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Only at the time of measurement. Youths grow into adults, and unless there's some proposed mechanism intervening, one would expect trans youth to grow up into trans adults, and trans adult to have been, at one point, trans youth. Thus today's trans adults are yesterday's trans youth, and today's trans youth are tomorrow's trans adults. Absent some other influence, a doubling in the number of current trans youth over past baselines would indicate that when those youth grow up, there will have been a significant discontinuity in the number of trans adults from the last generation to this one.
Something else has to be going on for both of the hilighted statements to be true.
They point out the youth figures from the new estimate are now derived from a direct question added to the survey post-2017, where before they were estimating by other means. So that would be the baseline something that could enable both statements to be true.
They say their estimate has increased, not that the true (the actual amount we would see if measured by some omniscient entity) numbers have. Now it is certainly possible their original methodology was actually just as accurate as the direct question method and so the increase is a real one, rather than one driven by the methodology change. That might indicate a recent wave of youth identification. In the reverse if the previous numbers were wrong and the doubled numbers were also correct historically then that might indicate some level of de-transitioning before adulthood.
But because the methodology changed we don't know if either is true.
But that elides the question of what happens between the estimate of the trans youth population, and the survey of trans adults, right?
In what way? There are 300,000 youth trans people and 1.3 million adults (according to their figures) now (or as of 2020 really).
Previously their estimate was 1.6 million in total, 160,000 of which were youths back in 2016.
Presumably all of the youths in the 2016 estimate (using data from 2014-15) aged out of the category and either became adult trans, detransitioned or died. And some number of the adults remained trans, some number detransitioned and some number died. But we don't have those numbers.
There are 391,000 Trans people between 18-24 in their 2020 charts. So some of these would have been from the youth cohort from 2016. We don't know how many were "new" and how many were from the 2016 youth cohort however. It could be there really only were 160,000 back in 2016 and all became adults and trans. Or some number detransitioned and were replaced by new adult trans people.
Is that what you were trying to figure out?
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