"2.5% [of people who had earlier identified as transgender] were using pronouns associated with their sex at birth and could be categorized as cisgender at the time of data collection, including one who first retransitioned to live as nonbinary."
From a highly opinionated article on the study (https://www.them.us/story/trans-youth-desistance-rare-study-pediatrics): "Published this month in the medical journal Pediatrics, it reveals the findings of a five-year longitudinal study of trans youth conducted by Princeton University’s Trans Youth Project. Out of more than 300 young trans-identifying people aged 3-12, only 2.5% identified as cisgender at the end of the five-year period, with 94% identifying as trans girls or boys and 3.5% identifying as nonbinary.
This stands in sharp contrast to inflated figures cited by anti-trans pundits, who often claim that a majority of trans youth will “detransition” and experience significant psychological distress as they return to presenting and living as their birth gender. (The Princeton team uses the term “retransition” in place of the more loaded term “detransition,” which other researchers have noted has “become associated with politically motivated attempts to impede access to gender-affirming care.”)
“These results suggest that retransitions are infrequent,” the Princeton study authors concluded. “More commonly, transgender youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way.”
This doesn’t mean the researchers believe retransition is so rare as not to be worth studying; to the contrary, they argue that “understanding retransitions is crucial for clinicians and families to help make them as smooth as possible for youth.”
And this study did uncover some early data about children who retransition. “Later cisgender identities were more common amongst youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6,” the study noted, with most of those children retransitioning to a cisgender identity before age 10."
I've linked the actual study below. I don't expect it'll change a ton of minds here, but I'm hopeful it will at least change yours.
~Camilla
Ghavrel is Ghavrel is Ghavrel
*MySmiley*