Layer Five: Gender-Affirming Care
Given the amount of conservative hysterics about gender-affirming care, and the
corresponding attacks on healthcare, this discussion would be incomplete
without at least some mention of trans healthcare.
In general, we are living in the healthcare misinformation age. From the belief
that vaccines cause autism, to the sometimes comic-book-like origin stories of
COVID-19. Not to mention our collective denial about the rapid destruction of
our ecosystem due to anthropogenic climate change.
I suppose it would be shocking if trans healthcare wasn’t victim to the same
mass-produced hokum that is the nicotine of social media.
Some claims are flat out nonsense and easily debunked. Like the claim that
puberty blockers are irreversible and therefore shouldn’t be given to kids, since
they might not understand the consequences.
Puberty blockers are meant to delay puberty, not alter it, until they are certain
they are trans. It prevents a possibly transgender child from going through the
wrong puberty, which has permanent effects
So those who want to ban puberty blockers for trans teens because the effects are
supposedly permanent, since children shouldn’t make permanent life-altering
decisions, have it completely backwards. Puberty blockers are quite literally
intended to prevent, and temporarily postpone, permanent life-altering events.
Other claims are slightly more complex and insidious, but they’ve been debunked
by scientists and activists in detail. I don’t want to get bogged down into
debunking a myriad of myopic claims and falsehoods, which would be like
emptying a lake with a bucket. Instead, I want to focus on one metric that I think
is most revealing: regret rates.
Regret rates for gender-affirming care is extraordinarily low. Especially when
compared to other surgeries (both necessary and elective) and other major life
decisions.
There are a good studies on this. A 2021 meta-analysis—meaning it carefully
reviews data from multiple studies at once, 27 in this case—found that less than 1
percent of trans people who had gender-affirming surgery expressed regret.
One major Dutch study that followed 6,793 trans men and women from 1972 to
2015, found that 0.6 percent of women and 0.3 percent of men expressed regret
for getting gender-affirming surgery.
Only a half of them, however, expressed “true regret”—what the study defines as
people who thought “gender-affirming treatment would be a ‘solution’ for, for
example, homosexuality or personal acceptance, but, in retrospect, regretted the
diagnosis and treatment.”
The others still identified as trans, but had what the study calls “social regret.”
They “reported reasons such as ‘ignored by surroundings’ or ‘the loss of relatives
is a large sacrifice’ for” de-transitioning.
These are golden numbers for any medical treatment. By contrast, between 5 and
14 percent of women who get risk-reducing mastectomies report regret. And
roughly 33 percent of people who get knee replacement surgery express regret.
The satisfaction rate for gender-affirming treatments is not only way higher than
most other surgeries and medical treatments, but even life decisions.
A Gallup poll once asked Americans over 45 with children: If you could “do it
over again,” how many kids would you like to have? Seven percent said, “no
children.”
A 2015 study by the American Society for Dermatological Surgery found that 16.2
percent of people regretted getting a tattoo.
In short, what this means is that trans people know they are trans, and are not
seeking treatment by mistake or because they are “confused.” The treatments
work.
Furthermore, every year the number of teenagers getting plastic surgeries
increases dramatically. The numbers are in the hundreds of thousands, and
social media is fueling it.
But conservatives never talk about that. When a trans teenage boy wants to
remove his breasts, conservatives consider it “maiming” (Jordan Peterson
famously said trans actor Elliot Page was “butchered” by “a criminal physician”).
But when a teenage girl gets bigger boobs, or fuller lips, or a sharper jawline, as
so many of them do, to look more like some digital beauty standard, no
conservative is getting on their soapbox for that.
Not that it would be helpful if they did, but the contrast is very stark.
One last study I’ll mention. In 2017, a group of researchers looked at suicide rates
in states that banned gender-affirming healthcare. They published their finding
in Nature Human Behavior journal: In states that enacted such bans, “suicide
attempts among [transgender and non-binary] young people [increased] by 7-72
percent.”
This is the reason why politicians should not be involved in healthcare at all,
whether it’s about abortion or trans care. They don’t understand that
fundamental part of the Hippocratic oath:
“First, do no harm.”