The fight will end, because the math doesn’t work. The social contagion is losing momentum.
We’re having a deeply unfortunate political battle over transgender medical procedures for minors, like pediatric mutilation is a thing that’s up for debate. In the opening days of his second term, President Trump declared that “it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.” A series of regulatory acts followed, with the Department of Health and Human Services declaring that medical standards for pediatric sex change procedures “are unsupported by the weight of evidence.”
Democrats have struck back, asking the courts to protect sex change treatments for children, while the California legislature is currently advancing a series of bills to promote and support transgender identity among minors.
There’s just one group of people who are increasingly uninterested in pushing for more trans kids, and it’s trans kids themselves. This is a semi-legible jumble of facts, but notice the graph, and it’ll all make more sense in a moment:
Detransition is the term for the reversal of gender transition procedures, as a boy living as a girl decides to live as a boy again, or a girl living as a boy decides to live as a girl again. Desistance is stopping, making the choice to desist in living as transgender. With media hyping transgender identity, the “caring professions” like therapy and social work encouraging gender transition, and weak parents urgently supporting the mutilation of their “trans kids,” desistance is still becoming a majority decision. Kids just quit. They quit, in good part, because it hurts.
A growing body of peer-reviewed medical literature is shining a light on the emerging importance of detransition and desistance. A 2024 quantitative analysis of medical billing data in Germany concluded that persistence in adolescent gender identity disorder after five years has fallen below 50 percent, with girls quitting at rates nearing 75 percent.
A smaller but longer term 2021 study followed 139 boys who were diagnosed with gender identity disorders as children, following up with them as young adults. “Of the 139 participants, 17 (12.2%) were classified as persisters and the remaining 122 (87.8%) were classified as desisters.” Almost 90 percent just … stopped.
While desistance reduces the population of “trans kids,” the most obvious recent pipeline to gender crisis has also closed. Diagnoses of transgender identity and gender dysmorphia among adolescents soared during the pandemic, when K-12 students faced lockdowns, lost friendships, in-person school closures, and social isolation. More lonely and anxious kids going to therapy became more trans kids, as therapists told suggestible young people that they might have been born in the wrong body. You feel anxiety? Look, you’ll feel much better if you just cut off some healthy body parts. Madness, barbarism, and sick coercion, widely celebrated.
No pandemic, no social isolation, less anxiety, fewer new trans kids.
As the pipeline closes and destransition grows more common, young people living in pain because their bodies were butchered by lunatics are filing medical malpractice lawsuits against surgeons who perform pediatric sex change procedures. Opening paragraph from a New York Times story last month: “In the first malpractice verdict against providers of gender-affirming care for minors, a jury in New York State has awarded a woman $2 million in damages for a double mastectomy she received as a teenager that she said had left her disfigured.”
You have to be impressed by the ideological commitment required to insert that “she said.” A child had her healthy body parts cut off, and she says the unnecessary surgery disfigured her body.
More desistance and detransition, fewer children declaring transgender identity, more medical malpractice lawsuits. However the political fight goes, the practice of transing kids is losing momentum. Democrats aren’t going to save it.
