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by seethedeaduu 357 days ago
This is why I hate online "debates". Because over and over people will repeat the same stuff that have been debunked thousands of times before.

The DSM criteria for gender dysphoria aren't particularly useful when you are diagnosing kids that play with dolls despite not expressing a trans identity or wish to switch sexes by themselves.

In addition to that, when you are dealing with a conversion therapist it is only natural to depress, but this doesn't mean that it's healthy for you eeither mentally or physically. This is something that was forced onto me as well.

Finally, you seem to be considering transitioning to be inherently something that should be avoided, otherwise why would less kids desisting be considered a negative?

1 comments

The same criteria used to approve patients for puberty blockers were used in the study. Heck, the author of the study helped write the DSM criteria for gender dysphoria. This is not at all "debunked", as much as activists try to insist that it is

Transition is indeed something that should be avoided if a patient can become comfortable in a same sex gender identity, because even with a suppressed puberty trans people have negative health outcomes across a variety of measures. To say that transition is best avoided if possible isn't a moral judgment against trans people, it's an accurate statement about the disparities in health outcomes.

This is a simplistic model, but imagine trans people have 10% risk of suicide if they don't get blockers, 5% if they do, and cis people have 1%. If I have a cohort of 10 patients with gender dysphoria 8 will desist and 2 will persist without prescribing blockers. And if you do prescribe blockers all of them will persist and transition. The former achieves the optimal health outcomes for the group as a whole. Again this is hugely simplistic, as suicide is not the only healthcare outcome we care about, but it illustrates that desistence rates are relevant to measuring whether blockers improve overall health outcomes.

Of course ideally we'd be able to know which patients will and won't persist. Psychologists attempted to do this for decades, but were never able to reliably predict which patients would and would not persist. People like to point to the extremely low rates of desistence among people prescribed puberty blockers as proof that psychiatrist are predicting correctly. But of course it's also consistent with blockers serving as a determining factor in persistence, and not merely offering "time to think".