Dutch study proves kids grow out of gender dysphoria

[Hoardasurass]

A 15 year long dutch study has shown that gender dysphoria is temporary in most kids, I'm wondering how the activists will try and explain it 🤔

EXCL: Most kids grow out of desire to change sex, study suggests https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13263725/trans-kids-change-sex-adults-study.html?ito=native_share_article-nativemenubutton

I suspect had I been asked when I was 10 would I prefer to be a boy I would have said yes. I was definitely a tomboy and preferred the company of boys, had mainly interests in 'boy' things, this was a long time ago so I was a bit of a disappointment as a daughter. This continued until maybe 13-14 when I actually started to like being a girl although a girl who still liked boy things. I did double maths and Physics at A level and Engineering at Uni very untypical at the time, but also happily married another engineer, still together many years later.

Same. Though as an adult I still mainly have male friends and male orientated hobbies but I don’t want to be a man. I think from an early age I wanted to do everything that boys did, I was the only girl in the school football team/club at primary school, in the 80’s there were no girls teams. I grew up with a older brother and loved hanging out with him and his mates and being one of them, was always covered in mud, climbing trees etc…, I haven’t really changed but society changed to except it was ok for girls to do these things, sadly it’s now gone a step too far in telling our kids that they can now chose to be male or female.

Gender GP sell hormones to young people with no diagnosis of gender dysphoria

I posted this before bu I can almost guarantee if transgender was well known when I experiencing puberty in the early 90s, I may have thought I was a boy.

All my older siblings and cousins are boys. I used to hang out & play soccer with them. No interest in traditional girl's clothing, games, etc. Absolute tom boy. My periods started when I was 9 & I needed to wear a bra at 10/11. I had undiagnosed endometriosis so really hated my body & everything associated with being a girl.

It somehow changed by 14-15 or so as everyone else caught up. I no longer felt different.

It's about feeling different and also every child/teenager will feel different yo others at times. This should be explained more, rather than entertaining the possibility of being born in the wrong body.

I DGAF what adults do, in the main, but kids should be given facts about how normal it is to dislike puberty, how normal it is to feel like your different and reminded that they are still children and their brain, personality and identity is still forming and thst if they feel the same at 18, that they should explore it then but not before.

I can understand that people are cautious about agreeing that this study proves that the vast majority of gender confused kids grow out of it. (Although my own view is that the evidence has shown this has been obvious for many years).

Young people today are being told that if they have any feelings of confusion about their changing bodies then they definitely must be trans. They are being told by teachers, healthcare professionals and other people in authority that anyone who disagrees with their 'trans status' is a genocidal advocate for conversion therapy who would rather have a dead child than a trans child.

Given the extreme situation we're in, surely it's more important to discuss the wider impact of this study than to nit pick about the exact definition of gender dysphoria?

One study can't prove anything, but this is certainly very interesting. While there have been lots of studies which showed high rates of desistance among children seen at gender clinics, I don't think I've seen any study looking at the wider population before. So, it's interesting to see confirmed in a study that feeling that you would like to be the opposite sex is pretty common among children.

It doesn't really matter whether 'gender discontentedness' matches up with dysphoria/trans identification. Activists want to create a situation where it is against the law to suggest to a child that what they're experiencing could be a transient discontentedness rather than 'being trans'. Because that would be a conversion practice.

However, I'm still quite confused about what this study really shows. I was initially blaming the Mail article for mangling the stats: the stats they've thrown in from other sources are very hard to understand without context - eg the vagina construction bar chart adds up to 100% - does this mean that every single patient was in pain 2 years later? Or does it just show the proportion of the patients in pain who needed medical treatment compared with those who didn't (not very informative if the latter).

However, having looked at the original study, I'm still confused.

The abstract says firstly:

In early adolescence, 11% of participants reported gender non-contentedness. The prevalence decreased with age and was 4% at the last follow-up (around age 26).

