As part of the continuing war on trans lives, Trump has ordered the National Institute of Health to conduct a study concerning trans regret after transitioning. However, in addition to being a huge waste of everyone’s time and research funds, there’s a glaring problem with this premise. We already have stats surrounding detransition, and they’re much more complex than certain Cass Report-citing pseudoscientists would like to admit.
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Because when it comes to the topic of detransitioning, there’s a lot of (purposeful, right-wing spread) misinformation out there.
While right-wing pundits would love to paint a bleak picture of vulnerable youth being peer-pressured into transition at alarming rates, it’s simply not the case. The detransition rate is currently unknown, but what figures we do have fairly low and are further complicated by the fact that many detransitioners end up re-transitioning later on. This is because detransitioning isn’t always something that happens as a result of someone realizing they’re not trans, though of course that happens as well. But for many people, coming out as trans is a process that sometimes involves going back into the closet (and detransitioning) for safety reasons.
So the idea of charing “transition regret”—and paying the NIH to make sure their findings are as biased and anti-trans as possible—is already a flawed premise.
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NEW: After cancelling nearly all projects on trans health, the Trump admin has now directed the NIH to study the negative consequences of transitioning. This will create “a distorted research ecosystem where only politically favorable findings are permitted to exist”, researcher Harry Barbee says.
— Max Kozlov (@maxkozlov.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 2:37 PM
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None of this is surprising, of course. The Trump administration’s attacks on trans people is not rooted in fact, but purely ideological. Just as this administration would like us to believe that recent plane crashes and stock market disasters are the result of pronouns in bio and DEI rather than simple Trumpian incompetence, they want people to feel that trans people living happy, normal lives are somehow standing in the way of everyone else doing the same thing.
By reframing gender identity as child abuse—as Trump is currently trying to do—he’s leading the dumbest and most fearful of his followers to do the easy thing and fear what they don’t understand, rather than…you know…trying to understand it.
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