How many transwomen/trans girls detransition?

[piddocktrumperiness]

Just that really. I can't quite find stats for this. If you've stumbled across something or know of this, do many young teen trans girls de transition? Do many older trans women detransition?

News just in: Major health care endores treatments that make them huge profits.

there are plenty of happy trans adults about now who had this treatment in their youth.

Are there? If there's no robust follow-up research all you have are individual anecdotes.

And even then, the fact that those people don't regret their choice is not evidence that they would have regetted not transitioning. After all, we know the majority of those who don't start a medical pathway do get reconciled with their birth sex, and I'm sure we'd all agree that whatever ones beliefs about gender, to live happily without drastic surgery and life long artificial cross sex hormones is better than being a life-long patient. (Well, all of us who aren't making money from the treatments at least!)

Furthermore, the numbers of kids on these treatments has exploded and the type of person and expectations is changing too. I don't think the outcomes of the handful of people who had the treatment long ago enough to be living a happy trans adulthood now are going to be representative of the future outcomes for the cohort who started equivalent treatment in the last 5 to 10 years, whose long term adult outcomes are as yet unknown.

News just in: Major health care endores treatments that make them huge profits.

I don't think it's a bad thing to remember that profit may be a factor particularly within privatised healthcare systems. But I find it very difficult to believe that those who serve on the committees of the major healthcare organisations are so venal that they are endorsing something they secretly suspect could be causing children harm just for money. That's a deeply cynical view of healthcare professionals and not one I think is accurate. I think people have to accept that these are people who have read the evidence, are familiar with the clinical practice and outcomes and who don't share your views, not that they are all profit hungry sharks sacrificing children for pretty paltry rewards in the context of the cost of healthcare.

And I say paltry because trans healthcare is pretty cheap. People using private providers in the UK are paying about £40 a month for hormones. You won't get much therapy for that which is the often suggested alternative. If drug companies really wanted to sell more hormones they'd be far better off pushing HRT and the contraceptive pill given the very small number of trans people.

For all the squirrels on this thread the facts are these:

1. we don’t know true detransition rates and anyone who claims they do is lying or has an agenda
2. detransition rates are difficult to compare over different cohorts decades apart because large numbers of children being placed on puberty blockers with different demographics is a new phenomenon
3. without true numbers, doctors prescribing puberty blockers need to either a) fully inform the children and their parents that it is an unknown so they are properly informed or b) pretend it doesn’t matter and practise poor medicine. Clearly a) is what should happen but the reality is that b) is what is happening.

Adding to that:

The OP only asked about 'transwomen' and 'trans girls'. It is a bit of a feature not a flaw that the people that seem to keep their penises do tend to be the older males who declare that they are now women.

Whereas the younger girls, actual girls, that are trying to escape the horrorshow that is male attention/porn are the ones that are giving up most for this ideology - by having breasts removed [in the USA from age 13 up], by taking testosterone that has effects ranging from deeper voices, receding hairline and early onset menopause resulting in severe osteoporosis which is already showing as female having to walk with walking sticks in their 20s.

Pretending that detransitioners don't exist by flinging non-existent or flawed studies at you in the pretence of 'science', is key to pretending that this is somehow ethical.

There is nothing ethical about childrens hospitals advertising how to access mastectomies for girls in their early teens. Calling it 'top surgery' is another way of misrepresenting what they are actually doing.

Sorry to be a pedant aka historically accurate, but Galileo was not threatened with execution for stating the earth revolved around the sun. He was told to say that he thought it was a proposition worth examining ( which several Cardinals were actively encouraging) but not to state it as a fact until proven. The technology to do this did not exist until after his death .

I suppose it is fairer to say that Galileo was more like the TRA in that he insisted on sating as a fact something which was a hypothesis, even though he was ultimately correct : something which one must doubt will happen in this debate.

@GivenitupGerty

I do so hope all goes well for you both, and that the rest of her life is calm and pleasant

And I say paltry because trans healthcare is pretty cheap. People using private providers in the UK are paying about £40 a month for hormones. You won't get much therapy for that which is the often suggested alternative.

£40 a month for Testogel. Plus £30 a month for a Gender GP subscription, plus £60 every 6 months for a ‘catch up’ session’, plus £195 set up fee and £65 info gathering session.

