The vast majority of children who
experience gender dysphoria will embrace their biological sex by adulthood,
according to a sweeping national study that monitored children for 15 years.
Roughly two out of every three children
who identify as transgender will embrace their birth sex by their mid-20s, the
study found. People most likely to
continue to identify as transgender have low self-esteem and other mental
health challenges, researchers found.
A study of children in the Netherlands
tracked 2,772 adolescents from the age of 11 to 26, asking them to rate their
mental and physical health every three years for 15 years. The Youth and Adult Self-Report (YSR) asked
participants to assess how much they agree with the statement, “I wish to be of
the opposite sex.” A team of researchers
then pored over the data from the Tracking Adolescent’s Individual Lives Survey
(TRAILS) to measure “gender non-contentedness.”
The vast majority (78%) of people never
felt any feelings of gender dysphoria, researchers noted. “In early adolescence, 11% of participants
reported gender non-contentedness,” wrote researchers in the study, published
in February in the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behavior. “The prevalence decreased with age and was 4%
at the last follow-up (around age 26)” — a desistance rate of 64%.
Researchers also found that adolescents
were 950% more likely to feel better about their sex than to feel worse: 19% of
participants felt decreased “gender non-contentedness,” as compared with only
2% whose feelings deepened over time. Participants
whose gender confusion worsened over the years “more often were female,”
researchers noted.
Feeling more severe gender dysphoria as
an adult is also “associated with a lower [overall] self-worth, more behavioral
and emotional problems, and a non-heterosexual sexual” preference.
“Gender non-contentedness, while being
relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and
appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health
throughout development,” they concluded.
Experts felt vindicated by the latest
research. “This new study simply
confirms what has been known for over a decade,” Jay Richards, Ph.D., told The
Washington Stand (TWS). In 2013, the
American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-5) “noted that most kids who experience distress with their
sexed bodies resolve those feelings after they pass through natural puberty,”
Richards — who serves as director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for
Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation — told TWS.
The Dutch study acknowledges it did not
break new ground. Although few studies
follow the same cohort for such a long period of time, the analysts admitted
their findings fell in line with the best available literature. “The few longitudinal studies that have been
conducted in a clinical setting found low persistence rates of early childhood
gender dysphoric feelings into adolescence and adulthood,” wrote the
researchers, linking to studies from 2016 and 2021. The latter found, “Boys clinic-referred for gender
identity concerns in childhood had a high rate of desistance.”
Yet this and other studies reveal that
“minors who are put on puberty blockers for the purposes of ‘gender
affirmation’ are extremely likely to go on to take cross-hormones” such as
estrogen and testosterone, Richards told TWS. Studies show up to 93% of children who begin
on puberty blockers will go on to receive cross-sex hormone injections. Experts say the transgender industry’s early
medical intervention actually deepens and prolongs feelings of gender dysphoria
that would otherwise go away on their own. “This is what makes ‘gender-affirming’ (that
is, sex-denying) medical interventions on minors such a medical atrocity. These interventions fast track troubled kids
onto a path to sterilization and lifelong medical problems,” explained
Richards.
The harm goes beyond lost fertility. “There is no research into long-term harms,
but some evidence suggests decreased IQ and brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors
who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely
common as well,” wrote Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, at The
Hill. So-called “gender-affirming
hormonal treatment” (GAHT) causes “permanent physical changes including
excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk
for cancer and cardiovascular disease.”
The authors of the new study said they
hope their findings will “help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have
some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age
period and that this is also relatively common.” It should “provide some perspective to
clinicians primarily seeing individuals with intense gender dysphoric
feelings.”
This study, and others like it, prove
that “children need time, not gender-‘affirming’ medical mutilation,” said
Sarah Parshall Perry of the Heritage Foundation.
A growing number of young people
subjected to transgender ideology at pediatric gender clinics say they wish
they had known how common, and fleeting, feelings of transgenderism can be. “Young people, particularly young women, are
very susceptible to social contagion. They
are the most susceptible demographic,” Prisha Mosley, a detransitioner who now
works with the Independent Women’s Forum, told Laura Ingraham Thursday evening.
“And as for the 1% who continues to feel
that way, they deserve ethical and data-based mental health care.”
She noted how easily she received
transgender injections and procedures, as compared to treatment for her bona
fide mental health issues. “I had
actually been seeking mental health care and services for trauma and other
mental illnesses that were diagnosed prior to my gender dysphoria diagnosis for
several years. But as soon as I heard
about gender ideology online and expressed to my doctors that I felt I was born
in the wrong body, I was immediately fast-tracked,” Mosley told Ingraham on Fox
News. She said it took her “almost
10 years after getting my diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder to find
a dialectical behavioral therapist to treat it, but it was less than two years
to go from hormones to a double mastectomy and transition.”
Mosley urged parents to guard their
children against the predatory transgender industry, cautioning them to be
cognizant of “the way people are manipulating and breaking down language” on
the issue of gender. “And then do your
best to prepare your children for that. Maybe
tell them that there are tricky people out there who will twist language and
manipulate them, because unfortunately, it’s true.”
“Sometimes these predators — these
people — they’ll wear pins that say, ‘You’re safe with me,’ and all of that,
but that can oftentimes be a signal that you’re not safe,” warned Mosley.
“This new Dutch study reminds us that
children are being subjected to experimental medical interventions to treat
what, in most cases, is a temporary psychological state,” Richards told TWS. “This is a grotesque perversion of the medical
maxim to ‘first, do no harm.’”
Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor, Ft.
Snelling Memorial Chapel