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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?
It makes some sense. First, the design somewhat lends itself to this, since they use a very broad category (TGD can mean almost anything). Second, it's the group with highest percentage of males, and the rapid-onset worry was specifically about teenage girls that have shown no or very little indications beforehand. Most importantly however, it's clearly the most ego- and status-protecting option; I've heard about cases where a detransitioner would lose large parts of their social environment since their decision was seen as a direct attack on the shared worldview. Saying, in essence, that you didn't really change, you just chose to discontinue your transition due to discrimination gives you a gentler way out.
Personally, my biggest concerns is orthogonal, if not opposite, to detransitioners; I think that the concept of "gender" as-used in the social sciences is mostly bunk and better seen as "social realization of sex-based differences". For example, woman prefer interacting with/caring for people over other activities. In some (especially ancestral) societies this is realized through informal, usually familial, caring and organizing behaviour which is not directly paid but there is instead a general expectation for the men to provide for the women. In others (especially in modern), it's realized as formal, paid caring and organizing work. The basic underlying needs/expectations, and often even the actual behaviour, can be near identical, just the framework it's embedded in is different.
And I know they hate it, but most trans-individuals I've met fit in much better with their biological sex in both interpersonal interaction and general choice of occupation/hobbies. Using female-only pilots, painting your battlemechs in bright colours, creating large, detailed spreadsheets to optimize your firepower and occasionally making comments about the hot steaming yuri sex you want to have is just not very feminine (not making this up, I swear, though it's admittedly a particularly extreme example). Neither society nor them really benefits imo from enabling their delusions. That's not to mean that they necessarily are perfectly average manly men; They just certainly aren't female in a meaningful sense, either.
Worse, it has been quite conclusively shown that at least a substantial part of these needs/expectations come from sex-specific changes in puberty modulated by your hormonal state. That means if you screw with that, people biologically become sort-of intersex and will struggle even harder to fit in with either side of the natural sex dichotomy. You can't actually postpone puberty indefinitely, so after a while you get locked into an irreversible intermediate/undeveloped state. At that point, it's actually de-transitioning that becomes delusional; it's a one-way street. So, I don't actually expect a large number of de-transitioners to begin with, despite viewing the entire enterprise as rather questionable.
Overall, the data is better, but the results don't really seem notable enough to change anyones view on this, I'm afraid.
I discussed this here and here. Virtually all the trans women I've met in my life either have perfectly conventional male interests, or interests common to that subset of men who are nerdy and/or autistic. I genuinely can't recall ever meeting a trans woman who was heavily interested in knitting, crochet, astrology or murder podcasts.
Must take a ton of work, what with their brains really being female and all. Can you imagine resisting the urge to knit for years on end while you paint miniature fantasy soldiers?
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