Plus another £70 a month for a nasal spray GnRHa (synarel) if the hormone alone stop periods.

plus £8,000 for private mastectomy and what £90,000 for private phalloplasty (3 or 4 staged ops) plus multiple revisions for the many complications.

Hornone use will be far longer term than therapy and therapy has no side effects (no vaginal atrophy, no dangerously increased red blood cell count, no additional risk of heart disease).

Over the long term, therapy is definitely the budget friendly option.

Aside from some pretty well known drs making lots of money from transition surgeries, wont name them as my post might disappear.

Drug companies like getting £40 a month from lifetime subscribers. Its good business sense innit.
I have asthma and it's not going anywhere so for the rest of my life I need inhalers, at a permanent cost to me and a permanent income to the drug company.

Or we shall (not because I'm full of covid) do the math
£40 now, that will increase with cost of living and new drugs and generally as everything increases cost over time, times how many people? Up thread it was mooted up to 500k people, less detrans. Quite a lot of moolah really for many years into the future.
Then add on any drugs needed to treat the stuff brought on by puberty blockers like osteoporosis and tooth loss, those being the two I remember I know theres more. When you add it up, it's really a lot of money.

And the cloglady put it better, because she did the maths

@Allthegoodnamesarechosen
Thank you.
@AlisonDonut Unless you have direct experience of your DD wanting a mastectomy and their genitalia re fashioned you have no idea how devastating this is. We had no previous clues. Our DD was the Queen of pink.
What did happen to her at 12 was a sexual attack and then huge mental health issues. She still wears baggy clothes. However she has a boyfriend and could never look like a man.
5 years on she doesn't want hormones and wants her own children naturally.
The amount of aggressive shit she was subjected to on Internet forums was heartbraking. Her original thoughts were it was easier to be a boy. Her intellectual ability made her a target for activists. Luckily she saw through them. One told her she couldn't paint her nails! Bloody nowt to do with gender. My family has been through hell with other people pushing their genda on a traumatised kid. Only 5% given hormones? I don't believe that. Thank you for pointing out the shocking truth of what is happening.

@AlisonDonut Unless you have direct experience of your DD wanting a mastectomy and their genitalia re fashioned you have no idea how devastating this is. We had no previous clues. Our DD was the Queen of pink.

Don't know why you are having a pop at me, I'm totally gutted that all the hard work we women put into doing non gender conforming things has resulted in girls having their breasts removed. I know it is devastating, fucking hell I spend half my spare time pointing out on here how fucked up this all is.

Honestly. I don't know why I bother.

sometimes us mums of genderdistressed kids have a sort of bubble over moment and misdirect our emotions - our rage is really for social media influencers and algorithms, right on teachers and exploitative medical practitioners/drug companies.

Feminist women deffo are not our enemies but FWR is one of the few places we can talk about things openly.

Don’t give up, you are one of my favourite straight talking posters!

We dont know how many people detransition, nor how that changes over time. Those put on puberty blockers then cross sex hormones for extended periods do not experience a normal puberty, a time crucial in brain development. It is not known what impact this will have on their brains - will they ever become adult?

The full consequences of their decision to transition will often not become apparent for many years and once realised it may seem like there is no way back so they have to stay as they are. There may be a lot more regret than there is detransition.

@AlisonDonut
I am sorry I wasn't having a pop at you. I was thanking you for your wise words. I have an old phone jumping around and due to having to post under a spare name I should have given a gap in my monologue!

@TheClogLady
Exactly right.
I belive you helped me some years ago.
Lots of the forums will not allow any contra argument.

Thank you, bloody phones.

I've been itching to say this

All the more reason to improve NHS trans healthcare so people are no longer forced to rely on private providers.

And there is no evidence therapy works despite the huge cost (Stella O Malley charges £200 an hour). In fact most people report that therapy that seeks to cure someone of being trans is deeply harmful and evidence shows it is associated with negatove outcomes.

