But I guess parents are right (and very brave) if they ignore a professional in the gender dysphoria field who tells them that their child has no Gender Dysphoria. Because those Gender Dysphoria specialists are so unethical?
I'll need a Democrat to explain that one.
Final identity classification for these analyses was based on our most recent interaction with the child and/or their parent before January 1, 2021.
If it is just the most recent interaction with the child, how is it the "final identity classification?"
Because some families have not participated recently, we also separately report (Table 2) the results of the n = 291 youth with whom the research team had an interaction within the 2 years before that deadline. This additional analysis allows us to assess whether those who retransitioned were more likely to have missed their more recent appointments with our team.
Of course they were more likely to have missed the more recent appointments if they had realized how inappropriate the whole thing was and felt like suckers for falling for it.
Importantly, only 1 of the 26 families with whom we did not meet in the past 2 years has formally dropped out of the study;
Why is that important? You can't find them, because they don't want to be found by you and they felt no obligation to "formally drop out."
the others often did not complete participation during these 2 years because of personal circumstances at the time we attempted re-recruitment.
In other words, they told you that it was "personal" to avoid telling you that they realized it was a scam to begin with. And since they "re-transitioned" you think it was imperitive to "re-recruit" them. That's the right word, I'd say.
We anticipate that many in this group will participate again in the future.
I anticipate that this will go away with the next moronic fad. I sure hope it doesn't persist like wearing pants below the butt. Meanwhile, we need to make sure as few kids have their lives ruined as possible.
When I first taught, it was at a high school and the fad then was for girls to claim to bisexual to get attention from boys. That fad has gone away, but this one takes its place. Next it will be kids getting attention by claiming to be aliens, or reincarnations of famous people.
This study is marginally better than the one posted by
Curried Goats in his OP. But it's conclusions in no way support the Leftie media's interpretation of it.
