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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I mean, you can say #1 about everything. We can never know the counterfactual of any decision we make. We still have to make decisions. And it's not like there aren't TONS of decisions out there that people DO regret.

The issue here is that one side of the trans debate controls the education system, which means that if they're right there's no systematic error here but if they're partially or wholly wrong there's a systematic error of kids underestimating desistance rates.

I'm not going to engage you on the studies; that's not really my area of expertise. I think @ArjinFerman and maybe @gattsuru might be more interesting to talk to on that one.

The study referred to in the article is relatively fresh, so didn't make it to any of the systematic reviews published in the last years, and I can't even access it on sci-hub.

Studying desistence and detransition is a tricky subject. Clinics don't necessarily want to hear from detransitioners (who wants to parade an unsatisfied customer in front of potential ones?), and for that matter detransitions don't necessarily want to talk to people who feel they wronged them either. Criticism of the older studies on regret rates has reflected this - typically they're criticized for low follow-up rates (there was one popular study going around citing a 94+% satisfaction rate, but had a 63% dropout rate), another issue typically cited is short follow-up periods.

On the flip side there's a recent German study showing a >50% rate of desistence of medical treatment over a 5 year period, but this also needs to be studied further before it's declared a slam-dunk for the anti side.