(So, less than the 70-80% desistance rates seen in gender clinic studies, but I think that comes out as over a 60% reduction.)

However, it also says,

Three developmental trajectories of gender non-contentedness were identified: no gender non-contentedness (78%), decreasing gender non-contentedness (19%), and increasing gender non-contentedness (2%).

I think this is where the confusion upthread has arisen, with the suggestion that 80% didn't decrease. In fact most of those 80% didn't decrease because they didn't express any discontentedness (what a word!) in the first place.

I'm struggling to bring the two statements together though. How can 19% of people having a decreasing trajectory account for a drop of over 60%. Is it to do with the 11 > 4% change being measured between two points, and the 'trajectory' figure taking into account multiple intermediate points? Or something else? I have no maths or science beyond GCSE, so I'd be really grateful if anyone with more knowledge in this area could explain.

It's interesting also to compare the cohorts. At age 11, the general population group is slightly more likely to express 'discontentedness', but it drops off pretty quickly. The clinical group shows a lot higher persistence than the general population, particularly the boys. In fact the figure for males only drops off a little by age 22, and goes back up for 25. Almost all the decrease in that cohort is among the girls, from a much higher start point.

Bearing in mind that the clinical group is children with any kind of contact with mental health services, not necessarily anything to do with gender, this ties up with what other studies have shown about comorbidity of gender issues with other mental health troubles. Based on what I've seen over the last few years, I'd say that mental health services introducing and promoting gender ideology is also quite a plausible element of the picture here.

You forget that claiming that gender dysphoria is necessary to be trans has long, long been regarded as truscum, so much so that it is completely outdated.

I eagerly await the logical contortions you inevitably will come up with.

Yes, this is very weird. We have basically 78% never had any and 19% had decreasing (even going to zero at the end: "At the sixth assessment wave (around age 25), none of these individuals reported experiencing gender non-contentedness anymore"). If the value at age 11 is 11% for those who have some non-contentedness, how can 19% be decreasing? To be decreasing you must have had some, i.e. at least 19% must have had some.

Can't read it all now, but only thing I can think of is that some of these at the start had none, at the next assessment a lot of the ones that did have some went to none, but the ones on none went to some, and then by the end they also went back to none. So this 19% is made up of people who were yes-no-no and yes-yes-no but also those that were no-yes-no and this last group must be 8% and the two other the 11%.

Interesting read on PBs

https://twitter.com/buttonslives/status/1776016344086880513

Christina Buttons
@buttonslives
Groundbreaking new study from @MayoClinic, utilizing largest collection of testicular samples in youth, found mild to severe atrophy in the testes of boys who took puberty blockers, leading authors to doubt "reversibility" claims of these drugs.

https://www.buttonslives.news/p/new-mayo-clinic-study-finds-mild

It isn’t peer reviewed yet so take appropriate cautions when reading etc

On this question: “If the value at age 11 is 11% for those who have some non-contentedness, how can 19% be decreasing?”

The study split the population into three classes (No discontent, decreasing discontent and increasing discontent) by best fit. Not every member of each group will have had a straight line fit showing a smooth compliance with the overall trajectory.

So subjects who didn’t have any discontent in the first wave (age 11 also referred to in the study as T1) but did in the 2nd (T2) and/or third (T3) waves and then showed decreasing discontent after would likely have fit in the decreasing class the best. That accounts for a decreasing class that is larger than the number of people showing discontent in T1. (I.e. Yes, your last paragraph is basically correct).

There is some discussion that the three class model did not have the best fit (they tried a four class model too, including a stable discontentedness, which had a better fit by some measures, but the 4th class only had 8 subjects in it which they considered insufficient). The less good fit of the 3 class model is something that a bigger study might be able to improve on and that might give us more accurate figures on persistence and desistence.

On this question: “I'm struggling to bring the two statements together though. How can 19% of people having a decreasing trajectory account for a drop of over 60%. Is it to do with the 11 > 4% change being measured between two points, and the 'trajectory' figure taking into account multiple intermediate points?”

