JKR’s Claims Part 7: Desistance, Detransition and “If I Were a Kid Today I Would Have Been Transed”
Recently JK Rowling, author of Harry Potter, tweeted some transphobic statements and dogwhistles on Twitter that I have addressed here. After a few days silence she wrote a lengthy post trying to justify her position on her website. This is part 7 of my series addressing the claims in her piece. You can see the full thing here.
I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition
No. You wouldn’t have. This is a very common GC claim, the argument usually goes “when I was little I played with barbie/action man, therefore today I would have transitioned, but I am happy as I am today, so that would be bad, therefore we should ban everyone”. This is part of the wider GC view that being trans is just about what you wear or what your hobbies are, and also that specialist doctors hand out diagnoses of hugely complicated conditions like they’re prescribing paracetamol over the counter. No trans person thinks that they are trans because they liked painting their nails or climbing trees. As a kid I liked lego, trains and maths and pretty much nothing else and I was still trans. Doctors don’t diagnose kids as trans unless they show persistent dysphoria, and have gone through therapy for years.
The NHS says that less than 1% of people detransition, some of those go on to retransition, and most cite transphobia and lack of family support for their reason to detransition, not “transition regret”. That is not to say that people who do regret and other detrans people can be ignored at all. They often have all the same healthcare requirements as trans people, and sometimes even less support. It does mean that they should not be used as a tool to unempathetically wield against trans healthcare. That would be like pointing out that because up to 20% of people regret knee surgery (a regret rate over 20x higher than transition), we should ban it for everyone. If you genuinely wanted to decrease detransition rates and help detrans people you would increase funding for trans healthcare, remove the strict pressures on trans people to “transition the whole way or have no rights”, and improve LGBT education.
I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60–90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria
This can be a very complicated topic with lots of concepts to get your head around, especially when they are all intentionally conflated together by GC people, as JKR has done here. Some studies do show that prepubescent children showing signs of Gender Dysphoria will likely “grow out of it” (though these studies have had their methods, data and analysis called into question), they also show that if Gender Dysphoria persists into adolescence that “it is almost certainly permanent”. Conflating the different age groups of children together and ignoring the evidence from all of the leading medical organisations is done to make a narrative that this is all one big wild experiment, which is trivially nonsense.
The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment
The number of people coming out as trans is increasing, and this is true for children as well as adults. This is because of increased awareness, increased social acceptance, increased legal protections and increased access to healthcare. There is no evidence to show or imply that the rate at which people are born trans is changing, and again, there is no evidence that being trans is something you can be talked into.
If we multiply the number of new births per year in the UK by a rough estimate for the rate at which adults are trans, we would expect about 4000 new referrals per year of trans kids in a transphobia-free society.
As well as watching out for the conflation between detransition and desistance, and the various age groups being discussed, it is also worth noting the conflation between referrals and diagnoses. Many people will be referred to gender services and will receive therapy and that is it — no medication or anything else. The earlier young prepubescent kids who will “grow out of it” often still benefit from a referral and therapy from experts.
Often here there is the implication that trans kids are being forced to transition by overzealous parent, to which WPATH notes “There are no studies to support [the claim that] children are forced to undergo treatments they may regret”. All of this is, of course, brought up with the goal of stopping children having access to trans healthcare, regardless of whether they are trans or not. The reason this is such an emotionally powerful argument is because most cis people can imagine the horror of being incorrectly diagnosed as trans and go on to wrongly transition, but it is important to remember it is as bad to wrongly prescribe a cis person transition as it is to deny a trans person it. The pain experienced is the same.
But finally and most importantly on this section, why do you think you know more than all of the experts and doctors in this field of study? When you read a blog post that links to a handful of studies that seem to go against the entire worldwide medical consensus, why do you think you know enough to say science is wrong? How is wanting the government to step in and stop the experts from following the science any different to what anti-vaxxers want? Why do you think you know more about trans people than trans people and the professionals who study them?
Part 7 was released ahead of other parts because the media can’t go one week without platforming anti-trans stuff at the moment, and yesterday it was pushing stuff relevant to this. The rest of the parts will be out in order
Full post | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10