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A good write-up on a detransition study by the PI (Well, it's a cogent write-up, on its own; I didn't check if it was faithful to the study.)
They subtyped detransition into "Detransitioning with regret," 'Identity evolutions," "Transition ambivalence,' and "Interrupted gender transitions." The biggest surprise to me was the last subtype, since the others were pretty much what you'd expect. (Or, at least, what I'd expected.)
The write-up has a lot of tables and graphs, so block quotes aren't very effective.
To paraphrase the author, this is higher quality information than we had, previously, but the study can't tell us how to use that information... So, how would a utilitarian interpret this? Or a deontologist, virtue ethicist, contractualist, contractarianist, etc?
My skepticism about what's going on with the trans phenomenon doesn't really depend on detransitioners as much as other skeptics tend to but this fits well within my model of things. The piece uses the term "identity" 33 times and I think defining that term is at the heart of this whole thing. Identity has a few factors and all importantly interact with what trans even is.
Rule in criteria: This is the most discussed one on this topic for obvious reasons. The whole point of much of the debate is what should be the rule in criteria of the identities man/woman. Which naughty bits you have is the traditional criteria but some want to identify with these identities that would be excluded by this criteria. But that isn't the only identity being discussed here. There is the general LGBTQIA++ bucket that practically everyone involved in any way in this study claims membership to. There is the identity of trans or TGD itself. I think the stickiness of these markers and the fear someone who went whole hog into trans identity would fear losing access to them and the community surrounding them is a big part of the dynamic at play. Being ruled out hurts especially to an identity that you had at one point held on to tightly.
Malleability: This is heavily contested and in the linked post referred to as fluidity. There isn't general agreement on the trans affirming side of the fence on whether gender is actually malleable. The medicalists claim the existence of a real fact of the matter that is gender where if your body deviates from it you should to experience gender dysphoria which acts as proof that your body is the problem to be corrected. Another, seemingly more dominant with LGBTQIA++ circles, sees gender as a kind of basic expression. The binary can and should be queered. If you were born a male but think the truest expression of your inner light is to identify and present as a bearded woman with bolt on tits and any other random assortment of gendered markers then that's what you are and people should respect it.
To the unmalleable medicalist detransitioning is troubling, you have a person who seems to have felt dysphoria with their birth sex and transitioned but found the grass was not in fact greener on the other side. The only thing you have to work with is this idea of gender dysphoria so it being able to lead you astray is terrifying. Because we're all only blessed with one perspective and can't directly compare experiences of things like gender dysphoria to find out if that person just had a bad understanding of what gender dysphoria is then from the perspective of a rational person who feels what they believe to be gender dysphoria what are you to take from the existence of people who claim to have tried what you are considering and report it didn't work or in fact was quite bad? Could the people reporting a happy transition be subject to the sunk cost fallacy and in a counterfactual world where they hadn't transitioned and learned to live with their birth gender they might be even happier? There's genuinely no way to know. But there wouldn't be a way to know if there weren't any detransitioners either, detransitioners are just evidence.
The gender queer people can handle the existence of detransitioners more easily. They were always of the opinion that gender can change and if some people went a little too far then that's fine, that's life.
Salience: Salience is how tightly bound up your self conception is in an identity. Two people born in the same city in Texas, one might bind tightly to the identity of a Texan, attend rodeos, wear a cowboy hat/boots and exaggerate their accent, the other might act indistinguishably from what one might expect from a midwesterner. Both are by rule in criteria Texans but one holds the identity much more tightly. The low salience Texan might move to Chicago and feel no real loss, the high salience Texan might refuse to even visit other, inferior, states. People can bind to identities with a wide variance of salience depending on circumstance and nothing seems to encourage tight binding more than opposition. As a young kid I once bound my identity up with not liking a certain type of food in response to my parents attempting to make me eat it. It seemed genuinely important to preteen-aqouta that I wasn't the sort of person who ate cheese burgers - cringe I know.
So another element to the trans question is how salient should your sex and gender really be to your identity? Trans activism seems caught up in raising the salience of gender, many of their detractors would like to lower the salience of gender. Detransitioning seems like a kind of crisis in the salience of gender in an individual. This can be very hard on a person, especially if they perceive the identity to be besieged and that losing the salience of that identity would give the hated enemy ammunition. I don't think this conflict happens consciously in most people.
Conclusion: So what should those of us on the outside think of the existence of these different types of detransitioners? It's hard to say. If we could be confident that there is such a thing as hard gender dysphoria then we should advocate for better screening of people who were led to believe they have it but don't really. But false positives are probably unavoidable. We should recognize that this same identity formation dynamic happens in many other areas of life, that it's confusing particularly from the first person and hopefully we can extend grace to people living through that confusion.
This is pretty similar to my view (anyone who wants me to be more verbose, pretend I wrote that comment), which is why I think the "Interrupted gender transition" subtype is notable: they're contradicting our expectations for how a "fake" problem would manifest. (Or, the transwomen, at least, if you're incredulous of transmen.) Perhaps the full study has more useful information, but I don't care enough to ask the author for a copy.
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