New Evidence Shows that Two-Thirds of Sex Change Patients Regret Their Decisions

by Edwin BensonJuly 8, 2024 tfp.org/new-evidence-shows-that-two-thirds-of-sex-change-patients-regret-their-decisions

“Transition affirmation is not proven to be safe or effective long term. It does not reduce suicides. It does not repair mental health issues or trauma. Minors cannot give truly informed consent. Children have developing and immature brains. Their minds change often. They are prone to risk taking, they are vulnerable to peer pressure, and they don’t grasp long term consequences.”

The Myth of “Gender Affirming Care”

This succinct diagnosis comes from Dr. Andre Van Mol, a member of the American College of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Medical Ethics. He was taking direct aim at those who profit—both financially and ideologically—by providing “gender-affirming care” to adolescents.

“Gender-affirming care” is the euphemistic phrase that supporters of sex-change medications and surgeries apply to the evil that they commit. In their minds, children should be able to decide whether they wish to be boys or girls. Everyone else should accept the child’s whim as truth, calling these children by whatever name they wish and using the pronouns appropriate thereto.

Of course, such “advocates” forget several essential facts—that God makes each human being male or female. That choice takes form through the natural process at conception. Then, that determination finds an echo in each of the forty-six chromosomes within every one of the roughly thirty trillion cells in the adult human body.

The only adjustments the doctors can make are appearance, and even those superficial changes are seldom convincing.

A Successful Sex Change is Impossible

Eventually, every person who submits to this dehumanizing process has to face the fact that their quest to become something else has failed. That leaves them with two choices. They can continue the charade by taking more harmful and powerful drugs and enduring further painful, extreme and unsuccessful surgeries. The other choice is to accept that they are mutilated versions of their true selves. They can stop taking the medications. The body’s continued production of normal hormones will cause certain aspects of the patient’s natural sex to return, although the rate of return is individual and uncertain. The surgical mutilations are permanent.

These unfortunates are called “detransitioners.” In the introduction to her recent book, Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult, Catholic journalist Mary Margaret Olohan explores their plight.

“The word describes a person who has attempted to use surgery or hormonal intervention to change their biology because they believe, or want to believe, or have been told, that they were born in the wrong body. And nothing will make them happy or content until they have rectified that mistake.”

Of course, the drugs and surgeries fail, as they must. Despite the doctors’ and advocates’ promises, there is no way for these deceived young men actually to become women or vice versa. The biological imprint, a reflection of the Hand of God, is too strong to be set aside, no matter how radical the “treatment” may be.

The Quest to “Detransition”

Mary Margaret Olohan continues. “So that person detransitions: They try to reverse the process. They stop taking hormones, they reverse the surgeries (to the extent that is possible), and they attempt to deal with the mental and physical consequences of such brutal interventions in the physiology and anatomy of the human body.”

Those who promote and profit from the hormones and surgeries would have everyone believe that detransitioners are rare. They parade around their “success stories” like one-time reality show subject Jazz (née Jared) Jennings, who smiles broadly from the cover of the book Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen. The book is Amazon’s editors’ pick for “Best Young Adult.”

However, such stories are few and far between. More objective sources, like Dr. Van Moi, quoted above, tell very different stories, as do the young people described in Detrans.

Roadblocks to Locating Objective Evidence

Yet, a serious and vital question remains: What is the ratio of those who are satisfied with their treatments to the number who express regret? Such numbers are difficult to obtain for at least two reasons.

First, the people with access to the actual patients—the doctors—have a vested interest in promoting their work as successful. After the surgeons have done everything that they can do, even a satisfied patient’s hormone therapies must continue for life. That implies that each patient will produce income for the doctors and the pharmaceutical companies for years—perhaps decades—to come.

Second, the human character dislikes admitting mistakes or failures. The decision to “transition” is inherently difficult. It often involves the loss of friends and the censure of relatives. Even if everyone around the patient supports the so-called change, there will still be an immense and little-known psychological cost to the individuals, all of whom are, in effect, denying a significant component of their own physical, mental and emotional selves. Going through all that stress would hardly condition one to blithely dismiss the process as a mistake. In many—perhaps most—people, the tendency toward self-justification would compel one to pretend that all went well, even if it did not. The easiest option may well be to avoid the topic.

Insurance Records Reveal Important Information

So, then, how can researchers obtain a set of figures that objectively relate the number of patients who consider their transitions to be successful?

A set of researchers in Germany devised a sophisticated way to obtain such evidence—insurance records.

At first, such an approach appears doubtful at best. Only upon examination does its wisdom become obvious.

Like most Western European nations, Germany has a socialized health care system. That means payment for all covered medical conditions—sex changes among the rest—goes through a single government structure. Therefore, satisfied patients generate payments to doctors and clinics for the rest of their lives. Those payments cease whenever unsatisfied patients abandon their fruitless quests to assume another nature. The question becomes relatively simple: how many patients cease treatment at some point?

Almost Two-Thirds Abandon Treatment

The Daily Signal combed through the report and summarized the findings.

“Researchers found overall that 63.6% of trans-identifying children and adolescents desisted from their clinically confirmed gender diagnosis, and ‘only 36.4% had a confirmed [gender identity disorder] diagnosis after five years.’”

So, nearly two out of three patients abandoned treatments. Looking more deeply revealed interesting patterns behind the overall figures.

“The most likely group to change its mind is 15-to-19-year-old females, with 72.7% desisting. But a majority (50.3%) of young men who came to their transgender identity in adulthood (males aged 20-24) also desisted in five years.”

Although exact figures are difficult to obtain, many researchers consider adolescent females to be the most likely to consider a sex change transition. Yet, according to these figures, almost three-quarters of them eventually abandon the procedure.

These figures should give immediate pause to anyone whose concerns about the mental, emotional and physical health of children override their ideological commitments to the LGBT agenda. Coupled with the revelations provided by Great Britain’s groundbreaking Cass Review, the case for abandoning such experiments in child sacrifice grows ever stronger.