The End of the ‘Desistance’ Myth?
Read on for new (as yet unpublished) ‘desistance’ statistics from Australia (Spoiler: it may be as low as 4% ‘desistance’).
The 85% ‘desistance’ myth
Anyone with even a cursory awareness of issues relating to transgender children will have heard the 85% ‘desistance’ myth. Some old and flawed research studies, that lumped together large numbers of gender non-conforming cisgender children with transgender children, claimed astonishingly high levels of supposed ‘desistance’, ie children who held a cisgender (not transgender) identity after puberty. These studies are flawed in many ways, including in their analysis, where they assumed that children who could not be contacted or declined to be interviewed were all so called ‘desisters’. These statistics often relied upon older data from the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which societal acceptance for transgender people in the West was a long way behind where it is today.
Article on Growing Up Transgender website: The end of the ‘desistance’ myth?