Just a reminder for when you listen to people being presented as trans persons who regret their surgery:
Norma McCorvey - Jane Roe of Roe v Wade - was presented for decades as a devout Christian (evangelical and later Catholic) who regretted her decision. She was used as a prominent voice in the anti-abortion movement and in the attempts to overturn Roe.
She revealed on her deathbed that she was being paid to take that position. The narrative was also complicated by her 35 year relationship with Connie Gonzalez, later claiming that she was no longer a lesbian before confessing that she was paid to say that as well.
Also remember that when they call the child survivors of school shootings “paid actors,” it’s because that’s exactly the tactic they engage in.
It’s always projection. “Accuse your enemies of what you are guilty of.”
In fact, one systematic review found that the average prevalence of surgical regret was 14.4% among all research studies analyzed
Holy shit that’s actually crazy to me. [I actually tracked down that number because I was so curious] (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1007/s00268-017-3895-9) It’s over half cancer surgery. I’ve known that the regret rate for transition surgery was low for a long time, but that piece of context kinda blows my mind. You’re more likely to regret a variety of life saving procedures than gender affirming surgery, and it’s often by insane orders of magnitude.
And even the rare case of transition regret, it’s usually because 1. lack of peer group, 2. social condemnation and 3. your family now hates you.
Not because of the procedure, but because of the assholes around you. (This by one older Swedish study on the subject).
It’s a literal miracle cure. Any sane doctor would jump for it.
Even when it is the procedure, it is generally due to poor results, not the decision to have the surgery to begin with.
- lack of peer group, 2. social condemnation and 3. your family now hates you.
Having seen https://reddit.com/r/detrans what you’ve said here seems silly.
Worth noting that particular subreddit appears to be pretty heavily astroturfed. To the point where some detransitioners created r/actualdetrans to get away from the TERFs.
It’s unlikely the people who detransition because of it would be active on a detrans subreddit, because they would still consider themselves trans, and would instead be in trans subreddits for support.
The three reasons the other commenter mentioned was taken from studies done on the subject.
It’s unlikely the people who detransition because of it
Because of what? I don’t understand what you’re trying to communicate.
Because of external pressures, which you originally replied to
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8213007/
Here’s one of the more recent meta analysis papers on it. When people who detransition are asked, the majority of the cite external factors like the ones here.
“Back in 1997, virtually no one had heard of queergender people. I couldn’t find a support system, and I couldn’t figure out how to tell people what I was.”
That would be a big discrepency. The denizens of /r/detrans generally post about contemporary detransitioning rather than detransitions from 25 years ago.
I’m sorry, but if you think that there aren’t huge portions of the trans population who have no support system, then it doesn’t really feel possible to have a meaningful discussion about this with you.
if you think that there aren’t huge portions of the trans population who have no support system
Huge portions of the trans population having no support system doesn’t imply that reasons for detransitioning will include not having a support system because the lack of a support system alters the likelihood of transitioning in the first place.
if you think that there aren’t huge portions of the trans population who have no support system, it doesn’t really feel possible to have a meaningful discussion about this with you
I don’t think that and it doesn’t make sense to assume or even suspect I do, given anything I’ve said. I’ve no idea why you’ve introduced this idea into the conversation.
And even if I were to think that, what you’ve said doesn’t invalidate what I said, which was that having seen /r/detrans, the reasons given seemed silly.
Clearly it is indeed not possible for us to have a meaningful discussion.
I’m not saying it implies that. I’m saying that trans people and established research both say that. Your minimal experience with one of the detrans subreddits is not more substantial of a source than first hand accounts and peer reviewed papers.
Did you spend substantial time in /r/detrans and /r/actualdetrans? Were you aware of drama around when that split happened? Discussed it in the other trans communities on the sites? Because right now, your comments make it seem like you’re a passerby who has popped into a trans community and tried to say that your interactions with one community known for astroturfing are more meaningful than decades of research.
Even if they’d been right - it’s not a justification for taking away peoples’ right to choose. I’ve made many decisions in my life that I regretted afterward, some irrevocable. (And at least one that I’m certain has a far greater than average regret rate) That’s NOT basis for making it illegal for me to make those decisions, and it’s for sure not justification for making it illegal for others to make those decisions.
Not to mention the last statistic on regret rates I saw showed that a lower percentage of people regretted transition surgery than regretted things like hip or knee replacement. But of course to them literally anyone who regrets transition is cause to ban it.
Globally, a staggering 310 million major surgeries are performed each year; around 40 to 50 million in USA and 20 million in Europe. It is estimated that 1–4% of these patients will die, up to 15% will have serious postoperative morbidity, and 5–15% will be readmitted within 30 days. Source.
Yeah, when you look at the statistics for all surgeries and see that up to 4% of patients will die, and up to 15% will have serious complications, all of a sudden the regret rate seems pretty average.
I can’t recall where I read this, but I’ve also heard that a big part of it is regret when the surgeon does a bad job too. I think it was mainly top surgery, and surgeons that were trained to do mastectomies for cancer patients, who leave a bunch of loose skin bc that’s desirable when the patient wants breast augmentation. Which obviously isn’t what a trans person would want. Or just not removing all of the breast tissue, more severe scarring than average, etc. I bet these are the people conservatives quote about feeling “disfigured”.
Actual people regretting it is irrelevant and inconsequential. Remember how, for many years, the same people kept trying (and failing) to find any significant voter fraud? Then they decided to just ignore that detail and tell people it was happening anyway?
The exact same thing applies here.
You’re missing the point. They regret when people choose gender-affirming surgery. That’s the real issue. I know it’s not the argument they’re saying out loud, but it’s the real issue.
I’m not trans, but I wholeheartedly agree with you. As living beings we deserve autonomy, which includes the right to make choices that we may later regret. It isn’t up to anyone else but the individual to decide what’s right for them. It’s no-one else’s business (especially the government)
I wonder what the regret rate is for getting married? Having kids? Having conservative parents?
What conservatives say rarely aligns with reality in any way, so this should come as no surprise.
The only one I regret is orchi and thats because I could have made OnlyFans money cosplaying as a femboy for the cishet male simps. sigh
Great to have another study backing trans people. However, I have a feeling that the author of the linked article only read the abstract? At least it seems as if they don’t provide any additional information in the text. Like, how extensive was the search of the study and how many people did it include? I couldn’t access the paper itself, maybe someone knows how?
So the claim is here is that no transgender people regret surgery?
The claim of the study is that less than 1% do, contrary to conservative/TERF claims of a large ever growing wave of regret.
