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2025-06-19 17:14:40

Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io

Someone asked a great question in the comments of my most recent SGW article, and I wanted to share my response here because I actually had to math stuff out, so:

There are only about 24,000 people in the US who detransitioned because they weren't trans after all, according to the US Transgender Survey.

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2025-06-19 17:15:13

Doc Impossible

Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io

Here's how we get there:

1 in 9 (11.11%) of all people who transition detransition at some point. 4% of those detransition because they're not trans after all. That comes out to 0.44% of everyone who transitions got their gender wrong.

Almost none of those people receive gender-affirming care.

The trans population of the US is 1.6% of the population, according to our best numbers. So, 0.44% of a population that's 1.6% of the total headcount of the US comes out to only 0.007% of the population of the US.

24,429 people. In all of the nation.

2025-06-19 17:16:02

Doc Impossible

Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io

This, right here, is why our data on detransitioners is so incredibly poor. To have a statistical samothat you can even BEGIN to submit to basic tools of statistical analysis, you need 100 participants.

In this case, that's a half a percent *of the entire detransitioner population*.

Most of these folks, like I said, never had gender-affirming care. That means there's no clinics with contact info around, who can follow up and actually find these folks.

Most of them are people who tried out new names, pronouns, and clothes with friends and fam, and then moved on with life.

Now, the USTS uses snowball sampling, so we need to be careful about how much we extrapolate here. Even if we assume that the actual detransition rate is four times higher than what the USTS found, that's less than 100,000 eligible potential participants.

Its not a needle in a haystack situation here. It's a needle in a forty-acre wheat field situation. There are, by the numbers, *so few people* who detransition because they're cis after all that it's almost a statistical impossibility to sample enough of them to get real data, in a systematic way.

So, yeah. According to our best, newest data on detransition, one of the main things we've managed to learn is why this is such a huge gap in the literature.

And from those numbers, it's gonna be incredibly hard to change that.

2025-06-19 19:25:30

Miakoda

hellomiakoda@pdx.social

@Impossible_PhD Of all the trans people I've known, the only regret I hear about is that they didn't get started sooner.

I've had dental work with higher regret rates.

2025-06-20 05:19:54

Lola

lola@hubzilla.monster

@Doc Impossible It makes sense. Publicly outing yourself as trans is a very risky endeavor. You will be judged. You may be ostracized from your peer group and family. Most people would never to do it unless they are sure.

2025-06-20 05:28:18

Lola

lola@hubzilla.monster

@Doc Impossible

There are only about 24,000 people in the US who detransitioned because they weren't trans after all, according to the US Transgender Survey.

Makes sense. If you were trans, you wouldn't want to detransition. If you weren't trans, you would regret transitioning.

My question is, why did they think they were trans if they weren't trans? That may be a small percentage, but 24,000 is still a significant number.

Ideally, people who are trans who want to transition are able to transition, and people who are not trans don't mistakenly do something they regret later.