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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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From the study each of your links cites:

Quality Assessment

Based on the NIH quality assessment tool, the majority of article [sic] ranged between “poor” and “fair” categories.

In the current study, we identified a total of 7928 cases from 14 different countries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest attempt to compile the information on regret rates in this population. However, limitations such as significant heterogeneity among studies and among instruments used to assess regret rates, and moderate-to-high risk of bias in some studies represent a big barrier for generalization of the results of this study. The lack of validated questionnaires to evaluate regret in this population is a significant limiting factor. In addition, bias can occur because patients might restrain from expressing regrets due to fear of being judged by the interviewer. Moreover, the temporarity of the feeling of regret in some patients and the variable definition of regret may underestimate the real prevalence of “true” regret.

You've shared that airplane bullets meme with me in the past. I think it's reasonable to assume that a person who underwent an elective procedure and doesn't regret it will be more willing to participate in a study about the efficacy of said procedure than someone who regrets undergoing said procedure. A person who sadly took their own life after undergoing one of these procedures wouldn't appear in any of these studies, and there's at least one study which found that trans people who underwent gender reassignment surgery were more prone to suicide than trans people that didn't. (I'm not claiming the relationship is necessarily causative, but simply illustrating that these procedures aren't the silver bullet they're commonly presented as. Note that this was a longitudinal study following participants over thirty years, over three times longer than the longest study included in the regret meta-analysis and four times longer than the mean.)

The authors tabulate all the people who participated in the original studies, but don't give us any indication of what the denominator is (as obviously they couldn't, this information not being available to them).

Suffice it to say that I think "gender-affirming care has lower rates of regret than knee replacement surgery" is an irresponsible claim to make in a vacuum and without qualification. If I cited an otherwise identical meta-analysis making the opposite claim, you'd be pointing out all of these methodological shortcomings.

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