When I saw this headline pop up at The Atlantic today, I was absolutely shocked. The title of the piece is short and simple: “Take detransitioners seriously.” For an outlet as solidly liberal as The Atlantic to touch on this topic seemed very much out of character. The leftwing media loves to promote and “celebrate” all of the people (sadly, including children) who “transition” as part of the ongoing transgenderism craze. But discussions of people who realize what a horrible mistake they’ve made or how they’ve been misled are generally stuffed down the memory hole faster than people who previously asked if the new COVID vaccines really did prevent you from catching or spreading the novel coronavirus. It simply wasn’t allowed.
The authors, Leo Valdes and Kinnon MacKinnon, describe themselves as “trans academics.” (I didn’t even know that was a thing, but here we are.) They immediately make it clear that they are fully in support of helping people “transition” to deal with their gender dysphoria and they oppose legislative efforts to “target trans children” and block access by them to medical treatments. (Sigh.) But they at least recognize the reality of people who detransition and assert that the media needs to stop “downplaying” the phenomenon of detransitioning because it might hinder doctors from collecting important data. They begin with one of the most famous detransitioners many people have still never heard about, retired Navy SEAL Chris Beck.
When Kristin Beck, a decorated Navy Seal veteran, came out as a transgender woman in 2013, she became a high-profile advocate for the trans community—a role that earned her glowing coverage in left-wing and mainstream center-left media. But unless you’ve been reading right-wing websites in recent months, you might never know that Beck has since detransitioned and gone back to the name Chris Beck. Last month, Beck declared that he had “lived in hell for the past 10 years.” Most of the outlets that reported with enthusiasm on Beck’s initial transition have yet to cover the latest chapter in his life story…
For years, the detransition rate was thought to be in the low single digits. In a landmark study of people in Sweden who changed their legal sex from 1960 to 2010, 2 percent applied to return to their sex assigned at birth. Other studies suggest an even lower detransition rate. But data are relatively scarce, and anyway the cultural context for trans people has since evolved so much and so quickly that older studies may not adequately predict outcomes for today’s far larger, more diverse trans and gender-questioning population.
There is much to dislike or at least question in this article, but at least they’re admitting that this happens. And it probably is happening a lot more than anyone knows. The authors quote older studies, largely from Europe, that showed only a minuscule percentage of people undergoing gender transition treatment eventually returning to their actual gender.
That’s a disingenuous way to approach the question for obvious reasons. Nobody fully “returns” to their actual gender if they finish the full transgender procedure because almost all of what is done is irreversible. The most obvious examples are the surgeries, but the body will also never fully recover from extended treatments with unnatural hormones or puberty blockers either.
How many people have sincere and severe regrets about going through this process but realize that they’ll never be able to physically become the person they once were so they simply stay with their new “community” and remain silent? We may never know. And even for those who take the leap and detransition as much as they are able to, how many of them go out and announce it the way Chris Beck did? I’m willing to wager real number is a lot higher than these authors or many in the general public imagine it to be.
Another huge factor that could be skewing this data is actually brought up in the article by the authors, though likely unintentionally. Right in the excerpt above, they write, “Most of the outlets that reported with enthusiasm on Beck’s initial transition have yet to cover the latest chapter in his life story.” Now consider where most of the people (including “trans academics”) who compile these statistics get their data. Medical records are private by design. No hospitals or clinics are publishing lists of patients who have these procedures. And if almost all of the media that gleefully cover all of the people who are transitioning willfully ignore the stories of detransitioners, most of them wind up flying under the radar.
Another problem with this article is the way the authors join everyone else on the left in treating the entire transgender craze as “settled science.” It’s obviously anything but that. Up until quite recently, the number of diagnosed cases of actual gender dysphoria was tiny. Now, in less than a decade, we’ve reached the point where one study in California tells us that at least 6% of students are now identifying as transgender, “gender fluid,” or one of the other words and phrases on that growing list.
You don’t need a medical degree to understand that transgenderism isn’t transmitted by a virus or “something in the water.” This is not a transgender pandemic. This is a fad. It’s a craze. Or the more accurate and scientific description is that it is a social contagion. And social contagions can spread nearly as quickly as an actual pandemic and bring similarly disastrous results. My greatest fear is that we’re going produce an entire generation of people – particularly and most tragically, children – who are going to realize this in the coming years. And then the detransitioning statistics will really go through the roof. Sadly, it will be too late for all of them who completed the full surgical transition.