Yes. I think it is about decreasing from the highest point measured - which was 11% and happened to be in the first questionnaire, T1 (at age 11) - and the last point measured, which was 4% in T6 (age 25).

It’s worth noting that when they are talking about the three trajectories, that only covers 2,347 subjects, not everyone who was surveyed, because they excluded anyone who did not fit one of their 3 trajectories with a probability of at least 0.75. So the 19% decreasing trajectory class is 446 subjects which is only 16% of the entire survey groups. Equally the increasing discontent trajectory class is 47 subjects and only 1.7% of the entire survey groups.

The 11% expressing discontentedness at the high point down to 4% at the low point seems to cover all 2,772 subjects of the surveys.

Also, it appears surveys are ongoing , there is mention of the 8th survey about to be taken, implying there has already been a 7th that isn’t included in this study. The data from these responses at later points could end up changing the findings.

If gender incongruence is not a disorder, then why should society be forced to accommodate it? There are plenty of “incongruences” in life and we just say: get over it.

I think you’re arguing the narrow point that

“Dutch study proves kids grow out of gender dysphoria”

is overreach when you interpret it to mean

”Dutch study proves kids grow out of a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria”

or even

”Dutch study proves kids grow out of a self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria that survives the waiting list at GIDS”

but I think this misses the point that the trans lobby encourages parents to believe that as soon as a kid says “I’m trans” you have to treat them as if they have a disorder that could lead to their suicide if you don’t rush to affirm them. In other words, if you interpret “gender dysphoria” colloquially (as the trans lobby is spending millions to encourage), the OP’s interpretation is correct.

@NumberTheory Thank you so much. It sounds like I was groping towards the right answer, but simply couldn't understand the detail of the methodological bits. I just don't have the maths! So the 11% > 4% is based on comparing the 'start and finish' levels for the whole group, while the 'trajectory' includes people who went up and then down between those two points. And, in addition, the 19% figure is a percentage of the people who they allocated to one of their trajectories, not of the whole group. That's incredibly helpful, much appreciated.

Exactly!

Though from the way they write, I think the 11%>4% is based on the highest discontentedness that just so happens to be the first survey. They talk at one point about how if surveys had started when the cohorts were younger, we might have seen lower figures for discontentedness at the beginning with it peaking at age 11 (probably due to puberty), but there’s no way to know because they don’t have the data. Discontentedness doesn’t necessarily simply go down with age.

So if they had surveys that showed lower discontentedness earlier, they would still be taking the 11%>4% as they are looking at how much it can go down from the peak, not simply start to end point. IYSWIM.

Got you. So they're comparing the highest and lowest points, and that happens to coincide with the youngest and oldest groups.

I'm a bit disappointed this study only covers from age 11. I get that they can't cover everything and this is a vital stage, but I hope other studies will cover what happens to younger children.

By age 11, kids will have some awareness of the significance of their biological sex. Whereas much younger children just see the stereotypes and the sexed body is less relevant. (Eg. the girls are the ones with long hair. The trifling detail (covered by clothing) of sexual anatomy doesn't really matter from their POV.) So you'd expect kids at a younger age to be more likely to really believe they can change sex, plus being younger they are still developing their sense of self and reality. And, if socially transitioned, they have years of believing they have changed sex before the stark reality of puberty. This presumably cements their identity as the opposite sex and makes actual body dysphoria far more likely at puberty.

So I'd really like to see some data on outcomes for this age group, comparing those who were "affirmed" and socially transitioned compared to those who were not. I'm sure they would find that kids who were socially transitioned had far greater distress at puberty and persistence in the desire to be the opposite sex.

What has scared me for some time is the push to create trans kids. Insisting on immediate social transition. Because the younger you get them, the more likely they are to persist, to integrate the lie about their sex into their core reality.

Sorry,

No need to apologise. I can see that you're going through some stuff.