The other thing I wanted say we had a very mixed response whilst in secondary school. Most teachers were great. My dd chose a non binary name and was very militant if not called by it! We told her off because the new teacher was worried about being disciplined. One headmaster frequently forgot but he ignored her rants, uniform transgressions and got her through her GCSEs.
He asked me the other day what was her chosen name these days. He never believed she was a ftm but never wavered in his support. Unlike the teacher in her expensive private school who hounded her out. We ask alot of our teachers. If you are a teacher with an open mind, I thank you.
My dd is off to university, hopefully it will be easier for her there.

Free and very low cost therapy is available through Genspec.

The costs incurred by the NHS in facilitating gender transition are also going to be high so your ‘NHS should do it’ is an oversimplification.

Everything the NHS funds has to be costed and justified, across every specialism, the number of procedures the NHS considers value for money is dwindling for everyone.

NHS care needs to be evidence based and NICE certainly isn’t convinced that the current model is effective, let alone good value for money.
Very few practitioners seem to be interested in making gender a specialism either (look at MtF genital surgery as an example - Thomas recently passed away, Morley retired, Bellringer is reaching retirement age soon, that will leave only Larner, Coker and Rashid in NHS practice and Siepp in private (Inglefield is currently not operating while awaiting a continuation of his GMC disciplinary). The situation is even worse for FtM surgery as there is only one team and they’ve lost a couple of surgeons due to disciplinaries.

The NHS can’t force a doctor into training in this field and tendering contracts out doesn’t result in any suitable applicants. Even the NHS moonlighters (eg Gendercare doctors) don’t want their private practices to be paid for by NHS contracts (which is why there is no ‘right to choose’ for medical/social transition).

the only way for transition services to attract new providers is via financial incentive - the NHS has pay structures for all doctors so the incentive just isn’t there. Throw it open to a purely commercial marketplace and you’d probably get more surgeons interested (although perhaps not for the sorts of reasons you’d want a doctor to be motivated by).

The whole GIC system needs an overhaul, I agree, the current ‘gatekeeping’ is pointless because it’s a shelled out husk of what it used to be… but I suspect the long term results of that overhaul will be no NHS surgical procedures, but perhaps increased access to hormones - who knows, perhaps we’ll even end up with female sex HRT available over the counter to anyone who pays for it, as in Portugal,
(Testosterone is a controlled substance so that will have to stay prescription only).

I foresee a future where trans surgeries are classified as cosmetic body modifications and are entirely self-funded, same as facelifts and tattoos. WPATH jumped the shark by including the Eunuch chapter, so it’s no
longer able to pose as a credible organisation.

I’m so glad to hear your DD made it through her exams and is able to move forward to university!

Unfortunately, for a number of teens the temporarytrans cul de sac takes up a massive amount of headspace and energy and puts them at risk of derailment re: GCSE and A level, knocking them off the trajectory they were on before the new identity was announced.
Perhaps in some cases the grade derailment is the subconscious objective and the identity is a functional behaviour to excuse the dropped grades, rather than the other way around?
Crikey knows we have generations of incredibly clever girls who resort to self harm or develop eating disorders due to teenage pressures of perfection (whether they be specific pressures from parents/teachers or general pressures from societal messaging).

Well done to the pragmatic headteacher for holding his nerve and making enough space for your DD to manage both her temporary identity and her schoolwork. If only we could bottle that and send it to every school!

And there is no evidence therapy works despite the huge cost (Stella O Malley charges £200 an hour). In fact most people report that therapy that seeks to cure someone of being trans is deeply harmful and evidence shows it is associated with negatove outcomes.

Lol at a trans activist arguing for evidence-based care.

@livvyposts yet again you are misrepresenting things watchful waiting therapy for gender dysphoria IS NOT CONVERSION THERAPY.
It is helpful not harmful. I know this for a fact having gone through it myself. You work through all your underlying issues (which normally resolves the gender dysphoria) then work on having REALISTIC goals and outcomes and finally that no matter what you change about yourself you CAN NOT change your sex and help you come to terms with and accept that FACT.
The people I know who went through therapy at the same time as me who went on to transition (2out of 14 in my group) are happy and healthy (mentally not so much physically) and are happy in themselves and are greatfull for the therapy and outcomes they had. They also don't get "triggered" my being misgendered, needing prostate exams, seeing the words women/woman or pregnant women/woman nor by being refused access to women's single sex spaces.

Glad it's not just me!