Dr. Meredithe McNamara, assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale University, told attendees: “most trans people remain trans.” Jo Yurcaba, a reporter with NBC Out, which focuses on “LGBTQ-centric news,” asserted that desistance was a “myth” originating in a 2013 study.

Actually, we don’t have great data for those assertions. Several studies of childhood-onset gender dysphoria suggest that somewhere between 60 and 90 percent stopped experiencing dysphoria during puberty; those “desisters” had not socially transitioned, and never medically transitioned. The bulk of them (especially the boys) grew up to be gay.

The only real interruption to that assertion is a recent paper, which showed that most kids in the study who were socially transitioned continued to identify as trans five years later. That could be an indication of the power of social transition, rather than proof that “trans kids know who they are”—though that’s how most of the media reported it.

Elana Redfield, federal policy director at Williams Institute, UCLA’s gender think tank, asserted: “It’s a real piece of spin that minors are suddenly getting lots of hormones without counseling.” And McNamara said that “surgery is rare, especially among minors.”

Again, we don’t have enough data to make these cases. What have accounts by detransitioners, like Isabelle Ayala or Luca Hein, of being rushed along the medical path, their other mental health conditions ignored—just as we have accounts of happily and carefully transitioned youth. We don’t know the number of surgeries, but how many dozens of mastectomies need to be performed on for 13- to 16-year-olds before journalists will admit that they have even happened once, and that it’s not hateful to wrestle with the ethics of it, especially with so little follow-up? “They’re rare” translates into “don’t talk about them.” https://www.broadview.news/p/how-the-media-got-the-trans-kid-story?r=385ep